Oh the Irony
Written in 1912 in the Pittsburgh Courier: “No longer is a colored prisoner or citizen misused by a policeman in the city of New York.”
It is a rather daunting fact that I only just figured out that I have access to the historical Pittsburgh Courier. I thought the only digitized black paper I had access to was the Chicago Defender. At least this way I will have a greater breadth of perceptions, but it is also rather daunting to run all my names through the search engine again and sort through all the non-relevant entries. There was a practice in the Defender at least of keeping detailed notes about different localities that mean there might be 100-200 names on any one page (so and so rcently visited so and so in such and such a city. so and so was delighted to take tea with such and such. It is overwhelmingly quaint, sometimes helpful, and often annoying). At least I do love the old newspapers!
Racial Profiling
This week on This American Life has a startling fictionalized true story of racial profiling. The total insouciance of the cops and the distress of the child are so striking. I also found Cleve deeply compelling–trying to care for this child he clearly loved, trying to not provoke the police, and trying to protect his dignity through humor. How else could a black man taking care of a white child deal with such repeated police harassment? This to me introduces a different facet to the discussion of trans-racial families. This summer, I have been particularly enjoying Trey’s discussion of his own family. As a white father of a black girl married to another white man, he gets his share of rude treatment and extended stares. I have heard far fewer stories of black parents of a white child. I wonder what kinds of problems they confront and whether this heart-wrenching story is paradigmatic of their experiences.
Masculinity
There’s a conversation going on over at Center and Periphery about what is masculine. To me, this is supremely masculine.
And yes, I am getting back to work. So hard to settle after such a stimulating trip. I have a bazillion different things I want to write about and am not sure even where to start. But I will.
one more post on “Large People” and then I’m done
- This in a store known for a century for its beautiful displays?
After C&P went home, I spent Sunday afternoon browsing some clothes stores. I went to Macy’s and took this picture on my phone. For those of you, like me, unaware of New York stores, Macy’s in New York is the mothership of all department stores. Buried on the seventh floor, accessible only by elevator (the escalators stop at 6) is the big ladies department. I took this picture on my phone because I thought it perfectly captured all the problems with clothing for large ladies designed as an afterthought. Perhaps it doesn’t come across well, but there is no coverage for this poor model. This is way beyond a cleavage show.
:-)
Better to Be Fat and Fit Than Skinny and Unfit
Stephen Blair, “Why is it such a stretch of the imagination,” he said, “to consider that someone overweight or obese might actually be healthy and fit?”
Ever wonder what the categories of size–underweight, normal, overweight, obese, and morbidly obese, actually look like? Someone did a fascinating picture study of BMI’s.
Awesome archival trip
This has been a wonderful two weeks. I’ve spent a lot of hours in the archives and a lot of hours having fun, and not a lot of hours with the internet or tv. As much as I feared not giving appropriate time to each city and each archive, I actually ended up with just about the right amount of time in each place. I spent four days at Howard, two days at the National Archives, one and a half days at Columbia U, four days at the downtown NYPL and half a day at the Schomburg. I had a wide range of processing allowments. At Howard, I made hundreds of copies. At the National Archives, Columbia, and the Schomburg, I took hundreds of digital photos. And at the NYPL, neither photos or copies being possible, my fingers flew across hundreds or thousands of keys.
One of the best things, though, has been spending time with C&P, wandering all over the city. We met DXL for dinner one night (awesome Korean food). We wandered through Greenwich Village. We went to the New Museum. We saw August: Osage County. We hung out at Drama Book Shop. And we talked through a wide variety of issues–art, intellectual, historical, personal.
I feel like New York is a great mansion filled with secret rooms and hidaways, grand ballrooms, ghosts, and dark closets. Oh, and large, glorious libraries.
I feel so full of artistic inspiration. I have an art show, a short story, and a play all brewing. Oh and some history. 
More later.
“Large People”
(This archival trip has been awesome. More on that in a minute.)
A local running store that I have started to frequent for shoes and clothes published the following in their weekly newsletter. I felt compelled to respond. My response will follow. I would appreciate your feedback and opinions.
Running Store:
an obsessed runner
4. You run for the joy of it. Could you accept and embrace a large person who runs for joy and not to lose weight?
Evil is chaos
Saw Batman tonight. Wanted to be a part of a cultural phenomenon, even though I knew it would affect me deeply; indeed, was scared of how it would affect me. Sobbed afterwards. Terribly embarrasing. Still on the brink of tears.
Batman seemed to sum up everything our society is currently afraid of:
Terrorists–causing terror for no reason among “good” citizens.
Freaks with guns–i.e. school shootings. The outcast is terribly scary.
Mental Illness–why are so many people being medicated these days? Has our society succumbed to widespread illness?
Two-faced politicans
Ugly people. Deformed people. (poor Iraq veterans)
Wanting to torture bad guys but can’t quite accept it of our elected officials.
So where do we turn? Vigilante justice. Going it alone. Heaven forbid he accepts help. And when he tries, it just blows up in his face.
When historians write about Batman, it will be to access our society’s mental map. It will be cultural history at its finest.
So why did I sob? I’m not even entirely sure. Partly because of the pervasive sense of evil presented in the film. Not “hollywood” evil, but the kind bandied about by philosophers–would you sacrifice one person to save many? What if that one person was someone you loved? a stranger? Would you sacrifice evil doers to save good folk? Politicians and cops ever being corrupted.
Partly because it saddens me to know this is what our society fears–ugly, mentally ill people–and partly because chaos is the scariest villain I have ever seen. Because it makes me deeply sad that our country forever turns to a single savior to save it. A single savior whose only moral code is not to kill while staring someone in the face, though he constantly dances around it (and who knows how many deaths might have occurred on the sides of the rampage). I don’t understand why that is always the only acceptable morality for Americans. Is this savior complex something uniquely American? We are ever churning out the superhero movies this summer. Is it something to do with a Christian society that no longer quite wants its religious savior and so turns to secular ones?
And perhaps the greatest reason I sobbed is the reason I was afraid to see it in the first place–Heath Ledger. Throughout the movie I was constantly watching his craft unfold and being haunted by the sense that it was his own mental illness that had killed him. His own depression and anxiety.
Why do some people turn their internal pain outwards and others turn it inwards? Some people gender this–men tend to commit violence toward others while women tear themselves up inside. I don’t know. The Joker tore up others; Ledger tore up himself.
I was listening to Backstory (a history radio program) and one of the professors being interviewed said that we tend to heroicize slave revolts, with violence at the center, while disrespecting someone like Sally Hemmings, who through (love? manipulation? something) managed to free herself and her family. She is a rape victim; Denmark Vessey a hero.
I think I sobbed because the movie was great art and it affected me deeply. It psychologically and philosophically tore me up inside.
The spiders on my porch roof are respinning their webs after I attacked them with the vacuum today. With flowers come bugs. With cats come hairballs. I wonder–do religions that take these two sides as the same (a two headed coin, yin and yang)–do they deal with evil better than Christians? Does it make more sense to them? Can they live with it better? If we are forever fighting decrepitude, age, things breaking down, evil, where does that leave us? Forever fighting. Like all our heroes. Forever caught in sequels.
