Lily Salter's Blog, page 1008

“It’s not just a party, it’s our life”: Jazz musicians led the way back to the city after Katrina — but what is this “new” New Orleans?

The spot where St. Ann Street dead-ends into North Rampart in New Orleans, the dividing line between the French Quarter and the Tremé neighborhood, was quiet on a Friday night in November 2005. Once alight with bulbs that spelled out “Armstrong,” the large steel archway that frames the intersection was dark, its white paint overtaken by rust. Beneath it, a thick, carelessly wound chain bound two iron gates, from which dangled a steel padlock. The whole assembly looked as if it was meant to secure some oversized bicycle rather than the entrance to a 32-acre city park modeled after Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and named for trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Armstrong Park was closed, had been since the flood that resulted from the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina. You could see Elizabeth Catlett’s bronze statue of Louis, trumpet in left hand, handkerchief in right, but only from a distance through bars. Armstrong in prison, it looked like. Or maybe this likeness of the trumpeter, who left New Orleans early in his career for fame and for good, was on the outside. Maybe all of us in New Orleans in late 2005, the locals who made their way back and those like me, who had shown up from afar, were locked away from something essential — a culture that has long defined this city and its inhabitants, and long helped its visitors find their true selves.   Aug. 29 will mark a decade since the 2005 disaster that we’ve come to know by the name Katrina — for the hurricane, a natural disaster — but that is more accurately understood as unnameable and unnatural, a failure of engineering and due diligence followed by a long wake of indifference or worse. The media coverage surrounding this 10th anniversary will likely constitute its own deluge, dominated by maudlin memories of catastrophe and self-righteous hype about recovery. The conflation of past misery and present cheerleading came clear in New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's June appearance on MSBNC’s “Morning Joe,” to promote the city’s campaign, “Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans”: On-screen, stock 2005 footage showed fetid floodwaters and rescues in progress. Cut to Landrieu, in an interview, saying, “We’re doing great. We’re doing much better ... It’s a redemption, an incredible comeback story.” Within all the hoopla to come, expect trumpets and trombones and tubas and second-line parades in progress. The storied jazz culture of New Orleans will again provide prominent B-roll for TV. That culture belongs in the foreground. That’s the story I’ve been tracking. Now, a decade in, I want to know if those who most need and want New Orleans jazz culture now find themselves, amid all the rebuilding, estranged from it or feeling as if it may yet slip away. In October 2005, I wrote an essay for Salon in which I wondered whether musicians and other culture bearers of New Orleans would return to their devastated city at all. I worried over the prospect of a Disney-fied Crescent City, or whether the whole place would be turned into a museum piece. I asked if the culture born in New Orleans — which Ken Burns' PBS series “Jazz” famously cast as a signal of American values and virtues on the order of the Constitution — “still carried currency when it comes to the issues Katrina raised: identity, race, poverty and basic decency.” In the long wake of the flood, the ranks of jazz musicians, the brass-band-led Sunday second-line paraders and the feathered-and-beaded Mardi Gras Indians — the key players of indigenous New Orleans culture — did not simply return. They came back sooner and in greater numbers than the rest of the population. They led the way, and have maintained a vital sense of continuity. Louisiana State University sociologist Frederick Weil, who surveyed 6,000 New Orleans residents, told me, “By the standards of civic-engagement literature, the members of the Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs who sponsor weekly parades are ‘model citizens,’ scoring highest of any group. They are community leaders, supporting each other in times of need and providing concrete services.” David Simon’s HBO series “Treme,” a fictional depiction of post-Katrina New Orleans, captured this truth. In its premiere episode, before a word of dialogue was uttered, a saxophonist licked and then adjusted his reed. Slide oil was applied to a trombone. Two black kids danced to a faint parade rhythm. An unseen trumpet sounded an upward figure, followed by a tuba’s downward groove. The scene re-created the first second-line parade following Katrina — a memorial for a local chef, Austin Leslie. Simon told me then, in 2010, “Apart from culture, on some empirical level, it does not matter if all New Orleans washes into the Gulf, and if everyone from New Orleans ended up living in Houston or Baton Rouge or Atlanta. Culture is what brought this city back … New Orleans is coming back, and it’s sort of done it one second-line at a time.” "Initially, New Orleans jazz was a reflection of a way of life," clarinetist and professor Michael White told me back in 2006 at his office at Xavier University, while peering over a jagged pile that included the red notebook in which, during the weeks following Katrina, he jotted down the names and whereabouts of friends and colleagues. "It spoke of the way people walk, talk, eat, sleep, dance, drive, think, make jokes and dress. But I don't think America ever truly understood New Orleans culture, because the mind-set is so different here. So that whole tradition was hidden from most of America.” When I first got to New Orleans after the flood I was stunned first by just how much had been destroyed, and then later by just how little I knew. I’d been writing about jazz for 20 years. Yet I was profoundly ignorant about what it means to have a living music, one that flows from and embeds everyday life — a functional jazz culture of the sort that once existed in cities throughout the United States but now is exclusive to New Orleans. Before I spent months at a time in the city, before I spent countless hours with the people who make and support New Orleans jazz culture, I knew about but had not yet meaningfully felt the link to something fundamentally African, transplanted via the enslaved who passed through much of this hemisphere, who drummed and danced in Congo Square, a stone’s throw from where that Armstrong statue now stands. And I had no clue what a tenuous proposition this culture represents: What it was, is and maybe always will be up against. “There’s a feeling among many of us,” White told me in 2006, “that some of our older cultural institutions, like parades and jazz funerals, are in the way of progress and don’t fit in the new vision of New Orleans, that they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.” Was New Orleans jazz culture welcomed back? Not exactly. If there’s a culture war going on in the city, that’s hardly news. According to historian Freddi Williams Evans’ book “Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans,” Congo Square was codified by an 1817 city ordinance that restricted drumming and African dances to a single spot. Skip to 1996, when a photograph of a protest march that ran in the Times-Picayune newspaper showed a teenage snare drummer wearing a sign: “I Was Arrested for Playing Music.” The past decade lends a new chapter to such conflicts. In the years since the 2005 flood, tensions surrounding culture have flared. In 2007, a consortium of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs defeated jacked-up city permit fees for their weekly brass-band-led second-line parades in federal court, on First Amendment grounds. ("Should the law not be enjoined," the complaint, filed on behalf of a consortium of Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, stated, "there is very little doubt that plaintiff's cultural tradition will cease to exist.") Later that year, police busted up a memorial procession for a beloved tuba player in dramatic fashion, reigniting a long-standing fight over who owns the streets. This narrative unfolded despite the city’s pervasive use of these traditions to rekindle a tourism business that, in 2014, hosted 9.5 million visitors who spent $6.8 billion (a record for visitor spending). "We rose out of water and debris to lead the way back to the life that we love," said Bennie Pete, sousaphonist and leader of the Hot 8 Brass Band, a local favorite, at a public forum on such matters in 2008. "It's not just a party, it's our life. We can sugarcoat it all kinds of ways, but the city looks at us as uncivilized. And that's why they try to confine us." During the past few years, as a yet undefined “new” New Orleans rubs up against whatever is left of the old one, brass bands have been shut down on their customary street corners. Music clubs have increasingly been hit with lawsuits and visited by the police responding to phoned-in complaints. A revival of rarely enforced ordinances regarding noise and zoning has met a fresh groundswell of activism. All this has happened in the context of swift gentrification of neighborhoods such as Tremé, long a hothouse for indigenous culture. The calls and responses of a storied musical tradition have often of late been drowned out by back-and-forth arguments over these matters. At issue recently have been noise ordinances, the implications of a new citywide Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (especially as to where and when live music is allowed), and one particularly contentious item, Section 66-205, which states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.” (Never mind that tourists arrive with the precise expectation of hearing music played on the streets at night. Or that a city attorney had already declared that curfew unconstitutional.) The battles during the past decade over what would get rebuilt and what wouldn’t, who could return and who couldn’t, have in large part now given way to debates over the shape and character of the “new” city. Those who remember the green dots on maps issued in January 2006 by then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission — targeting certain hard-hit areas of New Orleans as future park space — know that the city’s future and character has a lot to do with how its spaces are zoned and used. Amid the panic and fury of residents whose neighborhoods had been overlaid with those green dots, who had expected to return and rebuild, that 2006 map quickly met its demise. Yet many of its ominous implications have played out anyway through obstacles to rebuilding and land grabs. The wave of gentrification that has intensified in New Orleans during the past few years — especially as carried by what one writer referred to as “yurps” (young urban rebuilding professionals) — has been stunningly swift and dramatic. New Orleans has long held bohemian attraction: Now that allure is coupled with start-up cash. In any city, gentrification raises questions: What happens when those who build upon cultural cachet don’t want that culture next door? The levees that failed represented an isolated confluence of chance, faulty design and neglect, and yet pointed to dangers lapping at all our shores; this story of an embattled culture is unexceptional in the sense that it suggests similar conflicts in other cities and common threats to our collective cultural identity. Yet in New Orleans, such concerns are underscored by a legitimately exceptional truth — a functional jazz culture that is, for many, elemental to daily life and social cohesion, and that the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau website correctly claims “bubbles up from the streets.” During a press conference at last year’s Jazz & Heritage Festival, Mayor Landrieu told me, “There is a way to organize culture without killing it.” Those words are either comforting or alarming, depending upon whom you ask. As David Freedman, the general manager of listener-supported WWOZ-FM (self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Groove”), told me, “An unintended consequence may be the death of spontaneous culture in New Orleans. Some may think this is good for tourism and development, but it is not good for the distinct musical traditions at the core of our identity.” As Alex Rawls, a veteran local music critic, said, “The Disneyfication of New Orleans that people talked about after Katrina was supposed to be quick and dramatic. The danger is not like that. If you take your hands off the wheel and let business interests rule, that sort of thing happens more gradually, almost without people noticing.” “In New Orleans, the music community has arguably been in a cultural crisis for two or three generations,” explained clarinetist Evan Christopher, who moved to New Orleans more than 20 years ago. “We have staved off cultural annihilation by embracing fictions in harmony with the tourism machine and smiled upon by the ‘New Right’ and their fetish for nostalgia. Post-Katrina, our community's leadership was nowhere to be seen and before half of our city had returned, 80 percent of us came back with hat in hand. The utterance of ‘jazz,’ which should have represented a true strategy of transformation or an answer to revitalization, quickly became an empty slogan hung from street lamps.” Beyond cultural policy is the stark reality facing the largely black communities that have long nurtured and still support the city’s indigenous culture. According to The Data Center, an independent research group based in New Orleans, there are 99,650 fewer black residents living in New Orleans now than in 2000. (The population is now 59 percent black, down from 66.7 percent in 2000.) The Urban League of Greater New Orleans released data points from a forthcoming “State of Black New Orleans” report revealing that the number of black children younger than 18 living in poverty in the city grew by 6.5 percent from 2005 to 2013. (In 2013, more than 54,000 black children younger than 18 — 50.5 percent — were considered to be poor.) The Urban League’s statistics show widening inequity as well— an 18 percent increase in the gap between the median income of black households and white households in the city. Overall, more than 35 percent of black families in New Orleans now live below the poverty line. “I think no one will disagree that there has been tremendous progress in New Orleans in many ways,” said Erika McConduit-Diggs, Greater New Orleans Urban League president. “You can tell that from bricks and mortar. But it’s more complex when you peel back layers and look at how African-American communities are faring. What was troubling for many residents before the storm is actually now worsened. We have relocated concentrated poverty.” Lolis Eric Elie, a former New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist and co-producer of the documentary "Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans," said, “My concern after the flood was that one catastrophic event might mean that this tradition that has endured would die out in one fell swoop. Now, my concern is that economic conditions make it increasingly hard for people to do these things because they require time, effort and money.” The headline to a recent article in the New Orleans Advocate declared, “Katrina Scattered New Orleans’ Entrenched Social Networks Far and Wide.” Even those black residents who have returned to New Orleans now increasingly live in nearby suburban parishes, reporter Katy Reckdahl explained. “All of these departures have slashed at the city’s network of extended families,” she wrote, “the generations of children who stayed in the same neighborhoods, blocks or even houses one decade after the next.” For Tamara Jackson, president of the Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force, a consortium of the organizations that sponsor second-line parades, “Our culture is the one thing that keeps us bonded and united. The second lines bring us together, in our old neighborhoods, for four hours at a time.” But she wondered aloud: “Is the 'new' New Orleans for native New Orleanians, or is it for tourists?” Jordan Hirsch, who was the founding director of the nonprofit Sweet Home New Orleans, a grass-roots organization that supported indigenous culture in Katrina’s wake, told me, “In some ways, this geographic dispersal has compelled people to double down on these indigenous traditions. If you can’t walk out your door and participate the way you used to, well, you’ll work even harder to make it happen. Still, I don’t think we know yet how this will really work. The issues are sustainability and transmission of tradition, which used to come more naturally.” Complicating that picture is a near-total conversion of the New Orleans schools to a charter system, which buses students all over the city and may or may not continue a long tradition of school-band instruction. New Orleans jazz culture was born in opposition to challenges, a subversion of racism and classicism. In the Tremé neighborhood in 2007, a few nights after the police had shut down that memorial, the two musicians who had been arrested led another procession. Glen David Andrews put down his trombone and sang "I'll Fly Away," as drummer Derrick Tabb snapped out beats on his snare. A tight circle surrounded the musicians, as a middle-aged black woman turned to the man next to her. "They say they want to stop this?" she asked softly. "They will never stop this." Yet there’s a creeping and newfound sense of alienation. “We dragged this city back,” said the Hot 8’s Bennie Pete, “and now we’re being shown the door.” Not that new doors haven’t opened. “One of the things that changed for the good in New Orleans,” said Lolis Elie, “is an increased conversation about the culture.” In some ways, the issues surrounding New Orleans culture are more clearly defined right now, more out in the open; musicians and other cultural leaders may be a step closer to the bargaining table when it comes to city policies. That’s thanks in large part to the emergence of some grass-roots organizations. The Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO), which began with lunchtime meetings in 2012 at a club owned by trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, seeks to “empower the New Orleans music and cultural community through collective self-representation advocating in the interests of cultural preservation, perpetuation and positive economic impact,” according to its website. It has served as a crucial source of information and advocacy. A board member of the newly formed nonprofit Crescent City Cultural Continuity Conservancy (C5) told me, “So much is changing so fast in New Orleans the cultural community is increasingly aware of the need to be visible advocates for aspects of the city's identity that may well be drowned in the sea change that defines New Orleans, circa 2015.” I’ll be honest. I’m ambivalent at best about this whole anniversary thing. I recall during the first anniversary of the flood, one Lower Ninth Ward family stood by and watched as a TV anchorwoman stood, microphone in hand, in front of their devastated home: “The producer said he doesn’t want us in the picture,” the father told me, holding his baby in his arms. I’ll never forget a moment during second-anniversary events, in 2007. At a “World Cultural Economic Forum” hosted by Mitch Landrieu (then Louisiana’s lieutenant governor), Denis G. Antoine, ambassador to the U.S. from Grenada, said, "If we're taking about rebuilding New Orleans, we have to ask: Which New Orleans are we talking about? We have to talk about social values and an ancestral past. There is an anthropological aspect to the nurturing of a new New Orleans and this will help direct what is appropriate and what is not.” (Well said, I thought.) He went on: “New Orleans is a perception. When we talk about safety: How safe do you feel? It's not just about crime, it's about how safe do you feel to be you?" When I returned to New Orleans to the mark the fifth anniversary, the word “resilience” popped up nearly everywhere—in city-sponsored press conferences, and on signs tacked to lampposts that read: “Stop calling me RESILIENT. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re so resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me.” A stone's throw from a just-restored Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts was that statue of Louis Armstrong, bound by ropes and secured by sandbags amid torn-up concrete and weeds, its base rusted and damaged—the unfortunate consequence of a renovation project initiated by then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin that had gone sour. Both statue and plaza have since been repaired, but in 2010 it seemed an apt image: In a city that has known devastation and government incompetence, can a celebrated homegrown culture once again find firm footing? I suppose I’m still wondering. Larry Blumenfeld writes regularly about jazz and culture for the Wall Street Journal, and at blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes. His Salon piece, “Band on the Run in New Orleans” was included in “Best Music Writing, 2008.” He will moderate a discussion, “Ten Years After: The State of New Orleans Music and Culture,” on Aug. 24 at Basin St. Station, in New Orleans. (The panel will be live-streamed by WWOZ-FM.)The spot where St. Ann Street dead-ends into North Rampart in New Orleans, the dividing line between the French Quarter and the Tremé neighborhood, was quiet on a Friday night in November 2005. Once alight with bulbs that spelled out “Armstrong,” the large steel archway that frames the intersection was dark, its white paint overtaken by rust. Beneath it, a thick, carelessly wound chain bound two iron gates, from which dangled a steel padlock. The whole assembly looked as if it was meant to secure some oversized bicycle rather than the entrance to a 32-acre city park modeled after Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and named for trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Armstrong Park was closed, had been since the flood that resulted from the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina. You could see Elizabeth Catlett’s bronze statue of Louis, trumpet in left hand, handkerchief in right, but only from a distance through bars. Armstrong in prison, it looked like. Or maybe this likeness of the trumpeter, who left New Orleans early in his career for fame and for good, was on the outside. Maybe all of us in New Orleans in late 2005, the locals who made their way back and those like me, who had shown up from afar, were locked away from something essential — a culture that has long defined this city and its inhabitants, and long helped its visitors find their true selves.   Aug. 29 will mark a decade since the 2005 disaster that we’ve come to know by the name Katrina — for the hurricane, a natural disaster — but that is more accurately understood as unnameable and unnatural, a failure of engineering and due diligence followed by a long wake of indifference or worse. The media coverage surrounding this 10th anniversary will likely constitute its own deluge, dominated by maudlin memories of catastrophe and self-righteous hype about recovery. The conflation of past misery and present cheerleading came clear in New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's June appearance on MSBNC’s “Morning Joe,” to promote the city’s campaign, “Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans”: On-screen, stock 2005 footage showed fetid floodwaters and rescues in progress. Cut to Landrieu, in an interview, saying, “We’re doing great. We’re doing much better ... It’s a redemption, an incredible comeback story.” Within all the hoopla to come, expect trumpets and trombones and tubas and second-line parades in progress. The storied jazz culture of New Orleans will again provide prominent B-roll for TV. That culture belongs in the foreground. That’s the story I’ve been tracking. Now, a decade in, I want to know if those who most need and want New Orleans jazz culture now find themselves, amid all the rebuilding, estranged from it or feeling as if it may yet slip away. In October 2005, I wrote an essay for Salon in which I wondered whether musicians and other culture bearers of New Orleans would return to their devastated city at all. I worried over the prospect of a Disney-fied Crescent City, or whether the whole place would be turned into a museum piece. I asked if the culture born in New Orleans — which Ken Burns' PBS series “Jazz” famously cast as a signal of American values and virtues on the order of the Constitution — “still carried currency when it comes to the issues Katrina raised: identity, race, poverty and basic decency.” In the long wake of the flood, the ranks of jazz musicians, the brass-band-led Sunday second-line paraders and the feathered-and-beaded Mardi Gras Indians — the key players of indigenous New Orleans culture — did not simply return. They came back sooner and in greater numbers than the rest of the population. They led the way, and have maintained a vital sense of continuity. Louisiana State University sociologist Frederick Weil, who surveyed 6,000 New Orleans residents, told me, “By the standards of civic-engagement literature, the members of the Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs who sponsor weekly parades are ‘model citizens,’ scoring highest of any group. They are community leaders, supporting each other in times of need and providing concrete services.” David Simon’s HBO series “Treme,” a fictional depiction of post-Katrina New Orleans, captured this truth. In its premiere episode, before a word of dialogue was uttered, a saxophonist licked and then adjusted his reed. Slide oil was applied to a trombone. Two black kids danced to a faint parade rhythm. An unseen trumpet sounded an upward figure, followed by a tuba’s downward groove. The scene re-created the first second-line parade following Katrina — a memorial for a local chef, Austin Leslie. Simon told me then, in 2010, “Apart from culture, on some empirical level, it does not matter if all New Orleans washes into the Gulf, and if everyone from New Orleans ended up living in Houston or Baton Rouge or Atlanta. Culture is what brought this city back … New Orleans is coming back, and it’s sort of done it one second-line at a time.” "Initially, New Orleans jazz was a reflection of a way of life," clarinetist and professor Michael White told me back in 2006 at his office at Xavier University, while peering over a jagged pile that included the red notebook in which, during the weeks following Katrina, he jotted down the names and whereabouts of friends and colleagues. "It spoke of the way people walk, talk, eat, sleep, dance, drive, think, make jokes and dress. But I don't think America ever truly understood New Orleans culture, because the mind-set is so different here. So that whole tradition was hidden from most of America.” When I first got to New Orleans after the flood I was stunned first by just how much had been destroyed, and then later by just how little I knew. I’d been writing about jazz for 20 years. Yet I was profoundly ignorant about what it means to have a living music, one that flows from and embeds everyday life — a functional jazz culture of the sort that once existed in cities throughout the United States but now is exclusive to New Orleans. Before I spent months at a time in the city, before I spent countless hours with the people who make and support New Orleans jazz culture, I knew about but had not yet meaningfully felt the link to something fundamentally African, transplanted via the enslaved who passed through much of this hemisphere, who drummed and danced in Congo Square, a stone’s throw from where that Armstrong statue now stands. And I had no clue what a tenuous proposition this culture represents: What it was, is and maybe always will be up against. “There’s a feeling among many of us,” White told me in 2006, “that some of our older cultural institutions, like parades and jazz funerals, are in the way of progress and don’t fit in the new vision of New Orleans, that they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.” Was New Orleans jazz culture welcomed back? Not exactly. If there’s a culture war going on in the city, that’s hardly news. According to historian Freddi Williams Evans’ book “Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans,” Congo Square was codified by an 1817 city ordinance that restricted drumming and African dances to a single spot. Skip to 1996, when a photograph of a protest march that ran in the Times-Picayune newspaper showed a teenage snare drummer wearing a sign: “I Was Arrested for Playing Music.” The past decade lends a new chapter to such conflicts. In the years since the 2005 flood, tensions surrounding culture have flared. In 2007, a consortium of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs defeated jacked-up city permit fees for their weekly brass-band-led second-line parades in federal court, on First Amendment grounds. ("Should the law not be enjoined," the complaint, filed on behalf of a consortium of Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, stated, "there is very little doubt that plaintiff's cultural tradition will cease to exist.") Later that year, police busted up a memorial procession for a beloved tuba player in dramatic fashion, reigniting a long-standing fight over who owns the streets. This narrative unfolded despite the city’s pervasive use of these traditions to rekindle a tourism business that, in 2014, hosted 9.5 million visitors who spent $6.8 billion (a record for visitor spending). "We rose out of water and debris to lead the way back to the life that we love," said Bennie Pete, sousaphonist and leader of the Hot 8 Brass Band, a local favorite, at a public forum on such matters in 2008. "It's not just a party, it's our life. We can sugarcoat it all kinds of ways, but the city looks at us as uncivilized. And that's why they try to confine us." During the past few years, as a yet undefined “new” New Orleans rubs up against whatever is left of the old one, brass bands have been shut down on their customary street corners. Music clubs have increasingly been hit with lawsuits and visited by the police responding to phoned-in complaints. A revival of rarely enforced ordinances regarding noise and zoning has met a fresh groundswell of activism. All this has happened in the context of swift gentrification of neighborhoods such as Tremé, long a hothouse for indigenous culture. The calls and responses of a storied musical tradition have often of late been drowned out by back-and-forth arguments over these matters. At issue recently have been noise ordinances, the implications of a new citywide Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (especially as to where and when live music is allowed), and one particularly contentious item, Section 66-205, which states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to play musical instruments on public rights-of-way between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m.” (Never mind that tourists arrive with the precise expectation of hearing music played on the streets at night. Or that a city attorney had already declared that curfew unconstitutional.) The battles during the past decade over what would get rebuilt and what wouldn’t, who could return and who couldn’t, have in large part now given way to debates over the shape and character of the “new” city. Those who remember the green dots on maps issued in January 2006 by then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission — targeting certain hard-hit areas of New Orleans as future park space — know that the city’s future and character has a lot to do with how its spaces are zoned and used. Amid the panic and fury of residents whose neighborhoods had been overlaid with those green dots, who had expected to return and rebuild, that 2006 map quickly met its demise. Yet many of its ominous implications have played out anyway through obstacles to rebuilding and land grabs. The wave of gentrification that has intensified in New Orleans during the past few years — especially as carried by what one writer referred to as “yurps” (young urban rebuilding professionals) — has been stunningly swift and dramatic. New Orleans has long held bohemian attraction: Now that allure is coupled with start-up cash. In any city, gentrification raises questions: What happens when those who build upon cultural cachet don’t want that culture next door? The levees that failed represented an isolated confluence of chance, faulty design and neglect, and yet pointed to dangers lapping at all our shores; this story of an embattled culture is unexceptional in the sense that it suggests similar conflicts in other cities and common threats to our collective cultural identity. Yet in New Orleans, such concerns are underscored by a legitimately exceptional truth — a functional jazz culture that is, for many, elemental to daily life and social cohesion, and that the city’s Convention & Visitors Bureau website correctly claims “bubbles up from the streets.” During a press conference at last year’s Jazz & Heritage Festival, Mayor Landrieu told me, “There is a way to organize culture without killing it.” Those words are either comforting or alarming, depending upon whom you ask. As David Freedman, the general manager of listener-supported WWOZ-FM (self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Groove”), told me, “An unintended consequence may be the death of spontaneous culture in New Orleans. Some may think this is good for tourism and development, but it is not good for the distinct musical traditions at the core of our identity.” As Alex Rawls, a veteran local music critic, said, “The Disneyfication of New Orleans that people talked about after Katrina was supposed to be quick and dramatic. The danger is not like that. If you take your hands off the wheel and let business interests rule, that sort of thing happens more gradually, almost without people noticing.” “In New Orleans, the music community has arguably been in a cultural crisis for two or three generations,” explained clarinetist Evan Christopher, who moved to New Orleans more than 20 years ago. “We have staved off cultural annihilation by embracing fictions in harmony with the tourism machine and smiled upon by the ‘New Right’ and their fetish for nostalgia. Post-Katrina, our community's leadership was nowhere to be seen and before half of our city had returned, 80 percent of us came back with hat in hand. The utterance of ‘jazz,’ which should have represented a true strategy of transformation or an answer to revitalization, quickly became an empty slogan hung from street lamps.” Beyond cultural policy is the stark reality facing the largely black communities that have long nurtured and still support the city’s indigenous culture. According to The Data Center, an independent research group based in New Orleans, there are 99,650 fewer black residents living in New Orleans now than in 2000. (The population is now 59 percent black, down from 66.7 percent in 2000.) The Urban League of Greater New Orleans released data points from a forthcoming “State of Black New Orleans” report revealing that the number of black children younger than 18 living in poverty in the city grew by 6.5 percent from 2005 to 2013. (In 2013, more than 54,000 black children younger than 18 — 50.5 percent — were considered to be poor.) The Urban League’s statistics show widening inequity as well— an 18 percent increase in the gap between the median income of black households and white households in the city. Overall, more than 35 percent of black families in New Orleans now live below the poverty line. “I think no one will disagree that there has been tremendous progress in New Orleans in many ways,” said Erika McConduit-Diggs, Greater New Orleans Urban League president. “You can tell that from bricks and mortar. But it’s more complex when you peel back layers and look at how African-American communities are faring. What was troubling for many residents before the storm is actually now worsened. We have relocated concentrated poverty.” Lolis Eric Elie, a former New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist and co-producer of the documentary "Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans," said, “My concern after the flood was that one catastrophic event might mean that this tradition that has endured would die out in one fell swoop. Now, my concern is that economic conditions make it increasingly hard for people to do these things because they require time, effort and money.” The headline to a recent article in the New Orleans Advocate declared, “Katrina Scattered New Orleans’ Entrenched Social Networks Far and Wide.” Even those black residents who have returned to New Orleans now increasingly live in nearby suburban parishes, reporter Katy Reckdahl explained. “All of these departures have slashed at the city’s network of extended families,” she wrote, “the generations of children who stayed in the same neighborhoods, blocks or even houses one decade after the next.” For Tamara Jackson, president of the Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force, a consortium of the organizations that sponsor second-line parades, “Our culture is the one thing that keeps us bonded and united. The second lines bring us together, in our old neighborhoods, for four hours at a time.” But she wondered aloud: “Is the 'new' New Orleans for native New Orleanians, or is it for tourists?” Jordan Hirsch, who was the founding director of the nonprofit Sweet Home New Orleans, a grass-roots organization that supported indigenous culture in Katrina’s wake, told me, “In some ways, this geographic dispersal has compelled people to double down on these indigenous traditions. If you can’t walk out your door and participate the way you used to, well, you’ll work even harder to make it happen. Still, I don’t think we know yet how this will really work. The issues are sustainability and transmission of tradition, which used to come more naturally.” Complicating that picture is a near-total conversion of the New Orleans schools to a charter system, which buses students all over the city and may or may not continue a long tradition of school-band instruction. New Orleans jazz culture was born in opposition to challenges, a subversion of racism and classicism. In the Tremé neighborhood in 2007, a few nights after the police had shut down that memorial, the two musicians who had been arrested led another procession. Glen David Andrews put down his trombone and sang "I'll Fly Away," as drummer Derrick Tabb snapped out beats on his snare. A tight circle surrounded the musicians, as a middle-aged black woman turned to the man next to her. "They say they want to stop this?" she asked softly. "They will never stop this." Yet there’s a creeping and newfound sense of alienation. “We dragged this city back,” said the Hot 8’s Bennie Pete, “and now we’re being shown the door.” Not that new doors haven’t opened. “One of the things that changed for the good in New Orleans,” said Lolis Elie, “is an increased conversation about the culture.” In some ways, the issues surrounding New Orleans culture are more clearly defined right now, more out in the open; musicians and other cultural leaders may be a step closer to the bargaining table when it comes to city policies. That’s thanks in large part to the emergence of some grass-roots organizations. The Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans (MACCNO), which began with lunchtime meetings in 2012 at a club owned by trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, seeks to “empower the New Orleans music and cultural community through collective self-representation advocating in the interests of cultural preservation, perpetuation and positive economic impact,” according to its website. It has served as a crucial source of information and advocacy. A board member of the newly formed nonprofit Crescent City Cultural Continuity Conservancy (C5) told me, “So much is changing so fast in New Orleans the cultural community is increasingly aware of the need to be visible advocates for aspects of the city's identity that may well be drowned in the sea change that defines New Orleans, circa 2015.” I’ll be honest. I’m ambivalent at best about this whole anniversary thing. I recall during the first anniversary of the flood, one Lower Ninth Ward family stood by and watched as a TV anchorwoman stood, microphone in hand, in front of their devastated home: “The producer said he doesn’t want us in the picture,” the father told me, holding his baby in his arms. I’ll never forget a moment during second-anniversary events, in 2007. At a “World Cultural Economic Forum” hosted by Mitch Landrieu (then Louisiana’s lieutenant governor), Denis G. Antoine, ambassador to the U.S. from Grenada, said, "If we're taking about rebuilding New Orleans, we have to ask: Which New Orleans are we talking about? We have to talk about social values and an ancestral past. There is an anthropological aspect to the nurturing of a new New Orleans and this will help direct what is appropriate and what is not.” (Well said, I thought.) He went on: “New Orleans is a perception. When we talk about safety: How safe do you feel? It's not just about crime, it's about how safe do you feel to be you?" When I returned to New Orleans to the mark the fifth anniversary, the word “resilience” popped up nearly everywhere—in city-sponsored press conferences, and on signs tacked to lampposts that read: “Stop calling me RESILIENT. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re so resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me.” A stone's throw from a just-restored Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts was that statue of Louis Armstrong, bound by ropes and secured by sandbags amid torn-up concrete and weeds, its base rusted and damaged—the unfortunate consequence of a renovation project initiated by then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin that had gone sour. Both statue and plaza have since been repaired, but in 2010 it seemed an apt image: In a city that has known devastation and government incompetence, can a celebrated homegrown culture once again find firm footing? I suppose I’m still wondering. Larry Blumenfeld writes regularly about jazz and culture for the Wall Street Journal, and at blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes. His Salon piece, “Band on the Run in New Orleans” was included in “Best Music Writing, 2008.” He will moderate a discussion, “Ten Years After: The State of New Orleans Music and Culture,” on Aug. 24 at Basin St. Station, in New Orleans. (The panel will be live-streamed by WWOZ-FM.)

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“Something happened to me in Selma”: 50 years ago, a young white seminary student risked everything for the call of civil rights

The ceremonies  that marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the historic Voting Rights Act last Aug. 6 have not yet ended. Last weekend people from as far away as Alaska and the Virgin Islands returned to Selma, Alabama, to remember yet another tragedy that occurred half a century ago when, on Aug. 20, 1965, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminary student named Jonathan Daniels lost his life while fighting for civil rights. Jon Daniels, of Keene, New Hampshire, was one of the thousands who answered Dr. Martin Luther King's call to join his campaign for voting rights in Selma following the assault on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965. He lived with a black family, tutored young students and demonstrated for equal rights. Nine days later he returned to his studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts,  but he was determined to make civil rights a part of his life. "Something happened to me in Selma ...," he later noted. "I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and  value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high , my own identity was called too nakedly into question ... I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here." He asked officials at the Episcopal Theological School to permit him to finish the semester in Selma. He would submit his academic assignments by mail while, at the same time, assisting the African-American community, who suffered so greatly from that tortured city's racial  problems. The school allowed him to go to Selma as a representative of ESCRU, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. He wore the badge with the letters "ESCRU" proudly on his chest. That badge brought him trouble when he returned to Selma. Waiting in line at the local post office, a man looked him over, his eye caught by the seminarian's collar and the ESCRU button. "Know what he is?" the man asked a friend. "Why, he's a white niggah." At first, Daniels was startled to see others turn to study him, obviously thinking he was one of  the pariahs the segregationists called "outside agitators." But then Daniels felt not fear but pride, wishing he could announce, "I am indeed a 'white nigger.'" Later he reflected, "I wouldn't swap the blessings He has given me. But black would be a very wonderful, a very beautiful color to be." On Palm Sunday, he and his colleagues led a group of African-Americans to Selma's St. Paul's Episcopal Church where, after some resistance, they were allowed to attend morning services -- the first church to be desegregated in Selma. But they were forced to sit in the church's last row and let white parishioners be the first to receive communion. Later Daniels was accosted in the street by a well-dressed man, perhaps a lawyer or a banker, who asked him: "Are you the scum that's been going to the Episcopal church?" Then he answered his question: "S-C-U-M. That's what you are -- you and that nigger trash you bring with you." Daniels said he was "sorry" that the man was upset by having to share his church with the blacks who shared his faith but complimented him on how well he could  spell. In August, he joined activists from King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were working in "Bloody Lowndes County," so called because of the brutal treatment blacks received there since the end of Reconstruction. Of the almost 6,000 blacks who were eligible to vote, none was registered prior to the advent of the civil rights movement in Alabama and, despite the efforts of activists who began working there early in 1965, not a single black participated in the Voting Rights March. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC's most charismatic organizer, who was building a civil rights movement in the county, aptly called Lowndes “the epitome of the tight, insulated police state.” Carmichael's target on Aug. 14 was Fort Deposit, a Klan bastion and a town that treated its black population with special cruelty. Here they would lead local youth in a protest, the first in the town's history. FBI agents on the scene urged them to cancel the demonstration. An armed mob of white men armed with guns, clubs and bottles was gathering and the Bureau refused to protect the protesters. They went forward anyway, picketing a cafe, a dry goods store and a grocery. The police soon appeared and arrested the activists, including Stokely Carmichael, Jon Daniels, four SNCC workers, a Catholic priest from Chicago named Richard Morrisoe and 17 local youths. They were charged with "resisting arrest and picketing to cause blood." The mob turned their fury on reporters observing events from the relative safety of two cars. The reporters fled after the mob attacked their cars with baseball bats as they tried to  pull them into the street. Daniels and the others were taken to the newly built county jail in Hayneville, a sleepy little town of 400, whose town square was built around a 10-foot-tall monument dedicated to county men killed during the Civil War. Two months earlier, its courthouse was the site of the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, one of the Klansmen who had killed civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit homemaker and mother of five, who was shot while driving with a black colleague following the conclusion of the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25. Townspeople resented the presence of foreign reporters -- more than 50, Americans, Englishmen and Swedes -- who had invaded the town in large numbers. The courtroom was filled with Klansmen who brought their wives and children to observe Imperial Klonsul Matthew Hobson Murphy defend one of their own. After a tumultuous trial, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict so the judge declared a mistrial. Klansmen whooped, stamped their feet and clapped. "I'm glad that's over," a woman told Life magazine's John Frook. "Y'all can go back North now and let us have some peace and quiet." Virginia Foster Durr, a writer and friend of Rosa Parks who had observed the trial, did not share the woman's optimism. She sensed "there was killing in the air."  Most "of the people frighten me," she later wrote friends. "They are so insane and prejudiced." She feared that "killing would strike again, for the white people of Hayneville had condoned the killing, whatever they might say."    The Wilkins trial and the coming of the civil rights movement to Lowndes County also enraged a 54-year-old Hayneville native named Tom Coleman. The old Lowndes County courthouse was his second home; his grandfather had been county Sheriff early in the 20th century and his father, superintendent of the county school system, once had an office there. So did his sister who currently held that post, as well as the current circuit court clerk, who was married to his cousin. Coleman spent time there every day, chatting with bailiffs and the court reporters and playing dominos in the clerk’s office. Although lacking a formal education, Coleman eventually became the county’s chief engineer whose work crews often included convict labor, which he supervised.  One night in August 1959, a black prisoner turned violent and, arming himself with broken bottles, refused to surrender peacefully and moved toward Coleman who fired his shotgun, killing the man. Since this was clearly a case of self-defense, Coleman was never charged. Indeed, he was treated by local police as a hero, a role he liked. He eventually became an unpaid “special deputy sheriff,” formed close friendships with Selma Sheriff Jim Clark and other law enforcement agents, and was proud that his son joined them by becoming a state trooper. He claimed never to have joined the Klan but he was active in the local White Citizens Council and, like the Klan, saw himself as a defender of the Southern way of life. For Coleman, those who challenged Southern mores, like Jon Daniels, were public enemy No. 1. "The food is vile and we aren't allowed to bathe (whew!)," Jon Daniels wrote his mother on Aug. 17, his third day in jail. "But otherwise we are okay. Should be out in 2-3 days and back to work. As you can imagine, I'll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini." ESCRU had offered to provide the bail to free Daniels but he refused because it wasn't sufficient to cover his 19 colleagues also imprisoned. Then, suddenly, on Friday, Aug. 20, Daniels was informed that their bail had been waived and they were free to go. Hayneville's mayor, apparently fearing federal intervention, had ordered their release. One of the first to learn the news was Tom Coleman, who was at the courthouse playing dominoes with friends. Believing that the notorious Stokely Carmichael was now on the loose and trouble was sure to ensue, Coleman got his .12- gauge automatic shotgun and went immediately to the local grocery, where he offered to protect Virginia Varner, a longtime friend who owned the Cash Store. Coleman was misinformed -- Carmichael's bail was paid two days earlier and he was no longer in Hayneville. At 3 o'clock, Daniels and his friends gathered outside the jail, happy to see that everyone had survived their squalid captivity without the customary beatings or worse. They asked the jailer to protect them but he refused, urging them to get off the county's property. So they began to walk toward the courthouse square a few blocks away. Obviously SNCC headquarters had not been informed of their release, so Willie Vaughn went in search of a phone. Spotting the Varner Cash Store with its large Coca-Cola signs, Daniels, Rev. Morrisroe and two African-American girls, Ruby Sales, 20,  and Joyce Bailey, 19, walked toward the store to get a cold drink and something to eat. It did not occur to the tired and hungry activists that an interracial group, even one so young and harmless, might incite local racists. Jon Daniels opened the screen door for Ruby Sales and the two came face to face with Tom Coleman. “[G]et out, the store is closed,” he yelled. "[G]et off this property or I’ll blow your god-damned heads off, you sons of bitches.” Daniels pulled Ruby Sales behind him and tried to talk to the angry man. He was polite and, with his clerical collar, did not look like someone who posed a threat. But, without further words, Coleman fired his .12-gauge automatic shotgun, blowing a hole in Daniel’s chest, killing him instantly. Richard Morrisroe grabbed Joyce Bailey's hand and they turned to run but Coleman fired again, hitting the priest in the back and side, seriously, but not critically, injuring him. After threatening to kill others who approached, Coleman put down his weapon, drove to the sheriff’s office and telephoned Al Lingo, Alabama’s safety director. “I just shot two preachers,” he told him. “You better get on down here.” Daniel and Morrisroe’s friends held a rally later that night. “We’re going to tear this county down,” a saddened and angry Stokely Carmichael said. “Then we’re going to build it back brick by brick, until it’s a fit place for human beings.” Since March, four civil rights workers had been murdered — Jimmy Lee Jackson, Rev. Jim Reeb, Viola Liuzzo and now Jonathan Daniels. Soon Carmichael’s fury would result in the organization of a separate political party in Lowndes County: Its symbol was the black panther, its slogan, “Power for Black People.” To the citizens of Lowndes County, Tom Coleman was a hero -- “a hell of a nice guy,” people said. County Solicitor Carlton Purdue said that Coleman “was like the rest of us. He’s strong in his feelings.” Tom Coleman and his family were “all good friends” of his, he told reporters who had returned to Lowndes County to cover another murder trial. “If [Daniels and Morrisroe] had been tending to their own business, like I was tending to mine, they’d be living and enjoying themselves." These attitudes may explain why the Lowndes County Grand Jury charged Coleman not with first- or second-degree murder and attempted murder in Morrisroe’s case, but manslaughter and assault and battery. Alabama’s attorney general, Richmond Flowers, called the grand jury’s action “an abdication of … responsibility.” Lowndes County justice proceeded as usual, oblivious to outsiders’ criticism. In fact, the more the national media attacked Southern customs, the more its citizens embraced them. When Flowers asked Judge T. Werth Thagard, who was trying the case, for a two-month postponement until Father Morrisroe, his chief eyewitness, had recovered sufficiently to testify, the judge rejected the motion and declared, “The trial of Tom Coleman will begin tomorrow.” Flowers refused to participate so Thagard removed him and asked Carlton Purdue and Arthur Gamble to prosecute. When the trial began on Sept. 27, the courtroom was packed with Klansmen — including Liuzzo's killers, Collie Leroy Wilkins, Eugene Thomas and William Orville Eaton. Defense witnesses testified that Daniels threatened Coleman with a switchblade knife while Morrisroe pulled a gun, so Coleman was merely protecting himself when he shot them. The jury rejected Ruby Sales' eyewitness testimony, finding the lies more persuasive. In his closing statement defense attorney Joe Phelps said, “You know Tom Coleman and you know he had to do what he did,” while his co-counsel added: “God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls -- and ready hands!” Coleman had a God-given right “to defend himself and his lady.” On Wednesday, Sept. 29, just two days after the trial began, the jury began its deliberations. The “trial watchers,” awaiting the jury’s decision, were “busily talking in huddles,” not about the verdict -- which was never in doubt -- but about tomorrow’s football game between the University of Alabama and “Ole Miss.” After about 90 minutes, the jury found Coleman not guilty of all charges. Thagard thanked the jurors who, before heading to the clerk’s office to receive their stipend, walked over to Coleman and shook his hand. One asked, "We gonna be able to make that dove shoot now, ain’t we?” The NAACP called the jury’s verdict “a monstrous farce,” which encouraged “every Alabama bigot” to declare “open season on Negroes and their white friends.” The NAACP was right — Fort Deposit citizens were now seen driving cars with bumper stickers which read "Open Season." Despite this legal travesty, Jon Daniels did not die in vain. ESCRU and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit that attacked the county legal system for prohibiting women and blacks from serving on juries. That October, the Justice Department intervened, ordering county officials to produce all jury records since 1915 and the results showed evidence of racial and gender discrimination and other legal improprieties. In 1966, the Federal Court of Appeals in Montgomery, Alabama, declared state laws excluding women from juries unconstitutional as well as any practice that prevented African-Americans from jury service. "The decision revolutionized the jury system in [Lowndes] County," writes historian Charles Eagles. "[And] indirectly it also promised greater protection for civil rights workers by guaranteeing that blacks would serve on the juries that indicted and tried people like Tom Coleman." Dr. Martin Luther King called Jon Daniels' sacrifice "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry." While countless African-Americans lost their lives in the South for simply being black or fighting for the right to vote, we should not forget their white allies, like Jon Daniels, who were jailed, beaten and murdered in the fight for civil rights.   The ceremonies  that marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the historic Voting Rights Act last Aug. 6 have not yet ended. Last weekend people from as far away as Alaska and the Virgin Islands returned to Selma, Alabama, to remember yet another tragedy that occurred half a century ago when, on Aug. 20, 1965, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminary student named Jonathan Daniels lost his life while fighting for civil rights. Jon Daniels, of Keene, New Hampshire, was one of the thousands who answered Dr. Martin Luther King's call to join his campaign for voting rights in Selma following the assault on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965. He lived with a black family, tutored young students and demonstrated for equal rights. Nine days later he returned to his studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts,  but he was determined to make civil rights a part of his life. "Something happened to me in Selma ...," he later noted. "I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and  value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high , my own identity was called too nakedly into question ... I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here." He asked officials at the Episcopal Theological School to permit him to finish the semester in Selma. He would submit his academic assignments by mail while, at the same time, assisting the African-American community, who suffered so greatly from that tortured city's racial  problems. The school allowed him to go to Selma as a representative of ESCRU, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. He wore the badge with the letters "ESCRU" proudly on his chest. That badge brought him trouble when he returned to Selma. Waiting in line at the local post office, a man looked him over, his eye caught by the seminarian's collar and the ESCRU button. "Know what he is?" the man asked a friend. "Why, he's a white niggah." At first, Daniels was startled to see others turn to study him, obviously thinking he was one of  the pariahs the segregationists called "outside agitators." But then Daniels felt not fear but pride, wishing he could announce, "I am indeed a 'white nigger.'" Later he reflected, "I wouldn't swap the blessings He has given me. But black would be a very wonderful, a very beautiful color to be." On Palm Sunday, he and his colleagues led a group of African-Americans to Selma's St. Paul's Episcopal Church where, after some resistance, they were allowed to attend morning services -- the first church to be desegregated in Selma. But they were forced to sit in the church's last row and let white parishioners be the first to receive communion. Later Daniels was accosted in the street by a well-dressed man, perhaps a lawyer or a banker, who asked him: "Are you the scum that's been going to the Episcopal church?" Then he answered his question: "S-C-U-M. That's what you are -- you and that nigger trash you bring with you." Daniels said he was "sorry" that the man was upset by having to share his church with the blacks who shared his faith but complimented him on how well he could  spell. In August, he joined activists from King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were working in "Bloody Lowndes County," so called because of the brutal treatment blacks received there since the end of Reconstruction. Of the almost 6,000 blacks who were eligible to vote, none was registered prior to the advent of the civil rights movement in Alabama and, despite the efforts of activists who began working there early in 1965, not a single black participated in the Voting Rights March. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC's most charismatic organizer, who was building a civil rights movement in the county, aptly called Lowndes “the epitome of the tight, insulated police state.” Carmichael's target on Aug. 14 was Fort Deposit, a Klan bastion and a town that treated its black population with special cruelty. Here they would lead local youth in a protest, the first in the town's history. FBI agents on the scene urged them to cancel the demonstration. An armed mob of white men armed with guns, clubs and bottles was gathering and the Bureau refused to protect the protesters. They went forward anyway, picketing a cafe, a dry goods store and a grocery. The police soon appeared and arrested the activists, including Stokely Carmichael, Jon Daniels, four SNCC workers, a Catholic priest from Chicago named Richard Morrisoe and 17 local youths. They were charged with "resisting arrest and picketing to cause blood." The mob turned their fury on reporters observing events from the relative safety of two cars. The reporters fled after the mob attacked their cars with baseball bats as they tried to  pull them into the street. Daniels and the others were taken to the newly built county jail in Hayneville, a sleepy little town of 400, whose town square was built around a 10-foot-tall monument dedicated to county men killed during the Civil War. Two months earlier, its courthouse was the site of the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, one of the Klansmen who had killed civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit homemaker and mother of five, who was shot while driving with a black colleague following the conclusion of the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25. Townspeople resented the presence of foreign reporters -- more than 50, Americans, Englishmen and Swedes -- who had invaded the town in large numbers. The courtroom was filled with Klansmen who brought their wives and children to observe Imperial Klonsul Matthew Hobson Murphy defend one of their own. After a tumultuous trial, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict so the judge declared a mistrial. Klansmen whooped, stamped their feet and clapped. "I'm glad that's over," a woman told Life magazine's John Frook. "Y'all can go back North now and let us have some peace and quiet." Virginia Foster Durr, a writer and friend of Rosa Parks who had observed the trial, did not share the woman's optimism. She sensed "there was killing in the air."  Most "of the people frighten me," she later wrote friends. "They are so insane and prejudiced." She feared that "killing would strike again, for the white people of Hayneville had condoned the killing, whatever they might say."    The Wilkins trial and the coming of the civil rights movement to Lowndes County also enraged a 54-year-old Hayneville native named Tom Coleman. The old Lowndes County courthouse was his second home; his grandfather had been county Sheriff early in the 20th century and his father, superintendent of the county school system, once had an office there. So did his sister who currently held that post, as well as the current circuit court clerk, who was married to his cousin. Coleman spent time there every day, chatting with bailiffs and the court reporters and playing dominos in the clerk’s office. Although lacking a formal education, Coleman eventually became the county’s chief engineer whose work crews often included convict labor, which he supervised.  One night in August 1959, a black prisoner turned violent and, arming himself with broken bottles, refused to surrender peacefully and moved toward Coleman who fired his shotgun, killing the man. Since this was clearly a case of self-defense, Coleman was never charged. Indeed, he was treated by local police as a hero, a role he liked. He eventually became an unpaid “special deputy sheriff,” formed close friendships with Selma Sheriff Jim Clark and other law enforcement agents, and was proud that his son joined them by becoming a state trooper. He claimed never to have joined the Klan but he was active in the local White Citizens Council and, like the Klan, saw himself as a defender of the Southern way of life. For Coleman, those who challenged Southern mores, like Jon Daniels, were public enemy No. 1. "The food is vile and we aren't allowed to bathe (whew!)," Jon Daniels wrote his mother on Aug. 17, his third day in jail. "But otherwise we are okay. Should be out in 2-3 days and back to work. As you can imagine, I'll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini." ESCRU had offered to provide the bail to free Daniels but he refused because it wasn't sufficient to cover his 19 colleagues also imprisoned. Then, suddenly, on Friday, Aug. 20, Daniels was informed that their bail had been waived and they were free to go. Hayneville's mayor, apparently fearing federal intervention, had ordered their release. One of the first to learn the news was Tom Coleman, who was at the courthouse playing dominoes with friends. Believing that the notorious Stokely Carmichael was now on the loose and trouble was sure to ensue, Coleman got his .12- gauge automatic shotgun and went immediately to the local grocery, where he offered to protect Virginia Varner, a longtime friend who owned the Cash Store. Coleman was misinformed -- Carmichael's bail was paid two days earlier and he was no longer in Hayneville. At 3 o'clock, Daniels and his friends gathered outside the jail, happy to see that everyone had survived their squalid captivity without the customary beatings or worse. They asked the jailer to protect them but he refused, urging them to get off the county's property. So they began to walk toward the courthouse square a few blocks away. Obviously SNCC headquarters had not been informed of their release, so Willie Vaughn went in search of a phone. Spotting the Varner Cash Store with its large Coca-Cola signs, Daniels, Rev. Morrisroe and two African-American girls, Ruby Sales, 20,  and Joyce Bailey, 19, walked toward the store to get a cold drink and something to eat. It did not occur to the tired and hungry activists that an interracial group, even one so young and harmless, might incite local racists. Jon Daniels opened the screen door for Ruby Sales and the two came face to face with Tom Coleman. “[G]et out, the store is closed,” he yelled. "[G]et off this property or I’ll blow your god-damned heads off, you sons of bitches.” Daniels pulled Ruby Sales behind him and tried to talk to the angry man. He was polite and, with his clerical collar, did not look like someone who posed a threat. But, without further words, Coleman fired his .12-gauge automatic shotgun, blowing a hole in Daniel’s chest, killing him instantly. Richard Morrisroe grabbed Joyce Bailey's hand and they turned to run but Coleman fired again, hitting the priest in the back and side, seriously, but not critically, injuring him. After threatening to kill others who approached, Coleman put down his weapon, drove to the sheriff’s office and telephoned Al Lingo, Alabama’s safety director. “I just shot two preachers,” he told him. “You better get on down here.” Daniel and Morrisroe’s friends held a rally later that night. “We’re going to tear this county down,” a saddened and angry Stokely Carmichael said. “Then we’re going to build it back brick by brick, until it’s a fit place for human beings.” Since March, four civil rights workers had been murdered — Jimmy Lee Jackson, Rev. Jim Reeb, Viola Liuzzo and now Jonathan Daniels. Soon Carmichael’s fury would result in the organization of a separate political party in Lowndes County: Its symbol was the black panther, its slogan, “Power for Black People.” To the citizens of Lowndes County, Tom Coleman was a hero -- “a hell of a nice guy,” people said. County Solicitor Carlton Purdue said that Coleman “was like the rest of us. He’s strong in his feelings.” Tom Coleman and his family were “all good friends” of his, he told reporters who had returned to Lowndes County to cover another murder trial. “If [Daniels and Morrisroe] had been tending to their own business, like I was tending to mine, they’d be living and enjoying themselves." These attitudes may explain why the Lowndes County Grand Jury charged Coleman not with first- or second-degree murder and attempted murder in Morrisroe’s case, but manslaughter and assault and battery. Alabama’s attorney general, Richmond Flowers, called the grand jury’s action “an abdication of … responsibility.” Lowndes County justice proceeded as usual, oblivious to outsiders’ criticism. In fact, the more the national media attacked Southern customs, the more its citizens embraced them. When Flowers asked Judge T. Werth Thagard, who was trying the case, for a two-month postponement until Father Morrisroe, his chief eyewitness, had recovered sufficiently to testify, the judge rejected the motion and declared, “The trial of Tom Coleman will begin tomorrow.” Flowers refused to participate so Thagard removed him and asked Carlton Purdue and Arthur Gamble to prosecute. When the trial began on Sept. 27, the courtroom was packed with Klansmen — including Liuzzo's killers, Collie Leroy Wilkins, Eugene Thomas and William Orville Eaton. Defense witnesses testified that Daniels threatened Coleman with a switchblade knife while Morrisroe pulled a gun, so Coleman was merely protecting himself when he shot them. The jury rejected Ruby Sales' eyewitness testimony, finding the lies more persuasive. In his closing statement defense attorney Joe Phelps said, “You know Tom Coleman and you know he had to do what he did,” while his co-counsel added: “God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls -- and ready hands!” Coleman had a God-given right “to defend himself and his lady.” On Wednesday, Sept. 29, just two days after the trial began, the jury began its deliberations. The “trial watchers,” awaiting the jury’s decision, were “busily talking in huddles,” not about the verdict -- which was never in doubt -- but about tomorrow’s football game between the University of Alabama and “Ole Miss.” After about 90 minutes, the jury found Coleman not guilty of all charges. Thagard thanked the jurors who, before heading to the clerk’s office to receive their stipend, walked over to Coleman and shook his hand. One asked, "We gonna be able to make that dove shoot now, ain’t we?” The NAACP called the jury’s verdict “a monstrous farce,” which encouraged “every Alabama bigot” to declare “open season on Negroes and their white friends.” The NAACP was right — Fort Deposit citizens were now seen driving cars with bumper stickers which read "Open Season." Despite this legal travesty, Jon Daniels did not die in vain. ESCRU and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit that attacked the county legal system for prohibiting women and blacks from serving on juries. That October, the Justice Department intervened, ordering county officials to produce all jury records since 1915 and the results showed evidence of racial and gender discrimination and other legal improprieties. In 1966, the Federal Court of Appeals in Montgomery, Alabama, declared state laws excluding women from juries unconstitutional as well as any practice that prevented African-Americans from jury service. "The decision revolutionized the jury system in [Lowndes] County," writes historian Charles Eagles. "[And] indirectly it also promised greater protection for civil rights workers by guaranteeing that blacks would serve on the juries that indicted and tried people like Tom Coleman." Dr. Martin Luther King called Jon Daniels' sacrifice "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry." While countless African-Americans lost their lives in the South for simply being black or fighting for the right to vote, we should not forget their white allies, like Jon Daniels, who were jailed, beaten and murdered in the fight for civil rights.   The ceremonies  that marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the historic Voting Rights Act last Aug. 6 have not yet ended. Last weekend people from as far away as Alaska and the Virgin Islands returned to Selma, Alabama, to remember yet another tragedy that occurred half a century ago when, on Aug. 20, 1965, a 26-year-old Episcopal seminary student named Jonathan Daniels lost his life while fighting for civil rights. Jon Daniels, of Keene, New Hampshire, was one of the thousands who answered Dr. Martin Luther King's call to join his campaign for voting rights in Selma following the assault on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965. He lived with a black family, tutored young students and demonstrated for equal rights. Nine days later he returned to his studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts,  but he was determined to make civil rights a part of his life. "Something happened to me in Selma ...," he later noted. "I could not stand by in benevolent dispassion any longer without compromising everything I know and love and  value. The imperative was too clear, the stakes too high , my own identity was called too nakedly into question ... I had been blinded by what I saw here (and elsewhere), and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here." He asked officials at the Episcopal Theological School to permit him to finish the semester in Selma. He would submit his academic assignments by mail while, at the same time, assisting the African-American community, who suffered so greatly from that tortured city's racial  problems. The school allowed him to go to Selma as a representative of ESCRU, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. He wore the badge with the letters "ESCRU" proudly on his chest. That badge brought him trouble when he returned to Selma. Waiting in line at the local post office, a man looked him over, his eye caught by the seminarian's collar and the ESCRU button. "Know what he is?" the man asked a friend. "Why, he's a white niggah." At first, Daniels was startled to see others turn to study him, obviously thinking he was one of  the pariahs the segregationists called "outside agitators." But then Daniels felt not fear but pride, wishing he could announce, "I am indeed a 'white nigger.'" Later he reflected, "I wouldn't swap the blessings He has given me. But black would be a very wonderful, a very beautiful color to be." On Palm Sunday, he and his colleagues led a group of African-Americans to Selma's St. Paul's Episcopal Church where, after some resistance, they were allowed to attend morning services -- the first church to be desegregated in Selma. But they were forced to sit in the church's last row and let white parishioners be the first to receive communion. Later Daniels was accosted in the street by a well-dressed man, perhaps a lawyer or a banker, who asked him: "Are you the scum that's been going to the Episcopal church?" Then he answered his question: "S-C-U-M. That's what you are -- you and that nigger trash you bring with you." Daniels said he was "sorry" that the man was upset by having to share his church with the blacks who shared his faith but complimented him on how well he could  spell. In August, he joined activists from King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were working in "Bloody Lowndes County," so called because of the brutal treatment blacks received there since the end of Reconstruction. Of the almost 6,000 blacks who were eligible to vote, none was registered prior to the advent of the civil rights movement in Alabama and, despite the efforts of activists who began working there early in 1965, not a single black participated in the Voting Rights March. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC's most charismatic organizer, who was building a civil rights movement in the county, aptly called Lowndes “the epitome of the tight, insulated police state.” Carmichael's target on Aug. 14 was Fort Deposit, a Klan bastion and a town that treated its black population with special cruelty. Here they would lead local youth in a protest, the first in the town's history. FBI agents on the scene urged them to cancel the demonstration. An armed mob of white men armed with guns, clubs and bottles was gathering and the Bureau refused to protect the protesters. They went forward anyway, picketing a cafe, a dry goods store and a grocery. The police soon appeared and arrested the activists, including Stokely Carmichael, Jon Daniels, four SNCC workers, a Catholic priest from Chicago named Richard Morrisoe and 17 local youths. They were charged with "resisting arrest and picketing to cause blood." The mob turned their fury on reporters observing events from the relative safety of two cars. The reporters fled after the mob attacked their cars with baseball bats as they tried to  pull them into the street. Daniels and the others were taken to the newly built county jail in Hayneville, a sleepy little town of 400, whose town square was built around a 10-foot-tall monument dedicated to county men killed during the Civil War. Two months earlier, its courthouse was the site of the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, one of the Klansmen who had killed civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit homemaker and mother of five, who was shot while driving with a black colleague following the conclusion of the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25. Townspeople resented the presence of foreign reporters -- more than 50, Americans, Englishmen and Swedes -- who had invaded the town in large numbers. The courtroom was filled with Klansmen who brought their wives and children to observe Imperial Klonsul Matthew Hobson Murphy defend one of their own. After a tumultuous trial, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict so the judge declared a mistrial. Klansmen whooped, stamped their feet and clapped. "I'm glad that's over," a woman told Life magazine's John Frook. "Y'all can go back North now and let us have some peace and quiet." Virginia Foster Durr, a writer and friend of Rosa Parks who had observed the trial, did not share the woman's optimism. She sensed "there was killing in the air."  Most "of the people frighten me," she later wrote friends. "They are so insane and prejudiced." She feared that "killing would strike again, for the white people of Hayneville had condoned the killing, whatever they might say."    The Wilkins trial and the coming of the civil rights movement to Lowndes County also enraged a 54-year-old Hayneville native named Tom Coleman. The old Lowndes County courthouse was his second home; his grandfather had been county Sheriff early in the 20th century and his father, superintendent of the county school system, once had an office there. So did his sister who currently held that post, as well as the current circuit court clerk, who was married to his cousin. Coleman spent time there every day, chatting with bailiffs and the court reporters and playing dominos in the clerk’s office. Although lacking a formal education, Coleman eventually became the county’s chief engineer whose work crews often included convict labor, which he supervised.  One night in August 1959, a black prisoner turned violent and, arming himself with broken bottles, refused to surrender peacefully and moved toward Coleman who fired his shotgun, killing the man. Since this was clearly a case of self-defense, Coleman was never charged. Indeed, he was treated by local police as a hero, a role he liked. He eventually became an unpaid “special deputy sheriff,” formed close friendships with Selma Sheriff Jim Clark and other law enforcement agents, and was proud that his son joined them by becoming a state trooper. He claimed never to have joined the Klan but he was active in the local White Citizens Council and, like the Klan, saw himself as a defender of the Southern way of life. For Coleman, those who challenged Southern mores, like Jon Daniels, were public enemy No. 1. "The food is vile and we aren't allowed to bathe (whew!)," Jon Daniels wrote his mother on Aug. 17, his third day in jail. "But otherwise we are okay. Should be out in 2-3 days and back to work. As you can imagine, I'll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini." ESCRU had offered to provide the bail to free Daniels but he refused because it wasn't sufficient to cover his 19 colleagues also imprisoned. Then, suddenly, on Friday, Aug. 20, Daniels was informed that their bail had been waived and they were free to go. Hayneville's mayor, apparently fearing federal intervention, had ordered their release. One of the first to learn the news was Tom Coleman, who was at the courthouse playing dominoes with friends. Believing that the notorious Stokely Carmichael was now on the loose and trouble was sure to ensue, Coleman got his .12- gauge automatic shotgun and went immediately to the local grocery, where he offered to protect Virginia Varner, a longtime friend who owned the Cash Store. Coleman was misinformed -- Carmichael's bail was paid two days earlier and he was no longer in Hayneville. At 3 o'clock, Daniels and his friends gathered outside the jail, happy to see that everyone had survived their squalid captivity without the customary beatings or worse. They asked the jailer to protect them but he refused, urging them to get off the county's property. So they began to walk toward the courthouse square a few blocks away. Obviously SNCC headquarters had not been informed of their release, so Willie Vaughn went in search of a phone. Spotting the Varner Cash Store with its large Coca-Cola signs, Daniels, Rev. Morrisroe and two African-American girls, Ruby Sales, 20,  and Joyce Bailey, 19, walked toward the store to get a cold drink and something to eat. It did not occur to the tired and hungry activists that an interracial group, even one so young and harmless, might incite local racists. Jon Daniels opened the screen door for Ruby Sales and the two came face to face with Tom Coleman. “[G]et out, the store is closed,” he yelled. "[G]et off this property or I’ll blow your god-damned heads off, you sons of bitches.” Daniels pulled Ruby Sales behind him and tried to talk to the angry man. He was polite and, with his clerical collar, did not look like someone who posed a threat. But, without further words, Coleman fired his .12-gauge automatic shotgun, blowing a hole in Daniel’s chest, killing him instantly. Richard Morrisroe grabbed Joyce Bailey's hand and they turned to run but Coleman fired again, hitting the priest in the back and side, seriously, but not critically, injuring him. After threatening to kill others who approached, Coleman put down his weapon, drove to the sheriff’s office and telephoned Al Lingo, Alabama’s safety director. “I just shot two preachers,” he told him. “You better get on down here.” Daniel and Morrisroe’s friends held a rally later that night. “We’re going to tear this county down,” a saddened and angry Stokely Carmichael said. “Then we’re going to build it back brick by brick, until it’s a fit place for human beings.” Since March, four civil rights workers had been murdered — Jimmy Lee Jackson, Rev. Jim Reeb, Viola Liuzzo and now Jonathan Daniels. Soon Carmichael’s fury would result in the organization of a separate political party in Lowndes County: Its symbol was the black panther, its slogan, “Power for Black People.” To the citizens of Lowndes County, Tom Coleman was a hero -- “a hell of a nice guy,” people said. County Solicitor Carlton Purdue said that Coleman “was like the rest of us. He’s strong in his feelings.” Tom Coleman and his family were “all good friends” of his, he told reporters who had returned to Lowndes County to cover another murder trial. “If [Daniels and Morrisroe] had been tending to their own business, like I was tending to mine, they’d be living and enjoying themselves." These attitudes may explain why the Lowndes County Grand Jury charged Coleman not with first- or second-degree murder and attempted murder in Morrisroe’s case, but manslaughter and assault and battery. Alabama’s attorney general, Richmond Flowers, called the grand jury’s action “an abdication of … responsibility.” Lowndes County justice proceeded as usual, oblivious to outsiders’ criticism. In fact, the more the national media attacked Southern customs, the more its citizens embraced them. When Flowers asked Judge T. Werth Thagard, who was trying the case, for a two-month postponement until Father Morrisroe, his chief eyewitness, had recovered sufficiently to testify, the judge rejected the motion and declared, “The trial of Tom Coleman will begin tomorrow.” Flowers refused to participate so Thagard removed him and asked Carlton Purdue and Arthur Gamble to prosecute. When the trial began on Sept. 27, the courtroom was packed with Klansmen — including Liuzzo's killers, Collie Leroy Wilkins, Eugene Thomas and William Orville Eaton. Defense witnesses testified that Daniels threatened Coleman with a switchblade knife while Morrisroe pulled a gun, so Coleman was merely protecting himself when he shot them. The jury rejected Ruby Sales' eyewitness testimony, finding the lies more persuasive. In his closing statement defense attorney Joe Phelps said, “You know Tom Coleman and you know he had to do what he did,” while his co-counsel added: “God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls -- and ready hands!” Coleman had a God-given right “to defend himself and his lady.” On Wednesday, Sept. 29, just two days after the trial began, the jury began its deliberations. The “trial watchers,” awaiting the jury’s decision, were “busily talking in huddles,” not about the verdict -- which was never in doubt -- but about tomorrow’s football game between the University of Alabama and “Ole Miss.” After about 90 minutes, the jury found Coleman not guilty of all charges. Thagard thanked the jurors who, before heading to the clerk’s office to receive their stipend, walked over to Coleman and shook his hand. One asked, "We gonna be able to make that dove shoot now, ain’t we?” The NAACP called the jury’s verdict “a monstrous farce,” which encouraged “every Alabama bigot” to declare “open season on Negroes and their white friends.” The NAACP was right — Fort Deposit citizens were now seen driving cars with bumper stickers which read "Open Season." Despite this legal travesty, Jon Daniels did not die in vain. ESCRU and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit that attacked the county legal system for prohibiting women and blacks from serving on juries. That October, the Justice Department intervened, ordering county officials to produce all jury records since 1915 and the results showed evidence of racial and gender discrimination and other legal improprieties. In 1966, the Federal Court of Appeals in Montgomery, Alabama, declared state laws excluding women from juries unconstitutional as well as any practice that prevented African-Americans from jury service. "The decision revolutionized the jury system in [Lowndes] County," writes historian Charles Eagles. "[And] indirectly it also promised greater protection for civil rights workers by guaranteeing that blacks would serve on the juries that indicted and tried people like Tom Coleman." Dr. Martin Luther King called Jon Daniels' sacrifice "one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry." While countless African-Americans lost their lives in the South for simply being black or fighting for the right to vote, we should not forget their white allies, like Jon Daniels, who were jailed, beaten and murdered in the fight for civil rights.   

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Black America owes no forgiveness: How Christianity hinders racial justice

On the one-year anniversary of the death of an 18-year-old black teenager named Michael Brown by a (now confessed racist) white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was asked if she forgave Darren Wilson for his cruel and wanton act of legal murder. She told Al Jazeera that she will “never forgive” Darren Wilson and that “he’s evil, his acts were devilish.” Her response is unusual. Its candor is refreshing. Lezley McSpadden’s truth-telling reveals the full humanity and emotions of black folks, and by doing so defies the norms which demand that when Black Americans suffer they do so stoically, and always in such a way where forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America. The expectation that black people will always and immediately forgive the violence done to them by the State, or individual white people, is a bizarre and sick American ritual. The necropolis of black bodies in the Age of Obama provides many examples of the ritual. Less than a month after her son Samuel Dubose was executed by a thug cop, his mother, Audrey Dubose was asked during a press conference, if she forgave Ray Tensing. She answered “I can forgive him. I can forgive anybody. God forgave us." After Dylann Roof massacred nine black Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church their families were asked to forgive the white racist terrorist. Rituals reinforce social norms, values, and beliefs. Rituals can empower some groups and individuals; rituals can also serve to weaken and oppress others. The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness for the historic and contemporary suffering visited upon the black community by White America reflects the complexities of the color line. Black Americans may publicly—and this says nothing of just and righteous private anger, upset, and desire for justice and revenge—be so quick to forgive white violence and injustice because it a tactic and strategy for coping with life in a historically white supremacist society. If black folks publicly expressed their anger and lack of forgiveness at centuries of white transgressions they could and were beaten, raped, murdered, shot, stabbed, burned alive, run out of town, hung, put in prisons, locked up in insane asylums, fired from their jobs, their land stolen from them, and kicked out of schools. Even in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama, being branded with the veritable scarlet letter of being an “angry” black man or “angry” black woman, can result in their life opportunities being significantly reduced. The African-American church is also central to the black American ritual of forgiveness. A belief in fantastical and mythological beings was used to fuel struggle and resistance in a long march of liberation and dignity against white supremacy, injustice, and degradation. The notion of “Christian forgiveness” as taught by the black church could also be a practical means of self-medication, one designed to stave off existential malaise, and to heal oneself in the face of the quotidian struggles of life under American Apartheid. Likewise, some used Christianity and the black church to teach passivity and weakness in the face of white terrorism because some great reward supposedly awaits those who suffer on Earth. The public mask of public black forgiveness and peace was also a tool that was used during the long Black Freedom Struggle as a means of demonstrating the honor, humanity, dignity, and civic virtue of black Americans--a group who only wanted their just and paid for in blood (and free labor) civil rights. The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness fulfills the expectations of the White Gaze and the White Racial Frame. A lack of empathy from White America towards Black America is central to the ritual: if white folks could truly feel the pain of black people (and First Nations, Hispanics and Latinos, and other people of color) in these times of meanness, cruelty, and violence, then immediate forgiveness would not be an expectation. Many white Americans actually believe thatblack people are superhuman, magical, and do not feel pain. This cannot help but to somehow factor into the public ritual of black people saying “I forgive” the violence visited upon them by white cops, paramilitaries, hate mongers, bureaucrats, and the State. Whiteness is central here too. Whiteness imagines itself as benign, just, and innocent. Therefore, too many white people (especially those who have not acknowledged, renounced, and rejected white privilege) view white on black racial violence as some type of ahistorical outlier, something that is not part of a pattern, a punctuation or disruption in American life, something not inherent to it, and thus not a norm of the country’s social and political life. Here, the ritual of African-American forgiveness allows White America absolution and innocence without having to put in the deeds and necessary hard work for true justice, fairness, and equal democracy on both sides of the color line. The black forgiveness ritual’s heaviest anchor is white anxiety and fear. As I wrote in an earlier piece, White America is deeply terrified, and has been since before the Founding, of black righteous anger, and that white people in this country would be held accountable for the actions done both in their name, and for their collective benefit against black people. This ahistorical and delusional dread (where in fact white Americans are experts in the practice of collective violence against people of color; the reverse has never been true) was summoned in the antebellum period by worries of “slave revolts”. It still resonates in the 20th and 21st centuries with white racial paranoia about “ghetto” or “black” riots, as well as the persistent bugaboo that is “black crime”. When black people say “we forgive” it is a salve for those white worries and fears. The absurdity and uniqueness of black Americans being naturally expected to immediately forgive the crimes and harm done to them by white people is highlighted precisely by how (White) America, both as an aggregate and as individuals, are not burdened with such a task. One of the greatest privileges that comes with being “white” in America is the permission and encouragement to hold onto a sense of injustice, grievance, anger, and pain. Consider the following. The family of Kathryn Steinle—and whose death is the macabre subject for Donald Trump’s race-baiting obsessions with “illegal” immigrants from Mexico—has not been publicly asked to forgive Francisco Sanchez, the man who killed her. The families of the children murdered by the gun toting mass shooter Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut were not publicly asked during a press conference if they forgave the killer. The families of the 70 people wounded and 12 killed by James Holmes in a Colorado movie theater were not asked during a press conference to publicly forgive him. And of course, the families of those killed on September 11, 2001, when agents of Al Qaeda attacked the United States, were not asked several weeks after the event if they forgave Osama bin Laden and his agents. More than ten years after that faithful morning when the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda—and an era of national derangement and perpetual war was ushered into being—there are survivors who will still not forgive those who wrought devastation onto their lives. Some of them shared with the National Catholic Review how continue to nurture their anger: Mr. Haberman admitted, “That’s a tough one for me. When I sit in court with these guys, can I forgive them? I have a hard time. I mean, they don’t want my forgiveness. I think justice is the word.” Dorine and Martin Toyen of Avon, Conn., lost their daughter Amy, 24, in the World Trade Center. She was engaged to be married. “Her whole life was taken away from her,” said Ms. Toyen. “There is no way I could ever forgive them.” Mr. Toyen concurred. “I want justice, not forgiveness,” he said. “I’m still very bitter. Rage.” If the accused “are found guilty, then I would have no qualms with the death penalty.” Ms. Noeth said the death penalty would be too easy. “The people that we lost suffered a lot more than that. I think they deserve as much pain as can possibly be inflicted on them.” If a reporter or other interviewer publicly asked those people who had their love ones stolen from them either on 9/11, at Newtown, or Littleton, if they forgave the monsters who hurt them so deeply, said person would (rightfully) be derided, mocked, and likely fired. (White) Americans are not expected to forgive those who transgress them. Black Americans who have lost their loved ones to police thuggery, violence, or other types of white on black racial terrorism and murder should be allowed the same latitude and freedom of expression and feelings. Of course, they are not—such a right exists outside the ritual that is Black America’s expected forgiveness for all the racist grievances and wrongs suffered by it. This public ritual is a performance. It gives the white American public what they expect while concealing the true and private feelings of many black Americans, the latter being a people who are not foolish or naïve enough to perpetually forgive, forget, and turn the other cheek when faced with perpetual abuse. Perhaps, one day there will be a moment when a black American who has suffered unjust loss and pain will tell the reporter who immediately asks them, “do you forgive the thug cop or racial terrorist who killed your unarmed child/friend/brother/sister/husband/wife?” and they will reply, “Hell no! Not now, not ever, and you can go fuck yourself for asking such a question.” We are allowed to dream. Such a moment of honesty and sharing will be a true step forward for racial justice and respect across the color line, as opposed to the charade and Kabuki-like Theater that now passes for the obligatory and weak “national conversation on race” that the American people have been repeatedly afflicted with in the post civil rights era. On the one-year anniversary of the death of an 18-year-old black teenager named Michael Brown by a (now confessed racist) white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was asked if she forgave Darren Wilson for his cruel and wanton act of legal murder. She told Al Jazeera that she will “never forgive” Darren Wilson and that “he’s evil, his acts were devilish.” Her response is unusual. Its candor is refreshing. Lezley McSpadden’s truth-telling reveals the full humanity and emotions of black folks, and by doing so defies the norms which demand that when Black Americans suffer they do so stoically, and always in such a way where forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America. The expectation that black people will always and immediately forgive the violence done to them by the State, or individual white people, is a bizarre and sick American ritual. The necropolis of black bodies in the Age of Obama provides many examples of the ritual. Less than a month after her son Samuel Dubose was executed by a thug cop, his mother, Audrey Dubose was asked during a press conference, if she forgave Ray Tensing. She answered “I can forgive him. I can forgive anybody. God forgave us." After Dylann Roof massacred nine black Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church their families were asked to forgive the white racist terrorist. Rituals reinforce social norms, values, and beliefs. Rituals can empower some groups and individuals; rituals can also serve to weaken and oppress others. The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness for the historic and contemporary suffering visited upon the black community by White America reflects the complexities of the color line. Black Americans may publicly—and this says nothing of just and righteous private anger, upset, and desire for justice and revenge—be so quick to forgive white violence and injustice because it a tactic and strategy for coping with life in a historically white supremacist society. If black folks publicly expressed their anger and lack of forgiveness at centuries of white transgressions they could and were beaten, raped, murdered, shot, stabbed, burned alive, run out of town, hung, put in prisons, locked up in insane asylums, fired from their jobs, their land stolen from them, and kicked out of schools. Even in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama, being branded with the veritable scarlet letter of being an “angry” black man or “angry” black woman, can result in their life opportunities being significantly reduced. The African-American church is also central to the black American ritual of forgiveness. A belief in fantastical and mythological beings was used to fuel struggle and resistance in a long march of liberation and dignity against white supremacy, injustice, and degradation. The notion of “Christian forgiveness” as taught by the black church could also be a practical means of self-medication, one designed to stave off existential malaise, and to heal oneself in the face of the quotidian struggles of life under American Apartheid. Likewise, some used Christianity and the black church to teach passivity and weakness in the face of white terrorism because some great reward supposedly awaits those who suffer on Earth. The public mask of public black forgiveness and peace was also a tool that was used during the long Black Freedom Struggle as a means of demonstrating the honor, humanity, dignity, and civic virtue of black Americans--a group who only wanted their just and paid for in blood (and free labor) civil rights. The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness fulfills the expectations of the White Gaze and the White Racial Frame. A lack of empathy from White America towards Black America is central to the ritual: if white folks could truly feel the pain of black people (and First Nations, Hispanics and Latinos, and other people of color) in these times of meanness, cruelty, and violence, then immediate forgiveness would not be an expectation. Many white Americans actually believe thatblack people are superhuman, magical, and do not feel pain. This cannot help but to somehow factor into the public ritual of black people saying “I forgive” the violence visited upon them by white cops, paramilitaries, hate mongers, bureaucrats, and the State. Whiteness is central here too. Whiteness imagines itself as benign, just, and innocent. Therefore, too many white people (especially those who have not acknowledged, renounced, and rejected white privilege) view white on black racial violence as some type of ahistorical outlier, something that is not part of a pattern, a punctuation or disruption in American life, something not inherent to it, and thus not a norm of the country’s social and political life. Here, the ritual of African-American forgiveness allows White America absolution and innocence without having to put in the deeds and necessary hard work for true justice, fairness, and equal democracy on both sides of the color line. The black forgiveness ritual’s heaviest anchor is white anxiety and fear. As I wrote in an earlier piece, White America is deeply terrified, and has been since before the Founding, of black righteous anger, and that white people in this country would be held accountable for the actions done both in their name, and for their collective benefit against black people. This ahistorical and delusional dread (where in fact white Americans are experts in the practice of collective violence against people of color; the reverse has never been true) was summoned in the antebellum period by worries of “slave revolts”. It still resonates in the 20th and 21st centuries with white racial paranoia about “ghetto” or “black” riots, as well as the persistent bugaboo that is “black crime”. When black people say “we forgive” it is a salve for those white worries and fears. The absurdity and uniqueness of black Americans being naturally expected to immediately forgive the crimes and harm done to them by white people is highlighted precisely by how (White) America, both as an aggregate and as individuals, are not burdened with such a task. One of the greatest privileges that comes with being “white” in America is the permission and encouragement to hold onto a sense of injustice, grievance, anger, and pain. Consider the following. The family of Kathryn Steinle—and whose death is the macabre subject for Donald Trump’s race-baiting obsessions with “illegal” immigrants from Mexico—has not been publicly asked to forgive Francisco Sanchez, the man who killed her. The families of the children murdered by the gun toting mass shooter Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut were not publicly asked during a press conference if they forgave the killer. The families of the 70 people wounded and 12 killed by James Holmes in a Colorado movie theater were not asked during a press conference to publicly forgive him. And of course, the families of those killed on September 11, 2001, when agents of Al Qaeda attacked the United States, were not asked several weeks after the event if they forgave Osama bin Laden and his agents. More than ten years after that faithful morning when the United States was attacked by Al Qaeda—and an era of national derangement and perpetual war was ushered into being—there are survivors who will still not forgive those who wrought devastation onto their lives. Some of them shared with the National Catholic Review how continue to nurture their anger: Mr. Haberman admitted, “That’s a tough one for me. When I sit in court with these guys, can I forgive them? I have a hard time. I mean, they don’t want my forgiveness. I think justice is the word.” Dorine and Martin Toyen of Avon, Conn., lost their daughter Amy, 24, in the World Trade Center. She was engaged to be married. “Her whole life was taken away from her,” said Ms. Toyen. “There is no way I could ever forgive them.” Mr. Toyen concurred. “I want justice, not forgiveness,” he said. “I’m still very bitter. Rage.” If the accused “are found guilty, then I would have no qualms with the death penalty.” Ms. Noeth said the death penalty would be too easy. “The people that we lost suffered a lot more than that. I think they deserve as much pain as can possibly be inflicted on them.” If a reporter or other interviewer publicly asked those people who had their love ones stolen from them either on 9/11, at Newtown, or Littleton, if they forgave the monsters who hurt them so deeply, said person would (rightfully) be derided, mocked, and likely fired. (White) Americans are not expected to forgive those who transgress them. Black Americans who have lost their loved ones to police thuggery, violence, or other types of white on black racial terrorism and murder should be allowed the same latitude and freedom of expression and feelings. Of course, they are not—such a right exists outside the ritual that is Black America’s expected forgiveness for all the racist grievances and wrongs suffered by it. This public ritual is a performance. It gives the white American public what they expect while concealing the true and private feelings of many black Americans, the latter being a people who are not foolish or naïve enough to perpetually forgive, forget, and turn the other cheek when faced with perpetual abuse. Perhaps, one day there will be a moment when a black American who has suffered unjust loss and pain will tell the reporter who immediately asks them, “do you forgive the thug cop or racial terrorist who killed your unarmed child/friend/brother/sister/husband/wife?” and they will reply, “Hell no! Not now, not ever, and you can go fuck yourself for asking such a question.” We are allowed to dream. Such a moment of honesty and sharing will be a true step forward for racial justice and respect across the color line, as opposed to the charade and Kabuki-like Theater that now passes for the obligatory and weak “national conversation on race” that the American people have been repeatedly afflicted with in the post civil rights era.

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From poster mom to pariah

I was never what you would call conventional. I worked as a stripper in New York to fund my writing career, did the whole "drinking too much, experimenting with every drug imaginable" bullshit we all do in our late teens and twenties, became a screenwriter, moved to L.A. and fell in love with a fierce, brave, handsome outspoken tattooed ex-con weirdo who took pictures of strangers on the street. We got married, ran out of money, and lived together in his van, which was parked in the back of our polyamorous friends’ house in South L.A. We became the darlings of the internet a year later, as the poster couple for what was regarded here in the U.S. as the “home-birth movement.” More from DAME: "Can an Open Marriage Be a Good Marriage?" Even before our son’s birth, pregnancy had conveyed upon me a level of acceptance I’d never before experienced. Whereas before I’d been known for my habit of calling people “cunt” (affectionately and derogatorily) amd writing provocative op-eds in places like Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, and Counterpunch that had earned the ire of people like Sinead O’ Connor, who’d threatened to sue me, the hormones softened my tongue and made it nearly impossible for me to continue publishing the angry, sarcastic pieces that I’d been building my career on. My work had become more thoughtful, contemplative. The exhaustion and nesting instinct made living in a van anathema to me. People started smiling at me, asking about the baby as my belly grew, assuming I was a “nice” person by virtue of harboring another life inside me, never thinking to question my credentials for motherhood. I loved every second of being boring and predictable. I loved prenatal appointments with my midwife, sessions that would extend into hour-long gossip sessions where we’d all laugh and cry. I loved making new pregnant friends and comparing our bellies and ailments and bizarre new symptoms. I suppose I threw myself into it partly because my husband didn’t. He was scared shitless of being a father, and he seemed to be having a breakdown—he was barely sleeping, losing his temper, acting so strangely that I would lock myself in the bedroom night after night, terrified, barely recognizing him as the man I married. When I was seven months pregnant with our son, I learned why he was so off. I woke up at 6 one morning to find him locked in the bathroom. I banged on the door and he made a hasty, naked exit, leaving a wet towel on the floor. I picked it up, and found a piece of tinfoil with a startled, vivid smoky streak across it, a homemade pipe fashioned from the body of a ballpoint pen carelessly discarded nearby. I followed wet footprints that led from the bathroom, through the living room, down the stoop and outside to the front lawn where I discovered my husband—pin-pricked pupils, sweating despite the cool of an early October morning—outside, gardening urgently, wearing only boxer shorts. In shock, I texted my neighbor, the daughter of a former addict. She came outside and spoke briefly to him, and confirmed my suspicions. He was high on meth. I locked myself in the bedroom and called my midwife, desperate for advice. She didn’t have any, but she was eager to vent about an argument she’d had with my doula the day before. It was the first time I realized these magic women who were to deliver my baby were just flawed human beings—like my husband and me. I confronted my husband a few days later in therapy. He agreed to a home drug test which came out positive for meth and heroin. He told me later he only took the test because he thought it was out of his system, and the evidence could be disposed of. I think, somehow, he wanted me to know. He was falling apart as our baby grew bigger, and he knew he needed someone outside him to make him stop. I asked him to leave until he could guarantee he would come back sober and ready to address whatever inside him was compelling him to check out. I called his family, and cried. Though his mother appeared to sympathize, she sent a text to me later that day that was meant for her sister: “I think Ruth is as crazy as he is.” That, more than anything, made me realize I was alone in this shit. I wasn’t ready to be a single mother. My husband wasn’t ready to leave us, either, so he promised to get clean and seek help. The midwife, on the other hand, dealt with us with a new briskness once she’d calmed down about her squabble with the doula. She was a mandated reporter, and told my husband he had to get his act together, because she didn’t want to be the one to snitch him out. And he did—for the remainder of my pregnancy, and for the birth. We began to fall back in love and remember why we were having a baby together. I went into labor on Christmas Day, 2013, and sent the first tweet out to my family: “Labor started at 8 p.m.” Our son was born at home 12 hours—and many tweets and pictures—later. Then something bizarre happened. Newspapers across the world picked up on a Huffington Post piece about “the girl who live-tweeted her birth”—even gossip-blogger Perez Hilton wrote about us. Suddenly, mothers in Costa Rica, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, Argentina, England, Italy, Turkey were all reading about our son’s home birth. My live-tweeting catapulted us into the spotlight as the poster family for the home-birth movement. Our fleeting internet fame forgave all of our transgressions. My midwife told me even she had been recognized in a store by two guys who were talking at the checkout about “the girl who gave birth and tweeted all those pictures.” People bought me food and sent me gifts and told me I was fabulous and told our son, Nye, that he was adorable, and told my husband he was an amazing father. Even the assistant midwife who’d been at the birth kept dropping by with wine and gossip and meals, drawn in, perhaps, by the seeming glamor of the cute tattooed dad, the British mom, the Venice Beach home, our “alternative” past behind us, simply more color to a perfect picture. I was hounded to do TV shows. Pale and wan from the blood loss of a retained placenta, I did one—and hated it, quickly retreating back to my pajamas and bonding with my wide-eyed, aware little son who seemed so much more mature than a newborn. More from DAME: "Not Tonight, Honey. And Maybe Not Ever Again" My husband and I rode the wave of this popularity for as long as we could—I suppose, because we both knew it would be over soon. Because, of course we were not the perfect, adorable sweet couple who had birthed their son at home. We were a family with dark, worrying secrets that I was scared would bubble to the surface again, and destroy us all as they nearly had before our son was born. And they did. Even though he loved our son and was a natural father, my husband began to drink daily, and his temper grew exponentially. He’d spend hours brooding over a computer screen in the same pajamas he’d wear for days, ignoring our son gurgling on the playmat at his feet while I tried to take care of our household, our child, earn money, and love a man who didn’t seem to like the world or himself very much. I started to suspect he was taking drugs so I asked him to take a drug test after he turned up at 1:30 a.m. after having been missing for hours. He was furious, refused the test, and walked out. Within 24 hours he was demanding a legal separation and printing out a diary of my ineptitude as a mother. He began a blog he’d titled, “A Boy and His Dad,” a photographic diary detailing his struggles to maintain a relationship with his son due to his "bitch" wife. He wanted me to feel scared. I was. I loved him, but the speed at which he left, and the venom of his response made me think he’d wanted out for a while. I felt I had no choice but to file for divorce from this man who was living in a van, stinking of booze, bellowing at me every day, and insisting on disappearing with our 8-month-old for hours at a time, refusing to tell me where they were going, refusing to return him for nursing breaks. I hid the messy breakup and divorce and custody battle for awhile from everyone but my immediate family. But when the time came that I felt able to talk openly about it, I suppose I was naïve enough to think that it might elicit some sympathy, maybe even invite some help. But I instantly went from vaunted to reviled, and even mocked. I had become the Pariah. I discovered that the curious, enquiring mothers who offered to give me support and a shoulder to cry on when they didn’t know all the details, now wanted nothing to do with me. My neighbor in our Venice fourplex—irritated when she’d learned I playfully mocked diaper-free parenting philosophies she endorsed on Facebook—took my husband’s side. She encouraged my husband to ditch the therapy, and fed into his narrative of “abusive wife tries to steal baby from loving husband.” She wrote long letters to court detailing conversations she’d overheard, things I’d said and done which might somehow prove my moral and ethical failings as a parent (“I have also seen Ruth with her arms around him this Wednesday saying she loves him so much”).  Things took a sinister turn when she showed up with my ex-husband at our (intensely private) mediation session claiming that I was abusive to my son, tried to convince our landlord, on more than one occasion, to evict me, and then filed a restraining order against me claiming I’d poisoned her dog, and was threatening the life of her unborn child. It was thrown out, of course and revealed as simply malicious litigation by a very sick woman. Someone—to this day, I don’t know who—called the Department of Children and Family Services, and a skinny young woman with a Southern accent carrying a clipboard stumbled unannounced into my kitchen one afternoon, disappointed to find my husband had been banished by a restraining order, and my toddler son and I were engaged in little more than finger-painting, giggling and eating kale chips. I asked the new mom friends that I’d met in prenatal yoga class and mamas meetings if they would testify in court—not against my husband, but on my behalf, to tell the judge what kind of person I was. Most of them “didn’t want to get involved” and “couldn’t be the kind of friend that I needed.” So I drifted toward other mothers who had felt the deepest kind of pain and grief imaginable. Like Mary, who had woken up one morning to find her husband had passed away from Deep Vein Thrombosis after a long haul flight before they’d ever had a chance to start a family. Laura who had lost her little girl, Layla, just a month before she was due. Opal who had to listen, over and over, to her teenage son relate to an uncaring courtroom how his father had assaulted him, an act which led one mother to say loudly outside the school gates well within Opal’s earshot, “I wouldn’t let my kids anywhere near her house.” More from DAME: "How Will I Survive August Without My Shrink?" Dysfunction is infectious, or so it seems. There’s something about being “happily” married, “happily” pregnant, “happily” conventional that shuns not only the horrors that afflict some mothers, but those mothers themselves. We are complicit in our own tragedies, yes: How could we not be? Something about me chose to have a child with a man who would crumble and walk out on us at eight months postpartum. Laura’s daughter was not destined to ever set eyes on her loving parents. Opal married a man who would turn out to be abusive, not only to her, but to her children. Mary fell deeply in love with a man who would leave this world well before it was time, leaving her nothing but snapshots and memories and a well of unconscionable grief. I suppose part of our pain is waking up to that knowledge every day, facing that our intuitive and uncontrollable failures, that loving the wrong people, have hurt not only us, but those whom we love the most—our children, those we have, those we had, those we might have had. When others act as if proximity to us might prove catching, is it any wonder that in our darkest hours we half believe it ourselves? What has stunned me most about becoming a single parent is how pain makes a mother the pariah amid a sea of carefully edited social-networking nirvana. That the words and comfort we expected from those that can see how much we have lost—the families we had planned, the families they still have—never came. Perhaps it is because to survive the storm of parenting, we have to reserve the empathy gene for ourselves. Or perhaps it is simply that no words are ever sufficient to cover the deepest pain imaginable when families are destroyed.

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Sex trafficking “happens in everybody’s backyard”: A survivor busts the biggest myths and offers advice on how to keep kids safe

Savannah Sanders’s first encounter with sex trafficking at the age of 16 was as a victim. But during the years since, she has tackled this shockingly prevalent problem as an educator, a mentor, a social work student and most recently an author. Her debut book “Sex Trafficking Prevention: A Trauma-Informed Approach for Parents and Professionals,” to be published by Unhooked Books on September 8, weaves her plight together with research on the U.S. sex trade and advice for everyday people to minimize children’s vulnerability. Sanders speaks in a warm tone even when discussing grave matters, joking about how her expertise in concepts like body safety — the practice of consent in every activity from tickles to hugs — has informed her approach to mothering her four children. Though she harbors no resentment about her past, she believes it was avoidable and is dedicated to preventing it in her own family and arming others with the knowledge to do the same. I spoke to Sanders about the abuse she overcame, its psychological consequences, the patterns it illuminates about other survivors and how we can address the issue on a political, cultural and individual level. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Could you start by telling me your own story? How were you first coerced into the sex trade? I, like a lot of people, started experiencing sexual abuse at a pretty young age. I was raped and molested starting from six on. That left shame and guilt and all sorts of stuff in my life. I moved around a lot and dropped out of school in eighth grade and started cutting and running from home a lot. I was 16 when a friend of mine took me to a club at night, and when I got out of the club, there was a guy out there who introduced himself to me and told me to come over the next day. When we got there, he told me I would be working with him. I was forced to work in a massage parlor and have all of the money taken by this guy for nine months. How did you get out of that situation? The police started doing an investigation on the massage parlor. I was told to leave before the police found me. I think they wanted me to leave so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, but I’m sure back then I most definitely would have gotten arrested for something. I got into more abusive relationships and started using drugs even harder. When I was 18, my grandmother had passed away, and I tried to stay clean for a little bit. During that time, I met my now-husband. Has anyone ever blamed you for your victimization? I was blamed for a lot of what happened to me. “Why didn't you run?” “Why didn't you go back to your parents?” That kind of stuff. What did the people who said those things fail to understand? That you're abused and trauma puts somebody in survival mode, and so they do what they have to do to get through to the next day. Most trafficking survivors have been going through trauma from very young ages. What’s the relationship between childhood trauma and sex trafficking? Mainly, there’s a lot of shame when somebody experiences sexual abuse or physical abuse, and so they act out and become very vulnerable to being picked up by other abusers. In our society, we see people acting out by cutting or using drugs or engaging in risky behavior, and instead of seeing those behaviors as a result of their trauma, we see them as rebellions. And that’s exactly what traffickers and various abusers look for because they know that those are the most vulnerable in the population. How does your story compare to the stories of other sex trafficking victims in the U.S.? I don't think my story's unusual. I do think, though, that trafficking happens in many, many different ways, that sexual abuse is a huge precursor to most stories but not all of them, that trafficking happens to boys and girls and that individuals at the highest risk are young girls of color, LGBTQ youth, homeless youth and kids who have been ostracized or taken into the foster care system. But anybody who has a pimp, whether they’re under 18 or over 18, is considered a trafficking victim by law. So a lot of times, people consider prostitution to be two consenting adults, but legally, if there’s a pimp, they’re considered a trafficking victim. Where is the line between sex work and trafficking? The line is the moment that anybody else is manipulating the situation, forcing, coercing or taking advantage of somebody in a vulnerable spot. I also think that there are many people who want to get out of sex work but don't feel like they have any viable options because they feel like they don't have any other skills. What do you think of the recent Amnesty International proposal to legalize sex work, then? I don't really have a specific take on that. It's not as easy an answer as legalization. As far as curbing child sex trafficking, there is absolutely no way that legalization will do that. Just because adult porn is legal doesn't mean that child porn dissipates, so I don't feel that legalizing adult sex work would contribute to curbing child sex trafficking. Some people are even saying the policy could encourage sex trafficking. I don't know if it'll encourage trafficking. It already occurs at an extremely high rate. It's such a big topic that there's no easy “yes” or “no” answer. The issue is so much broader than that. If we want to make a real difference, we have to address poverty and we have to address gender inequality. What about the recently passed Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 ? Could the increased government funding for victims make a difference in their lives? I think there will be some changes, and I'm thankful that trafficking issues are coming up at a federal level. I don’t know what the long-term unintended consequences or ramifications of that bill are, so I wouldn't say I'm for or against it. It’s easy to think that when we've passed a law, we’ve made a change, but we don't understand the long-term consequences of that law. We’ll just have to see as time goes on if it’s really helping or if things need to be tweaked in order to make sure that we’re doing the best for victims first. You mentioned we need to make changes broader than legislation. What are some society-wide transformations you’d like to see? We need an array of services. We can't just be pumping up shelters all over the country and think that’s going to solve the problem. We need services that are unique and individualized and meet the needs of each person instead of trying to force them through a funnel. They need to be in control of their own change and growth. Shelters are very much needed, but so are specialized foster care and outpatient services that meet victims where they're at. Somebody might not ever want to go into a shelter. We have this idea that if somebody doesn’t follow through with services, they must not want help. That’s rarely the case. Usually, the services just weren’t a good fit for that person. We can’t expect somebody who has been experiencing trauma their whole life to be healed by what we as a society deem successful. They need to be able to create their own success. What can we as individuals do to prevent sex trafficking? When we talk about prevention, a lot of time, we talk about it as recognition of trafficking and learning warning signs. That’s helpful, but it's not prevention. Prevention starts well before a child turns five. Prevention is about educating kids and addressing poverty and gender inequality and learning body safety and breaking generational cycles of abuse. My book is about how to become a safe adult and support kids so that they aren't as vulnerable to being trafficked. People in my life didn't understand the effects of trauma, so they just thought I was acting out or being a bad kid. I think if someone had asked the right questions, there could have been a different outcome. What are the most telltale signs of vulnerability to look out for? Early childhood sexual abuse is probably the number one precursor to trafficking, and I think it's the number one sign people miss. The list of signs that someone has been abused really does go on and on: sudden change in behavior, bed-wetting, extreme aggression, hyper-sexualization. A lot of times, when kids are acting sexualized when they're younger, it's for a very good reason. And sexual abuse isn't always somebody touching them. It can mean being exposed to pornography at a young age, which is very common these days. That’s interesting because I never thought of pornography as a source of trauma. Kids aren't ready to be exposed to sex at such a young age, and it's very similar to being sexually abused. It takes away their innocence at a very young age. I know young girls ten and eleven years old who have been highly addicted to pornography. Young girls get addicted to pornography just as young boys do. I don't think that people really understand the effects that it has on their brains. And it's not just the hyper-sexualization that it causes; it's the violence against women, unrealistic body expectations, and shame. What do you think is the most widely accepted myth surrounding sex trafficking? That it doesn’t happen here. People don’t understand how prevalent it is in America. 83 percent of victims of trafficking in America were born in America, and it's the same in other countries. So, if you go to Mexico, 79 percent of their victims are from Mexico and born in Mexico. We have this misconception that it's a border issue. But it happens in everybody's backyard.Savannah Sanders’s first encounter with sex trafficking at the age of 16 was as a victim. But during the years since, she has tackled this shockingly prevalent problem as an educator, a mentor, a social work student and most recently an author. Her debut book “Sex Trafficking Prevention: A Trauma-Informed Approach for Parents and Professionals,” to be published by Unhooked Books on September 8, weaves her plight together with research on the U.S. sex trade and advice for everyday people to minimize children’s vulnerability. Sanders speaks in a warm tone even when discussing grave matters, joking about how her expertise in concepts like body safety — the practice of consent in every activity from tickles to hugs — has informed her approach to mothering her four children. Though she harbors no resentment about her past, she believes it was avoidable and is dedicated to preventing it in her own family and arming others with the knowledge to do the same. I spoke to Sanders about the abuse she overcame, its psychological consequences, the patterns it illuminates about other survivors and how we can address the issue on a political, cultural and individual level. The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Could you start by telling me your own story? How were you first coerced into the sex trade? I, like a lot of people, started experiencing sexual abuse at a pretty young age. I was raped and molested starting from six on. That left shame and guilt and all sorts of stuff in my life. I moved around a lot and dropped out of school in eighth grade and started cutting and running from home a lot. I was 16 when a friend of mine took me to a club at night, and when I got out of the club, there was a guy out there who introduced himself to me and told me to come over the next day. When we got there, he told me I would be working with him. I was forced to work in a massage parlor and have all of the money taken by this guy for nine months. How did you get out of that situation? The police started doing an investigation on the massage parlor. I was told to leave before the police found me. I think they wanted me to leave so that they wouldn’t get in trouble, but I’m sure back then I most definitely would have gotten arrested for something. I got into more abusive relationships and started using drugs even harder. When I was 18, my grandmother had passed away, and I tried to stay clean for a little bit. During that time, I met my now-husband. Has anyone ever blamed you for your victimization? I was blamed for a lot of what happened to me. “Why didn't you run?” “Why didn't you go back to your parents?” That kind of stuff. What did the people who said those things fail to understand? That you're abused and trauma puts somebody in survival mode, and so they do what they have to do to get through to the next day. Most trafficking survivors have been going through trauma from very young ages. What’s the relationship between childhood trauma and sex trafficking? Mainly, there’s a lot of shame when somebody experiences sexual abuse or physical abuse, and so they act out and become very vulnerable to being picked up by other abusers. In our society, we see people acting out by cutting or using drugs or engaging in risky behavior, and instead of seeing those behaviors as a result of their trauma, we see them as rebellions. And that’s exactly what traffickers and various abusers look for because they know that those are the most vulnerable in the population. How does your story compare to the stories of other sex trafficking victims in the U.S.? I don't think my story's unusual. I do think, though, that trafficking happens in many, many different ways, that sexual abuse is a huge precursor to most stories but not all of them, that trafficking happens to boys and girls and that individuals at the highest risk are young girls of color, LGBTQ youth, homeless youth and kids who have been ostracized or taken into the foster care system. But anybody who has a pimp, whether they’re under 18 or over 18, is considered a trafficking victim by law. So a lot of times, people consider prostitution to be two consenting adults, but legally, if there’s a pimp, they’re considered a trafficking victim. Where is the line between sex work and trafficking? The line is the moment that anybody else is manipulating the situation, forcing, coercing or taking advantage of somebody in a vulnerable spot. I also think that there are many people who want to get out of sex work but don't feel like they have any viable options because they feel like they don't have any other skills. What do you think of the recent Amnesty International proposal to legalize sex work, then? I don't really have a specific take on that. It's not as easy an answer as legalization. As far as curbing child sex trafficking, there is absolutely no way that legalization will do that. Just because adult porn is legal doesn't mean that child porn dissipates, so I don't feel that legalizing adult sex work would contribute to curbing child sex trafficking. Some people are even saying the policy could encourage sex trafficking. I don't know if it'll encourage trafficking. It already occurs at an extremely high rate. It's such a big topic that there's no easy “yes” or “no” answer. The issue is so much broader than that. If we want to make a real difference, we have to address poverty and we have to address gender inequality. What about the recently passed Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 ? Could the increased government funding for victims make a difference in their lives? I think there will be some changes, and I'm thankful that trafficking issues are coming up at a federal level. I don’t know what the long-term unintended consequences or ramifications of that bill are, so I wouldn't say I'm for or against it. It’s easy to think that when we've passed a law, we’ve made a change, but we don't understand the long-term consequences of that law. We’ll just have to see as time goes on if it’s really helping or if things need to be tweaked in order to make sure that we’re doing the best for victims first. You mentioned we need to make changes broader than legislation. What are some society-wide transformations you’d like to see? We need an array of services. We can't just be pumping up shelters all over the country and think that’s going to solve the problem. We need services that are unique and individualized and meet the needs of each person instead of trying to force them through a funnel. They need to be in control of their own change and growth. Shelters are very much needed, but so are specialized foster care and outpatient services that meet victims where they're at. Somebody might not ever want to go into a shelter. We have this idea that if somebody doesn’t follow through with services, they must not want help. That’s rarely the case. Usually, the services just weren’t a good fit for that person. We can’t expect somebody who has been experiencing trauma their whole life to be healed by what we as a society deem successful. They need to be able to create their own success. What can we as individuals do to prevent sex trafficking? When we talk about prevention, a lot of time, we talk about it as recognition of trafficking and learning warning signs. That’s helpful, but it's not prevention. Prevention starts well before a child turns five. Prevention is about educating kids and addressing poverty and gender inequality and learning body safety and breaking generational cycles of abuse. My book is about how to become a safe adult and support kids so that they aren't as vulnerable to being trafficked. People in my life didn't understand the effects of trauma, so they just thought I was acting out or being a bad kid. I think if someone had asked the right questions, there could have been a different outcome. What are the most telltale signs of vulnerability to look out for? Early childhood sexual abuse is probably the number one precursor to trafficking, and I think it's the number one sign people miss. The list of signs that someone has been abused really does go on and on: sudden change in behavior, bed-wetting, extreme aggression, hyper-sexualization. A lot of times, when kids are acting sexualized when they're younger, it's for a very good reason. And sexual abuse isn't always somebody touching them. It can mean being exposed to pornography at a young age, which is very common these days. That’s interesting because I never thought of pornography as a source of trauma. Kids aren't ready to be exposed to sex at such a young age, and it's very similar to being sexually abused. It takes away their innocence at a very young age. I know young girls ten and eleven years old who have been highly addicted to pornography. Young girls get addicted to pornography just as young boys do. I don't think that people really understand the effects that it has on their brains. And it's not just the hyper-sexualization that it causes; it's the violence against women, unrealistic body expectations, and shame. What do you think is the most widely accepted myth surrounding sex trafficking? That it doesn’t happen here. People don’t understand how prevalent it is in America. 83 percent of victims of trafficking in America were born in America, and it's the same in other countries. So, if you go to Mexico, 79 percent of their victims are from Mexico and born in Mexico. We have this misconception that it's a border issue. But it happens in everybody's backyard.

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The sexy ’70s, re-imagined now: The empowering seduction of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a coming-of-age fantasy that couldn’t be set today

"I refuse to be a sniveling crybaby. I'm a fucking woman and this is my life."  So goes the battle cry of Minnie Goetze, the irrepressible heroine of “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a film widely lauded as a game-changing coming-of-age narrative. And the film should be praised for its unapologetic treatment of female desire as something to contend with. Of the best coming-of-age films, almost all star male protagonists, and those who are female tend to come of age through a sequence of unavoidable, often traumatic, events that happen to them rather than as a result of their own volition (anyone who jumps to “Juno” as an exception should fully consider the trauma of carrying a child to term and then giving that child away). But in “Diary,” director Marielle Heller’s debut feature film, Minnie Goetze gets what she wants, when she wants it, a refreshingly frequent amount of time. For most of the film what she wants to get is sex — something the film approaches with a rare respect for the exigency of female desire, perhaps specifically the desire to be desired. Played by British actor Bel Powley, Minnie “gets to get” in a pool shed, hotel room, the belly of a sailboat, the back of a car. The perspective offered is patently female; Minnie is less objectified gamine than woman on the prowl for a good lay. Even the way she sees herself (as revealed in the film’s opening shot) is as a moving sexual agent: the lens looks up at her trousered booty as she strides surely forward. Given Minnie’s small stature, we know that this shot is how she imagines her body and sexuality as towering and powerful. I can think of few shots of a young woman’s caboose that carry such surprisingly positive connotations. “Surprise” seems to be the operative term that many critics take. HuffPost’s Leora Tanenbaum asserts that “[t]he surprise of this movie … is that it portrays Minnie as someone in control of her body and her life — even when her surrounding circumstances may lead us to conclude otherwise.” That a female sexual coming-of-age can happen sans victimization might indeed prove a surprise to any fan of the genre; typically a girl becomes a “fucking woman” not through, well, fucking from a standpoint of desire, but through enduring any number of bad things that assault her body — having her period, suffering cramps (or cliques) or submitting to a painful, violent, or at least awkward loss of virginity. So Minnie as lusty protagonist comes as a welcome “surprise,” though it’s sad to admit that’s the case 39 years after 1976, when the film is set, a time when the FDA has finally approved a version of “female Viagra” for women with flagging libidos. And it is in this gap of eras that the film really seduces. No matter how surprisingly willful its teenage heroine, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” ultimately serves the seventies as sensual panacea to a 2015 consciousness. Set in a decade in which the economy sucked and crime was, in many cities, at an all-time high, the film presents a free-for-all of bohemian pleasures far from rampant urban decline — high schoolers get served at bars, entertainment comes through comic books or record playing and a single-mom librarian can afford a house in San Francisco. Even the porn projected in the background of parties (body hair! B cups! flesh jiggles!) seems innocent. Free of smartphones and selfies, these late-night festivities unfurl in a blur of soft focus and roving-camera reverie. Flash forward and today seems prudish, even downright hostile to sexually adventurous young women. As pointed out last week by Amanda Hess in Slate, “the underlying sexual and technological panic” streaming from recent anti-Tinder-heads “looks remarkably similar to the Victorian version” over a hundred years ago. But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot less reprehensible, less like statutory rape and more like just another break from taboo. “My life has gotten really crazy of late,” she gleefully boasts into her audio-diary early in the film after their first encounter. It becomes easier to accept, and even enjoy, the ensuing sexcapades between Minnie and Monroe amidst an Instagrammish scenescape of bellbottoms and tighty whities. It’s as though one has to displace her mind to a time she hasn’t lived through to entertain the illusion that the sex depicted is consensual, that the teenage girl is really the one calling the shots. In the process, the potentially treacherous side of sex with men (rape, objectification, unplanned pregnancy) is almost entirely faded over in a haze of ringer tees and striped tube socks. Now that we've learned of how even the most wholesome of paternal icons carried out his sexually-predatorial behavior — many of the 50 women accusing Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them first met him in the '70s — it's all the more tempting to revert to a version of the past in which women somehow weren’t as subjected to such perils. In a particularly cogent animated sequence in the film, Minnie imagines herself a kind of ravenous giantess, picking up tiny young men on the street and having her way with them — a clear reversal of the typical predator-prey relationship and gratifying to witness. At the same time, nothing really permanently "bad" ever happens to Minnie, no matter how many close brushes with rock-bottom debauchery she has by the end; she and her best friend are depicted as powerful seductresses with Teflon hearts, and her failed affair with Monroe ultimately leads to a stronger relationship with her mother. It is fantasy by any stretch of the imagination — a fantasy all too seductive for those who can’t remember the ‘70s themselves, the viewers who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. “Childhood itself has changed greatly during the past generation,” write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their recent article “The Coddling of the American Mind” for The Atlantic. “[K]ids were expected to occupy themselves, getting into minor scrapes and learning from their experiences. But ‘free range’ childhood became less common in the 1980s … many parents pulled in the reins and worked harder to keep their children safe.” In “Diary,” Minnie’s freedom from such control would strike many audience members as downright foreign. Her parents barely monitor their daughter's life and her sexual (mis)adventures follow suit. But the parents aren't depicted as "bad parents" demanding our scrutiny; Kristen Wiig’s rendering of Charlotte, Minnie’s mother, is ultimately a warm one, if fettered by her denial of and response to her daughter’s affair with Charlotte’s boyfriend. Pascal, Minnie’s academic stepdad, is distant but clearly engaged; he buys his daughters espressos and questions their lives, pays for private schooling about which Minnie couldn’t care less. Speaking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air on August 13, Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the autobiographical book upon which the film was based, inserted a dose of reality to the aftermath of such freedom. Of Minnie, she says, “People used to tell me, God, you know, your family is so cool. You can do whatever you want. You can smoke pot at home, you can do this. And I would say, you know, I wish I lived in your house. I would've welcomed the chance to not have been allowed to do anything … I wanted to be just held tightly and controlled because it was — everything was so anarchical.” To younger Gen-Xers and Millennials, this anarchy holds its own onscreen appeal. In April, Marcie Bianco wrote “8 Feminist Reasons We Know 2015 Is Just 1972 All Over Again,” and "Diary" feels of a piece with this persuasion. But 2015 isn’t 1972 all over again. If it was, films like “Diary” wouldn’t feel so openly, so sumptuously, escapist. Director Marielle Heller was born in 1979. I was born in 1979. I understand the compulsion to romanticize the period right before one was born; my students often do this with the early ‘90s. But as much as “Diary” celebrates the complexity of female desire, its perspective of the ‘70s can be too simple and sentimental. “This is for all the girls when they have grown,” concludes the voiceover at the end of the film, followed by a wistful shoreline scene that rolls with the credits. For all teenage girls who have grown, leaving the cineplex might prove a rude awakening.

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A Tig Notaro primer: 8 iconic works you need to know beyond “Hello, I have cancer”

While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds." While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds." While Tig Notaro exploded onto the scene with her instantly iconic “cancer set” at Los Angeles’ Largo theater in 2012 — which she famously began by saying “Hello, I have cancer,” before speaking openly about her illness and her mother’s recent death — there’s a lot more to the comedian than one (admittedly legendary) performance. A longtime comics' comic with an adoring cult following, Notaro was a rising star on the indie comedy scene for years before an unlikely set of tragic circumstances — and her singular response to them — catapulted her into the spotlight. As we prepare for her HBO comedy special “Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted" to air tonight at 10 p.m., here are some other highlights from her impressive career: The Tig Series Tig’s interview series, ‘The Tig Series," gives Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’ a run for its money when it comes to bizarre talk show formats — like in this 2009 interview with (who else?) Zach Galifianakis, which she conducts with her face a foot away from his. "Good One" Notaro released her first live stand-up album in 2011, featuring many bits that have become classics among her fans: For example, the eminently quotable "no moleste” routine about a “do not disturb” sign in her Mexican hotel room. "Professor Blastoff" Notaro’s podcast, hosted alongside David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan, ran for 217 episodes from 2011 to 2015, during which the hosts picked a guest expert's brain on all manner of scientific, creative and philosophical topics. Here’s Tig talking about her cancer diagnosis in 2012: And here’s one of their most-talked-about episodes, a famously awkward interview with pickup artist Rick Jeffries: Her stand-up sets on "Conan" Late night appearences were many people's first introduction to Notaro's absurdist brand of comedy, like her much-discussed 2011 Conan appearance, during which she dragged a stool around the stage for almost five minutes. That same year, she also busted out another of her classic stand-up bits — a clever meta gag centered around an impression of a person doing impressions. "This American Life" Notaro is a frequent "This American Life" contributor, but easily her most popular story was one she performed live in 2012, when she talked about her encounters with ‘80s pop singer Taylor Dayne. (The story also makes frequent appearances in Tig’s standup sets and was featured on "Good One") The "cancer set" Even those unfamiliar with Notaro’s other work will likely know her for her 2012 set at Largo, where she walked onstage and announced "Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you." What followed was a raw, hilarious and intimate excavation of the recent hardships in Tig’s life, including her stage 2 cancer diagnosis, her mother’s recent death and her recovery from a rare bacterial infection. The day after the set, Louis CK tweeted: "In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The "topless set" In yet another legendary set at the New York Comedy Festival in 2014, Notaro revealed she had recently had a successful double mastectomy — and then tore off her shirt to reveal her scars, performing her jokes shirtless before an awestruck crowd (she had previously performed a similar topless set at Largo a month before) Here’s Tig discussing the set on "Conan": "Knock Knock, it’s Tig Notaro" This charming 2015 Showtime documentary followed Notaro as she travels across the country and performs intimate stand-up performances for her fans inside their homes — as well as their basements, barns, backyards and anywhere else they would have her. "Tig" This deeply personal 2015 Netflix documentary explores Notaro's battle with cancer and gives an intimate look at how she got through the toughest year of her life, as well as how she rebounded from her misfortune with a new perspective and a nascent romance with her "In a World" co-star Stephanie Allynne. As BuzzFeed's Ira Madison III writes in his rave review of the film: "the beauty of 'Tig' is that it’s not just a story about a comedian — it’s a story about a woman and how she learns to love again, finding inner strength against insurmountable odds."

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Jay Smooth: “Someone needs to defend Bernie Sanders from his own supporters”

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Hillary and Bernie at the prison gates: Mass incarceration is finally a hot political issue — if we want to save America we must seize the moment

Mass incarceration is an issue whose time has finally come. There are many signs that the wind is shifting on the question of America’s vast, wasteful and immensely destructive prison state, both among the public and the political class -- and that shift is not limited to the left. Criminal justice reform was supposed to be the issue that separated Rand Paul from the other Republican presidential candidates, at least until he got Trumped. It has become a central focus, believe it or not, of the Charles Koch Institute, the billionaire GOP donor’s libertarian nonprofit. This shift has created an important opening for political change, but it’s also a shift in the moral and cultural landscape, in ways that may be less evident but are just as important. Barack Obama has evidently decided to use the bully pulpit of his final two years in the White House to shift the national debate on mass incarceration and the enormous racial disparities it both reveals and exacerbates. This could be seen as six years late and billions of dollars short, given the extent to which the president has avoided or soft-pedaled those issues throughout his time in office. As in so many other areas, Obama is more reactive than proactive, more a follower than a leader. He’s responding to the same conditions that have compelled Hillary Clinton to take up the cause despite what can only be described as an abysmal record on these issues, the same conditions that have unexpectedly made prisons, policing and criminal justice central themes of the 2016 campaign. In fairness, Bernie Sanders has been a critic of America’s mass incarceration policies for years, although he has foregrounded the issue much more vigorously since being confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters. As is generally the case with any such shift, these politicians have been forced into new stances by ground-level activism, by the sheer weight of statistical evidence and intellectual argument, and by the altered mood of the public. In that regard, I think this summer’s tabloid-friendly story of Richard Matt and David Sweat, the two convicted murderers who dug their way out of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, was a more significant event than it appeared to be on the surface. If their improbable saga seemed more like a Hollywood screenplay than reality – a pair of white killers, amid a demographic that is predominantly black and Latino, a Miss Lonelyhearts romance, an elaborate escape route through the steam tunnels – the ambiguous mixture of fear, longing and “Shawshank Redemption” sympathy they provoked reflected a widespread underlying unease with the nature of imprisonment in America. Reality reasserted itself, you might say, after Matt was killed and Sweat was recaptured, with the allegations that other inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility – a prison deliberately sited in the Adirondack North Woods, far from any population center -- had been viciously choked, beaten and suffocated by guards seeking information about the escape. That story has been less vigorously pursued, to be sure, by the TV reporters who breathlessly relayed every half-baked rumor about Matt and Sweat’s whereabouts. But it now appears that the Clinton escape inadvertently revealed the tip of an extremely ugly iceberg. Only the most naïve or most hypocritical observer would try to claim that the widening scandal around official abuse and corruption within New York’s prison system (including the alleged murder of at least one inmate, and its subsequent coverup) is unlikely to be replicated in other places. The political opportunity presented by this moment of rapidly shifting perceptions – the opportunity to change laws, to change hearts and minds, and if possible to re-examine our entire approach to criminal justice -- must not be squandered if we want to build a more just society. But real change will not come easily: As Adam Gopnik wrote three years ago in the New Yorker, mass incarceration on a scale never before seen in human history, a policy that has disproportionately affected communities of color that were already marginalized, impoverished and disenfranchised, could be called “the fundamental fact” in American society. Some studies suggest that rates of incarceration have dipped slightly as a result of recent reforms, but by any standard you like America remains the unchallenged superpower when it comes to locking up its own citizens. We have a prison population of roughly 700 inmates per 100,000 people, with Russia – Russia! – a distant second among major nations at about 455. We even lead the world in terms of absolute prison population, with at least 2.2 million people behind bars at any given time, while China, with four times our population, has around 1.6 million prisoners. You can slice and dice these numbers in all kinds of amazing ways: The United States has just 4 percent of the world’s population but nearly one-quarter of its prisoners; 37 American states have higher incarceration rates than any nation in the world, large or small. That fundamental fact of our society is insulated by thick walls of ideology and money. Law-and-order think tanks are standing by to argue that all the zillions we have poured into the prison state, and all the harsh sentences handed down for minor offenses, are the primary cause of the decline in crime over the last several decades. That’s a can of worms to drill open some other time, but here are a couple of salient points: Correlation does not equal causation, as the ancient social science maxim holds, and there is much more evidence to suggest that long-term incarceration breeds career criminals than that it deters them. Secondly, this is the only context where you ever hear prison-industry lobbyists, or the Republican legislators they bankroll, admit that crime has trended consistently downward for 50 years. Their entire con game relies on the media-fueled perception that “urban violence” is out of control and mobs of armed black men are roaming the streets in search of white victims. Cutting through these lies and misperceptions and undoing the social devastation of mass incarceration is likely to require forging difficult alliances across ideological boundaries, not to mention working with many of the same people who created this disaster in the first place. There are innumerable reasons to indict our bipartisan political system for its mendacity and cowardice, but I can think of none worse than this: For at least 35 years, the only perceptible division between mainstream Democrats and Republicans on the prison issue was over whether we should simply build more and more prisons and stuff more and more people into them (the "moderate" view) or whether we should do that and hand the whole enterprise over to private, for-profit corporations. Understanding that shared political culpability is one important aspect of the point that Black Lives Matter activists have tried to make in their recent confrontations with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Whatever we make of those tactics – bearing in mind that BLM is a decentralized movement whose members don’t necessarily reflect a unified strategy – I think it’s crucial for white leftists to face the fact that the Democratic Party has blood on its hands on this issue (among others), and that liberal sanctimony simply will not do. I hesitate to give Hillary Clinton credit for much of anything beyond her well-known gift for shrewd political calculation – which led to fateful arrogance in 2008, and may yet do so again in this campaign. But her rhetorical turnabout on the issue of mass incarceration, including the fact that she now routinely utters those words aloud, is an important signal of the changing tide. Clinton vigorously supported her husband’s massive anti-crime bill of 1994, which provided almost $10 billion in prison funding, stripped state and federal prison inmates of the right to higher education, made gang membership a crime in itself (almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment), and implemented the infamous “Three Strikes, You’re Out” policy mandating life sentences for repeat offenders, even for certain nonviolent crimes. (I learned something new about that law while doing some background reading: It required the Justice Department to issue annual reports on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” No such reports have ever appeared.) Clinton has looked a bit defensive during the early stages of her Democratic campaign, although she is unquestionably playing the long game and it’s way too early to announce that she’s in trouble. Her videotaped conversation last week with BLM activists has been endlessly picked apart by Clinton-bashers on the left, and I’d love to play along. But in terms of sheer political calculus and her middle-class, liberal base, she probably did herself no damage. She adroitly steered the discussion away from the Bill Clinton administration’s thoroughly noxious record on criminal justice and toward her long history of support for mainstream civil-rights issues and her political alliances with the African-American community. There were good reasons for that. The aforementioned Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (whose principal legislative sponsor, by the way, was Sen. Joe Biden) almost certainly did more to drive the boom in prison-building and mass incarceration than the policies of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush put together. Furthermore, it epitomized the cynical Clintonite strategy of “triangulation,” which in this case specifically meant co-opting a core Republican issue while marginalizing or repudiating poor black people, the most vulnerable element of the most loyal Democratic constituency. Given that history, I don’t think African-American activists – or anyone else – can be blamed for feeling less than convinced by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 change of heart. Both Clintons have expressed regret over certain consequences of the 1994 law that were perhaps unintended or unforeseen – and, fine, let’s take them at their word. But social scientists, activists and investigative journalists have told us all along that the vast prison-industrial complex created by bipartisan consensus was brutal, corrupt and inefficient -- to state the case in its narrowest possible terms. Many went on to observe that its principal product, and arguably its intended purpose, was a “new Jim Crow,” to borrow the title of Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking study. In practice, mass incarceration amounted to the selective and systematic oppression of poor people in general and African-Americans in particular. It hardened patterns of enduring racial injustice and widening economic inequality. Nobody in mainstream political or media circles particularly wanted to hear any of that. Such ideas were viewed as tedious and unrealistic left-wing spinach, until they abruptly became unavoidable. The mythical suburban swing voters understood to be decisive in national elections wanted tough talk on crime, and they got it. No candidate in American political history has ever lost an election by promising to be tougher on crime than his or her opponent, to build prisons that resemble the Château d’If from “The Count of Monte Cristo” as closely as possible and then fill them up with drug lords, sexual abusers, juvenile “superpredators” and other fearsome monstrosities. Those poisonous fantasies have not entirely lost their grip, to be sure, but they are starting to come unglued. What happened in reality was quite different: It was the evil default setting of the American criminal justice system, cranked up to 11 and fed with crystal meth. We bankrupted ourselves and ripped our society apart with a “war on drugs” that everyone with a brain knew would not work but was supported by every major politician in both parties. We locked up black and brown men by the millions (along with significant numbers of poor rural whites), mostly for the kinds of nonviolent drug offenses that are widely tolerated or overlooked among the more affluent classes. When we look at the current political landscape and see the bizarre coalition that has concluded that all this was a dreadful mistake, from the Clintons to Rand Paul and his dad to the Koch brothers, we may well respond with a mixture of hilarity, nausea and disbelief. But this is no time for ideological purity; addressing this national emergency will require all those odd alliances and many more. If the question is who Hillary Clinton thinks she is fooling and whether she can be trusted, the only possible answers are “nobody, I hope” and “hell, no.” I'm not saying I wouldn't rather have Bernie Sanders, or that Clinton is inevitable (especially given how this crazy campaign has gone so far). But we may be stuck with her anyway, and then the question becomes whether we have the will, and the political power, to compel her to do the right thing.

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Robert Reich: Corporate welfare is ravaging American taxpayers

Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities. Corporate welfare is often camouflaged in taxes that seem neutral on their face but give windfalls to big entrenched corporations at the expense of average people and small businesses. Take a look at commercial property taxes in California, for example. In 1978 California voters passed Proposition 13 – which began to assess property for tax purposes at its price when it was bought, rather than its current market price. This has protected homeowners and renters. But it’s also given a quiet windfall to entrenched corporate owners of commercial property. Corporations don’t need this protection. They’re in the real economy. They’re supposed to compete on a level playing field with new companies whose property taxes are based on current market prices. This corporate windfall has caused three big problems. First, it’s shifted more of the property tax on to California homeowners. Back in 1978, corporations paid 44 percent of all property taxes and homeowners paid 56 percent. Now, after exploiting this loophole for years, corporations pay only 28 percent of property taxes, while homeowners pick up 72 percent of the tab. Second, it’s robbed California of billions of dollars to support schools and local services. If all corporations were paying the property taxes they should be paying, schools and local services would have $9 billion dollars more in revenues this year. Third, it penalizes new and expanding businesses that don’t get this windfall because their commercial property is assessed at the current market price – but they compete for customers with companies whose property is assessed at the price they purchased it years ago. That’s unfair and it’s bad for the economy because California needs new and expanding businesses. Today, almost half of all commercial properties in California pay their fair share of property taxes, but they’re hobbled by those that don’t. This loophole must be closed. All corporations should be paying commercial property taxes based on current market prices. The giant corporations that are currently exploiting the loophole for their own profits obviously don’t want it closed, so they’re trying to scare people by saying closing it will cause businesses to leave California. That’s baloney. Leveling the playing field for all businesses will make the California economy more efficient, and help new and expanding businesses. Besides, California’s property taxes are already much lower than the national average. So even if corporations pay their full share, they’re still getting a great deal. Right now, a grassroots movement is growing of Californians determined to reform this broken commercial property tax system, and who know California needs more stable funding for its schools, libraries, roads, and communities.

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