Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 228

An affordable housing movement is rising from the wreckage of the foreclosure crisis

(Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber)

In late September, activists staged actions in 45 cities to draw attention to predatory rent practices and vast cuts to Housing and Urban Development funding. “Renters Week of Action” was partially inspired by a report put out by the Right to the City Alliance (RTC) highlighting solutions to the problems tenants now face after the foreclosure crisis.

“The majority of all renters pay an unaffordable rent,” Darnell Johnson of RTC told In These Times. “Eviction, rising rents and gentrification are racial, gender and economic violence harming our people.”

The coordinated actions stem from a long history. The rent control movement gained momentum during the late 1970s and early 1980s, spreading beyond New York City and taking hold in California. In 1978, California voters approved Proposition 13, which lowered property taxes throughout the state.

Many believed that the savings would mean lower home prices and rents. But almost 40 years later, California is a symbol of the era’s failed optimism. The median California house costs 2.5 times more than the median national house, and rents are some of the highest in the nation. Cities throughout the country have now experienced decades of gentrification from a real estate industry consistently looking for ways to subvert the few remaining housing protections that exist for tenants.

Over the last few years, housing activism has boomed — a trend that transcends the issue of rent control through its focus on halting gentrification and protecting low-income people of color from displacement. This work is even more important in the era of Trump, as the GOP is actively pushing a tax plan to benefit the richest members of U.S. society. House Republicans just passed a tax plan that will cut corporate rates down to 20 percent while increasing taxes for households that make between $10,000 and $30,000 a year.

The movement has taken hold throughout the country, and it’s recently chalked up a number of important victories. After activists staged a hunger strike in San Jose, lawmakers approved some of the strongest renter protections in the nation. Seattle’s city council was pushed to end housing discrimination against formerly incarcerated individuals. Earlier this year, New York became the first city to guarantee attorneys for low-income renters facing eviction.

One group with a track record of effective strategy is the Minneapolis-based Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia. Organizer Roberto de la Riva told In These Times that the group has a direct-action approach to combating his city’s housing crisis. The racial breakdown of housing in Minneapolis is stark: Most people of color rent, while most people white people own homes. He spoke of Latino residents being fined hundreds of dollars by landlords for opening their windows during the winter — and being forced to pay their rent via money order.

“As an organization that works with directly-affected tenants in the most affordable housing in Minneapolis, we see first-hand the amount of power that landlords hold over tenants,” said de la Riva. “They can intimidate freely without anyone holding them accountable and use the system for their business model. Because of the lack of effective organizing and renter protections like rent control, and just cause protection against eviction, landlords get free reign in the city.”

“When we organize with tenants against their landlords,” he added, “we are able to break down fear and isolation, equalize power relations and move tenants to defend their rights to negotiate with the landlord on renters’ terms.”

One of the most effective ways Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia has fought for tenants is through the acquisition of pro-bono attorneys to fight for renters in court. This method has led to a major rent return lawsuit, charging two Minneapolis landlords with hiding their ownership of properties from the city and purposely suppressing the costs of repairs for financial gain. If successful, the lawsuit could financially benefit thousands of Minnesota residents. “It could be the largest case in terms of damages and rent refunds in U.S. history,” housing attorney Larry McDonough told The Star Tribune. “I could not find a single class action around the country that had this kind of price tag on it.”

De la Riva said tenants and activists are up against powerful, moneyed interests in Minneapolis.

According to advocates, this trend extends nationwide, “Entire communities and cultures are being erased by aggressive development,” Johnson underscored. “We’re occupying their offices, taking back our communities and escalating. Because this isn’t a game. We’re fighting for our lives, our communities and our futures.”

In Boston, 2016 saw an uptick in resistance to predatory rent practices, with activists fighting for “Just Cause Eviction” rules that would prevent landlords from evicting tenants for improper reasons. Through organizing, communities advanced the Jim Brooks Community Stabilization Act, a piece of legislation that has already cleared Boston’s city council and will now make its way to the state legislature. If passed, the act would require landlords with more than six units to provide a reason for evicting a tenant — and mandate that they report the eviction to the city. The city would then be required to notify the tenant of their rights as a renter.

Ten miles outside of downtown Boston is the city of Lynn, where an organization of local residents is fighting back against unjust evictions and foreclosures. Lynn United for Change’s Isaac Simon Hodes told In These Times that unaffordable rent is a massive problem in the city, and the group is committed to working with homeowners.

“We bring together homeowners facing foreclosure and tenants facing eviction because all of these battles are part of the broader struggle to defend the human right to housing,” said Hodes, “Whether it’s big banks that are foreclosing or corporate landlords that are causing displacement, we’ll only be able to challenge the damage they’re doing to our communities by building a strong and broad movement for housing justice.”

Last year, Lynn Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy declared that the city already had enough affordable housing but needed more rich residents for economic expansion. “Lynn has more than its share of affordable housing right now,” said Kennedy. “We have exceeded the goal, and one of the things that Lynn needs to succeed in is its long-term economic development is to have people with disposable income in the mix of the housing that we offer.”

During “Renters Week of Action,” Lynn United for Change members occupied a development site demanding that affordable housing be included in a new set of waterfront apartments. “We do not oppose development,” reads the petition that activists passed out during the event on September 26. “We want to see our city grow and improve. But new development will only be good for the people of our city if it takes our needs and concerns into account and does not push out current residents.”

Pink shoes, brown bodies: How dancers of color are fighting for representation

(Credit: Getty/Fedinchik)

It was July 15, 2013, just two days after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

The Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, a historically and predominantly black modern dance company from Denver, was performing “Southland” at the University of Florida. It’s a work created by iconic, pioneering black choreographer Katherine Dunham in 1951 about lynchings in the U.S. South.

Dunham debuted “Southland” in Chile, taking it to Paris two years later. But the U.S. State Department blocked its American premiere, furious about the way “Southland” portrayed the country.

When founder and artistic director Cleo Parker Robinson made plans to revive the controversial work, Martin was still alive and Zimmerman’s name was unknown. The dance, about a white woman who was beaten by her white boyfriend and then blamed a black man who is then lynched for her false claims of rape, was already powerful. But dancer Roxanne Young remembers that, backstage in Gainesville that night, the stakes were raised.

Remember that  Zimmerman’s acquittal was the moment that pushed Alicia Garza to write “Black Lives Matter” for the first time on Facebook. It was the affirmation and rallying call that helped jumpstart a social movement.

Meanwhile, at the University of Florida, Young was nervous. The whole state was on edge. People at the university warned the dancers to stay clear of Sanford and the mass protests taking place. She wondered if people were even going to show up for the performance.

But they came, and were blown away. For Young, it confirmed for that “Southland” contained a story and a message that needed to be told at exactly that moment. The themes are “still very relevant, just in a different form,” she tells Salon. “I feel like now more choreographers, especially black choreographers, are really trying to use their art form to speak about issues that are happening now.”

As the Black Lives Matter movement has resurfaced national dialogues about race in nearly every arena, parts of the dance world have taken part. “The current sociopolitical climate makes this work even more relevant to audiences,” acclaimed choreographer Camille Brown told Dance Magazine.

Recent works by Brown, Kyle Abraham, Abdel Salaam, Rennie Harris, and others deal with themes like mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial stereotypes. But the same systematic racism and race-based presumptions that the Black Lives Matter movement seeks to upend permeate the dance world as well.

In the mainstream, no dancer has publicly addressed this more than Misty Copeland, the first black ballerina to become a principal dancer for the esteemed American Ballet Theatre.

Her promotion in 2015 did not stop her from speaking out against racism. If anything, it amplified her outspokenness. “All of a sudden now that I am in this position, I’m not going to say ‘I’m just a dancer,'” she told Essence at the time. “It’s easy for someone who isn’t black or other or who has never experienced racism to dismiss what I’m saying.”

Ebony Webster, a dancer with Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, tells Salon that the challenges of being a black dancer mirror those of every black professional in America. “It’s harder,” she says. The standards applied and the bars for entry are higher, just as the jobs and contracts are fewer in this industry where “look” (meaning European appearance) reigns supreme.

Young, now a member of the dance company MoveDIPR, recounted the frustration of attending numerous auditions for all-white dance companies, just for choreographers to say they “value diversity” and still refuse to contract any dancers of color. Webster agreed, noting she often looks up dance companies ahead of time to see if she should even bother going.

For predominantly white dance companies like the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Young says “you feel discouraged to even try.” Shanna Woods, who dances for  Olujimi Dance Theatre and Jubilation Dance Ensemble, says she’s been to several auditions, looked around and thought “I’m clearly not supposed to be here.”

Even the tradition dance attire operates from a presumption of whiteness. Webster explained that, in ballet, the “nude” baseline color for all ballerina’s costumes in a company is typically pale pink.

While there’s a purpose to the uniformity — “to not break the line in the extension, so it looks like one color all the way down to the ballet shoe,” as Webster says — the naming and the choice of color privileges white skin tones. For dancers whose “nude” is a shade of brown, the convention leaves them conceptually and aesthetically on the margins.

Other ways black dancers can feel marginalized in majority-white dance spaces is through the use of certain words they often find applied to them. Woods said these can include “sassy,” “curvy,” “snappy” and “urban,” all descriptions that serve to “discredit the ability of a black artist” and limit a dancer’s versatility.

Quite often, this sort of treatment sees black dancers joining predominantly black dance companies, Young says. “We know we’ll get accepted,” Young said of them.

Some of these companies, having been founded at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, when black dancers were almost always excluded from mainstream organizations, are not just welcome options, they’re historical repositories. Young acknowledged that it wasn’t until she joined Cleo Parker Robinson’s dance company that she learned about black dance pioneers like Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Arthur Mitchell and others.

Webster adds that her own understanding of black dance icons only came when she was allowed to pick individual topics for research in school. Though she, like Young, was a dance major in college, where dance history is typically a required course, the black side of the discipline was mostly unknown to her before then. “It’s not in the textbooks,” she said. “It’s not part of the curriculum.”

So, yes, black dance companies afford black dancers and choreographers a place to work and sense of home and history. But even there, they can find themselves on the wrong side of racial insensitivity, particularly at the hands of dance critics, most of whom are white.

This year, Abdel Salaam, director of Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, constructed a dance work for the annual DanceAfrica celebration in Brooklyn titled “The Healing Sevens” that merged African dance, hip-hop and modern forms to tell an intricate story of gun violence and brutality. Well received, it would go on to win a  prestigious Bessie Award for “Best Production.”

Yet New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas slammed “The Healing Sevens” in a review, asking why Salaam would try to move traditional African dance “beyond” its conventions — as if ballet has never deviated, modernized or moved beyond its traditions. It was almost as if she wanted the African form to stay stagnant, docile, frozen.

Knowing the struggle for success, acceptance and equality for black dancers, many black creatives have fostered unique spaces outside of the mainstream dance industry. The International Association of Blacks in Dance conference and festival, for instance, launched in 1991 a mission to preserve and promote dance by black artists. Every year it brings out the biggest, most famous black dance companies in this country, from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre to the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

In 2012, Paloma McGregor founded “Dancing While Black,” an artist-led initiative to bring “the voices of black dance artists from the periphery to the center, providing opportunities to self-determine the languages and lenses that define their work.”

Webster, with her partner Natasha Williams, started a business this year called “Melanin Moves,” a networking platform for black dancers to connect with and empower each other by discussing the issues they face in a safe space. Webster said, “Some people don’t even know these issues exist and it’s important because it’s a big part of our lives as black dancers.”

“It’s one of those quiet things that people don’t like to talk about in the dance world, but it’s still there,” Young said, of the micro-aggressions and racial inequalities black dancers experience.

“People don’t want to give it that recognition, especially in New York, because we have such diversity, but it still shows.” She added, “We need to break that silence. We need to have people recognize that this is still happening right now in the dance world and it’s still very relevant.”

“Pie & Whiskey”: The joy of booze and butter

Sam Ligon and Kate Lebo (Credit: Adriana Janovich)

“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” — David Mamet

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” — Mark Twain

Pairing a warm fruit-filled pastry and a sultry bourbon seems naughty somehow, a slap in the face of propriety. Pie goes with coffee. Everybody knows that. Whiskey, on the other hand, is the drink of outlaws and ne’er-do-wells, or people who style themselves as such, which is more common these days.

“They’re both substances that you could do all on your own but might feel a little bad about when you’re all done,” author Kate Lebo observed in a recent interview with Salon. “They’re better enjoyed with people, but as good as they are, they can still go bad.”

Put the two together, as Lebo and her collaborator Samuel Ligon have been doing since 2012  to lure audiences in live readings of short stories, essays and poetry written by favorite writers, and the results vary wildly. But the servings Lebo and Ligon curated to create “Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter & Booze” prove there’s magic in this mating of sweetness and sin.

All it takes to yield stunning, delicious prose, the pair discovered, is a suggestion: Pie. Whiskey. Both, perhaps. Why not? The chemistry is undeniable. Pie teases out thoughts of reward and pleasure, while whiskey fuels folly and soothes regrets. The fiction, essays and poetry in “Pie & Whiskey” capture crumbs of these notions or plummet into the messy filling of conflicting emotions, with dessert and drink taking on very different roles and guises.

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s “And Then There Was Rum Cake” examines, among other things, how the differences between her Indian heritage and that of her white Midwestern husband can be marked by types of flour and preparations of pastry. Anthony Doerr muses upon love lost in his short story “Heavenly Pies,” while Steve Almond takes the innocent suggestion of a long-married couple prepping desserts for a parental function and heats it into a dirty interlude . . . with a rhubarb twist.

“What we couldn’t anticipate was what came out of the pairing,” Ligon said. “Kate talks about that play, which absolutely comes out of the pairing of pie and whiskey, but the other thing that comes out of it is a kind of transgression. The writers tend to go kind of transgressive, playful and dark places. Because whiskey is Saturday night, pie is Sunday morning.”

Now that we have officially entered the season of sweets and indulgence, of naughty and nice, of red and green presented as complementary colors, “Pie & Whiskey” reads as validation and, perhaps, catharsis. As our initial mania for turkey subsides, baking takes center stage with stress as its sideman, and as holiday chefs crank out artistic creations that demonstrate their love, whiskey is often nearby, frequently disguised in Irish creams or Southern-style eggnog. Rest assured it is there, never far away from the butter and flour that may eventually take the form of pie.

Pie crowns holiday feasts. Savory pies are the feasts in some households. Others give pies as gifts, evidence to loved ones of the exalted position they hold in our circle of caring. Those are people we care enough to nourish with additional extravagance.

As for the family and acquaintances we’re forced to tolerate, they are the reason why whiskey is king at Christmas, and even earlier. In Jess Walter’s “Whiskey Pie,” the writer casts the liquor as a silent main player role in a disastrous Thanksgiving, a story that inspires a pie recipe that also appear in the book. Lebo partners several stories with a recipe that evokes their themes. Ligon contributes a series of cocktail recipes that are actually just variations on classic drinks that serves as both a refrain and the backbone of a repetitive joke.

Within this context, “Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze” feels as subversive — Ligon refers to it as a conspiracy the editors and writers share with the reader — as it does seasonally appropriate.

This is true even though “Pie & Whiskey” hit bookshelves in late October, in the midst of apple harvest season — too late to score fresh berries, but in time to cater to the whims of bakers ready to bring their ovens humming to life again. Whether that date was chosen with such intent on the part of Sasquatch Books I cannot say. Actually, to be accurate, I did not ask. But such data matters far less than the origins of a tradition that began in Spokane, Washington, in response to a simple truth about literary gatherings: “We were very much aware that readings are often bad and boring,” Ligon recalled.

Though the first “Pie & Whiskey” event occurred in Spokane, Ligon and Lebo trace its origins to a time before 2012, when the pair taught together at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. “It really started there, with us just baking together and serving writers whiskey with pie that we made, just as a way to bring writers together at a place we were teaching.”

At the time, Lebo had debuted “A Commonplace Book of Pie” and was strategizing ways to promote it. “This was a time when I was really using pie as a kind of social currency,” she said before correcting herself: “Actually, no — as actual currency. I was baking it and selling it to make my rent.”

Ligon, in the meantime, had been to a Pittsburgh reading that attracted around 300 people by offering food and beer. “So we thought, ‘Let’s do a reading that is actually really fun,’” he recalled. “We were like, ‘Let’s make pie,’ because we’d been making pies together, ‘and let’s serve whiskey, and let’s get writers who we love but who also know how to read, to perform their work.’”

Ligon and Lebo recruited 12 writers to create five-minute pieces of original work inspired by the dessert and libation. The hosts baked 10 pies and persuaded a liquor producer, Spokane’s Dry Fly Distilling, to donate six fifths — more than enough for the 50 people they thought would attend.

They vastly underestimated the appeal of the dessert world’s most tempting bribe and America’s favorite social lubricant: more than 300 people showed up to the reading, far more than they could feed. The crowd’s hunger created another buzz the pair hadn’t anticipated, that the combination of sweetness and booze created an edge in the room they soon feared they wouldn’t be able to completely control. “There was kind of a frenzy or intensity among the writers to hold on to the room,” Ligon said. “That’s maintained to this day.”

Subsequent readings gave the pair a sense of the idea’s popularity as well as an appropriate scale. Lebo and Ligon still bake the goods for their events, with the help of volunteers, although now they know to make sheet pies (“square pie has more usable surface area than round pie, and serves more people faster,” Lebo explains) with an appropriate number of servings.

A recent Seattle reading called for 350 servings of pie, including chocolate pecan pie whiskey shots inspired by Walter’s piece, funeral pie based on Lebo’s contribution about judging desserts at the Iowa state fair, and a blueberry pie because, why not? They washed it down with 48 fifths of Dry Fly whiskey, while listening to readings from the anthology as well as new work by local poets and writers. All told they estimate that over five years and eight readings, audiences have guzzled 500 gallons of whiskey and 30,000 square feet of pie. Feel free to question their math, but if you really want to quibble with such a lovely picture of contentment an inebriation, reconsider your life priorities.

Anyway, along with the production lessons, Lebo said she learned quite a bit about pie’s power to bring communities together.

Ligon agreed. “Ranchers like pie and ranchers like whiskey, and farmers like pie and so do hipsters,” he said.

“Atheists and Christians,” Lebo added.

“Cowboys and circus clowns,” Ligon offered.

“If you bake pie and you serve whiskey, they will come and they will like each other,” Lebo finished. “People let down their guard, and you know writers — we’re weird.”

Nothing a heaping helping of buttery crusts and booze can’t smooth out.

In-store shopping still matters this holiday season

(Credit: AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

It surprises most millennials to learn that only about 10 percent of all retail purchases are actually made online. Each semester, when I ask hundreds of undergraduate business students to estimate, they consistently guess that between a quarter and half of all retail spending happens on the internet. But this holiday shopping season, as ever in the past, the overwhelming majority of purchases will still happen within four physical walls of a store.

This should encourage the thousands of retailers anchored in strip malls, lifestyle centers and mixed use developments. The National Retail Federation expects holiday retail sales — not counting car, gas and restaurant purchases — in November and December this year to increase up to 4 percent over last year, to as much as US$682 billion.

Stores will need the money in order to avoid being added to 2017’s record-breaking roster of retail bankruptcies, store closures and layoffs, which included landmark brands like Toys R Us and RadioShack.

A reason to visit

Traditional retailers must give consumers good reasons to visit their stores, beyond product selection and good value. Joe Pine and James Gilmore’s 1999 book “The Experience Economy” foretold how savvy companies, like Apple and American Girl, excel by staging compelling experiences that teach, entertain or inspire customers.

The main asset of a physical store in a digital world is human staffing. Even if a shopper doesn’t want help, a smile acknowledging his or her presence encourages connection. Front-line employees can ask customers about their kids, in-laws or Thanksgiving meal planning. That can lead to an authentic personal connection through which employees can discover a shopper’s unique wants and respond with products on the shelves, or ordered and shipped for free to the customer’s home. An in-person encounter can become a seamless blend of the online and physical worlds.

Even Walmart, America’s largest retailer, is moving to a more experiential model. In hopes of boosting sales, its 4,700 stores will host 20,000 parties with Santa before the New Year. Customers will be able to take pictures, test out toys and get tots excited.

The company has another advantage over online sellers, too: nine in 10 Americans live within 15 minutes of a Walmart store. A thousand Walmarts now let customers drive up to the storefront to pick up online grocery orders the same day they’re purchased, at no additional charge. That rivals Amazon’s Fresh grocery service, which comes at an extra cost and often doesn’t deliver until the next day.

Emotional connection in a digital age

Beyond face-to-face service, successful companies today must develop a deeper connection with their customers, whether online or off. Store-based retailers can show their values in ways that at times can take on a very personal meaning for shoppers and store owners alike. I have been a loyal customer of Gallery Furniture in Houston for years. Owner Jim McIngvale, known as “Mattress Mack,” is a marketing maverick known for his decades of zany TV commercials pledging to “Save you money!”

After the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, he opened his stores to anyone in need of a place to stay. Some came by boat, with only the clothes they were wearing. McIngvale welcomed thousands of Houstonians to sleep on his inventory of mattresses. He sheltered, fed and prayed for flood victims.

On Halloween, McIngvale flew 50 first responders to Game 6 of the World Series in Los Angeles, giving those lucky Astros fans a once-in-a-lifetime experience and emotional lift in the wake of natural disaster.

Like other retailers gearing up for the holidays, Gallery Furniture is promoting “monster sales.” But with the floodwaters gone and the Astros crowned as baseball’s world champions, McIngvale’s community spirit seems to have positioned his chain as more than a brand, destination or store. Beyond capturing market share, Gallery Furniture may have an advantage in customer sentiment.

Best Buy is buzzing again

Community involvement isn’t the only way retailers can regain strength. National electronics chain Best Buy has ridden a roller coaster over the last 20 years: In 2004 it was recognized by Forbes magazine as “Company of the Year.” By 2012 it was dismissed as a real-world showroom for cheaper online retailers. In August 2017, though, its stock price hit an all-time high.

As Amazon grew, Best Buy defended itself, becoming a top 10 retailer in sales by matching competitors’ prices and investing in personal services like Geek Squad. The company also trained workers to help customers understand technology: Product descriptions can list a camera’s functions, but a knowledgeable employee can explain how it works with lenses, editing software or with other devices. That allows the company to take advantage of the ever-increasing number of tech-connected items in smart homes, from Nest thermostats to 4K TVs — which require more instruction to set up and operate than their analog predecessors.

In the face of online competition, brick-and-mortar retailers must give consumers unique in-store experiences that build emotional connections with shoppers. Black Friday promos on toasters or iPads won’t cut it. They have to provide heartfelt feelings like surprise, delight and excitement — and actual help and useful advice. Shopping on a couch via a mobile app is efficient, but a store can be magical and memory-making.

The census always boxed us out

(Credit: Illustration by Xia Gordon/Narratively)

In June, 1967, I walked across the quad of Howard University, a light-skinned, 19-year-old sophomore. It was Black Power days, when I was on fire to learn the black history America had largely ignored. On that wide walkway, I ran into a boy from class who broke into a toothy smile, stuck out his much darker hand and shook mine vigorously, laughing like he had no sense.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Congratulations for what?”

“For not being a bastard anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, snatching my hand away. “I was born legit.”

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“No you weren’t,” he said. The day before, the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia had overturned laws in 16 states outlawing interracial marriage, and he assumed that this meant my parents’ marriage was finally legal. In fact, my parents were married in New York, where their union was officially sanctioned, but the Loving decision was still a watershed — the start of a long journey to learn the truth about my mixed family’s place in America’s racial landscape.

* * *

Nearly 25 years before Loving, my parents married for love. To escape Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws, my mother staged her own disappearance, going underground to marry my father in New York. After she vanished, the FBI was called in to search for her, and finally pronounced her dead, likely the victim of foul play. Her family still believed her dead when Loving was won.

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When my brothers and I were born in the 1940s, the federal census racial categories dictated who we were. We were biologically mixed blood, but it said NEGRO on our birth certificates, with no indication of our mother’s whiteness. For over 50 years, on government and school forms, job applications, doctor’s records and the census, we dutifully checked the box that said Negro or Black. The facts of our births meant nothing to the Census Bureau. By the centuries-old One Drop Rule, one drop of black blood made us 100 percent Negro. The government said so.

However, in my private life, checking that box never shielded me from the parade of strangers who challenged my identity. It’s the olive skin, light eyes and soft curly hair that confuses them and starts a guessing game about my ethnicity. Thrown off, they ask “What are you?” like the gas station attendant who demanded to know if I was “Spanish, Eye-Talian, Injun or Jewish.” When I told him I was black, he whooped and jumped back from the car, then yelled across the pumps to another gas man. “Come ’ere and lookit this gal. She says she’s black.”

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Or the Egyptian cab driver who insisted I looked like his sister and needed to confess my Egyptian roots. Or the Puerto Ricans, Greeks, Berbers and Sicilians who talk to me in their tongues. Or the white colleague who was so incredulous when I explained why I don’t try to pass for white that his face turned red. Or the house salesman in Louisiana who gushed over me until he understood I was black, and then slammed the office door and pulled the shade down.

Or the black people who call me high yellow, redbone, and half-breed. Or accuse me of thinking I’m better than them and enjoying near-white privilege. Some were discriminated against by light Negroes — refused from Negro bourgeois clubs or marriage to the lighter partners who could bleach their lines, because their skin was darker than a brown paper bag. Some thought that was my fault, although it was blacks with two black parents who exacted those criteria, wanting to protect whatever paper bag-brownness got them in white America.

This confusion has plagued me my entire life, and finally drove me to search the census records, to see how people like me have been counted through the years.

The Census Bureau says it is the leading source of data about the nation’s people and economy, guided by “scientific objectivity,” with data presented as statistical observation. But as I worked in a dark carrel of the National Archives outside Boston, cranking through wheels of census microfilm, I squinted through page after fuzzy page, and saw something different. From 1790 to present, the census has singled out, separated and subdivided those who are black and brown. From its inception, the census has not just counted Americans, but has deliberately drawn a line between a monolithically labelled white category and the endlessly sliced and diced others, the not-white.

The possible races open to respondents to the questionnaire have included Chinese, Korean, Hindu — a religion, not a race — and “half-Hawaiian.” East Indians appear from 1900 through 1950, when they apparently became white (even if they were Hindu), while Mexicans, previously considered white, were separated out in 1930. Native Americans weren’t counted at all until 1960. But while Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants had difficulty assimilating into the United States, the census never had them declare a separate, other, heritage. Their whiteness won out, because they were European.

The term mulatto, meaning half-white, which would have described my own mixed racial makeup, first appeared in the census questionnaire in 1850. In 1890, the terms quadroon (one-quarter black) and octoroon (one-eighth) were added. Mulatto, quadroon and octoroon disappeared in 1900, but the mulattos reappeared in 1910 and ’20. By 1970, with the the Supreme Court’s Loving decision, the option was gone, suggesting that the category mattered to the government only when slave holders and their sons needed a way to record children they fathered as chattel.

For the first time, the 2000 Census offered an option for mixed race that gave the respondent the chance to self-declare the components of his or her own identity. Dozens of racial and ethnic categories were listed for those who wished to check all the boxes of their multicultural, multi-racial, selves, including a box for white, allowing people like me to acknowledge, legally and honorably, both sides of their heritage. After more than 200 years, the census had stopped dictating who people had to be and asked me to define myself.

And I did. And again in 2010, when the number of racial and ethnic census choices expanded further, I felt as if my country could finally see me. My mother’s race was recognized, as was my father’s. For the first time, I found some humanity in the government’s census boxes. Apparently many others did too. Between the 2000 and 2010 counts, the census reported that seven percent of Americans identified as multi-race, a group that grew three times as fast as single race people, and PEW Research’s Multiracial in America report projects that the multiracial population will triple by 2060. Further, in 2020, the census is considering how to clarify categories for Latinos. While this newer recognition of mixed race gives me hope, I must also remember my own family history with it.

* * *

In 1969 I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to meet my father’s great-aunt Willie. I had been hearing about her all my life. When my grandmother in Buffalo dictated me letters to write, it was Willie to whom I wrote: the relative who never migrated north when others left.

I had trouble convincing the cab driver that a white-ish looking woman like me wanted to go to Willie’s segregated black neighborhood, but he took me. Aunt Willie, a dark, African featured woman, came out in a wrapped dress complimenting her stately figure. As she fussed over me as only an ancient relative with Southern manners could, I caught the scent of her hair’s straightening pomade.

“Oooo-weee, look who come to see the old folk,” she said. After settling my things in the guest room, she and I began to get acquainted while we sipped sweet tea and rocked gently in her metal glider on the front porch of her bungalow. Neither the extended awning overhead nor the ice clinking in our sweating glasses could shield us from the shimmering heat as we began unraveling our murky family connection.

I offered news and photos of my father and Grandma Belia in Buffalo, but Willie kept interrupting to introduce passers-by, from the postman to neighbors going to and fro. I made pleasantries with everyone, even the woman who came up on the porch, leaning in to get a good look at me. With that Southern cover-all that excuses everything, she said, “Bless your heart, honey. But is y’all really related? You don’t look nothing like Willie.”

I answered her sweetly, “She’s my daddy’s aunt.”

Later, Aunt Willie considered the photo of my grandmother I’d given her. “Ain’t you jes’ the spitting image of Belia? You both got that white side, see? Like Acie in New York, too.”

What white side? Not my grandma. Not Aunt Acie, her cousin, who I met once, on my teenage trip to Harlem. We were light, but we were black — just part of the chalk-to-charcoal spectrum of black people’s coloring. Or so I thought.

“I don’t know about their white side,” I said.

“Ain’t they told you ’bout it?”

She said Grandma and her cousin Acie were born to two sisters that had been raped repeatedly by two white brothers. The men’s family owned the Georgia farm where the sisters worked. They were teenage girls in 1890 when Grandma was born, on the same farm where her ancestors had been slaves. In fact, there had been three children fathered by these men: Grandma, Acie and Jack, who was still in Georgia.

“That’s how it was back then,” she said nonchalantly, running her napkin around the outside of her glass.

My throat caught as the meaning sunk in. Decades after emancipation, that old Massa privilege of white men raping black females at will had been forced on my great grandmother? How had the child of that rape, the grandmother who helped raise me, lived with the pain and humiliation all these years and never talked about it? I didn’t know what to do with my outrage. But I tried to stuff it because my aunt sat by, not outraged in the least.

No wonder Grandma called leaving Georgia escaping. I’d never given that old lady — now crippled by arthritis — credit for getting her family out. I’d never known that Buffalo, a wintry steel town, had been my grandma’s promised land.

“I guess she didn’t tell me about that because she was ashamed,” I said.

“’Shamed? What she have to be ’shamed of? No, everybody knew white men did that whenever they got ready, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. In your great grandmaw’s time, there was no getting away from those men. She was ripe, you know, 16 or so when she birthed your grandma Belia.”

Wasn’t that the same old nobodyness imposed on blacks during slavery? Was rape still the black woman’s story, living such degradation 30 years after emancipation just to subsist at the pleasure of whites? Aunt Willie’s flat recounting proved there was no getting away from it, even after blacks were free in the segregated south.

Sickened, I tried to imagine what my great grandmother Frances and her sister Pearl had gone through, being raped on demand. Had her parents instructed her not to resist so they could continue to have the food and shelter sharecropping the whites’ farm provided? Had the girls turned their faces away and their minds off in that devil’s bargain? Did the white men take what they wanted because they could, or was it justified in their minds as satisfying themselves in a way that preserved the purity of their own white women and Southern culture?

“Did my grandma know her father?” I asked Aunt Willie.

“It weren’t no secret,” she said. “Ever body knew what they done.” She could still picture that white man, coming around to their place every blue moon. He’d plop down on the porch chair with a bag of candy and set one of his kids on his knee for a little while. He was their father, but they all knew not to claim him beyond the bounds of their front yard.

So that’s what flowed in my veins, white “plantation” rape. It was one thing to read about this kind of history, but the subjugation of my own grandmother and her mother made my ulcer burn in the wall of my gut. Carrying that rapist’s blood in me certainly wasn’t the family connection I’d come to Alabama looking for. But it was a fact, a critical part of my Black Power education, to learn what violent race-mixing meant only two generations before me.

The next time I went home to Buffalo, I asked my grandmother why she never told me about her white father. “Ain’t nothin to tell,” she said. “He wasn’t nothin’ to me.” She looked at me over her wire rim glasses, her two grey plaits hanging on either side of a center part. “We weren’t the only kids like that. Where you think all these light-skinned Negros came from?”

* * *

I went back to the Georgia census to see how the official records showed

Grandma. Among the handwritten names, I found my grandmother in 1900 Lee County, named Bella, not Belia, as we knew her. Her race was marked Negro, not mulatto, and her father was marked as the black man who raised her, not the white man who raped her mother. Back then, no white man was fool enough to claim kinship with their illegitimate offspring. And apparently, that census worker wasn’t about to record their folly.

But today, instead of ignoring my heritage like Grandma and census takers did, I declare both my races, except to the hard core obnoxious. I tell them I’m from Madagascar.

It’s not insane to think Oasis could reunite

Noel Gallagher (Credit: AP)

Liam Gallagher is performing this week in Toronto, and as I prepare to take in the concert, it’s all coming back: The epic battles, still ongoing, between the infamous Liam and his brother Noel of the hugely popular ‘90s rock band, Oasis.

Oasis topped the charts globally with hits that included “Champagne Supernova” and “Wonderwall.” I was a fan and still am — the band’s music stands the test of time, and the seemingly endless feuds between Noel and Liam continue to capture our attention.

 

 

But 20 years after they first became rock ‘n’ roll megastars, I have another take on the Gallagher brothers through my work as an associate professor of social work at the University of Toronto and lead investigator of Make Resilience Matter. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, it is a research, policy and practice initiative about children exposed to domestic violence.

So what does Oasis have to do with it?

We are learning that resilience can help kids “come through the fire” of domestic violence — an important finding, given what the Gallagher brothers faced then, and what children still face today. We are also learning that the Gallagher brothers’ exposure to domestic abuse could go a long way to explaining their continuing animosity towards one another.

Exposure to domestic violence equals abuse

Noel and Liam witnessed their father physically and verbally attacking their mother — they still recall her pain and humiliation. Noel has also talked about being beaten by his father.

However, through this adversity, I suggest that both brothers found escape — and, ultimately, resilience — through their music. Noel himself has stated that, as a teenager, the guitar he found lying around the house took him away from it all.

Music became the brothers’ lifeline. Music, in fact, as one form of healthy escape — along with other factors and processes we’ve identified in our research — can help put children on a pathway to resilience.

Why should we be concerned?

Today in Canada, children as young as infants experience what the Gallagher boys lived through. Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is a form of child abuse just like physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect.

The frequency of child abuse, including IPV exposure, has been well-established through large-scale studies in North America, such as the ground-breaking Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study in the United States. In Canada, exposure to IPV is the most frequently reported form of abuse

with the latest Canadian census showing children living with violence in over half a million households.

Noel credited music as helping him escape

I shine a light on the Gallagher brothers’ story — as they themselves recount in their recent documentary, “Oasis: Supersonic,” and through media interviews — not to draw attention to the over-the-top rock star antics portrayed in the media, but to make a point about children, resilience and domestic violence.

Growing up in a social housing estate in Manchester, England, and on probation for truancy and stealing at 13, Noel discovered music, saying that it was his escape from everything, no matter what was going on at home or school.

Along with music, our research identifies other forms of “escape” such as sports, art, acting, writing and reading. As well, the strength and support of the boys’ mother Peggy, who ultimately left her husband with her sons, reflects another key finding in my research: Children need a safe, supportive adult/caregiver.

Through in-depth interviews with adults about their childhoods affected by IPV, we have gone on to identify 21 ways to resilience.

There’s significant research that tells us children exposed to IPV are more likely to experience trauma, aggression, depression and difficulties managing and expressing their emotions appropriately.

Seeing your mother hurt and living in a fear-filled house where everyone walks on eggshells, as the Gallaghers did, can cast a long shadow into the future: When children are exposed during critical formative years, it not only immediately disrupts important cognitive, social and emotional development, it also affects relationships and pathways into adulthood.

Research is also beginning to show — and I will be delving into this more fully in my own research — how sibling relationships can be affected: Some siblings may become over-protective, others may become distant, and still others may be hostile.

The antagonistic relationship between Liam and Noel immediately springs to mind.

Children can overcome their childhoods

There is good news, however, for the Gallaghers and others who grew up in homes plagued by domestic violence. Children can overcome significant adversity — many have. But they, and everyone surrounding and supporting them, need to know one thing: Resilience is not innate. It is not something one child has and another doesn’t.

It can be developed and fostered. (Visit our site for a full definition of resilience, with references.)

Children who experience difficulties — sometimes severe problems — can adopt healthy relational behaviours, recover and follow healthy developmental trajectories.

Through our rigorous study of children and families facing extremely tough challenges surrounding domestic violence, we’ve found that resilience can be actively and intentionally promoted at three levels: The child, the child’s relationships and the context or the community that surrounds the child.

Many of these factors and processes can be developed, taught or strengthened by:

Encouraging a skill or talent;
Providing outlets and resources for kids to play sports, make music, act, etc.;
Connecting kids with safe, supportive adults and positive role models;
Assisting mothers in their efforts to protect their children from further harm by increasing access to support, housing, education, employment;
Involving supportive extended family;
Helping children accurately assign responsibility for the abuse and break the cycle of violence.

‘Through the fire’

For good reason, research and practice have focused largely on establishing the scope and addressing negative effects.

Now we’re learning that we need to more fully understand how children navigate their way “through the fire.” By better connecting the dots between children, intimate partner violence and resilience, we will improve how we identify and support resilience factors and processes for each and every child.

As for Liam and Noel Gallagher, there is still hope for their relationship.

Individually, they have navigated tremendous adversity. Despite their feuding via the media, given the desire, the right conditions and skilled intervention, there is still the possibility of reconciliation. Maybe their motivation could be what compels so many of us to do better — for our children.

For the Gallaghers, letting go of the anger and settling their differences might help stop the trauma and violence too often passed down from one generation to another — and encourage and support their own children’s resilience.

Ramona Alaggia, Associate Professor; Factor-Inwentash Chair in Children’s Mental Health, University of Toronto

I’m done with competitive parenting

(Credit: Getty/Montage by Salon)

You were right all along, sanctimommies. I didn’t breastfeed long enough, didn’t Ferberize soon enough. I parked the kids in front of the TV instead of playing enriching imagination games. I caved when they wanted to quit the free tennis program at our local park. And now that both of my daughters are teenagers and one is preparing to graduate high school, I fold. They are not geniuses. They are not going to Stanford or to Wimbledon. Never gonna be president now. So can we stop competing with each other?

Sometimes it seems so hard to remember how we all managed so much one-upmanship in the early years of the century, when we didn’t even have Instagram to boast on. Yet I still vividly recall my early encounters with face-to-face concern trolling from other moms — is she sleeping through the night yet? Crawling yet? I would sheepishly respond, then accept their gentle reassurances that someday, my child too might actually figure out how to hold a spoon. (The jury is still out.)

Sure, in those exhausted days of baby boot camp, there were parents who distinguished themselves as comrades in arms, the ones whose children, like mine, never seemed to earn appreciative coos for being so “good” and “quiet.” My kids — like theirs — were loud, wakeful and clearly thought walking was a sucker’s game, remaining determined to be carried on their mother’s hips for as long as they possibly could. But other families seemed to be perpetually crushing it, marveling at their babies’ advanced reading aptitudes or can-do-it approach to toilet training.

I don’t know why, but back then I somehow thought once our children were fully bipedal and off to school, the “Is my kid better than yours?” subtext of parental interactions would abate. After all, so many of those early interactions could be chalked up to nervous new parenting — a need for reassurance that if you just wore the baby sling enough hours a day, the rewards will later reveal themselves in SAT scores.

Instead, school only ramped up the opportunities for quantifying our children’s merits and checking how they stacked up against those of other kids. Before long, I saw families eagerly applying for gifted and talented programs, signing on for immersive experiences in exotic lands, and humblebragging about crushing loads of homework. I once had a mom tell me, at a party, “You get what you pay for,” when I said my daughters were in public school. I had another tell me to my face her son had been “bored” by the academics at the school my children attended, so she had to find someplace “more challenging.” I’ve been grilled on why my kids didn’t play sports. Because I want to ruin their opportunities, I guess.

My kids have experienced this Type A attitude from adults as well. When my elder daughter interviewed for a well-regarded local middle school a few years ago, the administrator asked her what she believed she could bring to the institution. “Like, in my backpack?” she asked, puzzled, before revealing, “Well, I have a lucky koala bear.” I still wonder, what would the right answer have been? What’s the best way for a 10-year-old to sell you on how she will elevate your sixth grade class? She didn’t get in.

So here we are now. My daughters, by the way, are awesome. They are smart, kind young women who have faced serious mental and physical health issues, who get good grades and who still can’t play tennis. They’re strong and brave and I am proud of them. And they did eventually learn to walk, too, so there’s that. My older daughter has a part-time job to save money for school. She will, I hope, soon land at a perfectly fine college we can afford to pay for, all but certainly one with a name that does not guarantee Instagram bragging rights. It’ll be, I hope, okay anyway.

I’ve got my baggage. I worry that I’ve failed my kids by not pushing them enough, by not being affluent enough, by not being like the dad I recall from a long-ago preschool event who once drily observed, “What’s wrong with putting a child on a track if the track leads to Harvard?” Fifteen years later, his kid really is on that prestige track. And I confess I feel envy for families whose tracks seem so much shinier than ours — tracks not paved with discouraging financial aid officers and undone laundry.

But what I know in my heart is going on in my darkest moments of social media scab-picking is the dumb insecurity that if we’re not all brilliant, we’re all boring. What if it turned out you and your kids were not . . . exceptional? What if you were neither gifted nor talented? Could you still be all right, somehow? Could you remember every moment your child came to you in tears, when all you wanted in the world for her was not that she be fluent in Mandarin but that she just be happy? Could you remember every emergency room visit, when her GPA was meaningless and you just wanted her to be healthy?

I’m trying, truly, to get better. I’ve worked so hard their whole lives to just let my kids bloom at their own pace, to avoid the noxious world of high stakes childhood. The result is that they are nice girls who are just not, by any outside assessment, superstars. You know, most people aren’t. What I so often lose sight of is that there have been a lot of iffy moments for our family over the years. There have been diseases and disasters. We’re not unique in that. Simply being alive, being able to get out of bed in the morning, having family and friends who offer love and support and having somehow just enough to pay the bills — these are huge deals for a great many of us. These are our finest achievements. And if I could get a bumper sticker that said “PROUD MOTHER OF DECENT, SOMETIMES FUNCTIONING HUMAN BEINGS,” I have no doubt I would. 

Life is evolving through a hurricane of human pollution

Chinese men wearing masks to filter the pollution walk on a bridge near building shrouded by fog and pollution in Beijing, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2017. China has long faced some of the worst air pollution in the world, blamed on its reliance of coal for energy and factory production, as well as a surplus of older, less efficient cars on its roads. Inadequate controls on industry and lax enforcement of standards have worsened the pollution problem. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) (Credit: AP Photo/Andy Wong)

No other species pollutes the way humans do. Many pollutants, like dioxins, phenyls, hydrocarbons, and some pesticides, are so slow to degrade that they can persist for generations in an environment. Others, like the caffeine and birth control hormones we flush down the toilet daily, are released so constantly that they are replaced as rapidly as they are broken down.

Animals are doing their best to weather this hurricane that humanity is wreaking on the natural world. Some, like pigeons and rats, seem to thrive in new urban environments. Others, like coral reefs and giant pandas, seem to be dangerously close to extinction.

Animals that are best able to cope with human-caused climate shifts tend to be the ones to pass on their genes to the next generation. In this way, these selective pressures are the rules by which the “winners” and “losers” are decided, and influence the building blocks (genes) of evolution in a species. We don’t know for certain how this will play out in animal populations around the world, but one place scientists are looking for clues is within lineages that have survived for a long time already in difficult environments, both natural and human-induced.

They have found that animals can adapt to polluted environments, and persist even in environments that are inhospitable to most living things, but that those changes cause evolutionary trade-offs. The ideal solution for one problem (like pollution) can lead to terrible consequences in another process (like reproductive success). This means that even if animals are able to initially survive in pollute environments, they’ll still have to contend with long-term consequences that are difficult to predict, and could ultimately lead to their decline. And species that are able to escape extinction, and even thrive, like urban rats, are going to be drastically different from ancestors that evolved without human influence.

Adapting at a cost

Last month, researchers from Kansas State University and Juárez Autonomous University of Tabasco, in Mexico, reinforced this finding by examining how life in a toxic spring shaped the multiple independent evolutionary lineages at the site.

The Poecilia mexicana species complex is composed of multiple independent lineages of fish that have colonized toxic, hydrogen sulfide-rich springs occurring naturally in river drainages in southern Mexico. Fish from sulfuric springs show a suite of behavioral, physiological, and anatomical differences from populations in nearby, non-sulfuric springs. While the hydrogen sulfide in these springs is the product of a nearby volcano, it can also make its way into the aquatic environment from petroleum refineries, paper mills, and sewage.

Sulfuric and non-sulfuric springs form fascinating natural laboratories

Because the populations in sulfuric and non-sulfuric springs are isolated from each other and have continued on their evolutionary trajectories independently for some time, they form a fascinating natural laboratory that scientists can use to ask questions about how animals adapt to extreme environments.

Hydrogen sulfide is a respiratory toxicant — it shorts out mitochondria (“the powerhouse of the cell”) and makes energy production slow and inefficient. This is exacerbated by the fact that it takes a lot of energy — dedicated proteins and metabolic processes — to detoxify hydrogen sulfide to reasonable levels. Contributing to this chronic energy shortage is that few lifeforms can survive in the extreme conditions of the springs, meaning that food for predators like fish is limited.

Given this energy shortage at multiple levels of biology, the researchers hypothesized that perhaps populations from hydrogen sulfide-contaminated springs adapted to have lower energetic demands than fish from uncontaminated waters. By saving energy on routine maintenance, they reasoned, the fish would be able to allocate more of their limited energy stores to non-survival functions like reproduction.

The team surveyed the body size and routine metabolic rate, two indicators of whole-animal energy demands, of Poecilia fishes from 11 field sites (five sulfuric and six non-sulfuric). They also reared fish from a subset of sites in the lab and conducted the same analyses. This extra step allowed them to track down whether any differences observed between the populations had a genetic basis (since they would remain even after the fish were raised in the same environment).

In support of their hypothesis, fish from sulfurous springs showed evidence of adaptation for lower energetic demands — they were smaller, and had lower oxygen consumption rates than fish from uncontaminated sites, even when reared in the lab. Though some river drainages showed more pronounced differences between sulfuric and non-sulfuric populations, there appeared to be convergent evolution for lower energetic demands in the Poecilia fishes, as multiple, distantly related, independent lineages appeared to find the same solution to the problem of life in a toxic spring.

Life in toxic soup

Like the fish confined to hydrogen sulfide-rich springs, killifish from a number of polluted sites have made similar adjustments in their physiology to adapt to their extreme environment. The species, which holds a special place in my heart, are renowned for their remarkable tolerance of a wide swath of environmental challenges including low oxygen, high salinity, large swings in temperature, and even the microgravity of space. They also have a reputation for being one of the few species that will doggedly persist in sites besieged by contamination, and have been the subject of intensive toxicological research.

This all makes them a model ripe for examining how animals are rapidly adapting to our increasingly polluted world, and intensive study of the genetics and physiology of killifish populations residing in densely populated, urban estuaries on the Atlantic coast has taught us a lot about the population-level effects of pollution.

Compared to animals from clean sites, killifish from polluted areas are far more tolerant of a large class of persistent, toxic compounds like polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), and dioxins. And in spite of huge site-to-site variation in the exact nature of the toxic soup, the fish all seem to have the same basic adaption: desensitization of the aryl-hydrocarbon receptor pathway, an important detoxifying pathway that allows proteins to break down the toxic compounds that would otherwise harm them.

As animals come to grips with pollution, evolution marches on

But why shut down a cellular response that helps to break down pollutants? The working theory is that desensitizing that pathway avoids its over-activation in contaminated sites, which can disrupt normal cell processes and lead to cell death. More focused work on specific populations has shown that these changes evolved quickly, repeatedly, and independently.

Conceptually, the sulfur-rich springs of southern Mexico are not all that different from a polluted killifish environment or a highly contaminated superfund site, where animals are persistently exposed to a cocktail of nasty urban and industrial chemical by-products. As animals come to grips with the new reality of life on Earth with humans, evolution marches on, as has been the case for thousands and thousands of lineages over millions of years. Only now, it’s a race to adapt to what we’re doing to the planet.

Humans are the world’s greatest evolutionary force. How will animals cope with the new reality of polluted habitats? We can look at lineages that have survived for a long time in difficult environments (both natural and human-induced) for clues.

An American education for women in Qatar

The Doha Experiment: Arab Kingdom, Catholic College, Jewish Teacher by Gary Wasserman (Credit: Skyhorse Publishing/YouTube/Georgetown University Qatar)

Parents in Doha wanted American educators in their city partly because they didn’t want their daughters educated in America. Their hope for this “home-delivery college” was that one could deconstruct a modern university, expose students to the good stuff, and keep them away from the bad. And they especially wanted to shield their daughters from the downsides of Western culture. Learning was fine, acquiring job skills was great, and familiarity with the world at large was okay if necessary. But the other foibles of youth that American campuses contained—social rebellion, sexual experimentation, drug and alcohol abuse, a debased online culture, and secular questioning of religious beliefs—not so good. Admittedly, this parental fantasy of separating the positive from the negative in their kids’ college years is a familiar one outside the Middle East. But in Doha, there’s at least the possibility of paying for the dream.

Has it worked? Has moving Georgetown to Doha removed the perils and produced graduates who can seamlessly fill their expected places in this society? Disentangling the impact of a university on its women graduates is as muddled as unpacking their actual educational experiences. From the women students, much is expected, much is feared. Educated women offer a unique catalyst for changing what are largely patriarchal societies. What these women—now composing 70 percent of the student body—do when they graduate is a key test of whether this type of education can actually transform these societies. Or are women graduates compelled to leave their countries to fully use what they’ve learned, what they’ve become? I spent time listening to educated women, both graduates and faculty, wrestle with their time in and out of school.

Amira

Amira took several of my classes and I got to know her as well as any of my students. I watched her develop from a shy, bright, but awkward girl into a socially adept young woman. She entered college with a cynicism that I thought came from living in a society where young girls were expected to listen to older, usually male, adults. Because she was usually smarter than the people she was listening to, she got comfortable quietly disregarding others’ opinions, especially those of us in authority.

I never saw Amira wearing an abaya; she preferred the contemporary casual dress—jeans and long-sleeved blouses—of a globalized teenager with a hint of restraint inherited from her conservative Syrian family. She would not be called conventionally pretty—too many angles on her long, Semitic face—but her large eyes stood out beneath her rimless glasses. She was a diligent student, seldom assertive in class. But her papers reflected someone who took her studies seriously.

She took my question about how a university education affected women like her and gave me a thoughtful response: “Education in the Middle East is a way to get a job, not to change the way you think. For women from families that can afford it, the norm is now education. A university degree no longer takes away your chances of getting married. Most of the women from my graduating class in 2009 are in fact married.”

But there was a price she paid for her education. University had changed her. Even worse for family tranquility, it had affected the way she thought.

“Believe me, my parents didn’t send me to Georgetown to widen my horizons or liberate my mind. But it often does change the way students think.” She paused and gave me a half smile. “After Georgetown, I have become more curious and less certain.”

She had become sadder, perhaps more realistic, about her hopes for the region and others’ grand schemes to improve life there.

And yet when she stopped to think about her classmates, she said that even before the Arab Spring, “Everyone has gotten good at playing the victim.”

Although Amira had passed on the student trip to Israel (“What was the point of it?”), she had signed on to the following year’s visit to Rwanda. It had changed her. Under the rubric “Zones of Conflict, Zones of Peace,” the Office of Student Affairs had organized a series of overseas trips each year. In spring 2009, they had visited the sites of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by Hutus. They went to memorials for victims and talked to people who had lived through the mass murders of some six hundred thousand people. The most meaningful experience for Amira was sitting in on the operations of grassroots courts, called Gaccaca, where people who had killed their neighbors with machetes were confronted by the families of the victims. Amira was especially struck by children who, though they had no memories of the horror, were made to attend the trials. She recalls how impassively they watched.

Not only had the trials emphasized forgiveness, they also deemphasized the country’s tribal divisions. Indeed, the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were never used. What struck Amira was how the memories of the violence were channeled into the courts and schools, and so the searing topic of genocide was in the main kept out of family discussions and social engagements. She compared this with her own experiences among Palestinian refugees and how their memories of war were never institutionalized but were left to the families with all the harsh, personal baggage that parents added to them.

She had not lost her cold-eyed view of the Arab world. She mentioned a story her father told her in explaining the spate of violence afflicting the region, following the Arab Spring. “When you lock people in a dark room and deprive them of a lot of things, including freedom, they may appear calm and adjusted. Then someone comes along and suddenly opens the door. No one files out in an orderly, single line. Instead, they rush out to the light, trampling each other on the way. In their desperation to fit through the narrow opening, they harm themselves and each other. It’s a shame but understandable.”

Rogaia was having none of it. Professor Rogaia Abusharaf, a Sudanese-born anthropologist teaching at our school, clad in black slacks and colorful wedged shoes, brought up a point that often gets raised among women in Qatar when they gather to “talk gender.” What’s wrong with the men?

The women of Doha—those from elsewhere as well as Qataris—hardly struck one as a weak, downcast social group. Rogaia endorsed the consensus view of her colleagues that our women students were better at their studies than the men. “Our Qatari women students are driven. They take pride in their work. And they have a strong sense of urgency toward their studies. No wonder. They worry about depending on men.”

She quoted a friend who said, “Men are cheap.” It is the women who are populating the government agencies. It was the best of our graduates, often women, who were allowing the Islamic world to compete in a global economy. And their families were behind this change, celebrating their success quite as much as that of their men. “Confidence is not an issue for our women students,” Rogaia added. “They have come to us with their family supports already in place. There are few clear-cut boundaries restraining them in their lives.”

Rogaia’s point is that Westerners’ preconceived notions of traditional societies have blinded many to the diversity and complexity of male-female relations. Women traditionally played a strong, if not dominant, role in villages while the men were off partying and hanging out with their buddies. This left the women central to financial, child-rearing, and housekeeping decisions made in the family. The myth of a harem and men with multiple wives is just that, she says: a myth. Qatari men seldom took more than one wife, even in the old days.

The truth in many Arab families is that “the women call the shots.” Rogaia recounted the story of an Arab professor in the social sciences—she wouldn’t tell me his name—whom she was recruiting to work on a project during the summer break. He apparently wanted to join the research but said he couldn’t. He said his wife wouldn’t allow him to travel during the summer. She wanted him at home. He stayed put.

In another story reinforcing the same theme, Rogaia spoke of an Egyptian housepainter who complained to her that a Qatari man he worked for couldn’t make a decision on the color of paint to use for rooms in his house. The Qatari man said he couldn’t decide without his wife present. She was apparently in another of their homes. The painter asked his employer to invite her to the house to decide. No, he responded, I tried but she won’t come. The project was put on hold, indefinitely.

The painter’s conclusion, shared by Rogaia, was that behind the appearance of patriarchy and male dominance, Qatari couples operated “like everyone else.” Where wives are the stronger personality, they will be in charge.

Rogaia disputed the dichotomy between modern and traditional in discussing the roles of women. She concluded bluntly, “I don’t subscribe to the idea of tradition making women subservient or holding them back.”

Boys and Girls Together

Most of the young men and women in our school would be easily recognizable in a middle-tier American liberal arts college. Some were bright, some weren’t; some worked hard, some didn’t. They had the customary range of abilities and interests and identities. Many were mature and motivated. Others were just occupying space. And why not? Education for their children was one of many benefits Qataris and their families expected from the state. Students were fulfilling expectations that they reflect the family’s position among a status conscious people. Georgetown offered another expensive import: a prestigious university degree.

Girls seemed better prepared, more focused on getting good grades, sometimes just smarter. Figuring out why was not beyond faculty speculation. Many of the boys we were teaching, especially those from the Gulf, were already familiar with the material pleasures of life: Porsches, summers on the Riviera, fast catamarans, drivers, servants. They came from closely knit, wealthy families in which they had inherited an elevated position. If they were Qatari, they were guaranteed a well-paying, not-very-demanding government job if they wanted, supplemented by financial grants from the regime that allowed them to live a very comfortable life. Bottom line: Gulf men did not have to do well in school to do well in life. Unsurprisingly, teachers who voiced an opinion thought Qatari male students were less motivated than the women. The president of Qatar University, Sheikha Missad, might concur: “This country doesn’t have a woman problem,” she was often quoted as saying, “it has a man problem.”

None of which is to say that girls didn’t engage equally with the material benefits that came with affluence. A graduate of Georgetown’s first class, Katrina Quirolgico, thought the discrimination facing Qatari women depended on their social class. The higher your standing in the social strata, the less likely you were to face adversity because of gender. The less affluent confronted more social restrictions. As for upper-class Qatari women, observed Ms. Quirolgico, “They do what they want to do.”

But for those not quite as privileged, a university education promised an elevation at home and within their female-subordinated society. It might even provide a path to a lifestyle that could take them out of traditional home-and-hearth roles. Wealthy, educated women did not have to give up their families to have a profession. Education for women was prized in traditional societies as long as the consequences of that education didn’t undermine the family, the male-dominated hierarchy, and the faith.

Those women who made it to Georgetown had already proven themselves outstanding students. One Egyptian colleague described her female students as “strong, confident, and assertive.” If they were intimidated by men or a male-dominated culture, I never noticed it in the classroom. Doing their best in college increased their options, including grad school and delaying marriage. In short, Georgetown opened the possibility of following the Western female models portrayed in the global media.

Mixing with men in academia was a daring step for many of them. After an unsteady first year, most of the women adapted fairly easily. But that doesn’t mean the broader cultures did the same. It was not uncommon to hear that Georgetown women were considered “sluts” for mixing with men by their peers at gender-separated, less-prestigious Qatar University across town. One graduate of our “University of Kafirs” told of a prospective husband closely questioning her over the phone about having gone to college with men and then never calling again.

Social mixing between unmarried women and men was still haram in most Gulf families. When it did occur, the results could in some cases be dire. A colleague told the harrowing story of a female student who had a boyfriend at school. As did others, they would sometimes meet and hold hands in inconspicuous corners of the school building. My colleague thought it rather sweet and innocent. Unfortunately, the female student sent an email intended for her boyfriend to her father by accident. The father, who hadn’t known of the boyfriend, confronted her at home, stripped the girl to the waist, and lashed her with a belt. The girl knew enough to take photos of her injuries at the school clinic and to give an account there of what had happened.

Her mother supported her daughter and they both moved out of the compound where they lived; from there, they went into hiding. The father, with the girl’s brother, came looking for them. My colleague was sure they meant to punish the girl, likely with another beating, perhaps worse. At this point, the police intervened to protect the women. It was now plain, however, that it was too dangerous for the girl and her mother to stay in Qatar. The women had stepped outside of customary boundaries and the males in the family were unforgiving. The women fled to another country in the Gulf where the girl continued her education.

A clash of cultures, which could have had a tragic outcome, seemed to resolve well enough for the girl involved, in part because of her own ability to use the resources that our school made available to her.

Where Do They Go Next?

An independent-minded Pakistani coed who graduated with honors from Georgetown and went to graduate school in California remarked, “My family has both given up on me and is proud of me.”

Outside the classroom, many women confront the binding traditions they have temporarily left. They have increased their value in the marriage market, yet they may intimidate the less-educated men available. The women, too, might have gotten a little bit pickier, less amenable to the pressures put on them by their parents, who have selected partners for them. One former Georgetown student insisted that her husband-to-be had to be a college graduate. Needing to live up to his new wife’s expectations, after their wedding he went back to college to get his degree. Georgetown’s former dean Gerd Nonneman called this a “reinvention of traditional elements” by women graduates. While these women still might be socially constrained, many were insisting on rights in their marriage contract that included continuing their education and having a separate house to live in.

Marriages arranged by parents still occur but in the cases I heard about, those pairing off had a say—often a veto—over any parental choice. As one said, we are not forced into marriage but we are pressured. With gender separation in force, it became somewhat difficult for prospective partners in Qatar to make an independent selection. Often the mothers were key in making the choice for their offspring. My wife, Ann, saw this at a Qatar wedding she was invited to. There were two celebrations held miles apart: one for men, one for women.

At the female gathering, an interesting fashion show occurred. Young women, dressed in very revealing clothes, paraded on a stage in front of an audience consisting mainly of older women, most of whom were described to Ann as being the mothers of eligible sons. This was apparently an opportunity for the mothers to “inspect the goods.” The ones passing this initial physical review would presumably merit a recommendation for their sons and a pass to the next level of selection.

Careers for women in Doha were possible, indeed sometimes easier than in other parts of the world. Becoming a mother in Doha was not a career killer as it could be in the United States. With plenty of servants and extended families, day care was not an issue. But the quality of jobs could be a challenge. Two Georgetown graduates spoke about taking their guaranteed jobs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry had a poor reputation among students as an uncreative place to work and these grads’ story illustrated why.

Apparently, the women were assigned to the fourth floor of the Ministry, where female employees gathered mostly to gossip and do their nails. When they were invited to hear visiting speakers, they were seated in the back and given pro forma questions to ask. They complained that in their time at the Ministry they were not assigned anything significant to do. They both quit after six months. There was a debate in the corridors of our school about whether female graduates of Western universities could ever fulfill their professional ambitions if they remained in Doha. Many recent grads stayed in Doha, if only because they were required to remain for a couple years if they wanted their financial aid from Qatar to be forgiven. Most found jobs in multinational corporations, nonprofits, or government agencies, courtesy of a still-expanding, prosperous economy. Sheikha Mozah was a model for many Qatari women seeking positions in Qatar society. Female students often pointed with pride to the three Qatari women who had become ambassadors. Some added knowingly that none of the three was married.

On the other side of the debate was a realpolitik appraisal that we were educating women for a world that didn’t quite exist in the Arab Gulf. Georgetown’s first and, later, interim dean, Jim Reardon-Anderson, put it this way: “Success of women lies with those who take our education into the global marketplace. Those who don’t are stuck.” In reality, the women grads of Georgetown in Doha were not doing what women who gained a degree from the main campus had available to them. The non-Qatari women educated here have taken wing, the dean added. For the others, they might have to wait for the next generation.

And of course, there was the other side. An Arab friend criticized America for letting its women wander the streets at all hours of the night, vulnerable and unprotected. He pointed to crimes against women and how many were victimized by predators or trapped raising children on their own without the support of a husband or strong family. But women in America have collectively decided they don’t want men’s protection; they want tasks and careers equal to those of men. Pressuring or steering women toward subordinate roles in the family or workplace was no longer acceptable for increasing numbers of them. Justifying this practice because of their “weaker” feminine inclinations or inherited customs was equally unacceptable. If the women themselves rejected these identities, men were unlikely to be able to impose them for long.

Creating choices for individual women was what many Georgetown administrators, faculty, and families recognized and supported. One Georgetown graduate and feminist leader, Melanne Verveer, put the point well: “An educated girl was the single most important development story.”

Many in the Muslim world and elsewhere do not allow women to make their own choices or honor them when made. This will not likely halt the increasing number of women who want to travel their own paths and live with the consequences. Arguing that there were no differences between how women were treated in “traditional” and “modern” societies was not consistent with the experiences of these students. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t considerable variation in both types of society.

Amira

My last meeting with Amira was in a Washington coffee house—one of those modern, mostly glass affairs on a downtown corner but nearly empty on the late Friday afternoon when we sat down to talk. It had just rained, a sudden summer downpour. I was wet and late. She had arrived on time, which was not like her. Amira seemed unusually upbeat. She proudly declared that she had given up cigarettes. She was working for an English nonprofit that campaigned to expand press freedoms and online access throughout the world. I turned the conversation to her life. She said she had a serious boyfriend.

“He’s a Catholic, an American, working as an international consultant.”

“What do your parents think?”

“Actually, he was traveling through Doha and he stopped by to meet the family. He stayed for dinner and it went well.” She said this with a bit of can-you-believe-this in her voice.

“My mother was surprisingly accepting. My father didn’t seem concerned; he worries more about my safety living in the West. He doesn’t understand my living so far away from the family with no relatives to depend on. He doesn’t quite get the concept of roommates.”

“What happened?”

“I just turned twenty-seven. That’s quite old in our family for an unmarried woman. They just want to see me get married. And they don’t seem to care to whom.”

We said good-bye on the corner outside the café. In keeping with my Gulf training, I waited for her to reach out her hand to shake mine, knowing that in Qatar only a few Arab women were willing to indulge this seemingly daring courtesy.

Instead, she grinned and gave me a hug. Yet another step away from Doha.

Walking away, I wondered about her parents and their acceptance of her boyfriend. I thought of my mom when, in my late thirties, I brought home a divorced woman, not Jewish of course, with her six-year-old boy. I told Mom we wanted to get married. She never objected to Ann. Indeed, she welcomed Daniel as if he were already a grandson and seemed quite happy. I was pretty impressed with this late-in-life flexibility. Afterward, other family members mentioned, offhandedly, that despite having witnessed a series of my girlfriends, Mom worried that I was gay. She may have been joking, which didn’t mean she—a woman of stern traditions—wasn’t worried.

Who knows what fears, spoken and unspoken, caused Amira’s parents to accept her changes and choices. Perhaps the prospects she presented them were a vast improvement on the disasters they were witnessing in their own part of the world, not to mention other fears of what they could imagine harming their precious daughter. Maybe her parents were not that different from mine. One can almost hear them all reciting the oft-spoken oath of parents—from many different lands and faiths, of times ancient and current, who—when presented with an offer they can’t refuse from children they can’t control—bravely if halfheartedly respond:

“As long as you’re happy, dear.”

At least 1.3 million comments opposed to net neutrality were likely fake: Report

FCC commissioner Ajit Pai presents his dissent during a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing at the FCC in Washington. (Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

With the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules for internet service providers set to be voted on, and likely reversed next month, critics have slammed the agency’s public commenting process as having been “corrupted” and flooded with more than one million comments that were likely automated by bots and largely in favor of rolling back net neutrality rules.

Consumers have written letters to the FCC and claimed that their names, or addresses were used in comments that they had not written, and some were even listed as having come from people that are deceased, according to the Washington Post.

The public commenting process is in accordance with a law that requires federal agencies accept public comments on proposed rule changes. The FCC intends to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality rules in a meeting on December 14, which critics say will create an unequal internet that favors major telecom companies and provides them with the ability to charge consumers more for certain services.

Data scientist Jeff Kao wrote in a post on Medium that, according to his research, there were at least 1.3 million comments in favor of repealing net neutrality rules.

“It was particularly chilling to see these spam comments all in one place,” Kao wrote. “As they are exactly the type of policy arguments and language you expect to see in industry comments on the proposed repeal, or, these days, in the FCC Commissioner’s own statements lauding the repeal.”

In his finding, Kao wrote, “One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.”

“There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system,” he added.

Kao tallied duplicate comments and reached a total of “2,955,182 unique comments and their respective duplicate counts.”

The Post elaborated on Kao’s findings:

Using an algorithm to sort out duplicate entries, Kao said he was then able to apply another algorithm to identify the remaining comments that could be considered “unique.” Further analysis revealed that even some of the unique submissions shared common language and syntax, suggesting they weren’t unique at all but perhaps written by a computer program to appear superficially different. In total, Kao estimates more than a million comments, supporting Pai’s effort to repeal net neutrality, may have been faked.

Kao found that several comments contained similar language, for example one comment said, “Citizens, as opposed to Washington bureaucrats, should be empowered to buy whatever products they prefer.”

While another comment said, “Individual citizens, as opposed to Washington bureaucrats, should be able to select whichever services they desire.”

Brian Hart, a spokesperson for the FCC says the agency is not equipped with the resources needed to sift through every single comment, the Post reported. Hart shifted some blame onto those in favor of keeping net neutrality rules in place, and pointed out that 7.5 million comments appeared to come from 45,00 distinct email addresses “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.”

He added that there were roughly 400,000 comments in support of the rules that “appeared to originate from a mailing address based in Russia,” the Post reported. However, there is currently no public evidence to back up that claim.

The news surfaces as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman directly called out the FCC and raised on Tuesday and raised suspicions about the commenting process, which he compared to “identity theft on a massive scale,” Salon previously reported.

“In today’s digital age, the rules that govern the operation and delivery of internet service to hundreds of millions of Americans are critical to the economic and social well-being of the nation,” Schneiderman wrote in an open letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

He added, “Yet the process the FCC has employed to consider potentially sweeping alterations to current net neutrality rules has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities — and the FCC has been unwilling to assist my office in our efforts to investigate this unlawful activity.”

Schneiderman concluded that there was a “submission of enormous numbers of fake comments concerning the possible repeal of net neutrality rules.”

Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, and the Trump administration have been set on voting to repeal the Obama-era rules that require that websites be treated equally by internet service providers. But major telecom companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have spent at least “$572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008,” according to Maplight.

However, the Dec. 14 vote is still unlikely to change, even as 60 percent of Americans have expressed support for the current net neutrality rules.