sundries

- This is sad: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/18/van.meter.obit.ap/index.html
It will also no doubt lead to speculation that teh girl came from a high pressure home, and that childhood achievement never originates in the child and is the root of all evil.

- We have been in Iraq five years.

- Bad week: Arthur C. Clarke died. I remember, faintly, a 60 minutes thing on him as a kid, which tried t make unsavory innuendo about his personal life, which I didn't understand then and do now.

- The coverage of Obama's excellent speech yesterday has been so racist. If I see one more news item that's essentially "inside the secret, mysterious world of black churches" I'm going to scream. Black people watch CNN too! And that's the tip of that "I can't believe the shit that's coming out of your mouth" iceberg.

- This is the week short-list candidates for grad school are supposed to be notified. I increasingly suspect I will not get in, because I have a long history of understanding how people react to me and my writing. If I do get in, I also don't expect to be short-listed because the application asked what other schools I was applying to and I said none -- they aren't competing with anyone for me, so even if they like me, I expect to be near the top of the long list. But really, I think I will not get in, and I think too many people here will enjoy that. The real question is what to do if I don't get in; increasingly, I think I need the degree.

- Our See's Easter order is on the way.

- I have no idea what to do about the LJ thing. I have an insanejournal and a wordpress, and I have problems with both. Insane journal offers me the features I need but is ugly and seems isolated (truthfully, anywhere seems isolated). Wordpress feels cold and anonymous and ill-suited to how I use my bog. Staying here without paying once my account runs out isn't really viable either -- the thing works badly free, I'd have to see ads, and I don't want my content helping these fuckers make money. Meanwhile, I value my friends list highly even if you don't comment that often or I don't, and I don't see any meaningful way of maintaining that at scale if I move. It's so complicated and involves both professional issues and very personal ones.

- Fencing tonight, trains be damned.

- I will probably not be attending any of the keynotes at Terminus, because despite being told that meals will accomodate my food allergies the options are currently mix your own pasta, french toast and quiche. And no, pasta mix-ins without the pasta is not a meal. I hope they step up on this, but after Terminus, I think it's canned tuna in the hotel room again. I realize this is a normal and expected thing in my life, but NYC is so easy and my friends treat me so well, I'm not used to being left out because of my disease.

- The heap of stuff that was inappropriately living in our stairwell is gone. I saw peopel clearing it -- it was a building manager and a friend. I can't tell if the stuff belonged to the friend and that's why it was allowed to stay there so long despite being a health and safety hazard, or if they'd finally just had enough and removed it. If the stuff just got trashed, I'll be sad, because there was artwork I should have stolen in that case, but I didn't want it on my conscience or karma.

on race and family

One of the interesting things I've noticed in the aftermath of Obama's speech yesterday is people talking about their own experiences with racism: not racism directed at them, but the racism around them in family and friends and the racism in their own hearts.

This has been powerful, and important. It should not be diminished. But it should be kept in perspective, for confession does not absolve us. But neither should it be tossed aside, because confession matters, stories matter, the truths of our lives and our families have power either to set an example or to never be an example at all. As Obama so skillfully pointed out yesterday, often it's both.

I am a white woman, more or less. The more or less by and large doesn't matter very much. Living in this country, it's what you look like, and a lot of my heritage I didn't learn until I was older.

I am Sicilian Catholic, North African, Lithuanian Jewish and Mongolian.

My mother's people, for whom we have a family tree dating back to 1710, traveled from far-Eastern Russia, settled in Lithuania in the late 1780s, then traveled through Eastern Europe before emigrating to the U.S. in the 1880s. My grandmother, who died when I was seven, had Asian eyes and bright red hair.

My father's people are Sicilian, and what we know of their history is oral tradition only. No one wrote it down until a couple of decades ago; before that, people didn't just not have the inclination -- they mostly didn't have the education; my grandmother never got farther than second grade. We did come to Sicily from Malta, where we were probably Jews. Several African people that were almost certainly Tunisian married into the family; they were black and they were fisherman. If you met the whole of my extended family on that side, you might well be shocked that we're all related to each other; we're a mix of Caucasian features and dark skin and deeply African features and blindingly pale skin.

I grew up in New York City in the 1970s, which was fucked up in about eight different ways. I lived in a tony neighborhood and had one African American friend in preschool. His name was Nigel. When I went to Hewitt, the kindergarteners, held the hand of a graduating senior for their ceremony. I was assigned to a dark-skinned woman whose named I don't remember. People said she'd make me dirty. When I told my parents, they didn't tell me it was untrue, merely not to repeat things like that.

After that, they didn't have to worry about it for a long time. All the girls at Hewitt were white, except Mamiko, who was Japanese. And despite living in New York, my world was entirely white. I didn't think I or it were racist, but it certainly didn't occur to me this was odd or problematic, which pretty much speaks for itself in ugliness. I liked the bubble of my archaic life, and did not see the flaws in it I see now.

One of the lessons of my life is that all communities will ostracize. I may have been white, but I wasn't a Daughter of the American Revolution, so I wasn't white enough. And the people of Indian descent I've dated (there's been more than one) always spoke to me about how skin tone mattered in their communities and families. I know that it is not dissimilar in the African American community.

Racism, largely, has never been something I've seen as my battle. Certainly, it's not something I can lead the way in, but must follow in (it's a point made repeatedly on the journals of my friends who are PoC, and I am glad to listen and to nod and to accept that; it makes sense). But lately, through this election largely, I have come to see it as a battle I must actually, finally be present in.

Not just because I am sick of the suspicion with which my father looks at his African American neighbors in his tony apartment building. Not just because I am embarrassed by the things my uncle says, to the point I don't feel comfortable being in public with him, but because as a person living in a nation of immigrants, descended from people who came from places of significant ethnic mixing, I feel like I am watching our nation eat its own the way I have long watched my family eat its own.

My grandmother, when I was eight years old said to me, "You are in my will. But not your mother. You are of my blood. She is a Jew."

Well, I'm a Jew too. And chances are, so were the people my grandmother was descended from. Jews and Muslims and Christians alike. I may be pale and aquiline and privileged, but I know what I am, even if no one else does, and I cannot tolerate, in myself and in my family, all this racial and religious hatred anymore.

Surely, I've still got my own battles. I will freely admit that living in the economically depressed neighborhood I do can bring out the worst in me at times, feelings I know better than to give credence to, but still regrettably have. But as much as I confront my own racism, I feel like I also need to confront those remarks and incidents around me that I used to let slide because they'd just cause too much drama to address (and trust me, in a family like mine, there's a lot of drama to cause).

At the end of the day, all these little stories don't matter unless we change, and confession is not the same thing as change. I know that. I want to repeat that. But all this sudden confession, it feels like a start. It feels like we're thinking, if not again, then maybe for the first time.

Maybe we can finally get over our shit, as individuals and as a nation.

ETA:

Since it's also about to be Purim, you may want to listen to Esther: the Feast of Masks by ellen_kushner, as it addresses many of these issues about the spaces between what we are and what people think we are and what obligations and quandries that leaves us with. You can get the audio here: http://streams.wgbh.org/scripts/ram.php?show=026_esther

Meanwhile, karnythia is hosting a discussion about race here: http://karnythia.livejournal.com/977549.html