Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 2
January 8, 2017
March to fascism no. 2
“Senate confirmation hearings to begin without all background checks” by Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lichtblau
Several of the nominees are millionaires or billionaires and have vast webs of financial interests that must be untangled. . . . Norman Eisen, Mr. Obama’s ethics counsel in his first term, said the paperwork delays were “totally unheard-of.”
January 3, 2017
March to fascism no. 1
I thought I’d better start collecting these because, you know.
“America Becomes a Stan” by Paul Krugman
Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who’s laughing now?
“Trump private security force ‘playing with fire’” by Kenneth P. Vogel
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks declined to respond to a series of questions about the private security officials, who is paying them, their relationship with the Secret Service, whether they’re armed and what the...
August 21, 2016
Five years in
It’s coming up on five years since I gamed my way into the “Undoing Racism” training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (I traded on my affiliation with a community development organization to get in for free). Around the same time, I was also becoming involved with an anti-oppression group within Occupy Boston, where I met some people whose friendship and guidance I still treasure today. In the time that followed, I passed through what you might call the first fire of...
July 27, 2016
Overheard on Visiting Day at The City School
“White people are like, oh, I had a good day. They think that’s it, they had a good day. They don’t understand they had a prescribed good day. You had a prescribed good day and we had a prescribed bad day. We wake up and we know we’re going to have a bad day. We know somebody’s going to yell at us, somebody’s going to call us a name or look at us funny.”
Learn more about The City School and its Summer Leadership Program here.
July 24, 2016
My bridge was gapped
In Austin in 1995, when I was twenty-four, I knew a vivacious young woman with black hair and black eyes, L., who was the object of many a crush. You either were crushed on her or resented her, or both (I was of the first party). It was also at this time that I carried on a strange flirtation with a curly-headed blond guy named M. who was in a relationship with another girl. Hard as it is to believe now, I was ignorant of the politics of relationships and didn’t know things were going to get...
May 29, 2016
The horrifying digi-children of the future
No, I like small children. I really do. I’m always staring at them out in public, grooving on how these teacup humans are transparently emotional, so openly interested in the world. Then one day I was walking down the street and I saw a kid in a stroller, couldn’t have been more than ten months old. And I could see her little pudgy hands up in front of her face, and I thought, “How funny, she looks like she’s holding a phone.” Until I got closer and saw she really was holding a phone. I went...
March 27, 2016
“The Leftovers,” part deux
After fulminating against the failure of “The Leftovers” to represent 38.6% of the population of Texas, I watched the second half of Season 2 last night. I remain impressed by the ease with which this show passes both the Shukla and Bechdel Tests. There are many scenes in which people of color, especially the Murphy family, talk to each other without mentioning their race (the former), and a lengthy, wonderful two-hander between Nora and Erika in which they are definitely not talking about a...
March 20, 2016
Left out of “The Leftovers”
I have just one question for the second season of “The Leftovers” (spoilers!):
Where are all the Mexicans?
Actually, I have two questions, because I would also like to know why the inhabitants of prehistoric Texas are white. However, let’s move on. Jarden, Texas, rechristened “Miracle,” is a small town, apparently not far from Austin, with a population of 9,261. What makes it miraculous is that none of its inhabitants disappeared on October 14, the day of worldwide Departure. As season two o...
January 31, 2016
Doesn’t anyone know what a typewriter is anymore?
FYI, I have been thinking about race and fiction-writing a lot a lot.1 And I started what was going to be a very authoritative blog entry on two books by white authors with a lens on white supremacy, A Free State by Tom Piazza and Charlie Smith’s brutal masterpiece Ginny Gall. I spent a couple-three hours on that one. But I couldn’t seem to circle in on what I really wanted to say, and I realized for the umpteenth time that I’m not a nonfiction writer and decided to go watch “House of Cards.”...
November 20, 2015
Comment on The backpack incident by Cathy
Hi David! I didn’t say anything about whether her hostility was warranted. My comments are about what was happening on my side, not what was happening on hers.
