Cathy Jacobowitz's Blog, page 5

Mike Brown wasn’t armed, why did they shoot?

We chanted this yesterday as we marched down Dartmouth Street. We did other chants too, but this one made the most sense to me. Even though everybody in the street probably had a pretty good idea why the police shot Mike Brown, it was powerful to hear so many voices raised in a question that seemed shot through with anguish.

Here are some other things I heard.

“Every 28 hours somebody dies from police brutality. And they’re always Black, or brown.”

“Four years later we’re still waiting for the...

Comment on The erasure of #$%! race by Cathy

Thanks for the reality check Laurie!

The erasure of #$%! race

In Ferguson, Missouri, last Saturday, an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown was killed by a police officer. This is not uncommon in America: The Root has a slideshow of twenty such incidents since 1999 (it doesn’t include Trayvon Martin; another one happened on Monday). Here are some things these men were doing when they were killed: leaving a birthday party, climbing the stairs, getting ready to get married, kneeling, lying face-down, riding a bike, using a water fountain, fleeing Hu...

Gang initiations and NPR

I heard this amazing story on “The Moth Radio Hour.” You may have heard it too, if you listen to a lot of public radio. Ed Gavagan walked into a Latin Kings initiation and was so severely injured that when he woke up in the hospital, two homicide detectives were sitting on the end of his bed. The story is at once inspirational and grounded, funny and extremely graphic (I felt sick while listening). I have absolutely no bone to pick with Mr. Gavagan, who underwent great suffering and is a gift...

Encomium for Mr. C

I was recently contacted by a high-school classmate who was collecting thank-you letters for our old English teacher on the occasion of his retirement. Turns out there were already a couple of references to him on my blog, which are echoed below. Because why lose out on repeating a good turn of phrase? I’m sure Mr. C would understand.

Mr. C was a handsome devil. I expect he still is. I adored him from a distance. I hovered in doorways around him. I was a weirdo and too alone to know I was lone...

Alison and the Number One bus

At a Fenway literary evening in April, I read with my publisher Letta and another writer-neighbor, Alison Barnet. I had never met Alison in person before, though I knew her name. She seems quiet at first but has fiery opinions. I took home a copy of her book, South End Character: Speaking Out On Neighborhood Change, and was delighted with its deft mix of the graceful and acerbic. Here she is reflecting on public transit:

I also started [in 1970] teaching nights at OIC, a black-run adult educa...

How I set out to write about the revolution, and how it changed me

Here’s the talk I gave at the Lucy Parsons Center on May 3. Thanks to everyone who came out!

For many years now, there’s been a picture hanging above my desk. It’s a picture from some publisher’s book catalog, and it shows a rocket pop, one of those red-white-and-blue popsicles, being held up against a sunny sky. Across the popsicle are written the words “PURE FICTION.”

Before I wrote The One-Way Rain, if you asked me what I believed in, I would have pointed to this picture. From a very young...

What is white confession for?

I. Me versus the Y

Man, the problems I’ve had with the YMCA. So often I’d show up to swim and find the pool closed for this emergency repair or that, and insufficient signage to let me know before I changed into my suit and swim cap (the swim cap looks particularly stupid). There was that time they ended towel service, and the time they decided to close the women’s locker room for cleaning during the exact hour every day that I would be there, and what about the time a photographer came to rec...

Chocolate priest breakfast

Promotion is hard (this is the three-word distillation of my difficult winter). The One-Way Rain is gaining readers very slowly. I’m blessed with a beautiful group of supporters and have hosted some lively events. But I get insecure, and think myself inadequate, and that’s when I feel like d’Artagnan.

However, the forty pistoles of King Louis XIII, like all things in this world, having had a beginning, also had an end, and since that end our four companions had fallen into tight straits. . ....

Bumpy and flat

These days I tend to measure aggravation in degrees of social media. How pissed am I? Pissed enough to text a friend? Pissed enough to tweet? To tweet at someone? To post on my Facebook page? Or am I really, truly pissed enough to write an entry for the Antiracist Book Club?

I suspect that anger may not be the most productive mode for a white antiracist, especially one who does most of her work in her head. It feels like an indulgence, and is nothing to what people of color have to deal with...