Stop Violence Against Women of Color

Recent events in the United States have moved us to action. Violence against women is sadly, not a new phenomenon in our country or in the world, however, in the last year women of color have experienced brutal forms of violence, torture, rape and injustice which have gone unnoticed, received little to no media coverage, or a limited community response. We are responding to:

--The brutal and inhumane rape, torture, and kidnapping of Megan Williams in Logan, West Virginia who was held by six assailants for a month

--Rape survivors in the Dunbar Housing Projects in West Palm Beach, Florida one of whom was forced to perform sexual acts on her own child.

--A 13 year old native American girl was beaten by two white women and has since been harassed by several men yelling “white power” outside of her home

--Seven black lesbian girls attempted to stop an attacker and were later charged with aggravated assault and are facing up to 11 year prison sentences

Today, people around the country are, among other acts of protest, wearing red, gathering, and reading aloud this litany.

Out of the Silence, We Come: A Litany
Out of the silence, we come
In the name of nuestras abuelas,
In honor of our mamas
In the spirit of our petit fils,
In tribute to ourselves
We come crying out
Documenting the torture
We come wailing
Reporting the rape
We come singing
Testifying to the abuse
We come knowing
Knowing that the silence has not protected us from
the racism
the sexism
the homophobia
the physical pain
the emotional shame
the auction block

Once immobilized by silence
We come now, mobilized by collective voice
Dancing in harmonious move-ment to the thick drumbeat of la lucha, the struggle

We come indicting those who claim to love us, but violate us

We come prosecuting those who are paid to protect us, but harass us

We come sentencing those who say they represent us, but render
us invisible

Out of the Silence, we come
Naming ourselves
Telling our stories
Fighting for our lives
Refusing to accept that we were never meant to survive

The McCann Sisters Perform

Here are our geeky, goofy girls (Catherine is 2 and is rarely still long enough to comb her hair; Frances is 7 and lives for the spotlight) giving a command performance for their parents.

My Inner Angela Davis

It's been pointed out to me by several folk (well, really, only one folk and she knows who she is) that this space has been rather quiet lately. There's a long, boring story about tenure and new responsibilities at work, coupled with my indecision about exactly what to do with this space that explains it all--but I won't bother you with that. Instead, I'll venture into the always fraught world of black women's hair.

Since May I've been sporting cute, shoulder-length single braids. I had braids in grad school and when I first got married and I loved them, primarily because I couldn't be lazier when it comes to doing anything to my hair. I stopped wearing braids for a number of reasons, including being too impatient to sit for the 8-10 hours it takes to do my hair, but also because I concluded (as does mainstream culture) that I looked less young and more professional without them.

My innate hair laziness took over this summer, though, and the braids returned. I loved them. I kept them in for our vow renewal in June and for the start of classes in August. And was all set to get them redone last week when a minor catastrophe occurred.

When I undid my braids, my hair was tangled at the roots, so much so that I became convinced that I would need to cut it all off. I have really thick, shoulder-length hair, so cutting all but an inch or two off is drastic. But I was willing to do it, reading the moment as the universe's way of telling me it was time to start growing a sweet Angela Davis 'fro.

The only problem was that I couldn't find anyone in Charleston to cut my hair. Admittedly, after the first two people, both black women, refused (both very matter-of-factly telling me I was mistaken about wanting to cut all my hair off), my resolve weakened. Maybe the universe wasn't telling me to find my inner Angela Davis. Maybe it was saying I needed to go back to my chemically-enhanced soccer mom ponytail.

Brian wound up having to untangle my hair. The third woman I went to relaxed and trimmed my hair, ooh-ing and aah-ing through the entire four hour process.

I wish I'd had the courage to cut it all off myself.

Afrogeek Mom and Dad review Chris Rock's "I Think I Love My Wife"

Inspired by Alison and my's review of "Becoming Jane," Brian and I bring you a review of Chris Rock's "I Think I Love My Wife." The basic plot is that Rock's character is married with two kids, not having sex, and allowing himself to be tempted by the sexy, available, willing woman from his past.

*********

Conseula: So, my constant refrain throughout this movie was "grow up!" Actually, I used a little more profanity than that, but this is a family blog. I spent the majority of the film being absolutely infuriated with Chris Rock's character (and maybe that's the point), but I'll come back to that later. What I really want to talk about is the pop culture's erroneous notion that married couples don't have sex, primarily because married women lose all interest once they get a ring on their finger.

Brian: Personally, I don't know anything about married women and sex, or anything about single women and sex. Actually, I don't know all that much about sex. [Indeed, the two children are a mystery.--C] What I do know about is horror movies. This movie scared the fluids out of me. How is it that Conseula can't sit through a decent flesh-eating zombie movie, but she can watch a relationship movie without flinching? I shivered, huddled deep under the covers watching the train wreck that was Richard's (Chris Rock's character) life bearing down on him. I think that the most frightening part of the movie was that I could see Richard's doom approaching, while he seemed to be completely oblivious to it. I identified with the male lead, and I saw his fate as my own. (Not that I'd ever consider infidelity. I'm sorta attached to my man parts, and I want to keep it that way.)

Conseula: (He's totally not kidding about the shivering and the huddling. It was kind of cute.) While Brian identified with the male lead, I couldn't really identify with the female lead. Well, there were moments of identification, those moments when Brenda (played by the always stunning Gina Torres) called Richard on his bullshit. But mostly I didn't get this sexless, domestic goddess content to go months on end with no intimate contact from her husband. I'm also really annoyed with this notion of marriage as the place you go to die. I mean what could be better that than finding the one person you want to talk to every single day of your life and then committing yourself to that person? That's not misery, people. That's amazing. And I guess that's the point the movie eventually got to, but the idea of marriage took quite a beating along the way.

Brian: Actually, the marriage thing is working out well for me. [That's good to know.--C] I was never one of those sex-god-use-women-up-like-tissue-paper guys. I guess that is because I always saw women as people with feelings, and for that reason I saw that there was more to them than simple objects of sexual release. In the little dream sequence where Richard fantasizes that he's consuming women like popcorn, I was a little embarrassed. I can't even fantasize about women without their permission, how could I possibly be a serial boinker? Being in a committed, stable, relationship with a woman I actually respect, who I can actually talk to, is a relief for me. It's much easier than trying to live up to some false, Mandingo pipe-slinger persona.

Conseula: And there's my public service to women everywhere--saving them from Mandingo pipe-slinging Brian. I do what I can.

Brian: So, in conclusion, committed relationships are good. Nostalgia for the single life of 20 year olds is okay, and normal. Acting on that nostalgia is always stupid. And I Think I Love My Wife was an okay movie.

The Parenting Season

This space has been quiet for a while, primarily due to the start of the new school year. Brian and I like to think of mid-August to early-June as the official Parenting Season. Unlike in the summers, when we certainly have to entertain children on an almost constant basis, we are, neverthless, free to do that entertaining in our own fashion and on our own schedules. Today we might go swimming, tomorrow we may hit the museum, the next day we may spend an afternoon eating ice cream and watching Nickelodeon. Plans can be made and changed at the last minute. Routines can be altered (though not too drastically lest the tightly wound among us freak out). Time can be frittered away as we master Jedi powers in the Star Wars Lego Playstation game.

But then mid-August comes and school begins and we are back on the treadmill. Make no mistake--Brian and I, and parents every where I am sure, breathe a great big sigh of relief that first school morning after children have been dropped off (there really is only so much Nickelodeon a person can watch and I'm sure whatever ancients invented mancala didn't intend for me to play it for hours at a time). But every fall I am struck with how quickly time gets eaten up with homework and PTA meetings and soccer practice and choir performances and Halloween costumes and birthday parties. And how little deviation there can be from the routine lest the whole thing come crashing down. In any case, here are pictures of the girls (affectionately called The Monkey and The Barbarian at home) as we begin the 2007-2008 Parenting Season.

Cate--who is never happier than when she's a wearing hat and glasses, spinning around in a circle and yelling "awesome!"


And Frances, future rock 'n' roll scientist and champion of PacMan World Rally.

Brian McCann is not the babysitter

Brian is in this month's issue of Skirt! magazine. And, as usual, his modesty prevents him from saying anything. Go check him out.

Punch Drunk at 2am

It's moments like these when I question my chosen profession. I have reached the end of this seemingly never-ending marathon that is the process of writing this book on James Baldwin. While I realize there will still be changes and proofing and indexing to be done once the editors see it, the backbreaking, soul-sucking, mind-numbing work of writing it will be done shortly. (I am just about done proofreading the last chapter.) But before I turn it in tomorrow, last commemorate the process. The following pictures were taken in my family's den. For the last three months my children have been unable to eat a proper meal at a proper table because my stack of James Baldwin stuff has gotten increasingly larger and higher.

Here are a mere portion of the books I have been using. Notice Stratego at the bottom of the pile? Brian and Frances had cleared a space on the table to play, and I kicked them off in a fit of writing inspiration.

Here's what my workspace looks like right now. Underneath all this paper is the draft of the next book, which needs to be at the publisher's in a few short weeks.

Here's the corner of my den. There are many, many, many corners of my place that look exactly like this. We've had to clear out kids' toys from our living room to make way for all my Baldwin crap.

I have been informed by my whole family that they will be happy when this is done.

International Blog Against Racism Week

I hunker down for a few days to finish this book and when I pick my head up, the whole world has gone mad. The NAACP is following up their burial of the N-word with a defense of Michael Vick. Al Sharpton is calling for a National Day of Outrage. Barack Obama is in Vibe Magazine (he is looking pretty hot, though).

But are any of them talking about this:
In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles.

Or this:
After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They took cellphone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman’s skin and the boy’s eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.


Gina, from my newest favorite blog, What About Our Daughters, has expressed my outrage and frustration much better than I can (check out her list of the Immorally Indifferent), so I'll just say this: in honor of International Blog Against Racism Week, I encourage you all to do something about racism. Bitching about rap music you don't get doesn't actually do anything about the degradation of black women in this country. Burying the N-word in no way addresses the structures of racism that makes the word still carry so much weight.

Instead, make some noise. Write your congressman. Donate some money. Donate some time. Call out racism when you see it (we live in Charleston people--we see it everyday). When someone tells you you're doing something racist and thoughtless, stop it. When you see someone doing something racist and thoughtless, make them stop. Step outside of your comfort zone and realize that changes you make in the way you live your life everyday--in the way you talk to and treat people, in the decisions you make, in the jokes you tell, where you send your kids to school and where you choose to live--can make a difference. It's not marching to Selma or refusing to give up your seat on a bus, but it matters.

Anxiety Dreams 'R Us

It's become conventional wisdom here at Casa Afrogeek that I am incapable of writing anything unless it's about myself. In grad school I was smart and clever and quick-witted, but 5 years on the tenure track and two kids have apparently addled my brain. So instead of having something smart to say about the NAACP burying the N-word (are they purposely trying to be irrelevant?) or how spot-on Mark Anthony Neal is when he suggests that many black intellectuals have a deep dislike of black youth and black youth culture, I will share this.

I've been working like a mad woman on the James Baldwin book (which is very near finished) and have found that I am more productive if I take a short afternoon nap instead of trying to write with sleepy brain. I woke up from this afternoon's nap in a panic because of this dream:

My daughters and I are riding on a CARTA bus on our way to meet Alison, my prolific and insanely smart friend. We never make it to our destination, though, because my daughters get off the bus at a beauty salon. Apparently I used to work there and when we enter everyone is happy to see us. The owner of the salon immediately gives me a pile of paper containing hundreds of messages from former clients. My waking mind recognizes all the client names as names of students. It is then that I realize that, in the dream, I used to be a college professor but am no longer. I don't know why I left my job or why I'm no longer a hairdresser either. The final message is from a student who is now in law school. She's telling me about having read Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" in one of her classes and how excited she was that she knew the poem already because she read in my class. When she offered a reading of the poem (the one she learned from me), however, the professor shot her down. "This poem," he said, "is not about the Negro's dissembly. It's about his dissemblage."

Then I woke up. Isn't that a crazy anxiety dream? And why is my sleeping brain making words ("dissemblage"?)? I look forward to finishing this book for lots of reasons, not least of which is a good night's sleep.

Afrogeeks Get Married!

Okay, so we were already married. But we did renew our vows a few weeks ago. Walter took the pictures. Here we are in all our geeky, sappy glory.

Are you some kind of feminist or something?

I am used to having repetitive, vaguely annoying conversations about my name. For instance, my first name--Conseula--is spelled unconventionally (the "u" usually comes before the "e"). This causes people to pronounce it in the oddest ways (I get Kon-soo-luh alot) and to tell me "You know, your name is spelled wrong" (this happens more often than you would think). My last name--Francis--is a homonym for my daughter's first name--Frances. Do you know how many times in the last seven years I've had to answer these two questions: "You named her Frances Francis?" and "Don't you get confused?" In response to the first question, I always say, simply, that my daughter has her father's last name, not my own. Which brings me to the name conversation I rarely have anymore.

I taught Governor's School this summer and many of the kids in my class were fascinated by the fact that I didn't change my name when I got married. Here is a conversation I had on the last day of class:

Student (as I am writing down my address for her): So what's your real last name?

Me: (briefly confused by the question): What?

Student: You know, your real last name, your husband's name.

Me: My *husband's* last name is McCann. *My* last name is Francis. I didn't change my name when I got married.

Student: You didn't want to claim your husband?

Me: I "claimed" him when we got married.

Student: But don't you want to show that you're married?

Me: What does my husband do to show that he is married?

Student: He wears a wedding ring.

Me: I wear the matching ring.

Student: Why didn't you change your name?

Me: Because I am a grown up with a life and identity and profession that didn't disappear when I got married.

Student: Are you some kind of feminist or something?

So many of things I take for granted--not changing my name, not staying home with my children (a whole other conversation), feminism--were new and exotic (and maybe a little disturbing) for her. It's been a long time since I've met someone like that. Though, to be fair, she was only 17 and still has lots of growing up to do. Maybe I will be the first step in her feminist awakening.

Vow Renewal and Groovy Shoes

There's been nothing but silence around these parts lately. Finals and the end of the semester bled right into Governor's School and it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that every waking minute of my day is filled with students or grades or kids or writing. In addition, Brian and I are renewing our wedding vows in celebration of 10th anniversary. While I could bore you with details about how we eloped the first time around, or how that elopement came after I cancelled two weddings, or how shopping for party supplies and planning a menu is not as much fun as one would hope, I will instead share with you my favorite part of this whole renewal process.

These are my wedding shoes. I love them. I'm wearing them right now. I walk around in them because they make me happy.

What Black Men Think PSA

Damned Straight!

I, for one, am sick of so many of the malicious untruths spread about black men.

I think that it says alot about our society, and how willing we are to believe these "facts" about.

I'm in a rush, so, I'll publish a more indepth post later.

Brian

Conseula and Alison on the Road

Alison and I went to Tucson this weekend to interview science fiction writer Joanna Russ. We weren't quite prepared for this interview when we left on Friday, so actually worked quite a bit on this trip (a lot of that work got done in the Atlanta airport during our 6 hour lay over). But, thankfully, we also go to play some. Over in her blog Alison has some pictures of the yummy frybread we got while we were on the Tohono O'odham reservation. Here are some more pictures.

We went to Saguaro National Park and got the most amazing views of desert life.

Here is Alison squinting at the sun (which was unbelievably, deceptively hot) and standing next to a small cactus.

Here I am (bottle of water in tow) next to a huge saguaro. Saguaros can grow to up to fifty feet tall and can weigh more than 8 tons.

Here is that same saguaro in bloom.

The prickly pear cactus was also in abundance. I brought home candy made from prickly pear juice.

Later that day Alison and I went to El Charro Cafe where we ate our fill of tamales and guacomole (and prickly pear and mango margaritas). Here I am enjoying the famous cheese crisp appetizer. It was so big it could have easily fed a small nation.

Market for Niggas--Taalam Acey

I came across this video this morning and thought I'd share.

An Armed Campus is NOT a Safe Campus

Immediately in the aftermath of the shooting incident at Virginia Tech the usual swarm of loudmouths scuttled out from under the cultural baseboard and began to scream long and loud to anyone within earshot that if the students and faculty at VT had been armed that they'd have been able to deal with the shooter. (I wonder why no one mentioned arming the staff.) In truth, yes, on a college campus with a large percent of its population armed, eventually a shooter would be wounded or killed, but would an armed campus be safer than a campus where only the university police are allowed to be armed?

Lets face facts, federal, state, county, and local law enforcement personnel are screened to weed out the unstable and the unreliable. They receive training in firearms safety, marksmanship, and the use of deadly force, still, law enforcement personnel manage to mistake innocent persons for perpetrators, they miss their targets and hit bystanders, and the occasionally use excessive force.

Last night, after going through a red light, I was stopped by a cop. I made a conscious effort to keep my hands on the steering wheel where he could see them because I didn't want a nervous, pissed off, or frightened cop to make my kids orphans. If I can't trust a trained police officer not to shoot me, what makes anyone think that I should feel safe on a campus full of people who haven't been screened and who haven't had weeks of special training?

In not one of the letters to the editor, blogs, casual conversations, or radio call-in shows that I've been privy to has anyone explained how anyone's supposed to identify the shooter. If you're making your way across campus, and a friend runs up to you and yells, "Hey! Somebody's shooting people in Maybank Hall!" After you draw your weapon on a campus with a large percentage of armed people, how are you supposed to know which armed person is the shooter, and which one is responding to the shooting? How do the other armed people on campus know that you're not the shooter?

When talking to people about deadly force, I gave them this scenario: You've walked into a room in which there is one person on the floor suffering from an obvious gunshot wound, and two people facing each other with guns drawn. What do you do? Every time I posed that scenario, I'd get this response, "I'd shoot both of them." I know that these people were trying to be witty, but it was their very wittiness that exposes one of the flaws of the armed campus. I can think of many more.

If your Spidey sense (or whatever) does manage to clue you in on the shooter, are you sure that you're accurate enough to hit him and no one else? What about the other vigilantes, are you confidant in their marksmanship? What about the background of your target? Are there no innocent bystanders on the other side of the shooter? What about on the other side of that sheetrock wall beyond the shooter? Maybe you'd better add x-ray vision to your Spidey sense. Are you sure that there's only one shooter? Maybe while you're stalking the guy you think is the shooter, his buddy's stalking you.

Also, when the campus police, the local police, or the mob of students and faculty (and staff) respond to the crime, how do you identify yourself as not the shooter? Why shouldn't they shoot you?

Back when I was in the Army, soldiers who had privately owned weapons had to keep them either off-post, or locked downstairs in the arms room. If you wanted your weapon you had to give the armorer twenty-four hours notice before he'd release it to you. I guess that the idea was to keep young hotheads from running downstairs, demanding their weapons, then running back upstairs to settle scores. If the Army, after having invested a LOT of time and money training soldiers in the benefits of firearms safety, felt that it wasn't a good idea to allow soldiers to sleep with pistols under their pillows, why would it be a good idea to allow college students to do so?

I remember when the Knights of the White Camelia (an even more bedraggled version of the Klu Klux Klan, formerly based in Louisiana) was recruiting on campus at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. They came in and set up their table alongside the campus groups who were likewise recruiting. Unlike the campus organizations, they quickly drew a hostile crowd. Harsh words were thrown back and forth, but there was no violence. The university police kept the peace and the worst thing that happened was that the KWK got free publicity out of the deal. Had guns been allowed on campus, the situation could have turned into something much worse. Some of the students would surely have been armed, and without a doubt, some of the KWK would have been carrying as well.

I'm sure that there are some readers who believe that had the students been armed that the KWK would have stayed off campus. Don't be fooled. Terrorist aren't cowards, if they were, they wouldn't be effective. A misunderstanding on either the part of the students or the KWK probably would have resulted in a bloodbath, and the university police would have been out manned, outgunned, and probably helpless to intervene. Think of all the emotionally charged incidents that take place on college campuses -- Sporting events that turn violent, political protests, rivalries between fraternal organizations that often turn violent, and all of these incidents can be exasperated by youthful hormones and sometimes alcohol and controlled substances. Who believes that adding guns to the mix would improve the situation?

Brian's Geekiness Pays Off

Brian wouldn't ever toot his own horn (does that sound dirty to anyone else but me?), but he was in Head2Head Trivia today and kicked butt. Go take a look.

Gunfighter Interviews Conseula

Over on Gunfighter 's blog, people were interviewing each other. Here are the questions he had for me:

1. I know that you appropriated the term "Afrogeek" from elsewhere, but why did it speak to you so emphatically? Do you know many fellow Afrogeeks? Do you network with them/us (I proudly claim status!)?
I thought the term "afrogeek" was a great straightforward description of black people like my husband and I and I was also excited to find out there were other black people who felt the need for a term. While I have few (maybe none?) black friends who are also geeky in real life, I have found several online communities (and a few blogs) where afrogeeks hang out. We should get t-shirts.

2. Who are your favorite superheroes? What makes them your favorites? Are you a Marvel or DC person?
I'm definitely a Marvel person, though I do have a weakness for all things Batman and a giant crush on the Martian Manhunter. I love that J'onn J'onzz can take any form and still chooses not to pass as a human on Earth. And when he does go about as a human, he chooses the form of a black American man because that identity is most parallel to his experience of isolation and marginalization. My Marvel preference is courtesy of my husband who has been a Marvel zombie since he was a kid. I didn't really start reading comics until he and I were married.

3. You are an academic, which I think is seriousy cool... what is your discipline? Is it a subject you always wanted to study? Are you teaching in the subject of your academic discipline?
I have a PhD in English. My specialty is African American literature, with particular interests in literary movements and black intellectual thought. I am indeed teaching in my discipline. I think that the moment I figured out there was a job that would allow me to read and write and talk about books, I was hooked.

4. I'm a bit of a headbanger. I have always loved a lot of the old-school heavy metal. Do you enjoy heavy metal? Tell me about your history with the band "Living Colour"
I enjoyed heavy metal a lot when I was in high school. Hair metal band posters covered the walls of my bedroom. I still think G'N'R's Appetite for Desctruction may be the best rock 'n' roll album ever. I remember loving Living Colour because they looked like me and they played the kind of music I liked and I believed they understood what it meant to be the only black kid at the Whitesnake concert. My love of metal gave way, though, to my love of conscious and alternative rap. I went from listening to Poison and Metallica to listening to Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul and Arrested Development. My musical tastes in general, however, are quite wide-ranging.

5. With all of the amazing history represented in Charleston, do you find that there is any attention played to the very serious contributions made by black patriots in the American Revolutionary war battles fought in South Carolina?
I think there is very little attention paid to the black contribution to anything in South Carolina. There are certainly good people doing good work to correct the misinformation and disinformation that exists about blacks here, but there's also a lot of resistance. Charleston has a very particular view of itself--genteel, tradition-bound, honorable, aggrieved--that it couldn't easily maintain if black people and their history were fully integrated.

6. Do you prefer Kirk or Picard?
Dude, easy one. Picard, for the sexy bald head alone. (My husband says he'd rather serve under Picard because Picard's the better officer, but that Kirk has the luck of the Irish.)

7. Was Hal Jordan The Green Lantern when you first started reading the Green Lantern comics?
I haven't ever read The Green Lantern comics but I do believe Hal Jordan was Green Lantern when Brian started reading them.

8. Brag about yourself for a moment. Go ahead, it'll be fun.
I was the first black woman to receive an honors baccalaureate degree from my undergraduate institution. I recently had an op-ed piece published in The State.


If you are interested in participating, please see the following:

DIRECTIONS FOR THE INTERVIEW MEME
1. Leave a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions (if I don't have your email address, you can email me instead). I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Hey Ya! Charlie Brown Style

We obviously need a little bit of levity in this space. Here's what I've been watching when I'm need of a pick me up lately. Outkast and Peanuts--it doesn't get much better than this.

Conseula's Semi-Annual Breastfeeding Rant, or Why Mammies are Still a Bad Idea

Full disclosure time: I am troubled by the cult of breastfeeding. No, scratch that. The cult of breastfeeding culture pisses me off. When we had our first daughter we decided for very personal and very real reasons not to breastfeed. When we looked for information about formula feeding, we found very little that wasn't designed to induce feelings of guilt and inadequacy in mothers in didn't or couldn't breastfeed. Apparently our decision to use formula exclusively doomed our first born to be fat and stupid and lazy. When I came out of my new mother fog, I realized (as I did about so much of the American cult of motherhood) that breastfeeding culture (though not necessarily the act of breastfeeding itself) is a tool of patriarchy. "Tool of patriarchy" is a phrase that sounds archaic, as if it should only be used in an SNL sketch mocking second wave feminism. But the phrase exists for a reason. It exists because there are actual systemic forces that combine and conspire to keep women in proscribed roles that benefit men. Breastfeeding is one of these roles.

Breastfeeding is hard and exhausting. It is also, often, isolating and lonely. Breastfeeding makes going back to work full time more difficult than it otherwise might be. It makes getting a full night's sleep nearly impossible. It places the care of an infant squarely and necessarily on the shoulders of the mother.

That's just fucked up. I reject that the cult of breastfeeding. I reject the notion that I should breastfeed because doctors say it's best. Doctors once said giving a woman a hysterectomy would make her adapt better to her role as wife and mother. Doctors once said homosexuality is a disease. Doctors let my 16-year-old mother labor alone in a maternity ward for hours because "those women just pop them out like puppies." Excuse me if take what doctors say with a grain of salt.

I also reject the notion that feeding my child from my body is my duty and makes me a good mother. The greatest benefit of formula feeding, besides allowing me to hang on to my sanity and maintain some semblance of my life apart from my children, was that it allowed my husband and our friends the opportunity to bond with my daughters in a really fundamental way. I rarely got up for night feedings with my first daughter. 2am was daddy/daughter time and I am convinced that that time and my daughter associating her father with nourishment and comfort accounts in large part for the close relationship they share now. Formula feeding allowed my husband to participate fully as a parent in a way the cult of breastfeeding seems to think is unimportant.

This morning's breastfeeding rant was brought on by this article from Time magazine. It's about the rise of wet nurses in America. Here are some gems from that article.

"Advocates argue that milk sharing lets women be good moms while fulfilling other goals."
Because good moms breastfeed, you see, regardless of whether or not they can or want to. We might forgive your going back to work if you shell out the $1000 a week for a wet nurse.

One mother who cross-nurses with her neighbor says, "It takes female friendship to another level. You're trusting another person to nurture your child."
Because while hiring someone to care for my child while I work outside the home dooms me to a special place in hell (how often do working mothers have to answer to charges of paying someone else to raise our children?), we can forgive allowing someone else to breastfeed my child because it builds female community.

Here's the best part of the article, though:
Brenda (whose last name is withheld to protect her clients' privacy), 42, has wet-nursed 10 babies in the past seven years partly to help send her own two kids to college. She has mulled over the social implications of her work--because she's black and eight of the families she has worked for are white. "A friend asked me, Don't you feel like you're the mammy?" she recalls. But she finds her job fulfilling, and sometimes amusing. "If you're someplace with the family and the baby starts to pull at your blouse or put his hand in your bra, that can be embarrassing," she says, laughing.

Imagine this scene people. A nice middle class white family is out at dinner with the black woman who breastfeeds their kid. I bet the white couple tells friends that the black woman is just like one of the family. Am I the only one appalled? Remember those tools of patriarchy I mentioned earlier? Here they are at work. Poor black and brown women do not want to breastfeed privileged white women's kids. Yet they live in a society in which they feel that their most tradeable commodity is their bodies. So they scrub white women's floors and shake their asses in rap videos and, apparently, breastfeed other women's kids. That's the patriarchy at work. The same patriarchy that guilted all those white women into needing a wet nurse in the first place.