On Alcohol Education

My deepest apologies to anyone who reads this; I could cite personal problems, but instead I'm going to talk about issues with methods of "alcohol education."

There's this series of pamphlets at my school called "facts on tap," put out by Phoenix House. The two I got are titled "The Naked Truth: Alcohol and Your Body" and "A Risky Relationship: Alcohol and Sex." They have sections called "Just the Frightening Facts, Ma'am" and "Booze Truths," with pictures of a girl pouring something that might be tequila into a (presumably) fellow college student's gaping mouth and two people kissing, the girl with a beer bottle in her hand.

OK, I get it: they're trying to keep bad things from happening to young people. And seriously, that is among the noblest of goals.

But emphasizing only the worst-case scenario is not the way to go about it. And that's what's idiotic about this system: the way it inherently dramatizes and catastrophizes everything. So much AE literature focuses on things like killing people in drunk driving accidents or young women being raped while drunk in the most narrow definition. But, while those things absolutely, certainly happen, there is an enormous grey space in between sobriety and rape or death.

And most bad things that happen when someone or someones is/are have been drinking happen in that grey space. It's the seeds of addiction, it's liver damage, it's (very commonly) ruined relationships. Extremist scare tactics are not the way to teach kids to drink responsibly: the way to do that is to be honest with them. Teach them that drinking can be grand, that it can be a great time, but that they have to be responsible. ("Responsible" here means, first, being willing to drink responsibly, and to not resent it. That's the first thing we need to teach.)

People die in drunk driving accidents all the time. But what's even more common than that are the smaller things that can still change - or even ruin - somebody's life. Or multiple lives. Things like "not-so-bad" sexual assault (hardly anybody wants to admit they think this exists, but lots of people do). Like an irreparable fight with a loved one, be it a friend, significant other, or family member. Like using alcohol as an emotional escape or an excuse to do destructive things.

That's what they don't tell you about. And they tell you that only bad things happen when you drink. They don't tell you about the pitfalls of pleasure that lurk in the grey space: for example and for some, the feeling of peace that comes from being out of control. And that's the problem: most alcohol education programs teach children and teenagers that all alcohol is all-bad, and then when they drink anyway (as teenagers to), and nothing terrible happens, and they have a blast, they disregard the possibility of something bad occurring. That, coupled with most adolescents' "nothing-bad-can-happen-to-me" complex and the feeling that they're doing what they're supposed to do by partying like crazy, is a major part of what causes drunk driving deaths. And cirrhosis of the liver. And all the rest.

On Ebonics and Language Hierarchy

Today I'd like to talk about how superiority and discrimination can make themselves sneakily apparent in language and linguistics.

Full disclosure: I used to be obsessed with not doing anything at all ever that would potentially slightly disparage the image of black people. I had to be a "good black girl." Because I thought it was up to me to make black people "look good" in the eyes of other folks. Speech was part of that. I used to get furious at black people who didn't speak "proper English" because "it's not that hard" and "it just gives others more ammunition against us." But I have come to realize that it's not black people's fault that certain other people have problems with us. Just like rape is never the victim's fault, discrimination is never the target's fault. The only way to end discrimination is to demolish stereotypes, not by constantly contradicting them, but by teaching people that not all black people are gangsters and crackheads - some black people are Presidents! Or that not all Asian people are math geniuses - some Asian people are artists! Or that all white people are racists and bigots - some white people are good people!

More disclosure: I "talk white," meaning with "proper" grammar and word usage, etc. And that's the problem: applying words like "proper" or even "standard" to some aspects of American English. Because inherent in the word "proper" is the notion that anything arbitrarily labeled "improper" by the reigning socio-political hierarchy is wrong and therefore "lesser." And because to an awful lot of people in this country (black and white), from Idaho to Florida, saying "ain't" is, in fact, standard.

This is my issue with "ebonics" as an "academic area of study": according to Merriam-Webster Online, the word comes from somebody mashing the two words "ebony" and "phonics" together. The trouble with this is that it inherently associates "improper" English with black people, when plenty college-educated white folks "don't write well" or "can't spell" or "don't use English right." (That was intentional.) Yes, every language has its rules, but at the same time, languages simply cannot exist petrified in strict conformity with all their criteria: languages evolve, and the products of that evolution must be acknowledged not as the pet project of some university scholar pursuing a fellowship and not as a missile to be launched at black people's intrinsic worth, but as vibrant part of American history and contemporary society.

Many black people feel that they have to code switch, or talk two different ways, depending on the situation: in the office or in an interview vs. at home or with friends. (For a great take on black code switching, see Janelle Harris' article for Clutch online.) This needs to become unnecessary. "Ebonics" has evolved as a distinct form of American English, and must be treated as an acceptable, legitimate one, regardless of what the current linguistic doctrine demands.

So I challenge you to stop thinking of "black talk" as a marker of crudity, low intelligence, lack of sophistication, and/or lack of education, and by extension of all of those, brutality. This is one of the most fundamental components of how anyone (black or otherwise) views black people: it is a major aspect of how the social value of an individual black person is judged. Make that association, and then change your way of thinking, and, more importantly, your way of acting.

On Symmetry

My deepest apologies to anyone who reads for not posting more regularly.

Today I'd like to talk about physical symmetry - the balance of beauty.

Let me start off by saying that personally, I admire people with a little something "wrong" with them, a something a little "off" or some little "peculiarity." Or, hell, some big "peculiarity." (I am not, of course, saying that any body is better than another - I'm simply stating my personal view.)

I am not saying any of this to brag; I'm just saying this for all of you who have ever felt that there's something unpleasant, weird, funny, about you physically, something wrong with you, that you have too much of one thing or too little of something else - I want you to know that people like me exist.

But to move beyond the personal: there is nothing intrinsically good about physical beauty, defined any way you like. We all know that some form of beauty is what everybody from Gustave Eiffel to Jimmy Choo have striven and strive for. In reality, though, it is just a small facet of any person's being, and it only defines personality in so far as it affects self-esteem, positively or negatively. It does not make people nicer, kinder, gentler, or better in any way at all. Beauty is a relative social construct, our "Western" definition of which we have internalized through worship of ancient Greece.

One fact which I take as proof positive of the above statement is that every society - historical and modern - has had its own, distinct standards of beauty. This discrepancy in definition indicates to me that all "beauty" could defined as something else in another culture.

People (I am speaking of Americans here) tend to get so caught up in the tornado of changing fads and fashions that we cannot see that none of it means a damn thing. And the other main problem is that so many of these beauty standards are simply impossible for so many people and when they don't realize this inherent impossibility, they feel guilt because they continually "fail" to change themselves to meet idiotic standards of acceptability.

In reality, what needs to change is the way we look at the physical self.

Instead of spending our money and mental and emotional energy on vaginal plastic surgery, we should concentrate on sexual education; instead of working out to lose weight, we should focus on health for its own sake; instead of teaching young girls, boys, and kids in between that they should change their exterior, we must teach them to look inside themselves and others when something in their lives feels wrong. We as a society need to reevaluate our priorities. This has to happen immediately, so that these impossible standards don't keep hurting the people we love. And it starts with all of you.

On Privacy and Coming Out

I'm sure most of you are probably quite tired of hearing about Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech, but I don't care: this is something I have to say.

I am NOT angry about her speech - I'll get to that in a minute - like apparently a lot of people are, and like Deb Baer, a writer for the Huffington Post, is; nor am I seeking to speak for her or override what she did actually say, like Mark Olmstead, who also writes for the Huffintgon Post.

No, I'm mad about both of them.

Basically, they're not pleased, Baer more so than Olmstead; Baer is furious. Please actually read the articles (if you haven't already) and experience their words and opinions first-hand. You can find Baer's piece here, and Olmstead's piece here.

But I'm furious too - who the hell is anybody else to tell someone how or when to come out? Coming out is one of the most personal, terrifying, exhilarating things anyone can do, and you have to do it when you're ready, not before.

Everyone is entitled to her/his/hir privacy, especially in this "information age" of Facebook and Twitter and even Google+ - this age when we're all expected to share every little bit of our personalities with everybody else. Frankly, it's ridiculous. Since when did knowing when someone is going to brush her/his/hir teeth mandatory for friendship?

Privacy must be cherished, and we must not condemn those who guard theirs, even if they guard it jealously.

The point is this: when everybody not just wants, but demands to know everybody else's business, this desire applies especially to celebrities. People seem to think that they have a right to know the deepest details of a person's life just because this person happens to be famous. This is wrong. False. Erroneous. Nobody is entitled to know anything about anybody else; choosing to tell people about yourself is the point of friendship and trust. If you were famous, and loads of people knew your name and face, would you want complete strangers delving into your every aspect of your personal life, especially your sexuality, and judging you for it? I can't imagine any of you answering that question in the affirmative, except those of you who have severe attention issues.

Baer makes the point that "it's 2013," when we as a society have made progress toward equality for gay folks, trans folks, and many other non-heteronormative folks. But progress does not mean that the full goal is achieved. Plenty of people - even people in authority - still fear, hate, and openly attack non-heteronormative folks. There is still "othering," there is still stigma, and yes, there is still violent rage. These things still occur in spades, and no one should ever be forced to come out unless that person is absolutely comfortable and ready.

Blaming a celebrity for not flaunting her sexuality to a culture that is still often and openly resentful of that sexuality's very existence is just one more way of unduly demanding perfection from people who happen to be in the public eye. Celebrities are people, and people are never perfect. People can never be exactly what anybody else wants them to be; this is especially true when you're famous, and performing for the entire world.

Jodie Foster said what she said, when she said it, how she said it, and I applaud her for it. Coming out to people you know takes courage; admitting and affirming your sexuality to complete strangers takes even more of it.

On Anger

Today I'd like to talk about black people and our anger.

It's "all right" for all other kinds of folks to be angry - righteously, arrogantly angry, in fact; it's perfectly fine for them to be angry about all sorts of things from gun control to taxes. For white people, anger can even be praised. But with minorities - particularly, I believe, Native Americans - other people tend to suppress it and wave it aside as an "oh well" case and cause and move on. And with black people, other people demonize or even ridicule our anger, though we have more of a right to righteous anger than white people as a whole. We have, after all, been enslaved, caricatured, demonized, defiled, raped (physically, mentally, and spiritually), legally defined as less than human, and now they say we don't have a right to be angry?

Who is anybody else to tell black people when to be angry, and what to be angry about? This problem is one of the many manifestations of other (mostly white) people telling black people what is acceptable by their standards, and vilifying black people when we don't conform.

The only "acceptable" form of black anger is the stereotype and caricature of the "angry black woman." I knew a girl once who was mad about something, but she didn't want to do anything about it because she feared being categorized as just another "angry black woman." This stereotype is acceptable only because people have been trained to think of it as funny.

Why should black anger be funny when white anger about the same things would be lauded and applauded as "doing something about it," or "standing up for yourself"?

Let's talk history for a moment. More than being "all right," it was "grand and glorious" for American colonists to revolt against Britain, for Simón Bolívar to revolt against the Spanish, for the French and the Russians to overthrow their imperial governments. But what about the Haitian Revolution, or the decolonization of Africa? These two grand and glorious processes get ignored, shunted aside, swept under the rug.

America idealizes and romanticizes European anger while largely ignoring the racism, sexism, classism, and overall oppression of those societies; at the same time, it recoils from and reacts with horror toward black anger!

Now tell me: is this reaction right? Is it just? Is it democratic? NO!

So I'd like to say this to black people everywhere: it is not just fine to be angry. It is deserved.*

I wrote of a problem a few lines above. The only solution to this problem is black people deciding for themselves that it is more than "all right" to be righteously angry, and showing white people that we are capable of intellectual anger and not simply the brute, directionless shooting they associate with us.**

So I have a declaration to make: I'm black, and yes, I'm mad as hell!


*Please note that this statement or post does not condone physical violence, or pointless intellectual violence. By "intellectual violence," I mean simply those forceful mental actions that state in no uncertain terms that the doer has a purpose.

**This is not victim-blaming I'm doing here. I am simply saying that it is time for black people to do something about this (personally I think we need a Social Rights Movement), because the white folks sure won't do it for us.

On Weight Equality

Today I'd like to talk about weight equality.

There's that commercial for the "Special K Challenge," the one where women "weigh" themselves in Times Square and the scale shows what someone can "gain" from losing weight. You know the one.

When the participating women step on the scale, in the bar where the numbers would usually be appear instead words such as "Confidence," "Style," "Satisfaction," "Joy," "Courage," and other positive incentives for weight loss. The enormous problem staring America in this face right now is this: the assumption that people who don't weigh a certain amount can't have those things. Instead of telling our sisters and daughters that they're not good enough - that they are inherently deficient - because they're "overweight," we should be teaching them to say, "The hell with all of you who think there's something wrong with me! I'm fabulous the way I am."*

The only people who are "wrong" in this "conversation" about weight are those who look down on and put down others over whom they unjustly feel superior. I put "conversation" in quotes because it is less a conversation about and more a war on those of us who do not, for whatever reason, conform to society's idea of what a person should look like.

But this is about even more than body image; it's also a manifestation of a disease plaguing human society for centuries: the notion that a certain, elite group of people has the right to tell another group of people what to do with their bodies. This applies to women especially, but also to men. Women "should" be svelte and graceful and maybe a little muscular; men "should" be muscular and trim. There is, however, more pressure on women than on men to conform and perform because women have been taught for generations that the main thing in life is to be thought attractive by men.

While the ideal body image of women and men has changed over time, the false authority of the "acceptable" to tell the "unacceptable" that they are "unacceptable" has remained the same. And throughout history, it has been the economically elite who get to dictate what is "acceptable:" during medieval and Renaissance times, when the ideal of womanhood was what we would now call "slightly overweight," it was the economically elite who had access to the most food. Now, when the womanly ideal is just the opposite, it is the economically elite who have access to fitness equipment and, more importantly, to the foods most conducive to thinness. 

It is time for a radical shift in weight ideology. It is time for women to stop feeling less than "what they should be" - less than human - and to stop hating themselves for who they are not and begin loving themselves for who they are. This "dialogue" must not be allowed to endure. And that shift starts with each of us.

*Note: I do not intend this statement to apply to mental or behavioral health; but that's a whole different discussion.

These are the two links I used for the Special K words, plus my own memory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOhtZF9E1Og
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uY7tE60PZc

On Pinkie Rings, Purple Cadillacs, and History

Evidently I write best at three in the morning.

Anyway, today I'd like to talk about the popular image of black folks, and the general "black culture."

The major way the popular view of American blacks has changed is to grow more extreme, if you look at it this way: in the 1970s, the popular image of black people was of pimps who dressed in outlandish Zoot suits, wore gold rings inlaid with diamonds, and drove at least one low-riding Cadillac. This Cadillac was very often purple, lending more credence to the notion that black folks - particularly black men - perpetually existed way outside the acceptable norm.

Now, what do I mean by the "acceptable norm"? I mean anything that fit into the idea of what a human being "should be," as commonly defined by pop culture and advertising. (I'll discuss the massive negative impact advertising has on minorities in another post). Advertising and pop culture were then (perhaps almost) completely dominated by white men, and in many cases they still are, meaning that society as a whole is generally dominated by white men.

However. Now that is changing. More and more black people are establishing their own businesses - record labels, fashion lines, various other types of companies -

This is just in time to potentially do something about the contemporary view of black men as pimps and/or gang-bangers, hooked on some sort of cocaine and owning 12 guns and even more tattoos, and of black women as sluts and hookers. I say that this advancement in business comes at an opportune time because it could present an image of black people that is not inherently linked to violence: the violence of slavery, the violence of Jim Crow, the violence of drugs and gangs.

The trouble comes when black folks try to fit in with the dominant white culture. Why should we participate in a system that is inherently discriminatory toward us? In my opinion, black folks need to focus on creating a distinctive culture. Some would say we already have one, in rap and simply in the way lots of people present and see black people as living. But I'm calling for a black culture that is not founded on rape culture, drug culture,* or white folks' image of black economics. I'm calling for a black culture rooted in our history.

American blacks are the only people in the world who do not have their own culture. The Chinese sure do, as do the Saudis and the Irish and everybody else. Furthermore, these people even have their own language. We have forgotten whatever ancestral language we had when our fore-bearers were torn from their homeland. Now we have a language of socio-economic and political oppression, of violence, of struggling to demolish the legacies of something that humanity should never have allowed to exist.

Some might say that I'm being "divisive." But I'm merely asserting the idea that one of the rights of any group of people is to have their own, self-identified culture, one that is based in their shared experience and not founded on any outside influence. Instead, American blacks have our image thrust upon us by people antagonistic to us.

We are more than this image.

Yes, violence is absolutely part of our history, but we must give it its due and move past it. We should be focusing on the positives in our history - the beauty of Fredrick Douglass and Malcolm X's passion, the fierce gentleness of Dr. King, the fire of Angela Davis. While these individuals certainly had their faults and flaws, they proudly self-identified as black - or Black - and that made them part of something bigger - and perhaps better - than themselves.

*Note: This is obviously not to say that all black men are rapists and drug addicts. I am simply saying that many men (sometimes inadvertently) participate in rape culture, and that lots of rap is strongly connected with drugs and sexism.