Morehouse College, an "elite", historically black all-male College, boasting such eminent alumni as Martin Luther King Jr., puts its popularity amongst the "best and the brightest" African American men down to the "Morehouse Mystique":
The Mystique is joining a brotherhood like none other. And after being ignored, stereotyped or marginalized, it's about finally finding that "home" that, deep inside, you always knew existed, where you are the heart, soul and hope of the community. And where you are not alone.
Yet last week, in an act of rank hypocrisy, this very same College instituted an "appropriate attire policy" that discriminates against some LGBT members of this community, who have been persistently ignored, stereotyped and marginalized by society, and whose members must feel increasingly alone.
The new policy, introduced by the College's President Robert M. Franklin, bans a wide range of clothing, from sagging pants, to pajamas in public, to wearing caps and do-rags inside. But it is one clause, apparently targeted at the LGBT community, that has commentators, if not the students, up in arms:
Clause 9 (of 11) bans the: "wearing of clothing associated with women's garb (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at College-sponsored events."
While College officials claim the policy is aimed at "all students", Kevin Webb, co-president of Safe Space @ Morehouse, a gay-straight student alliance, says he "thinks this borders on discrimination," pointing out that while there "are gay people who sag their pants and wear their do-rags...you don't find people here who identify themselves as straight walking around in feminine garb".
The new policy is part of President Franklin's insistence on a broad understanding of education. Franklin has talked of the "five wells", calling on students to be "well read, well spoken, well traveled, well dressed and well balanced". Morehouse joins a small group of colleges that have adopted dress codes in recent years. The crucial difference is that these other Colleges are co-educational, and made no attempt to ban women's clothes. Indeed, it is Morehouse's distinctively gendered institutional identity, its desire to produce a particular brand of 'Morehouse Men', that seems to be driving this attempt to rigidly define the boundaries of its community.
The reaction from the College administration, and to some extent from students, has been disturbingly revealing about their tolerance, or even awareness, of the T in LGBT, and of queer- and gender-identity issues more generally. The issue has been framed in the language of community and values, bringing to the surface the deep, almost unconscious, prejudices underlying these concepts.
Dr. William Bynum, vice president for student services at Morehouse, insists that that the clothing rules be seen in the context of a broad set of values which the College seeks to promote--part of the College's program for developing students' minds and "social consciences". Effectively acknowledging that the policy was targeted at a particular group of students, he said "We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress in a way we do not expect in Morehouse men".
The reaction from students has been almost as disappointing. Bynum met with Safe Space before the policy went in to effect, and "Of the twenty-seven people in the room, only three were against it." The rules have been generally well-received, with vocal opposition coming from just a few LGBT students. Cameron Thomas-Shah, co-chief of staff of the Student Government Association, said he backs the new policy: "It's about the ideals of the school. If you come to Morehouse College, and want to become a Morehouse man, you should know these things... You shouldn't deviate from the norms of what a man wears".
While the men of Morehouse may allow gendered discrimination to be codified in the rules of their College, the LGBT blogosphere will not. Prominent LGBT bloggers and publications like Pam Spaulding's Pam's House Blend and The Advocate, have picked up on the story, as well as mainstream outlets such as CNN. Hopefully this will shock the students and staff of Morehouse College out of the lazy prejudices this episode has revealed, and of which their most famous alumni would surely disapprove. These aspiring leaders of the black community need to recognize the parallels between the struggle for LGBT liberation, and their own, ongoing struggle for equality. And the LGBT community desperately needs leaders from communities of color, such as Julian Bond, chair of the NAACP who was keynote speaker at the recent National Equality March in Washington, DC, to help build a broader base for its powerful demand for equality and respect. We can only hope that the next generation of 'Morehouse Men' will rise to this challenge.
Check out more at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/question/486663/seeing_through_the_morehouse_mystique
Friday, October 23, 2009
Shame
One of the reasons I've been blogging so much about obesity, class, and race, is that these are the questions I live with. To set down the road of food consciousness, to endeavor to understand what you're putting in the only body you'll ever have, is to phase-shift into a parallel world. You become acquainted with ritual of unwrapping aluminum foil on long plane rides. You cut elaborate deals with your partner over child-care and cleaning. You go hurtling through the internet in search of a decent pizza stone. It angers your son, because his simple request for Pop-Tarts turns into a pop-quiz referencing the ingredients on the box.
But more than that, it's the world I live in. The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you'll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who've lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.
I was there among them--the blacker and fatter--and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all--and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor--the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.
The metaphor is, of course, deceptive--more about how it feels, than how it is. For one thing, because of where we live, some of the most afflicted areas of black America are five minutes away from major media. Unless someone kills a census worker, media generally avoids Clay County, Kentucky. Moreover, you can't really hide in your car in New York. On the train, it's all right there. And then there's the absurd illusion of WhiteLand--this mythical place where there are no problems, because white people don't actually have problems.
But intellectually understanding something doesn't change your religion. In every black person, there's a desire to, as a buddy once put it, "show these motherfuckers." I keep going back to Bill Cosby, not as a leader, but as a marker of how we feel. "My problem," he once told a crowd of black men. "Is that I'm sick of losing to white people." When I heard him say that, I heard my mother and father. I heard my older brother. I heard the Babas from my old Rights of Passage program. I heard my professors at Howard. I heard one of my good friends--and his wife is white.
I heard them all. And I heard me. And I know that it is small of me. And I know that it is wrong of me. And I live for the day when I am right. But this is what I think about sometimes on the 2 train uptown. This is what I think about sometimes while cleaning the kitchen. And this is what I think about, almost always,before I write. I think about showing them. I think about showing myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most perceptive voices in black America today -- and one of the best young American writers, period.Author of The Beautiful Struggle and Writer and Editor for The Atlantic Monthly
But more than that, it's the world I live in. The buses in Harlem heave under the weight of wrecked bodies. New York will not super-size itself, so you'll see whole rows in which one person is taking up two seats and aisles in which people strain to squeeze past each other. And then there are the middle-age amputees in wheelchairs who've lost a leg or two way before their time. When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got.
I was there among them--the blacker and fatter--and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all--and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor--the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.
The metaphor is, of course, deceptive--more about how it feels, than how it is. For one thing, because of where we live, some of the most afflicted areas of black America are five minutes away from major media. Unless someone kills a census worker, media generally avoids Clay County, Kentucky. Moreover, you can't really hide in your car in New York. On the train, it's all right there. And then there's the absurd illusion of WhiteLand--this mythical place where there are no problems, because white people don't actually have problems.
But intellectually understanding something doesn't change your religion. In every black person, there's a desire to, as a buddy once put it, "show these motherfuckers." I keep going back to Bill Cosby, not as a leader, but as a marker of how we feel. "My problem," he once told a crowd of black men. "Is that I'm sick of losing to white people." When I heard him say that, I heard my mother and father. I heard my older brother. I heard the Babas from my old Rights of Passage program. I heard my professors at Howard. I heard one of my good friends--and his wife is white.
I heard them all. And I heard me. And I know that it is small of me. And I know that it is wrong of me. And I live for the day when I am right. But this is what I think about sometimes on the 2 train uptown. This is what I think about sometimes while cleaning the kitchen. And this is what I think about, almost always,before I write. I think about showing them. I think about showing myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most perceptive voices in black America today -- and one of the best young American writers, period.Author of The Beautiful Struggle and Writer and Editor for The Atlantic Monthly
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Morehouse’s Crossroads Has Nothing To Do With ‘Ghetto Gear’ or Cross-Dressing
The conversation regarding the new dress-code policy at Morehouse College has been hijacked by a vociferous gang of socially conservative black pundits: some of them simply politically misguided, others merely proud homophobes; a few of them the ideological love-children of Ward Connerly and Bill Cosby. In the short week and a half since I became the first writer to report the news of Morehouse’s new policy, the college has become the subject of an intensifying national debate regarding the role that style playsin producing (or constraining) black male substance.
By now, there is no need to explain what went “down” at Morehouse. You already know. But while you may have already heard the details of Morehouse’s new “no grills or purses” policy, it’s quite possible that you have yet to hear an impassioned defense of grillz and purses in the spirit of Morehouse’s most illustrious progenitors.
There are those who have argued that it is inappropriate to incite a national public dialogue about what’s happening at a private, independently funded college. In the blogosphere, there have been comments in recent days such as “What goes on at Morehouse is a private affair between its students, alumni and administrators. There is nothing illegal about a private school enforcing a dress code. Any student who is unhappy with the dress code has the liberty to leave.”
These voices are misguided and unsophisticated. Morehouse College is much more than simply a “private institution;” it is a black cultural pillar. In other words, the institution we call “Morehouse” is quite similar to the institution we call “the black church.” One does not have to be a member of these institutions in order to be affected by what goes on within their walls. Given Morehouse’s stature as a historical pillar, all African-American men (not just those who are students or alumni of the institution) have an ethical obligation to contribute to this national dialogue about the politics of the college’s policies—especially in instances where it promotes a climate of rampant anti-ghetto-culture classism and femiphobia.
The bourgeois classism and femiphobia embedded in Morehouse’s policy are symptomatic of a stubborn refusal on behalf of African Americans to have open discussions about 1) the sizable presence of gay men within our community, including (and perhaps especially) at institutions like Morehouse and 2) the continued popularity of black urban culture on the stylistic sensibilities of our black male youth.
The idea that young black men on college campuses are so developmentally arrested that the only way that they can distinguish between what to wear in the classroom vs. what to wear in "corporate America" is by prohibiting them from wearing sagging jeans at all times, is not only absolutely ridiculous, it’s also quite racist. Young black men are all too familiar with having our cultural fashions and stylistics pathologized as deviant, criminal or dysfunctional. It is thus painfully ironic that an administration such as Morehouse—run by and for black men—would promote a policy that implies that baggy jeans are a visual marker of anti-achievement.
Moreover, simply being a private college does not give Morehouse the ethical license to engage in fascist tactics. The vast majority of the nation’s top institutions (ranging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Yale University) do not depend on dress codes to “make sure” that their students are intelligent enough to deduce that walking into a medical school interview with gold teeth might not make for a stellar first impression. Instead, these institutions realize that even in the most challenging of intellectual environments, students should be allowed to express themselves on campus freely, in whatever clothing suits their interests.
Turning Morehouse College into a playground of men with cardigans and bow ties will not substantively increase the institution’s rapidly declining graduation rates (at last check, only 64 percent of Morehouse men graduate within six years). Nor will it help to reverse the college’s long-standing inability to attract superstar black faculty in the humanities or social sciences. (I doubt that a new undergraduate “dress code” would be appealing to the likes of Bell Hooks or Cornel West.) Nor will it beef up the resources that one would expect to find on the campus of a purportedly “elite” college (such as better library holdings, laboratories or facilities).
So the question becomes: What’s really behind this decision?
Morehouse College is at a crossroads, and it’s one that has nothing to do with cross-dressing. The institution is suffering from a financial and vision mismanagement crisis that threatens to rock the foundation of the college’s pedigree. The administration has failed repeatedly to substantively raise the college’s meek endowment (currently only at $117 million, a far cry from Spelman College’s $291 million and Howard’s comparatively colossal $490 million). Moreover, the administration has still not effectively come up with a strategy for raising the college’s national ranking (Both Spelman and Howard have recently ascended into U.S. News & World Report’s coveted “Tier 1” classification, while Morehouse lags behind in “Tier 3,” one rank above the lowest possible designation.)
Thus, the college’s decision to regulate the fashion trends of its undergrad student body is nothing short of a lazy attempt to shift the focus away from a failing administration that has had a less-than-stellar “job performance” in the crucial arenas of endowment, rank and matriculation. The administration’s buffoonish emphasis on attire instead of actual academic achievement is perhaps precisely why the college finds itself in the unfortunate situation it has inherited. Prohibiting feminine clothing and “ghetto gear” is simply an easy way of refusing to get down to the more serious, nitty-gritty work of revitalizing Morehouse’s scholastic legacy.
Moreover, the sexual politics of Morehouse’s dress code not only sends out a disheartening message to the legions of feminine or gender non-conforming black boys who one day hope to attend “The House” (long ago, I was one of them), it also promulgates an openly hostile climate toward current students on Morehouse’s campus who have an alternative vision of what a “Morehouse man” actually looks like. The policy is not so much “homophobic” (indeed, many gay men do not wear women’s clothing, therefore it is unfair to assume that the policy is directed toward gay men at large) as much as it is “femiphobic” (an attempt to vilify the subset of gay men who choose to express themselves in women’s clothing).
But perhaps most disturbingly, the new dress-code policy at Morehouse College is a stunning retrenchment of the prophetic vision once made famous by the institution’s most distinguished alumnus: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. It was Dr. King, of course, who prophesied the dawn of a political landscape where men would be judged first and foremost by the “content of their character” rather than by the superficial trappings of color (or, by extension, clothing). Morehouse’s dress-code policy is nothing short of a reversal of the ethical sensibility of Dr. King, who warned us repeatedly about the ruse of the exterior (color, gender, etc.) over the more substantive interior (intelligence, character, integrity). Perhaps this administration might rethink its policy in relationship to the man who most Americans see as the true embodiment of the institution’s political promise.
As African-American men, we all “belong” to Morehouse College, and Morehouse belongs to us. Doing the work of transforming the politics of sexuality and class within the black community is no easy task. But perhaps the best place to begin is in the halls of our “house.”
Frank Leon Roberts is a lecturer in the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at New York University.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Reflections on Marriage
Feminist author Jessica Valenti's marriage to Andrew Golis of Talking Points Memo was the lead wedding story in the New York Times style section this Sunday. It was odd to see this Full Frontal Feminist not only marry, but also submit to a romantic short story about her union. Indeed the Times seemed intent on portraying Valenti's marriage as a morality tale: tough feminists may talk about social equality, but all girls really want is a good man and note-worthy bustle. For some, Valenti's wedding became a lens for assessing her feminist credentials.
Valenti's story, as written by the Times, is an interesting companion to last week's National Equality March in Washington, DC. The National Equality March was clearly defined by organizers and participants as a demand for equal protection in all matters governed by civil law. It was a demonstration for justice in housing, employment, property, citizenship, and family law, but media nearly exclusively reported the event as a march for same-sex marriage equality.
For Valenti and for the National Equality March participants, as for many in America, marriage is the terrain where the personal is indeed political.
Marriage as the intersection between the personal and political is not new in the United States. In an upcoming book, ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America, Frances Smith Foster challenges the received wisdom that black families were destroyed during American slavery. She marshals convincing, historical evidence refuting the assumption that enslaved people accepted that their marriages were not "real" because they were not recognized by the state.
Her study of slave marriage does not reveal fragile, transient attachments; rather Foster uncovers a rich legacy of love, struggle, and commitment among enslaved black people. By choosing whom to love, how to love, what to sacrifice, and how long to stay committed, black Americans carved out space for their human selves even as enslavers tried to reduce them to chattel.
In spite of the fact that their marriages were not legally sanctioned, many enslaved people formed lifelong attachments, sacrificed personal security and freedom to maintain their relationships, protected their fidelity despite unthinkable obstacles, and remained deeply attached to their identities as married persons.
Some black men and women chose to remain in slavery or to submit to more brutal enslavers in order to stay married to their chosen partners. Foster's stories of these marriages challenge any idea that marriage is just about health insurance and burial rights. Clearly marriage is rooted in something far more personal and spiritual. To sustain marriage some were willingly to endure slavery.
I'd just finished reading Foster's book when I discovered the story of Keith Bardwell, a white, justice of the peace in Louisiana who makes it a practice to refuse marriage licenses to interracial couples, despite the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. Bardwell explains his resistance to interracial marriage not as racism, but as a protective measure for the potential children of these unions who, according to Bardwell, are not accepted in any racial community.
It is impossible not to laugh aloud about the utter absurdity of defending the tragic mulatto narrative in the age of Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, Ben Jealous, and Barack Obama. The hilarity is exceeded only by Bardwell's quaint assumption that refusing a marriage license to a heterosexual couple would block their ability to procreate. It is clear that Bardwell is not protecting children; he is protecting a particular understanding of marriage rooted in old American bigotry.
Together Foster's text and Bardwell's policy are reminders that marriage is a complex interplay between private choice and public practice. Marriage is never exclusively about loving attachment and commitment among consenting adults. It is also about state recognition of and ability to confer a specific bundle of privileges on particular individuals and relationships. But these privileges and state recognition are not enough to explain why people desire and chose marriage. The power to love, commit, and consent is more deeply human than that.
Enslaved people desired marriage, performed marriage ceremonies, and understood themselves as married, but without the protection of the state their marriages could be disrupted without their consent. They fought back, resisted, and sacrificed in order to stay married, but without the state they were vulnerable both as persons and as spouses.
To be gay in America today is not the same as being a slave in the 19th century. Despite the civil inequality faced by LGBT communities, little in human history compares to the realities of intergenerational, chattel slavery. But there are important connections between the realities of marriage for the enslaved and for contemporary gay men and lesbians.
Today, many same-sex couples in the United States live in a fraught, contingent space of loving attachment, unprotected by state recognition. My fierce commitment to marriage equality derives, in part, from my personal biography as an interracial child, descended from American slaves, and raised in Virginia, beginning less than a decade after the Loving decision. Even though I am heterosexual, marriage equality is personal. I learn from the history of racial and interracial marriage exclusion that the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples is wrong.
But, there is more than one lesson to be learned from the parallels between racial and same-sex marital exclusion. Today, black Americans can securely marry one another. And despite the bigotry of officials like Bardwell, they can legally marry opposite-sex partners of a different race. But despite this formal, legal equality, marriage has never been more rare or more insecure among African Americans.
Marriage is now a minority lifestyle among black people. African American women in all socioeconomic categories are the group least likely to marry, most likely to divorce, and most likely to bear and rear children alone. And although marriage has fallen most precipitously among black people, it has declined throughout the United States. Since 1970, marriage rates in the United States have dropped more than 15% overall, and divorce rates have climbed steadily during this same time.
Fewer people who can marry are choosing to do so. More people who do marry are choosing to exit. This is not solely about selfish individuals unwilling to sacrifice for joint commitment. Marriage itself is still bolstered by a troubling cultural mythology, a history of domination, and a contemporary set of gendered expectations that render it both unsatisfying and unstable for many people.
In short, despite the fierce battles for marriage, contemporary heterosexual marriage is a bit of a mess. The current state of straight marriage is a reminder that simply having the right to marry is not sufficient to generate social equality, create economic stability, or ensure personal fulfillment. Marriage is a crucial civil right, but not a panacea. Even as progressives fight for marriage equality for same-sex couples, we need also to reflect on marriage as a social and political institution in itself.
Our work must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether.
As LGBT communities were organizing for the D.C. event some LGBT activists were expressing concern that an exclusive focus on marriage rights obscures other pressing issues of civil inequality and ignores the contributions of non-traditional families. These critics pushed back against the assimilationist impulse of same-sex marriage advocates in favor of a celebrating the social, cultural, and political contributions of queer individuals and communities. Their arguments sounded quite a bit like the feminist critique of marriage offered by Jessica Valenti, before the NY Times style section got to her.
So what are we to make of marriage? It is both a deeply personal relationship for which people will make almost unthinkable sacrifices, and it is a declining social institution offering little security for most who enter it.
As a black, feminist, marriage-equality advocate I reside at an important intersection in this struggle. This movement must acknowledge the unique history of racial oppression, while still revealing the interconnections of all marriage exclusion. This work must reflect the feminist critique of marriage, while still acknowledging the ancient, cross cultural, human attachment to marriage. This work must be staunchly supportive of same-sex marriage, while rejecting a marriage-normative framework that silences the contributions of queer life.
Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. "Don't worry," we say, "allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices."
This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.
I know from personal experience that a bad marriage is enough to rid you of the fear of death. But this experience allows me suspect that a good marriage must be among the most powerful, life-affirming, emotionally fulfilling experiences available to human beings. I support marriage equality not only because it is unfair, in a legal sense, to deny people the privileges of marriage based on their identity; but also because it also seems immoral to forbid some human beings from opting into this emotional experience.
We must do more than simply integrate new groups into an old system. Let's use this moment to re-imagine marriage and marriage-free options for building families, rearing children, crafting communities, and distributing public goods.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.
Valenti's story, as written by the Times, is an interesting companion to last week's National Equality March in Washington, DC. The National Equality March was clearly defined by organizers and participants as a demand for equal protection in all matters governed by civil law. It was a demonstration for justice in housing, employment, property, citizenship, and family law, but media nearly exclusively reported the event as a march for same-sex marriage equality.
For Valenti and for the National Equality March participants, as for many in America, marriage is the terrain where the personal is indeed political.
Marriage as the intersection between the personal and political is not new in the United States. In an upcoming book, ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America, Frances Smith Foster challenges the received wisdom that black families were destroyed during American slavery. She marshals convincing, historical evidence refuting the assumption that enslaved people accepted that their marriages were not "real" because they were not recognized by the state.
Her study of slave marriage does not reveal fragile, transient attachments; rather Foster uncovers a rich legacy of love, struggle, and commitment among enslaved black people. By choosing whom to love, how to love, what to sacrifice, and how long to stay committed, black Americans carved out space for their human selves even as enslavers tried to reduce them to chattel.
In spite of the fact that their marriages were not legally sanctioned, many enslaved people formed lifelong attachments, sacrificed personal security and freedom to maintain their relationships, protected their fidelity despite unthinkable obstacles, and remained deeply attached to their identities as married persons.
Some black men and women chose to remain in slavery or to submit to more brutal enslavers in order to stay married to their chosen partners. Foster's stories of these marriages challenge any idea that marriage is just about health insurance and burial rights. Clearly marriage is rooted in something far more personal and spiritual. To sustain marriage some were willingly to endure slavery.
I'd just finished reading Foster's book when I discovered the story of Keith Bardwell, a white, justice of the peace in Louisiana who makes it a practice to refuse marriage licenses to interracial couples, despite the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. Bardwell explains his resistance to interracial marriage not as racism, but as a protective measure for the potential children of these unions who, according to Bardwell, are not accepted in any racial community.
It is impossible not to laugh aloud about the utter absurdity of defending the tragic mulatto narrative in the age of Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, Ben Jealous, and Barack Obama. The hilarity is exceeded only by Bardwell's quaint assumption that refusing a marriage license to a heterosexual couple would block their ability to procreate. It is clear that Bardwell is not protecting children; he is protecting a particular understanding of marriage rooted in old American bigotry.
Together Foster's text and Bardwell's policy are reminders that marriage is a complex interplay between private choice and public practice. Marriage is never exclusively about loving attachment and commitment among consenting adults. It is also about state recognition of and ability to confer a specific bundle of privileges on particular individuals and relationships. But these privileges and state recognition are not enough to explain why people desire and chose marriage. The power to love, commit, and consent is more deeply human than that.
Enslaved people desired marriage, performed marriage ceremonies, and understood themselves as married, but without the protection of the state their marriages could be disrupted without their consent. They fought back, resisted, and sacrificed in order to stay married, but without the state they were vulnerable both as persons and as spouses.
To be gay in America today is not the same as being a slave in the 19th century. Despite the civil inequality faced by LGBT communities, little in human history compares to the realities of intergenerational, chattel slavery. But there are important connections between the realities of marriage for the enslaved and for contemporary gay men and lesbians.
Today, many same-sex couples in the United States live in a fraught, contingent space of loving attachment, unprotected by state recognition. My fierce commitment to marriage equality derives, in part, from my personal biography as an interracial child, descended from American slaves, and raised in Virginia, beginning less than a decade after the Loving decision. Even though I am heterosexual, marriage equality is personal. I learn from the history of racial and interracial marriage exclusion that the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples is wrong.
But, there is more than one lesson to be learned from the parallels between racial and same-sex marital exclusion. Today, black Americans can securely marry one another. And despite the bigotry of officials like Bardwell, they can legally marry opposite-sex partners of a different race. But despite this formal, legal equality, marriage has never been more rare or more insecure among African Americans.
Marriage is now a minority lifestyle among black people. African American women in all socioeconomic categories are the group least likely to marry, most likely to divorce, and most likely to bear and rear children alone. And although marriage has fallen most precipitously among black people, it has declined throughout the United States. Since 1970, marriage rates in the United States have dropped more than 15% overall, and divorce rates have climbed steadily during this same time.
Fewer people who can marry are choosing to do so. More people who do marry are choosing to exit. This is not solely about selfish individuals unwilling to sacrifice for joint commitment. Marriage itself is still bolstered by a troubling cultural mythology, a history of domination, and a contemporary set of gendered expectations that render it both unsatisfying and unstable for many people.
In short, despite the fierce battles for marriage, contemporary heterosexual marriage is a bit of a mess. The current state of straight marriage is a reminder that simply having the right to marry is not sufficient to generate social equality, create economic stability, or ensure personal fulfillment. Marriage is a crucial civil right, but not a panacea. Even as progressives fight for marriage equality for same-sex couples, we need also to reflect on marriage as a social and political institution in itself.
Our work must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether.
As LGBT communities were organizing for the D.C. event some LGBT activists were expressing concern that an exclusive focus on marriage rights obscures other pressing issues of civil inequality and ignores the contributions of non-traditional families. These critics pushed back against the assimilationist impulse of same-sex marriage advocates in favor of a celebrating the social, cultural, and political contributions of queer individuals and communities. Their arguments sounded quite a bit like the feminist critique of marriage offered by Jessica Valenti, before the NY Times style section got to her.
So what are we to make of marriage? It is both a deeply personal relationship for which people will make almost unthinkable sacrifices, and it is a declining social institution offering little security for most who enter it.
As a black, feminist, marriage-equality advocate I reside at an important intersection in this struggle. This movement must acknowledge the unique history of racial oppression, while still revealing the interconnections of all marriage exclusion. This work must reflect the feminist critique of marriage, while still acknowledging the ancient, cross cultural, human attachment to marriage. This work must be staunchly supportive of same-sex marriage, while rejecting a marriage-normative framework that silences the contributions of queer life.
Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. "Don't worry," we say, "allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices."
This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.
I know from personal experience that a bad marriage is enough to rid you of the fear of death. But this experience allows me suspect that a good marriage must be among the most powerful, life-affirming, emotionally fulfilling experiences available to human beings. I support marriage equality not only because it is unfair, in a legal sense, to deny people the privileges of marriage based on their identity; but also because it also seems immoral to forbid some human beings from opting into this emotional experience.
We must do more than simply integrate new groups into an old system. Let's use this moment to re-imagine marriage and marriage-free options for building families, rearing children, crafting communities, and distributing public goods.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Did Obama Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?
My reaction to Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize elicited some decidedly "un-peaceful" responses from my friends and followers on social networking and blog sites.
As readers here at The Notion can attest -whether with glee or disdain-I have been an ardent supporter of President Obama. Despite some disagreements, I have urged the left to view this administration as an opportunity for genuine change and to regard it as friendly to progressive aims. But my response to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement was not particularly celebratory.
Yesterday I indulged in some Nobel Prize humor on Twitter. "Maybe Obama was awarded the NPP because he didn't smack Joe Wilson." I also made a joke on Politico.com "Maybe Kanye West will show up and grab the mic in protest."
I criticized the idea of awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to a president whose short presidency has included drone attacks with devastating civilian causalities, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and a painfully slow response to the basic human rights issues facing LGBT communities. I respect the President's accomplishments in diplomacy but believed these issues were relevant to assessing his record on peace.
The criticisms were not meant as a sweeping indictment of President Obama's administration, nor do they indicate my faltering support. I was using the occasion of the Nobel Peace Prize award to ask what the international community recognizes as indicative of a broad commitment to peace.
I was stunned by the swift and angry responses from dozens of readers, followers, and friends. Some suggested I was a "hater." Others felt my jovial tone was disrespectful of the President. Several fretted that conservatives would justify further attacks on President Obama using my words. I have disagreed with and criticized Obama as both a candidate and president before, but I have never elicited this kind of anxiety from readers.
In these responses, I detected a very particular American racial anxiety. Let's call it the "Affirmative Action Dilemma." Beginning in the 1980s, conservatives, led by African American thinkers like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, began to argue that affirmative action has a deleterious psychological impact on African Americans. Affirmative action, they lamented, leads black people to always wonder if their success is real, deserved, and meritorious, or simply illusory, unearned, and political. Yesterday's anxiety about my critique of the Nobel Peace Prize Award appeared to echo these worries. Some felt that by raising my disagreement I was implying President Obama did not deserve the prize, and that politics, not merit, was responsible for the committee's decision.
I heard the unspoken Affirmative Action Dilemma lurking. "Please professor, don't make them think we have things we didn't earn"
Generally the response to affirmative action anxiety is to list all of the individual's accomplishments and thereby prove the individual is actually worthy of the award or position. Most Obama faithful pursued this tactic yesterday. Many demanded that I tune into The Rachel Maddow Show and several sent me lists of all President Obama's accomplishments in the area of diplomacy. Uh...ok, but that strategy is limited. (Particularly because it doesn't really negate the whole two wars, drone attacks thing)
I think a more effective counter to the Affirmative Action Dilemma is a little honesty about the wages of whiteness.
I am an affirmative action baby (born in 1973), and I have never felt any dilemma about the policy. I did not sit in my college classroom fretting about whether my white peers thought I deserved to be studying beside them. I have never lost a night of sleep worrying about my colleagues who regard my tenured position at Princeton University as a policy decision, rather than a scholarly accomplishment. This is not because I am so sure of my personal worthiness- that ebbs and flows-rather my general lack of affirmative action anxiety is derived from my clear sense of the continuing reality of white privilege.
White privilege is the bundle of unearned advantages accessible to white people in America. White privilege is not equivalent to racial prejudice. All whites share certain element of racial privilege regardless of their political or racial views. This does not mean that life is perfect for all white people. I was raised by a single, white mother, so I certainly know that white American face real barriers and struggles based on class, opportunity, gender, education, sexuality, and other cross-cutting identities. But white privilege exists and has powerful consequences. This does not mean that race is more important than socioeconomic class. It does mean that in the United States there is a preferential option for whiteness, and this preference means racial privilege produces a certain wage of whiteness.
Simply put, not everything that white people have was earned by merit. Some was, some was not. Some of the wealth, access, prizes, goodies, and political power currently held by white people are ill gotten gains from centuries of accumulated white privilege. Knowing this makes me a lot more relaxed about having to prove that I "deserve" every success, acknowledgement, or position I have.
I encourage my friends and readers to calm down a little about having to prove Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. The point is that he has it now. I, for one, have been doing a little "impeach that suckers" dance ever since I heard. This one is in the history books. No turning back.
Rather than give into the racial anxiety to prove the President's worthiness let's celebrate that President Obama responded to the prize with humility and grace.
"I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won't all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone."
This is an instructive response for everyone who experiences the benefits of privilege and access. Imagine how different our world would be if, instead of proving that we deserved our prizes and positions, we chose to earn them through the service we offer our fellow man.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough.
What not to wear at Morehouse...
Moving Beyond Black Male Respectability:
Notes on Morehouse College's Dress Code Policy
Like many graduate students, I suffer from a serious "cant-get-any-work-done-in-my-apartment" syndrome. Try as I may, each time I sit down to write an article or dissertation chapter, I find myself having to venture out of my apartment and into a more open, public setting (libraries or cafes work well for me).
So there was nothing unusual about my decision to pack up my laptop today and head over to Morehouse College's Jazzmen Café to work on my dissertation amidst a comfortable climate of Pumpkin Lattes and innocently-arrogant Kappa Alpha Psi undergraduates. At 6 o'clock, after I had managed to spend three hours working, I decided to grab a bite to eat at Morehouse's Cafeteria. As I paid my $6 Non-Morehouse student fee to enter the cafeteria, I was told that in order to enter I would need to remove my red, fitted-baseball cap. "Uhm...ok" I thought to myself. It seemed a bit strange to me that baseball hats would be prohibited in a stinky, old cafeteria lounge, but hey, then again this was Morehouse College, an institution hell-bent on promoting images of black middle class respectability and propriety.
I didn't think anything of the no-red-fitted-caps-in-the-cafeteria policy until I glanced over at a headline from the October 6th Issue of The Maroon Tiger (Morehouse's 84 year old student newspaper). "Administration Announces New Attire Policy."
Immediately, I dropped my spoon in the stale cafeteria macaroni.
The administration's new policy (which goes into effect this month) is spear-headed by Morehouse's new President, Dr. Robert Michael Franklin Jr.
Here is a verbatim copy of the policy. It's almost too-good to be true.
Morehouse College Appropriate Attire Policy
October 2009
Published in The Maroon Tiger
It is our expectation that students who select Morehouse do so because of the College's outstanding legacy of producing leaders. On the campus and at College-sponsored events and activities, students at Morehouse College will be expected to dress neatly and appropriately at all times.
Students who choose not to abide by this policy will be denied admission into class and various functions and services of the College if their manner of attire is inappropriate. Examples of inappropriate attire and/or appearance include but are not limited to:
1. No caps, do-rags and/or hoods in classrooms, the cafeteria, or other indoor venues. This policy item does not apply to headgear considered as a part of religious or cultural dress.
2. Sun glasses or "shades" are not to be work in class or at formal programs, unless medical documentation is provided to support use.
3. Decorative orthodontic appliances (e.g. "grillz") be they permanent or removable, shall not be worn on the campus or at College-sponsored events.
4. Jeans at major programs such as, Opening Convocation, Commencement, Founder's Day or other programs dictating professional, business casual attire, semi-formal or formal attire.
5. Clothing with derogatory, offense and/or lewd messages either in words or pictures.
6. Top and bottom coverings should be work at all times. No bare feet in public venues.
7. No sagging--the wearing of one's pants or shorts low enough to reveal undergarments or secondary layers of clothing.
8. Pajamas, shall not be worn while in public or in common areas of the College.
9. No wearing of clothing associated with women's garb (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at College-sponsored events.
10. Additional dress regulations may be imposed upon students participating in certain extracurricular activities that are sponsored or organized by the College (e.g. athletic teams, the band, Glee Club, etc).
11. The college reserves the right to modify this policy as deemed appropriate.
*All administrative, faculty, students and support staff members are asked to assist in enforcing this policy and may report disregard or violations to the Office of Student Conduct. "
Wait a second: tell me this doesn't really say no "pumps" or "purses" at college sponsored events? And wait, are they really trying to ban grillz? What's up Morehouse?
I must be missing something. Is there some kind of growing, critical mass of high-heel wearing, gold-tooth rockin' boys threatening to take over the campus? (if so, Big Up).
Morehouse: I love you, but I'm going to need you to rethink this. Instead of prohibiting baggy jeans and non-normative gender attire, perhaps you might want to celebrate the fact that there is such a rich plurality of black styles and expressive self-fashionings found among Morehouse's all-male population. And less we forget, Morehouse is still a liberal arts college, right? Whatever happened to the idea of letting young undergraduate men "find themselves"--even if that means letting them sag their jeans a little bit or even throwing on a little black nail polish every now and then.
As an African American man who has deep sense of admiration for Morehouse's legacy (confession: I was very close to choosing Morehouse over NYU for college), I'm disturbed. This "proper attire" policy not only obviously contains an egregiously heterosexist bias, it also contains a deeply problematic class-politics.
Let's be real, Morehouse Pres: are we afraid that if these Morehouse boys wear baggy jeans, they might look a little too much like the local, poor community of the Castleberry section of Atlanta (where Morehouse is located)?
This is nuts. I was very proud of the college's recent decision to fire an employee who sent out homophobic emails to Morehouse's staff. Lets keep the ball rolling in that direction and not turn our backs on all those Durag-wearing, Timbs and Jeans rockin, Heels and Pumps-prone undergraduates we know you have all over your campus.
How do you feel about the policy? Am I just trippin'?
Frank Leon Roberts is a lecturer in the program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at New York University.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Blood in Our Streets
Nothing but a ‘G Thang?: Blood in Our Streets
by Stephane Dunn
I nicknamed him Psycho because he reminded of a young guy whose actual street name was Psycho. Actually, he reminded me of a thousand such young black men. Psycho and I met one evening as I sat on the front porch step of a friend’s store on the fringes of the projects. I was on a rare return trip home to little Elkhart, IN and an old high school friend was filling me in – a long list of who was in jail, on the way to jail, newly released from jail, strung out, selling drugs, and dead. Psycho wandered by for a hair net. He rocked several gold chains around his neck, but otherwise he looked, at twenty-five, almost school boyish in neat cornrows, a white t-shirt with Tupac on the front, and black jeans that didn’t quite sag so much they’d fall down without the blinged out belt he wore.
Somehow we got to talking –Tupac, music and Psycho’s life. He had a beautiful three year old daughter and an estranged girlfriend-baby mama whom he’d struck more than once. I questioned him about his daughter; would it be okay if some day a man hit her because she didn’t obey him or she took his car keys or mouthed off at him? He looked at me, black eyes deadly earnest, ’I’d kill that nigga’. No question.’ He was out there – as we like to say- living that thug life, a drug dealer extraordinaire with high plans for life after he left the game. He was going to do real estate, maybe open a barber shop, or another store, invest . . . I asked him again and again when ‘after’ was going to come. Soon he kept saying, soon.
We talked into the evening, the warm summer evening fading into late night; he ignored his beeper and both of us barely noticed the cars slow crawling by with the pumped up wheels and the Psycho looking imitators honking and hollering out. We were old friends by the time we hugged goodbye and I said to him last, Don’t stay out there too long. I don’t want to hear about you getting killed or going to prison.’ Nine months later Psycho was shot to death trying to flee his killers--three other young black men. They murdered him on the steps of his apartment building practically in front of his new girlfriend and their child, whom thank God the killers spared.
Right now, in Chicago, the murder of a sixteen year old honor student by three other young black men is making headline news. Usually, it doesn’t though it happens every day in small towns like Elkhart and big cities like Chicago. Despite it being an epidemic, we remain in denial, the proof of which lies in the distorted language used to characterize the perpetrators. The words ‘gang’ and ‘gang violence’ like ‘thugs’ are thrown around a lot so much so that they are merely vague euphemisms for something we want to believe can be chalked up to wayward, ‘bad’ ‘black’ and violent seeds and familiar violent groups (gangs) on the margins of society and our communities.
The only answer has been, as one CNN reporter echoed, to lock them up if they can be discovered especially when they dare kill other ‘respectable’ young people like the sixteen year old Chicagoan. Perhaps it’s too difficult to confront that we are up against a cultural psyche, a consciousness that has a generation of children bred to disvalue life – their own and others and to see going to court and prison as a rite of passage. Unfortunately, this nihilistic worldview does not just belong to some anonymous mass of gang members. The ‘thugs’ come from families with grandmas and aunts and folks whose hearts will break when they see that mug shot on the news. Too many are potentially productive young people who give in to the thug life so prevalent around them. Given the numbers of young folk in prisons across the nation, it’s clear that locking them up is merely the only resolution we’ve got, not the one that’s preventing others from going or staying out and it is not, obviously, keeping the blood from running in the streets of the President’s adopted city or my hometown.
***
Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles and commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).
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