Arguing with the Real.

I've been reading Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter and I'm struck by my memory of Rosalind Weisman, the founder and old e.d. of the now defunct Empower Program in Washington, DC.  I was on Empower's Girls' Advisory Board for two years as an adolescent, and ended up working there on staff later on in college.  We GAB girls would huddle up in the cramped living room of the row house that Empower called an office, eat chips and and salsa and talk about being teenage girls at home, at school, on the street, in our bodies.  Occasionally Ros would stop by and facilitate one of our meetings.  She might get us to talk about how we think of the gay girl at school or why we let that boy talk to us that way.  Sometimes she would draw a box on a flip sheet and explain to us the different positionalities of U.S. girlhood.  You can be inside the box, which is like a life raft, and in the center, soaking up the sun and feeling fine.  You can be one of the girls inside the box but to the side, struggling not to fall off, clamoring over all the other girls to get to the center.  Or you can be one of the girls outside the box entirely.  If you are one of those girls you better hope you can swim, otherwise you are drowning.  

It is an incredible credit to Ros that she was able to break down ideas that Butler complicates with words like the real, and the symbolic, and concepts of contingency and what is circumscribed by the law and foreclosure.  Butler isn't wrong to do this.  These are complicated systems of power all around us, in and outside of our little teen girl bodies.  But the effect of these systems is quite base, quite intuitive and emotional.  You are either floating or you are not.  You are either drowning or you are not.  If you have swam in the ocean and felt the undertow slip around your feet and carry you further than you realized, it is not hard to understand how scary it feels to drown. 

In reading Butler, I am reminded of the problematics of titling and naming, the contradictions in self-circumscription.  When we decide to call ourselves "queer" we have made the choice to draw a circle around ourselves, and that is dangerous.  It was part of my fear of moving out here to San Francisco in the first place -- "It is so gay..." I would whine to my Philadelphia friends.  "I don't know how to be queer in a place where no one cares that you are queer."  (I still feel as though I'm trying to figure that one out.)  Likewise, when we build "safe spaces" for ourselves, we are, by the fact of that very creation of space, establishing an opposite, an "unsafe space" for someone else. 

I've been in email dialogue with a friend about her interest in an organizing collective that is currently working under the auspices of being a place for womyn who love womyn.  Appropriately, this makes my friend nervous.  This was my response:

Personally, the way I feel about "trans-inclusion" is that it's not really an issue.  It's like, there is no reason to not be trans-inclusive.  Like, that shouldn't even be a phrase because that should just not be an issue.  And believe you me, I am a man-hater full on, so if anyone should be about "womyn-loving-womyn" it should be me.  But the fact of the matter is, SAFE SPACE IS NOT REAL: we can only create spaces where we are safe to challenge ourselves and each other.  That is what a safe space is.  And personally, I do not think that safe space is mutually discursive - I think that if you belong to a community that suffers from other peoples' illegally inherited privilege (i.e., your being trans means you get the bad end of the gender-normativity deal) then you are the only one who gets to make that call of whether or not it is a "safe space."  The one benefiting from that privilege doesn't get to make that call!  If the one benefiting from privilege does want to be exclusive, that is not a "safe space," that is called caucusing, and that is something completely different and fairly problematic in its own right.  That is like "Men Can Stop Rape" and "White Anti-Racist Support Group" stuff.  So don't get it twisted.

Having said that, I do not think that it is putting a halt to a movement or disrupting a collective process to say, "Hold up, I think we are not examining our gender privilege here," and to really complicate essentialist notions of gender and victimization.  To challenge the assumption that if you are a woman then you inherently need an exclusive space to heal from the trauma of womanhood.  When, for real, if you have the privilege of so easily being able to call yourself a woman without question, then you are also part of someone else's trauma.

These same ideas came up in the conversations I was having with another friend late one night last week, about being 21 and trying to find a place to live.  Feeling alienated from other 21 year olds, but rejected by older folks who are not interested in living with someone whose age represents [what? Immaturity?  An inability to be trusted?  We could not figure it out].  It would seem that power works in ways that are hard and visceral and complex, but not necessarily all that mysterious...

 

today SF decides how to Remember.

If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History.  If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic -- shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman's maneuver carried out at an "impossible angle" to the universe."

-Hakim Bey, Waiting for the Revolution

This week the New York Times reported on the confession of Morty Sobell, the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg case's only living defendant.  In an interview, Sobell admitted that he and Julius had worked together for the Soviet Union.  According to the Times, his confession has prompted the Rosenbergs' sons to themselves acknowledge that their father was a spy.  For all of the possible implications of his testimony, his simple and understated re-writing of history brings a much larger issue to the fore:  How Much Does It Really Matter?  That is, when does History stop attempting to be "objective" and get on with the reality of memory?  And in this case, the collective [leftist] memory is one of sympathy for the Rosenbergs.  Whether that sympathy is a result of the lamenting of an unfair trial, an anti-death penalty political stance, or a deep-seated belief that the Rosenbergs were innocent, Sobell's confession may not do much to shake the decision, made long ago and cemented in leftist gossip and propaganda, that an injustice was committed in 1952.  

The anti-climactic quality of Sobell's interview gets at other issues of memory versus History, admitted subjectivity versus assumed objectivity.  Today, right here in sunny San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors is considering legislation to give reparations to those [majority black and Japanese American] residents from the Western Addition / Fillmore neighborhood whose homes were demolished as part of "redevelopment."  In the 1940's, 60 blocks were slated for redevelopment, as they were considered "blighted."  Unfortunately, and as is often the case, the neighborhood was not a blight at all.  In fact, it had been hailed as the "Jazz Harlem of the West" (says Ross Mirkarimi, District 5 supervisor), was home to the SF Japanese American cultural center (Japantown), and rows of ancient Victorian homes and community owned music venues, restaurants and shops.  (By the numbers: 883 businesses and 4,729 households were forced out. 2,500 homes were demolished.)  The Redevelopment Agency offered those whose homes were taken through imminent domain and other illegal means certificates for replacement housing.  However, poor records were kept regarding who had lost their home, and the replacement homes themselves were too few and incomparable to the beautiful Victorians that had been owned by most residents.  What is on the table today is that descendants of all of the displaced will be [re]offered certificates that will be transferable to any SF housing program.  According to Mirkarimi, this effort is about "access to capital" - an interesting challenge, considering the fact that the homes that do still exist (but have been lost by their original owners) are now worth millions.  In any case, the Redevelopment Agency will officially close shop in the Western Addition this January.

There is a greater challenge at hand here: how can reparations be made to accommodate a stolen sense of community?  When stable communities are razed and pathologized, the repercussions are deep and whatever apologies come after must acknowledge that.  Considering Redevelopment's interests in the Mission and Bayview, it seems that the Agency's current attempts are mostly lip-service.  (About 1,300 acres of Bayview are about to be turned over to the Redevelopment Agency.)   The real question now is: sixty years after the label of Blight was given to Fillmore and the Western Addition, fifty years after the first demolitions, who in the neighborhood remembers what it used to be?  There is a successful jazz club called Yoshi's and an Ethiopian restaurant, but who living there truly remembers what came before?  

Victoria, BC social practitioner Lauren Marsden completed a project last summer with the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project in Vancouver to commemorate and advocate for another lost community: Vancouver's first and last black neighborhood Hogan's Alley.  In the 1970's, the Georgia Viaduct interurban freeway was constructed, effectively demolishing all of Hogan's Alley (as well as cutting Chinatown in half).  To see it now, it looks like how one would expect a freeway to look.  Like road and empty lot.  Marsden and the HAMP's project was to plant a welcome sign out of flowers for passersby and residents of the new high-rise condos under construction across the street.  "Hogan's Alley Welcomes You" the flowers read, in giant five-foot letters, and one is forced to do a double-take.  The statement is simple but massive.  Someone else still lays claim to this land; you, newcomer, are welcome here but only because someone else came and went before you.  

Historicization is a powerful tool, and Marsden and HAMP wield it quite well.  We live in a time period where the State uses History as a geopolitical weapon, making empty lots where there were once neighborhoods, building highways where communities once thrived.  Yes, History can be a powerful process of erasure.  In the case of Sobell and the Rosenbergs, it seems that the authoritative voice of History has become meaningless: the people (including Howard Zinn) have decided for themselves that the collective decision to memorialize, regardless of court decisions or official interviews, take precedence.  The question is how to make that privileging of alternative storytelling the instinctive act when one reaches for history?  How to replace History with memory as the preferred conduit of collective awareness - without institutionalizing it and allowing it to be, yet again, swallowed up by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy?  

"I don't even know if that's a job..."

Community Organizers Fight Back 

Well, I'm a little late to it, but it doesn't mean I don't feel the community organizer rage that has been rippling across the country since last week's comments from Giuliani, Pataki, and Palin on community organizing.  Their comments, if you haven't heard them, were fairly ignorant, and I mean that in the best possible way: particularly in Giuliani's case, they do not seem to actually know what a community organizer is.  Giuliani says "What?!" and the crowd goes wild.  I can't imagine I was the only one who felt a shiver as I watched that sea of white people on the RNC floor,  cheering at Obama's expense as much as at the expense of organizers and marginalized people failed by the government across the U.S., a few of them waving their ten-gallon cowboy hats in the air as their jaws flew open in laughter.  

It was a strange choice for George, Sarah and Rudy to make such cutting remarks.  In the cities I come from, the political minorities and the marginalized citizens are in the majority.  I come from Philadelphia, where there is not a lot of money to go around, especially if politicians want to invest it unwisely in community-debilitating schemes like casinos.  And I come from Washington, DC, a state built off of the descendants of slaves, where endless bureaucracy and lack of statehood create a glass ceiling ridiculously low to the ground.  In the places I come from, community organizers make the city run, whether they work on a large scale holding press conferences and meetings with the mayor, or if they work in a smaller neighborhood setting.  To charge that organizers do not have responsibilities, or to laugh and say "organizing" makes a resume look bad, or to throw up ones hands and ask, "What in God's name is a community organizer?  I don't even know if that's a job" tells all of the hundreds of thousands of citizens affected by organizers that you are ignorant.

Democracy Now! had a good interview a few days ago with John Raskin from Community Organizers of America, in which Amy Goodman brings up a quote from New York Governor David Paterson (don't deny this man is the bomb. I'm looking forward to the day he runs for President).

David Paterson ...said there are racial overtones in the Republican presidential ticket's criticism of Obama's work as a community organizer.  Paterson said at an event here in New York City, "There are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign ... The Republican party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative.  But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican convention."

Fair enough that all these politicians have bad feelings about organizers.  Particularly in Palin's case, it organizers that have kept the politicos in line, that have often organized against them.  The interesting point that Raskin raises is that earlier in the GOP campaign, they were using the term "street organizer," but eventually decided that was too overtly racially charged.  Yet again, the GOP lets loose their thinly veiled racism...

The most I can say for the whole situation is that it has done a good job of rallying community organizers.  And, as someone who worked for the past few years as an organizer in the form of an arts educator, I can say that we need more rallying.  Or rather, ironically, more organizing.  Organizers are overworked, and the majority are underpaid.  Often they are working in the deep muck that makes it difficult to see out, to be hopeful, to make connections and build coalitions.  It is exciting to see how these idiotic comments by a bunch of doofuses have clearly illustrated the marginalization of organizers themselves, and brought them closer to each other to fight for legitimate representation.  Maybe this is the start of something beautiful.

Cows Make Milk and We Make Artists (it just comes out of us)

Artists, along with everyone else, are culture makers.  They are not, however, the makers of politics.  The politics are there, imbued in everything that exists already -- now more so than ever, in our globalized world of geopolitics and hybrid identities.  Politics is in our hair, it's in the light bulbs we use, it is in where we choose to vacation, it is in our food and what our hands say about the work we have done.  It is not artists who make these politics, but it is artists who give politics a mode of expression, a voice.  It is artists who make manifest the pain, desire, joy and confusion of these politics.  Whether or not they say so, artists are political people.

So what does it mean for a preeminent art school, one that is in the business of educating almost 2,000 would-be artists and producing several hundred Masters of the Arts a year, to offer a requisite art history course in which, out of about 150 artists listed in the syllabus, far less than 1/3 are women and only 23 are people of color?  When the majority of artists of color whose work students are to explore (that is, whose work will join a cannon that forms the basis for our understanding of the major movements and moments in Western art history of the past fifty years) appear in the "Identity Politics" and "Diasporas" sections, which only cover the 1990's and 1980's, respectively?  In other words, what is a school suggesting by telling students that women are only occasionally artists and people of color actually only began artistic production within the last 30 years?  

At this point, I've gotten over the fact that fine arts programs consider it a priority that emerging artists know Western / Global Northern art history inside and out -- over, say, West African art histories or East Asian art histories or Mexican, Caribbean and Central American art histories, all of which have been heavily mined by white male artists over the years.  I can swallow that.  Not easily, but I can do it.  This, however, is some next level shit.

At my first complaint of this, someone said to me, "Do you think that this is what is being taught because this is just what's out there?"  It's a good question, and I think the answer complex.  It is what is out there.  A google search for Carrie Mae Weems will turn up a fraction of what a search for, say, Julian Schnabel or Jeff Koons will retrieve.  But part of why it is what is out there is because this is what the culture-making institutions put out there.  I look around the lecture hall and am overwhelmed by the whiteness of this place.  There are a helluva lot of reasons why grad/art school sees so few faces of color, and one of those reasons is because what is taught is: You Do Not Make Art.  In fact, not only do people of color not make art (unless, apparently, it is related to "Identity" or the "Diaspora"), but they are relegated to other work.  Indeed, they do not have a "practice," they have "jobs" -- they do security, they work in public maintenance, they are janitors.

And then some of them are criminals.

I am in day two of classes and have already heard two white students on separate occasions express fear over living in, or even being in Oakland (or anywhere deemed ungood or unsafe).  And here is where we get to the real down-and-dirty of racism, where we find that what is good is what is safe for white people, and what is safe for white people is to be in the majority.  A student fears her neighbors in  the Excelsior a mostly nonwhite district of the City.  Another student, in a different class, mentions that she has not yet gotten the reading packet for class because she would have to go to Oakland to get it.

"I don't know how to get there," she smiles sheepishly, and other students offer help with directions.

"Or," says one, "you could just take the BART down there and walk a few blocks."

She looks up and, laughing nervously, embarrassed at her own fear but feeling she is in a safe space, asks, "Will I get shot, though?"

"No," he reassures her.  "The houses there are big and nice.  Don't worry: it's an upscale neighborhood."

So we are being taught to call ourselves Artists.  We are learning the language, and all the colloquialisms and dialects and accents and hand gestures that go with it.  And part of that language is one of extreme normativity: whiteness and maleness and safety.  It makes me wonder... as we move forward now, looking towards futures of making culture and revealing politics, do we do so from a context of ignorance?  Who says that we must swallow this cannon in order to be masters of our art?