This innocence does not exist. As horrific as it is, and as many images and associations it brings up, the comparison of this law to 1930’s/40’s Germany is a cop-out. We don’t need to reach across oceans, time, and cultures to find parallels for the egregious actions being taken now in Arizona and contemplated in other states. We have many parallels much, much closer to home.  Most of which we, as a nation, would prefer to ignore.

The Arizona Republic

Since the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz by a suspected illegal immigrant in March, politicians and the national press have fanned a perception that the border is inundated with bloodshed and that it’s escalating.

In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that the failure to secure that border between Arizona and Mexico "has led to violence – the worst I have ever seen.”

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Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.

"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."

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Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, said there always has been crime associated with smuggling in southern Arizona, but today’s rhetoric does not seem to jibe with reality.

"This is a media-created event," Dupnik said. "I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure."

Fox News (via)

the Arizona Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state that critics say currently advocate separatism and racial preferences.

The bill, which passed 32-26 in the state House, had been approved by the Senate a day earlier. It now goes to Gov. Jan Brewer for her signature.

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”  (via)

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Frederic Mitchell at Jack and Jill Politics

The WSJ is reporting that the Arizona Department of Education is also pressuring principals to remove teachers who speak English with an accent to students who are learning English.

Arizona’s enforcement of fluency standards is based on an interpretation of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. That law states that for a school to receive federal funds, students learning English must be instructed by teachers fluent in the language. Defining fluency is left to each state, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education said.

“The teacher obviously must be fluent in every aspect of the English language,” said Adela Santa Cruz, director of the Arizona education-department office charged with enforcing standards in classes for students with limited English.

 

You’ll notice that no one is providing ANY type of empirical evidence supporting the utter ignorance that believes accents or pronunciation has anything to do with learning ability.

But this is even worse:

That poses a dilemma for Ms. Agneessens, the principal. In kindergarten, three of four classes are for English-language learners. Two of those three classes are taught by immigrants whose English didn’t pass muster.

Ms. Agneessens said she was trying to find a way to retain those two teachers by shifting them into classrooms not designated for English-language learners, even if that meant teaching a different grade. Both teachers declined to comment for this article.

Recently, she informed one experienced kindergarten teacher that she would have to be reassigned to a mainstream class in a higher grade in the fall, if she wished to remain at the school.

“We both cried,” she said.

Astonishing as the authors and supporters of these policies may find it, there is just no way that this can work as easily as it did before, for a few reasons:

1. Sunlight. People, to this day, still think that the reason Black and other of color folks don’t live in certain areas, or at least not in any numbers, is because “they don’t want to”, or “it’s too cold there”, and so on, as opposed to the fact that they were chased/forced/threatened out – and there was no media to report it, or anyone to care if they did. What is going on in Arizona, though, cannot be done in darkness.

2. Power. Latinos of today have far more political power than African Americans of yesteryear even thought of. They are a large and growing constituency, with buying power and voting power, who most sensible politicians do not want to cross.

3. The Civil Rights Movement. Though the Republican party itself is a sort of backlash against the Civil Rights movement and its still incomplete results, most people – and particularly most businesses – do not like to be seen as being on the wrong side of a discriminatory policy because of the gains made by those individuals at that point in time.

4. Arizona was successfully boycotted before – not surprisingly, again over issues with race, when they refused to declare a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Because of these things, among others, Arizona’s message is being heard, loud and clear, and not just by the usual suspects…

Frederic Mitchell again:

Arizona: Don’t come here if you’re not white.

Instead, I read a lot. Or downloaded at lot to read, even if not quite yet. I have 3 or 4 different ebook readers on my Blackberry and to test them out I’ve been busily downloading stuff to all of them (and, of course, forgetting which one has what).

They all work well but I think I’ve settled on Mobipocket Reader as my ebook reader of choice, for a number of reasons:

1. It’s free and easy to work with

2. I can download info from anywhere and create an ebook out of it, using Mobi’s ebook creator (it creates in different formats, too.)

3. It’s really easy to make notes and bookmarks as I am reading on the Blackberry then, after syncing with PC, copy the text I want and the notes from the desktop app into some other program – to blog about it or whatever. You can also sync online but I’ve not done this yet.

And, let’s see – that’s mainly it. I know other services do the same, but this one is just easiest for me, and has the advantage of everything being free.

… if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up. Anne Lamott

I should have found this quote the other day but it will do just as well for today. Dawn is sometimes a long time breaking.

I had other options for quotes; after all, there are zillions of people who have said quotable things, but what caught my eye about this one was the word “stubborn”.

Stubborn. So often that is a negative. A stubborn child (I was said to be one). A stubborn stain. A stubborn man or woman, who won’t budge from a wrong path. Bad things that won’t go away everywhere are said to be stubborn.

But some things should be, must be stubborn.

Hope. Without that, life would be unendurable for a good portion of the world.

Generosity. I had never thought of a stubborn generosity – of spirit, of time, of money – until I read a future friend’s work that mentioned it. But after that, I’ve seen an abundance of examples of it in many places past and present.

Friendship. Lasting through the good and the bad, pursued despite time and distance, nourished and propped up when it flags, greeted anew after time away – I’d say that many lasting friendships are of the stubborn variety.

Belief. In one’s self or in someone else (or, if you are so inclined, in spiritual matters). For all the pop culture hoopla over believing in yourself, I am not sure all that many do. Even some of the more successful people. They may believe in their abilities, to great monetary or professional success, but in themselves? I’m not so sure, for many. To me that is something much different and separate from just what is conventionally considered success.

And you can hardly do a more stubborn thing than trust. In yourself, surely. That’s a lifelong lesson to be learned, for some. Trusting in someone else is, at times, easier – though still the height of stubbornness.

I think I like this.

Here’s to living a stubborn life today. And all the tomorrows.

Not surprisingly, there has been a bit of controversy over the name from the beginning, with both white and Black people objecting to it for one reason or another. Right at the top of his blog page he has an explanation – “Why The Name” – with a video of Malcolm X giving his explanation of the difference between a field negro and a house negro, in today’s world. He also expands a bit on his thinking and who he designates as which, and why,  in this post he wrote a couple of years ago, Field-Negro 101.

So. I’ve never had much of a problem with the name or the explanation; I don’t really now, in fact, it’s just that… well, I’ve had cause to wonder lately if the entire field vs house negro bit didn’t come from the same poisoned well as “Mammy” and “Sapphire” and “Uncle Tom” and so on.

So much of our history that we were taught, Black history in particular, has turned out to be just lies. Some that perhaps based on a kernel of truth – after all, I imagine that at some point in time, and in some place, there was a slave or few who did fit the Mammy stereotype. Those same types exist today in all cultures, and I imagine they existed then. And some who embodied what we now call “Uncle Tom’s” (apparently the Uncle Tom in Beecher Snow’s book does not exactly resemble what the stereotype has grown to be known as), because they too exist today, across the board.

So, too, I’m sure there were “house negroes” who were more concerned with the master’s comfort and welfare, and the house and what measure of comfort and safety it brought the enslaved person, than they were with the welfare of their fellow captives – but,  well… did it hold true in great numbers?

I have no real idea. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research and reading about Black folks in the pre-Civil war south, and the lives of slaves and so on. Absolutely fascinating reading, some of it; no matter how dry the words that chronicled some of these lives, the just unimaginable spirit and determination forces its way through. So much I didn’t know; so much I have yet to learn.

What got me started on this research – because, shamefully, I really wasn’t all that interested before, it all seemed so one dimensional and boring, the way it was often presented – was a couple of paragraphs in the family tree book about my great-great-great (maybe another great) Uncle Louis. I’d read these paragraphs a few times – three of them, no more than 30 words altogether, that told a terrible, tragic, triumphant story, no less compelling for all that it was so short.  Whenever I’d go through the book to look up dates or to get the name of someone else that maybe I could Google, I’d glance over those words and wince a bit, but then move on to someone more modern.

If you had asked me, I would have said that of course I knew what those three paragraphs said – after all, had I not read them many (or at least a few) times? Any missing details my mind could supply, for this is a story often told, of the horrors of slavery and its effects.

His story in brief (because that is all I have is brief) is that of one of the youngest of maybe 17 children, some of whom were sold away, Louis was born into slavery and grew up in captivity. He was, apparently – and understandably – adamantly opposed to being in bondage and attempted to escape almost continuously. Each time he was either captured and brought back, or returned on his own. After his twelfth escape, he was captured and beaten so severely that he was bedridden for weeks, unable to move for part of the time. After he recovered he was finally as meek and mild as the slaveholder could have wished. A completely broken man, it was felt – until his escaped a thirteenth time and this time made it to Canada.

Terrible, fascinating story that I thought I knew the whole of. I could imagine him trudging through the fields, despairing, burdened, working from sun up to sun down, day by day, until it finally got to be too much and he just took off. Over and over again.

Except there was one part of his story that I kept missing, each time I read it, because (I guess) it didn’t fit in with my world view, with my preconceptions of both slaves and slavery. It wasn’t till I went to write it up for a family tree site that I finally noticed what I had been missing.

See,  Louis escaped the last time by making friends with some sort of clerk’s daughter, gaining access to blank passes, and then he forged himself a pass of some sort, that somehow got him into Canada, or at least to a place where he could initiate the journey there (maybe the Underground Railroad).

Anyway, he could forge this pass because he could read and write. And he could read and write, and do it well, because he was …. a secretary. The slaveholder’s secretary, in fact. A pencil pusher in the big house. A house Negro if ever there was one, I’d say. And yet he escaped, time and time again.

This completely upended my worldview. I had, it seems, accepted it as a given (were we not taught this?) that slaves who worked in the house – while they may have had a few discomforts just by virtue of being slaves and being at the beck and call of everyone in the house and liable to be hit by any white person in the house, including small children – were happy to stay there in relative comfort and looked down on the field workers. Oh, some may have helped by stealing food for those in the field shacks or something, but for the most part they valued their place and would do little to jeopardize it.

But how do we know that any of that is true? Again, I’m sure that there is at least a kernel of truth there, but how do we know it was not the other way around? That the majority of those in the house preferred not to be there, or to be in bondage anywhere, and it’s the few that were wedded to the house, the comfort and the masters? Could this not too be a lie, meant, like so many, to make us feel bad about our Blackness, our history and those who peopled it? I’d like to find out.

As I said, I don’t have any problem with Field Negro’s name, or why he uses it, or anything like that, in general, but I think it may possibly be unfair to the people it references. Sure my uncle’s story is just one story, but I’m just one random person wandering through her family tree who has found an unlikely hero; I think there are many, many more out there.

Un milagro diario el amanecer junto al mar

I don’t really like the ocean. Well, I like to listen to it and look at it, but I don’t particularly like to be in it. I can’t swim, you see, even though the rest of my family swim like fish. Me – one too many times getting almost drowned as a “joke”, maybe, when I was young. But I simply do not like to be in water. (Admitting this is almost considered sacrilege for a native Californian).

Many of my childhood memories deal with the ocean, though. I guess either we didn’t live too far from Santa Monica beach and pier, or that was just a favorite get away spot. Especially when the amusement park was there, POP.  Not pronounced pop, by the way, but pea oh pea, for Pacific Ocean Park.

Anyway, I seem to remember us spending a lot of time there, one way or another, mom just stuffing us into the car and heading west. Many of the rides terrified me (I was quite young) but I loved the roller coaster – at least until I almost fell out of it while it was moving quite fast. The only reason I stayed in the car is because my cousin, who had climbed down into the well of the car and who was the reason the bar didn’t lock in the first place, held on tightly to my dress whenever the roller coaster started to go down and I started to fly up.  This, as you might imagine, left quite an impression on me.

I also had a love/hate relationship with the round, glass sided ball thingies that you sat in and traveled from the shore over a portion of the ocean to some sort of structure on the other side. Great view, but they’d swing with the wind and jerk and stop and, in general, reminded me more of those images you see of people pulling in laundry from a clothesline with a pulley than anything else.  There were always stories about this or that tragedy happening with those. I have no clue how true any of them are – probably not very. I think they were mostly told by older siblings to their smaller sisters and brothers.

Sometimes we’d go to the pier and look at starfish clinging to the posts, but often we would go to the beach itself and play in the sand and the water, collecting seashells and so on. I would wade out a few feet into the ocean, but it would invariably knock me over and try to keep me. I really, really hated that feeling of grabbing on to the sand and attempting to move forward while the tide tried to drag me back in. Still do, but, man, that situation could apply to so many things, no?

My favorite ocean memories are when we’d just drive out to sit on the shore and wait for something – either a tidal wave that had been warned about (thank the heavens none ever came) or to see the seals or dolphins pass by or maybe just to watch the sunset.

So, sea memories. The title of this post, something about the sea, came about when I found the photo up top. The caption, in Spanish, is the original photographer’s. I read some Spanish, but not nearly enough and all I really know is that it says something about the sea.

The attractiveness of the photo itself (at least for me) changes with – I dunno, whatever mood I’m in? I really liked it when I first saw it, thought it looked refreshing and artistic, a lovely sunset. I look at it now and it looks a bit sinister and threatening.

Maybe the  caption says (or should say) something about the many faces and moods of the sea.

(photo from cuellar’s flickr stream)

He doesn’t belong to anyone – although he seems remarkably well cared for, for a stray. His thick, glossy fur on his large, muscled frame alternately reflects and absorbs all light as he wanders, strutting through his half-wild life as a part of the neighborhood he’s foraged in since he was small.

There is nothing special about my patio; like all the others in this 8 plex it’s a small square with pebble stone paving, and open to the courtyard so that we can look out at the bushes and any flowers the neighbors have planted. The elderly woman who lives across the way has the best patio, by far – all sorts of interesting things: hanging plants, flowers in pots, a bunch of different wind chimes, a bench and a bbq. Me, I have a small 3 legged table that I shove into the corner so that it will stand up, and a black folding chair with a cushioned seat. She is not as fortunate in her view out of her window as I am in mine.

And I guess I should say I share a chair, because it no longer appears to belong just to me.  If I peer through the patio window at night, sometimes I can make out a dark shape on the chair, almost blending in until he lifts his head to give me an unconcerned stare out of brilliant green eyes.

I wasn’t surprised to see him there, even the first time. I’ve pretty much come to expect that, wherever I live, a black cat will at least come visiting in a memorable way, if not take up residence.

The last one wasn’t mine either. She wasn’t a stray and she only came to sit outside my patio door (a different door, a different place) with a purpose.

When I first glanced up and saw her sitting there looking in my window – tall and delicate with silky black fur, jade green eyes and a golden pendant around her neck – it was the morning after I discovered that there were kittens behind my fireplace.

Well, I didn’t realize they were behind the fireplace at first – I just heard the mewing. My cat has been fixed since she was  young, so I knew they weren’t her doing. And, strangely, they weren’t the black cat’s doing either – I’d seen her around for months, and she hadn’t been pregnant (unless she carried them all in back or something, like some women do).

Anyway, the kittens were there, and for as many days as it took to first, figure out that they weren’t going anywhere on their own and then for the maintenance person to find them and figure out how to extract them, the cat would appear each morning to sit right outside my patio door, just waiting.

Once the kittens were gone, she was too.

The one before that was born on my patio. Its mother (again, not my cat) was one ugly cat – orange and yellow and brown, with a funny smushed face. She was wild and never let me get near her but still I fed her, when I could,  just because she was so ugly I was afraid no one else would, and she didn’t  seem all that good at scavenging.

She repaid me by having a kitten on my patio. Just one. A little black ball of fluff, with green eyes. After a few weeks, though, she picked it up by the scruff of the neck and toted it off to some better place she’d found, I guess. Anyway, she didn’t come back and neither did the kitten.

I was moving soon myself, so I just silently wished them well and continued to pack.

Funny to think that I’ve never actually owned a black cat, but I always seem to have one around.

(picture above of the cat is from Flamingo Patterns)