Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2014: Quandary

QuandaryFall/Winter 2014

Inside the media circus in Ferguson, Missouri

The downsides of feminisms pop-culture moment

Which race to choose, which to leave behind

Growing up black in Portland

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editorKathleen Holt

a rt dir ectorJen Wick

comm u n ications coor dinator sBen WaterhouseEloise Holland

copy editorAllison Dubinsky

comm u n ications/ pu blications in ter nHali Engelman

Oregon Humanities (ISSN 2333-5513) is published trian-nually by Oregon Humanities, 813 SW Alder St., Suite 702, Portland, Oregon 97205.

We welcome letters from readers. If you would like to submit a letter for consider-ation, please send it to the editor at [email protected] or to the address listed above. Letters may be edited for space or clarity.

Oregon Humanities is provided free to Oregonians. To join our mailing list, email [email protected], visit oregonhumanities.org/magazine, or call our office at (503) 241-0543 or (800) 735-0543.

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editor i a l a dv isory boa r dDebra GwartneyJulia HeydonGuy MaynardWin McCormackGreg NetzerCamela RaymondKate SageRich WandschneiderDave Weich

12The Late Showby n igel dua r aWe went to Ferguson to get a story, even if we had to make it ourselves.

18Feel-Good Feminism by a n di z eisl erHas feminisms pop-culture cachet doomed the movement?

23Boxed Inby w en dy w i l l isWhich box to check, which people to leave behind

Departments

4Editors Note

6Field WorkConversation Project Tour: Oregon Black History Toward One Oregon Letters to Strangers YWCA of Greater Portlands Social Change Program OH News Veterans Discussion Group Author! Author!

11From the Director

40PostsReaders write about Quandary

44Read. Talk. Think.Saint Friend by Carl Adamshick While the Gods Were Sleeping by Elizabeth Enslin Racism in America by Robert L. Jackson Morning Light by Barbara Drake Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz Utterly Heartless by Jan Underwood

46CroppingsRoger Shimomura: An American Knockoff at Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem

3 Fall/Winter 2014

28Are You My Mother? by l ois rusk a i m el inaShe wasnt acting like herself. Was that so bad?

33Gone Astray by s at ya d oy l e byo ckValues fall by the wayside for a humanitarian aid worker in Sri Lanka.

36The Air I Breathe by i fa n y i d. bel lGrowing up tolerated and underestimated in Portland

Features: Quandary

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We are excited to feature the work of new writers and artists in the pages of Oregon Humanities. The cover of this issue is Juggling by Alejandra Laviada.

If youre an artist and have work that we might consider for the Spring 2015 issue, on the theme Fix, wed love to know about it. Please familiarize yourself with our publication (back issues viewable online at oregonhumanities.org), then send us the

following by March 20, 2015: A high-resolution digital image (300 dpi

at 8 x 10; scans or photographs, JPEG or TIFF)

Your name, the title of the work, the type of media, as well as contact information (email and phone number)

Description of the relationship of the image to the themePlease consider the constraints of a

magazine cover (e.g., vertical orientation, nameplate, and cover lines). We are most interested in works by Oregon-based artists.

Submissions can be sent to [email protected] or by post to Oregon Humanities magazine, 813 SW Alder St. Suite 702, Portland, OR 97205.

Messy Business

W hen she w a s you nger, my d aug ht er h ad a pr et t y good poker face. She could be warm and chatty and unfailingly polite. But if she didnt like you, you wouldnt know it. If she adored you, you wouldnt know it. Shed maybe give a sidelong look and soft thank you before politely taking what you offer, whether words of praise or a chocolate chip cookie. But it didnt mean youd made a lifelong ally of her. She is always in the process of consideration, always protective of that roiling sea inside her.

Because being a parent is often about being a performer, Ive been hyper aware that this watchful, inscrutable child is my audience. I know shes looking for clues about how to beor not bein the world, and over the years, Ive done my best ren-dition of a mother: Ive lectured and cajoled. Ive given advice and instructions. In more grandiose moments, Ive concocted parables and metaphors. But unlike her, Im easy to agitate, less deft at keeping my emotions in check.

Shes ten years old now and only a half-a-foot shorter than me, a preadolescent assemblage of pointy joints and long limbs. She watches me react swiftly and passionately to things beyond my immediate controlthings like bad luck and circumstance, like injustice and inequity. I worry that it cant be good for her to see her mother thrash and rail and struggle to make sense of the world. Some days I wonder if I can pull off being two differ-ent people: the messy, impulsive person I am when shes not in

the roomthe one who always seems on the verge of blurting out a half-formed thought or opinionand the deliberate, capable person when shes there.

The other day as we were walking home from school, she casually mentioned that two boys playing kickball at recess that daythe only two boyswere the team captains. I paused a moment then, using my best calm-mom voice, asked, Why were they the captains? Why not the girls? I was holding her hand as we walked (something that sadly doesnt happen much anymore) and though my voice was steady, Id clenched her hand tightly. In response, she wriggled her hand a bit, not to let go, but to remind me she was therewatching, listening.

The essays in this issue of Oregon Humanities magazine are about people in tough predicaments or dealing with conun-drums. To get to the hearts of these quandaries, we pushed hard on the writers and, in the process, hit some very soft places, bruising an ego here and hurting some feelings there. So what you see on the pages that follow are naked emotions, struggle, doubt, and vulnerability. Because thats what it looks like to be perplexed about how to move forward or to lurch for-ward uncertainly and find on the other side regret or relief or resignation. Its messy, this business of deliberation and action and reflection, of making ones way through the world.

k athleen holt, [email protected]

Editors Note

Cover Art Ideas for Fix

5 Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary

A playful, pointed and curious look at the Northwests leading artists

and creative work.

Saturdays at noon on OPB Radio

Stream it at www.opb.org/stateofwonder

ORHumanities.indd 6 11/3/14 4:55 PM

A playful, pointed and curious look at the Northwests leading artists

and creative work.

Saturdays at noon on OPB Radio

Stream it at www.opb.org/stateofwonder

ORHumanities.indd 6 11/3/14 4:55 PM

Oregon Humanities6

Not Done TalkingA Conversation Project tour inspires ongoing action around race and oppression in Oregon.

I N SEPTEMBER, OREGON HUMANITIES partnered with the Rural Organizing Proj-ect (ROP), a network of volunteer organiza-tions promoting human dignity and democracy, to present the Conversation Project program

H U M A N ITI E S ACROS S OR EG ON

Field WorkWhy Arent There More Black People in Ore-gon? in six communities. The program, led by writer and educator Walidah Imarisha, trav-eled to Grants Pass, Redmond, Astoria, Albany, Newport, and Bay City. Jessica Campbell, an organizer with the ROP, says the group chose communities that could best use the program as a springboard to further organizing.

The partnership grew out of an earlier pub-lic discussion in Josephine County around the question What would you need to still live in this community in twenty years? For people of color, Campbell says, it certainly wasnt a safe place for them to live. White suprema-cist activity in the area has been on the risea trend the ROP is working to document.

Imarishas program, based on a timeline of Oregon history (an excerpt of which was published in the Summer 2013 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine), demonstrates that white supremacist ideology is nothing new in the state. Oregon as a state was founded as a white homeland, Imarisha says. In 1859, Oregon became the only state to join the union with racial exclusionary clauses in its constitu-tionbarring African Americans from living in the state, making contracts, or holding real estate. That language was not removed until 2001. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oregons popu-lation is 2.6 percent African American, which ranks it forty-first in the nation, according to the 2010 Census.

This isnt just history, Imarisha says: Its a living legacy, because this very much walks with each of us every day. Racial disparities in home ownership, employment, access to health care, education, and criminal justice, she says, are a direct result of this idea of the white homeland.

The September tour drew six hundred people overall, and Campbell says two dozen communities have asked to be included on any future tours of the program. After the tour, she

Walidah Imarisha on the Conversation Project tour with Rural Organizing Project in Albany

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adds, three themes emerged about next steps to take in local communities. First was the need for more public education on the history of race in Oregon. Second was the need for a rapid-response mechanism for incidents such as hate crimes. Third was the importance of focusing on institutional racism, such as racial profiling by police or disproportionate disci-plining of students of color.

Justin Chin was one of more than two hun-dred and fifty people who attended the Albany event; he is also one of about thirty community members from Corvallis and Albany who have begun meeting every two weeks to organize around the issues raised by the program. When Chin was growing up, his family members were the only people of Chinese descent living in his hometown of Dallas. I always thought of myself as a native Oregonian, says Chin, a Linn-Benton Community College career coach.

Walidahs presentation really opened my eyes to what a white separatist or whites-only state Oregon was.

Chins informal committee has discussed how to make Linn and Benton counties more welcoming to people of color, how to pool resources and help people access them, and how to bring information about Oregons ongoing history of race relations into local schools. Chin hopes to get community leaders, like the members of the Albany city council, to participate. Its one thing to be grassroots, he says, but its another thing to be grass-roots and be heard by the next level up, and the level after that.

ER IC G OL D

One Oregon?A Conversation Project explores the connections between Oregons diverse communities.

A L L O F O R E G O N H U M A N I T I E S Conversation Project leaders travel, often over long distances, to bring public discus-sions to all parts of the state. Michael Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, and Bruce Weber have done so ambitiously. Between the three of them they have presented their program, Toward One Oregon: Bridging Oregons Urban and Rural Communities, fifteen times in the past year, in such disparate communities as Halfway, Prineville, Tillamook, and Grants Pass.

All three are scholars at Oregon universi-ties, and their program was inspired by their research into ties and divisions between urban and rural communities. The idea going into it was that we would be in these various com-munities ranging from Portland to very tiny places, and people would think about the place

Mike Hibbard, Ethan Seltzer, Bruce Weber

Dear Stranger: QuandaryFor the third time in 2014, were inviting Orego-nians to write a personal letter to someone theyve never met. Call it an old-school pen-pal program, a long-distance community-building initiative, or a new-school commitment to paper in an email age. Were calling itDear Stranger.

Heres how it works: Write a letter. Address it Dear Stranger. Fill a page, maybe two. Write about quandariesa time youve experienced a pickle, a bind, or an impasse. A time you faced a seemingly unwinnable challenge. Sign your let-ter, but do not include your mailing address.

Print and sign the Dear Stranger release form at oregonhumanities.org. We cannot exchange letters without a signed release.

Mail your letter, the signed release, and a stamped, self-addressed envelope (so we can mail you a letter from your stranger), by January 9, 2015, to Dear Stranger, Oregon Humanities, 813 SW Alder St., Suite 702, Portland Oregon 97205.

When we receive your letter, we will exchange it with a letter from another writer. They will get your letter; you will get theirs. Read the letter; what happens next is up to you.

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of their community in the state as a whole, Hibbard says.

Over the past year, however, the three have found that the state as a whole is not necessarily at the top of participants concerns.

People live their lives locally, Seltzer says. And again I think the challenge that that poses for the state of Oregon is that the state of Oregon remains a kind of abstract concept.

Toward One Oregon will continue to ven-ture into Oregon cities and towns in the year to come. People are interested in exploring their own attachment to the places that they live, Weber says.

To bring Toward One Oregon or any of the thirty-three Conversation Project programs offered by Oregon Humanities to your com-munity, check out the 201415 Conversation Project catalog at oregonhumanities.org.

The catalog includes thirteen new conversa-tions on topics such as the meaning of sports, the Second Amendment, and community in the age of the Internet. Oregon nonprofit and community organizations may apply through January 31, 2015, to host programs taking place between March 1 and June 30, 2015.

BEN WATER HOUSE

Dismantling OppressionAn Oregon Humanities grant-funded program works as a catalyst for social change in Portland.

EL I M I N A T I N G O P P R E S S I O N A N D empowering underserved populations is not a simple task. These core issues have been the driving forces behind the YWCA of Greater Portlands Social Change Program, which offered fifteen advocacy training workshops this fall, all aimed at educating individuals through dialogues about racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. The workshops, presented this year at the YWCAs downtown Portland facility, explore class-, race-, and gender-based oppression and are supported in part by a grant from Oregon Humanities.

Program manager Dara Snyder says, Our goal is not only to get people thinking about and understanding core competency areas and fundamental concepts, but also to begin to become activists in their own right and work to dismantle different forms of oppression that are systemically in place.

BE YON D T H E M A RGI NS I n S ep t em -ber, Oregon Humanities kicked off a new online project were calling Beyond the Margins, which is a monthly emailed essay subscription sent (and then posted to our website) during the months the magazine isnt published. We receive a lot of great sub-missions that we simply dont have room to publish in our three print issues each year and were thrilled to be able to share them with you. Visit oregonhumanities.org/mag-azine-extras to read and subscribe.

T H I N K & DR I N K R ET U R N S O r e g on Humanities Think & Drink returns in 2015, inviting the public to think and talk together about big ideas. Speakers lined up for the series include author Barry Lopez, writer and educator Walidah Imarisha, and author Eula Biss. Visit oregonhumanities.org and sign up for our enewsletter to get all the latest news about the 2015 Think & Drink series.

HO S T A C ON V E R S AT ION P R O J E C T Since 2009, more than two hundred orga-nizations across the state have hosted free humanities-based public discussions through the Conversation Project. Oregon nonprofits and community groups can apply until January 31, 2015, to host Con-versation Project programs in the spring and summervisit oregonhumanities.org for more information. And watch out for the application window for 201516 conversa-tion leaders opening in January.

W EL COM E , N EW B OA R D M EM BER S Oregon Humanities board of directors voted in two new members this fall: Jeff Cronn, a partner at Tonkon Torp LLP, and Kimberly Howard, head of education initia-tives for the corporate social responsibility team at Portland General Electric. Find more information about our board of direc-tors at oregonhumanities.org/about-us/board-of-directors/

Oregon Humanities News


The workshops are facilitated by different experts, depending on the topic, and are fre-quently taught in collaboration with the pro-grams partner organizations, such as Bradley Angle and Raphael House of Portland. Some individuals participate in one or two work-shops; others are working to become certified by the Department of Human Services and attend as many as fifteen.

Snyder, an expert in areas of racism and cul-tural humility who teaches workshops such as

Understanding Oppression and Sex, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, says that the aver-age person doesnt understand how issues of oppression work in a community. The broader community is where a lot of the work, in terms of progress and social transformation, hap-pens, she says. She cites a lack of dialogue and honesty regarding these issues as the cause.

[Issues of oppression] are more insidious and covert than they were when discriminatory policies were the norm, she says, but they are

still very real and continue to affect all aspects of our lives. Snyder says the workshop pro-gram, which continues through April 2015, will be successful if it can continue to engage the broader community of people who have never examined these issues.

K ATIE G OU R L EY

War and WordsOregon Humanities debuts a free reading and discussion program for veterans.

OR E G ON H U M A N I T I E S H A S JOI N E D forces with Maine Humanities Council and ten other state humanities councils to pres-ent a series of free, five-session reading and dis-cussion programs for veterans in three Oregon communities in 2015.

The programs are made possible through support from the National Endowment for

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the Humanities Standing Together initiative, which was created to promote understand-ing of the military experience and to support returning veterans. The programs aim to pro-vide opportunities for participants to reflect on military service in a veteran-centered setting, connect with other veterans, and talk about the challenges and opportunities of transitioning from active duty to civilian life.

Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities, says the series is of a piece with OHs other discussion programs.

In all our work, we try to help people con-nect and make meaning, he says. Servicemaybe military service most of allisnt over when it ends. These discussion programs pro-vide Oregonians from different backgrounds and generations the opportunity to connect across deep and complex experiences and commitments.

The program will kick off in Oregon in Jan-uary and run through April 2015, with series in Roseburg, Portland, and Medford. For more information, visit oregonhumanities.org.

BEN WATER HOUSEWe need your support for more connected, imaginative, and vital communities.

Visit giveguide.org/#oregonhumanities to make a

gift through Willamette Weeks 2014 Give!Guide.

Storytellers Take the StageOregon Humanities cosponsors third year of Author! Author!

Oregon Humanities is pleased to cosponsor Deschutes Public Library Foundations Author! Author! literary series, which brings well-loved authors to Bend. Revenue from ticket sales will support library services and programs. The series takes place at the Bend High School Auditorium.

February 11, 7:00 p.m. Garth Stein, bestselling author of four novels, including The Art of Racing in the Rain and A Sudden Light

March 6, 7:00 p.m. Author Ann Patchett who has written six novels and three books of nonfiction, including The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, Run,Truth & Beauty

May 29, 7:00 p.m. Writer Piper Kerman, whose memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Womens Prison was adapted into a Peabody Awardwinning Netflix series

For more information about this series, please visit the Deschutes Public Library Foundation website at www.dplfoundation.org.

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KIM NGUYENHumanity in Perspective graduate Carlos Dory (in green t-shirt)

Author! Author! speakers Kerman, Patchett, and Stein

11 Fall/Winter 2014 Quandary FROM TH E DIR ECTOR

O N E A F T E R N O O N D U R I N G M Y junior year of high school, I made plans with two friends at the end of basketball prac-tice to meet up again that night. As I was leaving the gym another kid on the team approached and asked what we were doing later. I had fielded this kind of question from him before and seized the moment: If we wanted you to be there, I said, we would have invited you. And I walked out the door.

I dont remember what my friends and I did or what we talked about that night. Its possible that I told them what I had said to the fourth kid. Its possible that the three of us laughed. I suspect I was proud of myself for having said the honest and difficult thing that I thought needed to be said.

Now I work with an organization bent on inviting people to say honest and difficult things. We try to get the young talking with the old, the locavore talking with the large-scale

farmer, the fifth-generation Oregonian talk-ing with the newcomer. And we work to get more subtle differences to emerge as wellso that veterans of different wars can talk with one another about their experiences of coming home, so that Oregonians of different back-grounds can talk about the Oregon that is and is not their home.

We make a particular effort to invite people to talk about things that might divide themabout gun ownership, for example, and about the apparent rural/urban divide, and about jus-tice. It is rarely easy to get people who think they disagree into a room together, or to get them, once there, to speak honestly with one another.

But the hardest part of this workthe part Im learning most about through Oregon Humanities effortsis not the saying of dif-ficult things. As I should have known from my righteous declaration after basketball practice, saying honest and difficult things to another person is actually not so hard.

The harder workand the more important workis what comes after the first utterance, after the saying of the first honest and difficult thing. The harder work is genuinely inviting honest and difficult response. This requires that we be as open, even if only briefly, to oth-ers experiences and convictions as we are to our own. This feels to me like the risky and essential core of our work because of the expo-sure it demands, the opening up.

In some contexts exposure is a dirty word. It can mean showing too much and it can mean leaving yourself vulnerable. The kid who approached me after practice did just that: he risked an invitation and he left himself open. My response to him was genuineI spoke what I feltbut I had already made my decision. I already knew enough for both of us.

I dont mean to suggest that I should have invited him to join my friends and me that night. There are plenty of valid reasons to keep some doors closed, to keep some groups small. What I wonder about when I look back is my certainty about who we were and who he was.

With Oregon Humanities work in mind, I wonder especially about developing a practice of uncertaintyabout creating opportunities where all of us can work toward invitation, care, and risk.

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D AY S BROK E WA R M A N D S T IC K Y, the humidity hanging over our shoulders like a load of wet laundry. By mid-August, pro-tests were in full swing every day, marchers rounding the same familiar cracks in the side-walk, casually tossing trash into sewer grates.

It became routine after the first of couple days. The sun drifted behind fat, blue clouds, humidity hung, and the mosquitoes found us.

They always look for me, I told my pro-ducer, Priya. Sweet blood.

We spent our days in St. Louis city and the surrounding county, looking for witnesses or autopsy reports or which politician was fly-ing in next. But without fail, each evening we found ourselves back behind the yellow tape, in the crowd, waiting for the show.

And a show is what it became in Ferguson, Missouri, in the weeks after an unarmed black eighteen-year-old was shot and killed by a white police officer in a city where most of the cops are white and most of the residents are black. Maybe thats what it was from the beginning. Protesters south, cops north. Some-times the police would push in from farther south, trapping the protesters between two lines.

This had the potential to be civil rights history. That, osten-sibly, is why we in the media were there. From either coast, we came to see firsthand what wed previously seen only as black-and-white images from the 1960s: protesters versus police, a changing nation, a signal moment in a national shouting argu-ment about race.

At first blush, the right elements were there: a city wracked by racial discord, white flight, and redlining; aggressive police officers; clusters of protesters more ready to loot than march. If the reminders of the 1960s werent clear enough, at one point a

We went to Ferguson to find a story, even if we had to make it ourselves.N IGEL DUA R A


CNN International news anchor even asked why police didnt clear the protests with hoses.

When I set out for Ferguson from Portland, I imagined reporters as impartial observers, the blue helmets in interna-tional conflicts watching what was happening and sending it back in text, pictures, sound. I wasnt prepared for the role the media would play in the story. I wasnt prepared to deal with how the story permeated every inch of my life, from the food I ate to the people I spoke with. Even when I was back at my hotel alone at night, Ferguson was there: in my clothes that stank of tear-gas funk, garlic, and burning trash; in my dreams.

E V E R Y N I G H T B E G A N L I K E T H I S : D A R K N E S S approached and we parked at the police command center and walked down West Florissant Avenue, the street where Mike Brown was killed. Marchers started doing laps in a giant rect-angle, walking past the looted businesses and the boarded-up windows shattered a night or two earlier. The chants got louder. The police assembled. The sun set. And then, almost by design, something would crack.

The reasons varied from night to night. Missouri governor Jay Nixon issued a curfew, and protesters used the midnight deadline to challenge police. Police would order marchers to keep marching as part of an order against static assembly. Protesters would stop moving, forcing a face-off. Sometimes, the police would simply decide the situation was unsafe, order dispersal, and begin firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and mace bombs into the crowd.

I came to believe I understood the rhythms of police action. First, they would present themselves in ordinary uniforms. Then they would park armored personnel carriers at either end of Florissant. Once I saw officers carrying wooden batons and gas masks on their hips, I knew the night wouldnt go well.

We watched the small skirmishes expand into larger clashes. We ducked into the sole burger joint that stayed open after sundown, its panicked owner handing out sodas between frantic, wide-eyed stares at whoever was walk-ing through his door. We ate, we waited, we smoked, we watched. Then, inevitably, the police would have enough and order protest-ers to disperse. Without fail, the protesters refused. And out came the tear gas. One night, police appeared to use one of my videographers as a tracer round, following him as he scurried away from the gas, launching canister after canister near his feet as he fled.

The two biggest dangers in a place like this come from the crowd. The first is trampling. People, screaming, ran from the slightest sound. We later learned a Maoist revolution-ary group was throwing firecrackers designed to sound like gunfire. The second, of course, is gunfire, fired from the crowd, at the protest or at the cops or at the sky or at nothing at all. One man went to the hospital in critical condition, shot in the neck. Its a small miracle no one else was wounded by bullets.

We got gassed, we went home, we drank. Then we did it again, a day later. We were there to report on a police shooting. We stayed, and it became something else entirely.

R E P ORT E R S L I K E M E A R E T R A I N E D to cover events. Were not as good with tectonic cultural shifts or marking depth in the river of

In this Monday, August 18, 2014, file photo, people stand near a cloud of tear gas in Ferguson, Missouri, during protests.

AP PHOTO/JEFF ROBERSON

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time, but give us something with borders and a running clock, something with boundaries temporal and geographic, and well get you a story: NFL games and political debates, 3 a.m. murder scenes and city council meetings.

Each night, we covered an event. Some of us waited at the command center or in a cordoned-off media staging area in a fast-food parking lot. The rest were in the crowd, following protest-ers up and down Florissant, jamming cameras or recorders in faces, walking backward like campus tour guides. Listen, and youll hear us in the background of most interviews from the protestsWatch your back! Watch your back!chirping to each other to avoid cracks in the sidewalk, a clump of police in riot gear, sullen protesters looking for a fight.

Since we didnt have the boundaries we

The arena is one in which even the slightest turn of the screw makes news, where a single arrest in broad daylight on an oth-erwise unremarkable street is broadcast to the world.

ST. L OU IS IS A R E L AT I V E LY SM A L L M A JOR A M E R-ican city, surrounded and choked off by the larger county. White flight meant prosperous residents left decades ago, heading west into the cities of OFallon, St. Charles, and beyond. South St. Louis County stayed white but never prospered, and is now a bastion of working-class white families, largely Catholic. North County is mostly black.

The police on camera in Ferguson came from South County to enforce the law in North County. That is how it works here. North County police departments grab recruits from South County. Racial tensions endure and are exacerbated by this dynamic. And then theres the matter of money.

St. Louis County is divided into ninety municipalities, tiny fiefdoms sometimes no more than a few square blocks. Each has

We got gassed, we went home, we drank. Then we did it again, a day later. We were here to report on a police shooting. We stayed, and it became something else entirely.

were used to, we created them. The nominal theater was West Florissant, but in truth, it was broader than that. It was an arena in the minds of the men and women on the street, each side wearing their respective uniforms, created by people who followed the #Ferguson hashtag or who donated to a fund set up for Darren Wil-son, the officer who killed Brown. Two sides, a boundary, and a ticking clock. We were back to news normalcy.

At some point, I began to question whether we were doing more harm than good. We had a duty to be therethis much is clear. Who knows what either side might have done with the cameras off.

But the arena we created by being present is different than one construed by a few local TV cameramen and one harried print reporter try-ing to capture video with the phone in her right hand while tweeting with the one in her left.

a mayor and each has a police force. Many of the municipalities wouldnt exist were it not for the police, whose tickets in some cases make up more than 30 percent of the city budget.

The protests in Ferguson were about many things, and one of them is this dynamic of white administrations making money off the fines paid by black residents. The underlying message is that racial disparity between the public service and the people it serves creates friction, a misunderstanding between the people delivering that service and its recipients. This is also a criticism of newsrooms.

There is an effort among news organizations to remedy this. Newspapers have long been strongholds of white, upper-middle-class men, and change is afoot: more women and people of color are rising to positions of power than at any time in the history of American journalism. Look no further than the New York Times, where Jill Abramson was most recently executive editor, replaced by her deputy, Dean Baquet, who is black.

But journalism overall still lags behind the broader employ-ment market, and the recession pushed people of color and women even further out of newsrooms. We are yet further, as an


industry, from the people we cover. Some companies assemble newsroom staffs that racially and ethnically reflect the popula-tions of the cities they represent. But the truth is, this doesnt necessarily bring us closer to the people we write about. Ive been in lily-white Iowa newsrooms and those in the Deep South where half of my coworkers were black, but what Ive observed is that black or brown skin doesnt make a reporter interested in the issues of black or brown people.

This may, at first glance, seem callous. But I find it more cal-lous that we would simply assume a person of matching ethnicity will automatically bring a better understanding of that races culture and experience to a story or beat. This is not a call against diversifying newsrooms, but rather to consider factors beyond race, which might be the easiest and most obvious way to sort people but isnt always the most valuable way.

Simply being brown or black doesnt mean youll understand people any better. West Montgomery, Alabama, had some of the most abject poverty Ive seen in the United States. One reporter

for our jobs, and we would be leaving, unlike those from the local media. We reported what we saw through that prism. And, perhaps worse, we shifted from being necessary observers to partial participants. We couldnt extricate our-selves from the situation, and our presence and attention were affecting the actions that we were observing. This seems to be a fundamen-tal truth about reporting. But to see it happen in Ferguson was to see it in slow motion, stretched across a timeline of days that became weeks.

FROM M Y PER SPECTI V E , TH E SHIFT happened on Tuesday, August 19. It wont be marked as much on the Ferguson calendar. Hardly anyone was arrested and no one was shot. But it laid bare everything that bothered me about our presence at the protests.

assigned to cover the areawhat little coverage we gave itwas black. But he was a military veteran from a good home in New York State. He lived in a completely different part of town, ate at different restaurants, experienced Alabama through an entirely different lens. All he shared with the impoverished in the Deep South was the color of his skin and a presumption from editors that this should unify him and his subjects.

This is, at best, ripe for mocking and, at worst, dangerous. I went to school in Missouri, a hundred or so miles from Fergu-son. It remains a deeply segregated state. Three is the number most often referenced regarding the police in Ferguson: there are fifty-three officers on the police force and only three are black. But the issue goes deeper than that. The police officers monitoring the civil unrest in Ferguson were not from the area. Most police officers who worked that area came from outside of it, from the heavily white, heavily Catholic exurbs south of the city. This is where part of the tension lay, and it was exacer-bated by racial disparity.

Not all of us who went to Ferguson are white; Im not. But we all enjoyed a kind of privilegewe didnt have to be there but

The previous night had been filled with more gunfire and more tear gas, and I wasnt sure why. Protesters marching north were met by police who ordered their dispersal. The police said objects were thrown at them. There was no inciting event, just a drawn-out conver-sation between police and protesters that once again ended in a spasm of violence. It almost seemed rote.

I spent Tuesday morning trying to con-vince people in power to give me Mike Browns autopsy report. I told them a family-ordered autopsy of Brown was the only one available, and I felt that the states version could corrob-orate or refute the facts presented: that a bullet traveled through Browns brain and out of his eye, that the bullets path showed Brown had his arms up, that the case was closed.

The truth would help, I told them. I made the pledge in earnest, because I believed it

Photos taken by the author during the Ferguson protests in August

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thenand I believe it now. The facts, laid out without hyperbole or guesswork, would help answer peoples questions. They were crucial to the story. But I didnt get the report, and at that moment, it felt like the story slipped through my fingers. Not only the story, but maybe the answer to the whole question of Fer-guson and the nightly riots: In what part of his body was Mike Brown shothis back, his hand, his armpit? Did the evidence show he charged at the police officer?

I shuffled to the parking lot and sat in the drivers seat of my black Volkswagen rental. I locked the door and stared at the steering wheel. I felt a ringing in my ears. It took me a moment to realize I was screaming.

That night, the usual issues cropped up early: Protesters fought each other, police intervened. Someone threw something at the officers. The officers ordered their dispersal. But then something kind of magical happened. Maybe they tired of tear gas, maybe the order to keep moving wore protesters out. But for whatever reason, on that Tuesday, the script briefly changed. Protesters, aided by peace-keepers who separated them from the police, began to disperse.

Not all of them, and not all at once, but they did begin to move, slowly, then picking up steam, a river of people with signs and bull-horns and children perched on shoulders walk-ing back into neighborhoods or returning to their cars. It seemed peaceful and calm. Some people even smiled.

But we in the media were still there. And we didnt budge.

Some protesters saw that, particularly the ones who werent ready to leave. The police ordered us to return to the media staging area in the fast-food parking lot. Then they told us to leave. Then they couldnt make up their minds. Should the media go north or south? Should they be forced to walk through the neighborhoods east and west of the protests?

In the meantime, protesters slipped into the media area.

Save us! one man shouted repeatedly. Media! Stand with us! Dont leave! Dont leave! Dont leave!

Police said they saw a protester with a gun. A SWAT team pushed into the media area, grab-bing people they suspected of throwing things at officers or concealing weapons. Guns leveled at the media-protester mix, the police threw

people to the ground, protesters mostly but also some reporters. Canadas CTV News reporter Tom Walters was cuffed after ask-ing a police commander why they were forcing the media from the area.

I just asked a question! he shouted repeatedly as he was held down.

The police stopped distinguishing between protesters and the media. Ferguson was about Us vs. Them, and we had the luck and misfortune to be Them to both protesters and police. Police said we were interfering with their actions. Protesters said we were hiding video of real police abuse.

Into this mix stepped Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol. He took control of the police presence after a week of protests and became the public face of law enforcement. He would later tell a packed, majority-black church that he sym-pathized with their struggle and believed in rights for his own son, a black twenty-year-old with tattoos and baggy pants.

But on this Tuesday night, Johnson was all cop. And the cops couldnt decide what they wanted to do with us.

They herded us south. Then a cluster of police began push-ing us east. Another cluster, apparently not in communication with their fellow officers, ordered us to go west. Chaos. Shouting. More guns from the police, pointed at our faces, the red dots from rifle sights speckling our clothes.

I spotted Johnson on the edge of the crowd, behind police.Captain Johnson, I yelled over the helmets of the advancing

police line, is this going the way you thought it would?He glared at me and walked to the other side of the crowd.We had become the story. We were the people they were try-

ing to disperse. When we moved or failed to move, the police action we were reporting on was what was happening to us.

I believe most of us did the best we could with the situation we were presented. But I also clearly remember dumb tweets that presented a protesters opinion as fact. I remember a reporter from a small start-up news organization putting his hand over another reporters camera to block a shot of protest-ers rolling on the ground in a fistfight. I remember shockingly stupid questions lobbed at police, ministers, and activists dur-ing their respective press conferences.

And heres what I saw: Reporters getting arrested and screaming. Reporters getting detained and calmly waiting five minutes before they were released. Well-known TV faces creat-ing a scene on the sidewalk, bringing marchers to a halta viola-tion of the police order. Cameramen shouting at protesters to get out of their shot. Reporters giving people their water. Reporters sharing milk to wash peoples eyes of tear gas. Reporters run-ning from gunshots. Reporters running toward tear gas. Report-ers screaming. Reporters crying.

And each day, I readied myself for the backlash. Where was it? Where was the outrage? Where were the websites seemingly built explicitly around outrage? Where were the easy stories from lazy writers looking for easy clickbait? Hell, where were the SEO-friendly headlines?

You Wont Believe What This Reporter Said on Camera!


Privileged Media Gets National Race Story Wrong!17 Reasons Reporters Shouldnt Be in FergusonProtester OBLITERATES Media Narrative!Instead, we got praise for our work and tweets hoping for our

safety. All appreciated. All utterly misplaced. We enjoyed the most privilege of those on the streets of Ferguson in August, no question. We had the most choice. And yet, it seemed to me, we were upheld as doing the most righteous of work. But we and the public and social media had created an arena from which no one could escapenot the young, male protesters who liked whip-ping off their shirts and being the center of attention nor the cops in riot gear, sporting small smiles. Each side was trapped in a conflict from which they would not and could not back down, and each side bore a share of the publics blame. We in the media were generally held out as doing good work. The ones being excoriated were the people with the least amount of choice.

Reporters naturally affect the course of the stories we cover and, in the process, we are often seen as righteous heroes, when,

reporters who took to the Sunday talk shows immediately after their brief detainments by police.

There was plenty to report, and it was worthwhile, Jones said. That said, he added,

I dont think journalists should make them-selves the focus of the story.

So if national media couldnt do the job, would local media have handled it admirably, with sensitivity and good judgment? That might not have been true, either.

What I can offer is this: as media splinters and diversifies, more of us will be in more places for longer periods of time. This time, it was Vice News with a live-streaming camera and Argus Streaming News, a news outlet that materialized wholesale at the protests. There was Infowars, the right-wing conspiracy

We got praise for our work and tweets hoping for our safety. All appreciated. All utterly misplaced. We enjoyed the most privilege of those on the streets of Ferguson in August, no question. We had the most choice.

in fact, most of us are just doing our jobs. Nowhere is this more true than in an ongoing crisis, one prolonged over days and weeks, the same tired actors bracing themselves each morning for a fight, the same weary folks heading home after a night of standoffs, violence, close calls, and near misses.

Alex S. Jones runs the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University. He told a panel there that the media were indeed guilty of occasional sensationalism and erroneous reporting in Ferguson, but said they did their duty by bringing national attention to the situation and putting police militarization squarely in the national conversation.

I asked him what we could we have done differently. How was the coverage handled? Were there lessons we could learn for future coverage?

Jones seemed uncertain. He was happy, generally, with the fact that we were there at all. And he believed much of the reporting was crucial to our broader understanding of how police react with their backs to the wall. But he was dismayed by some of the tactics: for instance, a national network news reporter who, on air, loudly pledged to help protesters; and print

theorist site, and the Huffington Post, winner of a Pulitzer Prize.

Were going to be in these places, with these people, affecting the nature of the news. Our role is absolutely necessarythats true. But its also true that we are altering the story as we report it, and theres probably no satisfying solution to this conundrum.

Nigel Duara recently left his position as a reporter for the Associated Press in Portland, where he led coverage of the Ferguson civil unrest, investigated the Boy Scouts confidential perversion files, and unraveled the history of a Bosnian war criminal living for decades in the US. In January, he will begin his new position focusing on immigration and the border as a national writer for the Los Angeles Times.

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N I N E T E E N Y E A R S AG O, T WO F R I E N D S A N D I S AT around a San Francisco bedroom, putting the finishing touches on the first issue of our zine. It was a thirty-two-page, black-and-white, hand-illustrated affair centered on feminism, popular culture, and the representation of gender within both. It included articles about television and movies, critiques of sexist ad campaigns, a handful of reviews of the newest books about women and feminism, and more. Bleary-eyed, fueled by Twiz-zlers, hopped up on idealism, proofreading page after page as Guided By Voices bleated from tinny speakers, the three of us had found a place to channel our anxious post-college energy

Has feminisms pop-culture cachet doomed

the movement?

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girls, You can have ambition, but not too much. The sample concludes with Adichie paraphrasing the dictionary definition of feminist: The person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Bathed in spotlights, the biggest pop star in the world was wearing that maligned label like a curve-hugging designer dress, literally spelling it out for her fans. For once, the hackneyed phrase about having come a long way actually seemed to fit.

All of a sudden, it seems, feminism is hot, trendy, a Thing. Shortly after the VMAs, the actress Emma Watson, beloved for years as Harry Potter s Hermione, gave a speech on the importance of gender equality to the United Nationsnoting, among other things, that It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum, instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If we stop defining each other by what we are not, and start defining our-selves by who we are, we can all be freer. The pop singer Tay-lor Swift, who several years earlier had disavowed feminism, quickly changed tack with a media announcement that, in fact, shed been feminist all along. At Paris Fashion Week, Chanels runway-show finale took the form of a feminist rally, with mod-els draped in the labels signature tweeds raising signs that read, History Is Her Story and Womens Rights Are More Than Alright. Brands like Verizon are centering feminist themes in their ads for wireless plans. And my Google alert for women and feminism, which used to turn up lonely articles with head-lines like Feminism: Outmoded and Unpopular is now teem-ing with woman-power boosterism: Beyoncs Hip New Club: Feminism, Emma Watson Gives Feminism New Life, Why Male Feminists Are Hot.

The culture is exactly where my cofounders and I hoped it would be back when we spent late nights scrambling to finish up that first issue of Bitch. Well, kind of. A little bit. Maybe. It is and it isnt. And thats exactly the problem.

As I write this, for instance, the Supreme Court, in an ongo-ing legal battle, has just placed a hold on a Texas law that aims to close every abortion clinic in the state by demanding that each one meets the medical standards of ambulatory surgery cen-ters. Meanwhile, a feminist video-game critic has been forced to cancel an appearance at Utah State University because of an anonymous threat that stated, in part, If you do not can-cel [the] talk, a Montreal Massacrestyle attack will be car-ried out against the attendees, as well as students and staff at the nearby womens center. This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history. And Microsofts CEO Satya Nadella recently gave a speech to a group of female profession-als in which he responded to a question about how to ask for a raise by saying that women shouldnt, in fact, ask for raises, but instead [have] faith that the system will actually give you the right raisesyou know, the system that has always paid

and the sense that our lives stretched before us, waiting to be filled with purpose.

It was 1995, postriot grrrl but preSpice Girls, and it felt like feminism had only recently reentered the pop-cultural imagination. As magazine hoarders, TV junkies, and cine-philes who hated the word cinephile, we were ready for it. At a time when the first whiffs of the Internet had just begun to per-meate mass culture, the zine we started aimed to take popular culture seriously as a force that shapes the lives of everyoneparticularly young womenand the three of us were excited to make a case that the publication was the right place to center discussions about feminism.

Furthermore, we were interested in the possibility of disarming the word feminism itself. My cofounders and I were born in the 1970s but came of ideological age during the backlash 80s, when feminism was seen either as something that had already happened (Those marches! Those groups of women sitting around admiring their vaginas through spec-ulums!) or something that had utterly failed, leaving many women bitter and love-starved (thanks, Fatal Attraction). The zine we started was called Bitch, but we were equally concerned with reclaiming a word in the subtitle: A feminist response to pop culture. The zine grew into a magazine. The word bitch moved deeper into common parlance, becoming a staple of television and radio, a pangender casual greeting, and a signifier of female badness. But the complexity of making feminist palatable remained.

And here we are, at the end of 2014. Its been slightly more than a month since Beyonc commanded the stage at MTVs Video Music Awards, the word FEMINIST spelled out in lights behind her as her song Flawless sampled the words of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to

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women less than menand be rewarded with good karma. In other words, despite every signal boost for feminism,

every go-girl tweet from Lena Dunham or Miley Cyrus, every feel-good Upworthy video, every nod to leaning in, the beliefs behind it are still among the most contested in political and social life. The question at the heart of every wave of womens liberationare women human beings with the same rights and liberties as men?is posed nearly every day in spheres from politics and policy to entertainment and academia. It comes to the fore with every state restriction on abortion, with every Supreme Court decision like the one decreeing that Hobby Lobby can deny its workers insurance coverage for IUDs, with every epithet and death threat aimed at women who speak out about rape or harassment.

Its becoming clear that this state of affairs, much as wed like it to, wont be solved by Beyonc or Sheryl Sandberg or any amount of savvy capitalist spin. And now I cant help but worry that those of us who hoped that the marriage of pop culture and feminism would yield deliciously progressive fruit might have a lot to answer for.

The aspects of feminism that are currently given voice in pop culture, after all, are the most media-friendly ones, the ones that center on heterosexual relationships and marriage, on economic success that doesnt challenge existing capital-ist structures, on the right to be desirable yet have bodily autonomy. Watsons speech to the UN was centered on get-ting men invested in feminism, in order to better legitimize it; Sandbergs Lean In philosophy is about women conforming to workplaces that increasingly see them not as human beings but as automatons with inconvenient biology. The feminism they espouse is certainly reasonable, but its not particularly nuanced. It doesnt challenge identities and hegemonies so much as it offers nips and tucks.

And I feel, well, a little responsible. I realize how self-aggrandizing that sounds, so let me be

clear: I dont think that Bitch, with its relatively dinky circula-tion of fifty thousand, brought the gospel of feminism to the pop-culture heroes and heroines who now spread its light. But Bitch was part of a zeitgeist of media, both creators and chroni-clers, that spent the 1990s and 2000s blurring the boundaries between pop culture and politics. With the advent of the Inter-net and social media, the deregulation of media properties, the entertainment industry increasingly peopled with hyperlit-erate auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, and a market of overeducated, amply opinionated young people hungry for their product, pop culture became more important than ever before. And a feminist analysis of it was no longer the exclusive realm of academics like bell hooks or Angela McRob-bie, but something you could read in a new website or listen to in a podcast or see in a tongue-in-cheek infographic. If the per-sonal was political, as the old slogan goes, the pop, it turned out, was even more so.

And feminisms focus on pop culture as a locus of activism has in many ways worked. Feminism has made inroads into all aspects of culture, not simply in the numbers of female sena-tors and CEOs but in the ways that we talk about entertainment, about ethics, about life. Accusations of domestic violence, once considered extrinsic to the business of sports and its players, are now the subject of lengthy debates and press conferences. Offen-sive jokes in comedy shows that would have gone unremarked upon a decade ago are now the basis of microcampaigns on social media capable of gaining enough steam to create lasting impact for the joker. Weekly entertainment magazines review new movies with a lens on howor, for that matter, whetherfemale characters are represented.

Still, now that were at a moment when feminism is literally

The culture is exactly where my cofounders and I hoped it would be back when we spent late nights scrambling to finish up that first issue of Bitch. Well, kind of.

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trending (just check the Twitter stats that correspond to Beyon-cs VMA performance), it seems worth considering that it just might not be possible to make a political movement palatable on a mass scale without dumbing it down. The Chanel runway show is perhaps the most egregious example of bandwagon-jumping, but even Watsons well-received speech wasnt exactly ground-breaking in its content. The fact that feminism isnt just for women has been a tenet of the movement since Free to Be ... You and Me, and telling men that they should care about their sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters is oversimplified pandering. Had a non-celebrity stood before the UN to give the same speech, it would have gone unnoticed.

And yet, even for feminist statements that were about as mild and inclusive as they come, Watson received death threats, rape threats, threats to disseminate nude photos of herall the now-regular online abuse that women who speak up on the Internet are depressingly accustomed to. It seemed like a bit of a waste to me, to be honest: Watson would have been scorched for anything she said in favor of women, so she might as well have advocated for something more radical. (State-funded separatist communities! With their own political charters! And pet unicorn helpers!)

Ive thought quite a bit about why much of this trendifica-tion of feminism doesnt sit right with me, and it comes down to nuance. Feminism, as a movement, is not a monolithin fact, the current state of both theory and praxis is better described as feminisms, plural. So from the very start it is intrinsically incompatible with mainstream culture, which requires the broadness of characterizations and expedience of sound bites to make an impact. Marrying pop culture and feminism really does demand that much of what makes contemporary feminism so excitingits diversity of both population and thought, its inclusivity of a range of experiences, its willingness to venture well beyond the academy into areas like prison reform, sex work

as labor, and moreis stripped out to prioritize what is loudest and sexiest.

Ive done that. The magazine I cofounded has done it too. In steadily courting an ever-bigger audience, in saying, Look! Feminism can be popularjust give us a chance! perhaps weve done a disservice to the larger movement. (Some have certainly argued that weve sold it out with the title alone.) I was taken aback recently when a piece of e-mail came across my inbox praising Bitch for its coverage of a particular subject: Its so refreshing to see this in the pages of a mainstream magazine, the e-mail enthused. It was meant to be a compliment, but my mind stuck stubbornly on that word. Mainstream was the thing wed always wanted feminism to be, but the organization itself? The product we produced? Nope, never. It was a reality check: If everything I associated with the word mainstream was banal, overbroad, surface, why would bringing feminism into contact with it be a great idea?

Its hard to remember whether we actually talked, back then, about what a mainstream embrace of feminism would look like. I cant speak for my cofounders, but to me, it was the idea of a complete change in attitude that was most exciting, the idea that someday, someone might mention, in passing, Im a feminist, and the person they were talking towhether woman, man, or otherinstead of saying something like, Huh. Why? or, even worse, Well, I believe in equal rights and all, but Id never call myself a feminist, would simply say, Cool. Me too. It was the idea that being a feminist could stop being an outlying identity and instead be one that seemed so obvious and commonsense that it might not even be worth mentioning in the first place.

Such a state of affairs would require a lot. It would require feminism to become less elite, less associated with only the lives and concerns of white, educated, liberal women. It would have to loosen its ties to rarefied academic spaces dense with

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poststructuralist theory. It would mean less dogma, more flexibility, a big-tent approach that made room for opposing viewpoints to flourish side by side. Thats indeed where feminism has been headed for the past few decades. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that perhaps whats really required is a decontextualiza-tion that comes from thinking about feminism as less of a collective social movement and more of a personal iden-tity. And that, coincidentally, is exactly whats happening with todays trendy feminism.

The past few years have seen a number of attempts to rebrand feminism, generally undertaken with the rea-soning that the movement no longer feels relevant to young people and has too many fusty, humorless asso-ciations to flourish in an age of gifs and memes. In 2013, Elle magazine paired three feminist organizations with three London ad agencies to come up with posters that would serve as rebrandings. All were bright and snappy and visually appealing, but thats about it. None moved beyond the parameters of the exercise itself; trying to remember the resulting slogans or ideas requires a Google search. Rebranding a movement isnt like rede-signing the packaging on a soda can, because feminism was never meant to be a product.

And yet, I worry that turning feminism into a product is the natural result of celebrities and corporations tak-ing it up as a pet causeand that, by extension, those of us who cozied up to the mainstream are responsible for the dumbing-down that will likely result. Chanels embrace of feminism, for instance, feels particularly tone-deaf considering that high fashion still rewards only the thin-nestliterallyswath of female humanity for conform-ing to its impossible ideals; brands like Verizon using the

concept to shill for brand loyalty, meanwhile, cant help but look cynical.

Then again, I keep coming back to what a waggish com-menter on Bitchs Facebook page recently noted, apropos of some bit of trendy-feminism news: Feminism isnt like an indie band that you dont want to see get big because you dis-covered it first. And its true. The feminism that Ive been most excited about for more than eighteen years is the one that shares its enthusiasm, rather than hoards it for cool points. And even if I look askance at Karl Lagerfeld right now, in the end Im not sure if it matters where feminism comes from, pro-vided that the people it reaches ultimately do more than pas-sively take it in. I no longer see mainstream acceptance as the goal, but as yet another tool of activism. Do you want to know more about what feminism means? Do you have questions that cant be answered by Beyonc or Emma Watson, by a TED talk or a blog post? Do you feel responsibility to your idealism and a hunger to see it make changeeven after no one is singing about it or touting it as the next big thing?

Cool. Me too.

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Andi Zeisler is the cofounder and editorial/creative director of Bitch Media. She is the author of the book Feminism and Pop Culture and speaks frequently on the subject of feminism and the media at colleges and universities. She lives with her family in Portland.

Rebranding a movement isnt like redesigning the packaging on a soda can, because feminism was never meant to be a product.


Request for Identity

Name

Who do you think you are?

Race / Ethnicity

White Black/African American Hispanic

American Indian or Alaskan Native Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander

*Theresmore to this story

*

Identity is dynamic.

Itscomplicated.

Some of the above.

E HAVE BECOME A NATION OF inquiry. Every time we turn around, we are being asked our opinion about breakfast cereal or

the governors race or the mood of the coun-try. We send each other surveys to set meeting times and to extend birthday party invitations.

W

W EN DY W IL LIS

Boxed InWhich race to check, which people to leave behind

But then those queries often turn toward us. The purveyors of all those forms say they want to get to know us. They say they want to know who is in the room. So we gamely comply. Of course, the forms include the basic fill-in-the-blanksaddress and phone number, name and preferred salutation.

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But there are also the true, honest-to-good-ness forced-choice questions. The ones where we actually have to choose from among a finite set of options. I do pretty well with gender and marital status and age, though I know that is not true for everyone. Im not even shy about answering questions about my family income. But we are also usually asked to check a box to identify ourselves by race or ethnic origin. And thats where my confidence starts to break down. Thats where my hand wavers and my heart races a bit.

It shouldnt be that hard. The simple story is that I am a middle-aged white lady, and in most instances thats how I identify myself. But that is not the whole story. In fact, my grandfather and his family were Cherokees who stopped in Arkansas and then pulled up stakes and moved again when Oregon looked a little more promising than northern Arkansas through the smudge of the Dust Bowl. Eventually my grandfather met my German-Norwegian grandmother on Main Street in Springfield. She worked at the grocery store. He worked at the bakery. They married, he never returned to Arkansas, and he died in his fifties, when I was not quite three years old.

Now, forty-five years later, I still havent sorted out how to capture that story within the confines of a singleor even a doublecheck mark. I tell it to my friends and loved ones in pretty much the way I relayed it here. But the forms arent asking for a story; theyre asking for an outright choice. And theyre asking for a

choice for mostly good reasonsto make sure that people of color are visible and accounted for in our institutions and our thinking, and to make sure we are cognizant of whos benefiting from society and who isnt.

Most of the time, I check White, non-His-panic. But not always. On forms that seem somehow less official, I occasionally choose Mixed Race or both White and Native American. I am not sure why I waffle or why I sometimes choose one or the other. I suppose it is partially because identity is dynamic, but more than that, it is because I struggle over the right thing to do. Im not used to that feeling. At this stage of life, I have a pretty good idea of what the right thing to do is in most circum-stances. But this case is different. I really dont know what is right. Or to put it more accurately, I feel like both choices are wrong. I feel a sense of prickly discomfort and guilt either way. If I check Mixed Race or Native American in addition to White, I worry that I am being an appropriator or a poseur. As one friend put it, everyone wants to be an Indian until they have to deal with the realities. And I dont want to be that personthe one that appropri-ates but doesnt give back. The one that takes on the mantle of suffering without actually experiencing any of the suffering. The one that takes on legacies of power and pride that are not hers, legacies that she has not earned.

For me, like for many mixed race Ameri-cans, it is easy enough to pass as simply white, and the uncomplicated story often

If I just check White and call it good, I feel like a liar willing to leave a whole branch of my family behind for the sake of simplicity and safety. I feel like I am letting the assimilationists win.


seems like the preferable one, the one less fraught with moral and political risk. After all, Ive had all the privileges of being a white, educated, middle-class woman, and most of the time I think thats where I should stay. I think of Elizabeth Warren and Johnny Depp and others who have been publicly castigated for calling themselves Indian. I dont want to feel like that kind of pretender or subject myself to that type of ridicule, even if its only in my own mind. On the other hand, if I just check White and call it good, I feel like a liar willing to leave a whole branch of my family behind for the sake of simplicity and safety. I feel like I am letting the assimilationists win.

Because the fact is, this is just how the founders and authors of the capital-A, capital-S American Story wanted it, and not just that nasty Andrew Jackson either. Thomas Jeffer-son, who both admired Native culture and set wheels in motion to obliterate it, wrote to the US Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins:

In truth, the ultimate point of rest & happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the US, this is what the nat-ural progress of things will of course bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it. Surely it will be better for them to be identified with us, and preserved in the occupation of their lands, than be exposed to the many casualties which may endanger them while a separate

people. I have little doubt but that your reflec-tions must have led you to view the various ways in which their history may terminate, and to see that this is the one most for their happiness.

Teddy Roosevelt summarized it this way: But a l l of the Ind ia ns who had attained to an even low grade of industrial and social effi-ciency have remained in the land, and have for the most part simply been assimilated with the intruders, the assimilation marking on the whole a very considerable rise in their conditions.

And Henry Pratt, the founder of the notori-ous federal Indian boarding schools, put it even more bluntly when he advocated that the gov-ernment kill the Indian and save the man and then proceeded to aggressively pursue what he called assimilation through education.

So here I am, living in the twenty-first-century West, in exactly the position that Jef-ferson and Jackson and Roosevelt and Pratt designed for me: assimilated and white and anchoring down their vision of civilization in the far corner of the American frontier. To con-tinue calling myself white without footnote or protest makes me feel complicit in imperialism and like a pawn of their genocidal impulses.

I recognize that my version of this dilemma is a small one in a long line of uncomfortableand often unjustproblems created by these check boxes. On the 1790 Census form, the only racial categories included were Free White Males; Free White Females; All Other Free Persons; Slaves. In 1910, they were White; Black; Mulatto; Chinese; Japanese; Indian; Other. The Census Bureau essentially created a new race in 1980 by separating out Hispan-ics. And Native Hawaiian wasnt included as an option on the Census form until 2000, which was also the first year that individuals were allowed to identify as belonging to more than one race. Since the time of the founding, Americans have struggled to find themselves in the categories they have been presented with. But in this particular iteration, it is not that the categories are not there for me; its that I feel like a fraud no matter what I choose.

When it gets down to putting pen to paper and filling in the box with my own hand, ques-tions of identity have other, less visible com-plexities. Yes, they present issues of race. And

This is not the whole story.

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I cannot answer your

questions.

race and all that goes with it have deep political and social consequences. Race is the source of the gravest injustices Americans have perpe-trated upon one another. So those questions are fraught from their inception.

But the questions also raise issues of fam-ily loyalty and gratitude and just plain good manners. In twenty-first-century America, we are rarely asked to think beyond the current moment and its short-term gains and losses. We are rarely asked to acknowledge our past or take account of our future. We are a nation that values the here and now, the hot story of the moment. So when we are asked to identify ourselves by racial and ethnic origin, it is one of the very few times when we are asked, Who are your people? Where did they come from? Who do you bring with you? In that context, when I check the box White and nothing else, I am bringing treasured people along with memy German-Norwegian grandmother and my great-great-grandfather who was a ship boy between Germany and New York. I am bring-ing along sons and daughters of the American Revolution. And I am glad to have them there beside me.

But if I leave it at that, I abandon a whole bunch of other ancestors. I abandon my great-great-grandmother who lived on a dirt farm near the Arkansas-Missouri border, and my great-uncle, whom we remember because of the one photo we have of him with his rifle and his pup dog, as he wrote on the back. I deny my legendary great-grandfather who had a naughty streak and a taste for whiskey. And I leave behind my grandfather, who I remember for his sweet-smelling pipe and gravelly voice. When I think about all of them, its not about passing or blood quantum or federal recogni-tion. It is about my connection to real people. It is about being honest about who I love and honor. And to deny those dear ones to the likes of an Internet provider or census taker or employer feels disloyal and ungrateful. Its like bragging about the accomplishments of one of my children and pretending the other one doesnt exist. It makes me feel like I should be struck by lightning.

I also think that the urgency of the question of who comes along with me across generations and who is left behind is amplified by middle age and its nagging shadow of mortality. As I fill out some of the last school forms I will ever be faced with, I cant help but wonder what boxes

my daughters and their children and the chil-dren after that will check. I wonder whether they will choose the simple boxes they inher-ited from their father, the ones that flow from England and Ireland and Germany. I wonder if I will get left behind because I make things too complicated orworsebecause I chose to make things simple.

All that said, though, I know this dilemma is a privilege: I live in a cloak of whiteness. Anytime I want, I can shelve my moral hand-wringing, check the White box, and never have to think or talk about race and its power dynamics and its ugly legacy unless I want to, and if I do, it can be on my own terms. This abil-ity partially answers the question about what box I should check.

But it doesnt answer it entirely. There is a kind of polite, middle-class timidity in check-ing White in order not to offend, in trying to stay far from the line where anyone could possibly criticize me for being a poseur or an appropriator. There is privilege, yes, in tak-ing the path of least resistance. But there is also cowardice and complicity. I want to come to this question with more fierceness, with more outrage and courage. I am reminded of and chastened by James Dickeys mag-nificent poem For the Last Wolverine. The entire poem embodies the snarl and wildness of an imagined wolverine before the species becomes entirely extinct. In Dickeys poem, the wolverine eats an elks horned heart and mates with the last eagle in the branches of a tree. Here is where the poem ends:

Neither, exactly.


Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland. Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, was released by Press 53 in 2012. She is also the executive director of the Policy Consensus Initiative, a national nonprofit devoted to democratic governance housed at Portland State University.

Your unnoticed going will mean:How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The gluttons internal fire the elksHeart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the blind swallowingThing, with himself, to eatThe world, and not to be driven off itUntil it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you areAnd make of you what I will,Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirstyNon-survivor.

Lord, let me die but not die Out.

In the face of this invitation to eat/ The world, and not to be driven off it, I am ashamed of my own timid poem, of my own quiet dithering over which box to check on the survey about cereal preferences. Despite the best efforts of Andrew Jackson and his cronies past and present, Native cultures are alive and well in America. They have thrived in the face of tremendous adversity and violence.

But in my own lineage, the thread has grown thin. My grandparents are gone, and I fear their legacy is passing into milk-white obscurity. I am embarrassed by the placid-ity of my response. I certainly do not want

to pretend that I carry the lived experience of Native peoples who are facing down frack-ing and depletion of fisheries and centuries of struggle to regain traditional lands. I cant speak to those injustices, but I do carry a dif-ferent lived experienceone that is nameless and amorphous and without a box. If I were a braver woman and less timorous in the face of what my Cowlitz-French friend calls the internalized fear of ridicule or the Johnny Depp syndrome, I might approach those boxes more like the wolverine. I might spit on the form and scrawl across it: I know you have to ask these questions. Go ahead. And what is my answer? You have turned me into a house cat with your Indian Removal Act and blood quan-tum measurements and deep concerns for my happiness that come tied up with a bow of oblit-eration. I am three generations removed from knowing what month the tart-sweet berries turn red or where best to hunt the fattest tur-key. I am declawed and weak and trembling. So heres the answer: I cannot answer your ques-tions. I have no idea what I am. Move along. Oh Lord, let me die. But not die out.

There is privilege, yes, in taking the path of least resistance. But there is also cowardice and complicity.

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LOIS RUSK A I M ELINA

She wasnt acting like herself. Was that so bad?

Are You My Mother?

T H E R E H E I S , M O M S A I D , P O I N T I N G T O one of the men gathered in anticipation of the 4:45 p.m. opening of the dining hall. She whispered so that he wouldnt overhear, but I detected the school-girl excitement in her voice. He was white-haired and hunched into his own world, like most of the residents who waited on cushioned benches that lined the walls, on the drop-down seats of walkers, and on armless chairs. A few, like Mom, sat in wheelchairs. On our way to the dining room Mom had relayed her discovery: Eddie Albert, who had starred with Eva Gabor on the television show Green Acres, lived in her assisted living facility.

As though to confirm what shed told me, Mom called out to the man shed spotted, Do you ever see Eva?

Moms bold overture, lacking salutation, surprised me. I knew her to be shy and socially unsure. Much of my life shed been depressed and anxious, not always available even to those she loved.

When the man didnt respond, Mom repeated her question, this time a little louder: Do you ever see Eva?

Eddie Albert looked up, looked bored. Not in years, he said, then bowed his head again, deny-

ing Mom any further conversation. Mom smiled at me and mouthed, Just like a movie star. Then the dining room doors opened, and an aide greeted each resident and guest by squirt-ing antibacterial liquid into their hands and wiping down the handles of wheelchairs.

JEN

WIC

K S

TU

DIO


Mom had moved to the assisted living facility a few months earlier, and shed told me it was hard for her to make friends. Most of them are a little confused, she said about the other res-idents. They couldnt remember that they had sat with Mom at another meal, much less what they talked about. They couldnt keep track of the important currency of conversation among the elderlychildren, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Like a version of the movie Groundhog Day, each encounter was an introduction. Stories couldnt build. Relationships couldnt form without stories. I could see that even if Mom werent such an introvert, she would be challenged, so Id accepted her invi-tation to dinner. That night, however, Mom was doing a good impersonation of an extrovert. I couldnt remember when Id heard her chatter so much to people she barely knew.

When I got home, I Googled Eddie Albert. He had died three years earlier. I decided not to tell Mom.

ON A NOTHER V ISIT, NOT LONG A FTER TH AT ON E , Id barely stepped through the door of her apartment when Mom called out to me, I want you to make copies of this! She smiled broadly as she handed me a page ripped from the Sun-day Parade magazine. What had caught Moms eye? Large gold coins, a patriotic image embossed on them, that looked like they might contain discs of milk chocolate. The ad promised unbe-lievably low prices for these genuine gold coins, touting this as an unprecedented investment opportunity.

I want you to give the copies to the aides, she explained. They make so little money, and this is such a good opportunity for them to get ahead.

All my life I had known Mom as a quiet, no-nonsense person who examined the fine print on the inserts that came with her medications, looking for potential side effects and contraindi-cations with other drugs. She scrutinized contracts before she signed them. When the credit card company sent a notice of a change in fees, she read every word printed in impossibly small type on pages as thin as tissue paper. She was smart. She didnt fall for scams.

Ive been calling this number all morning, she told me, pointing to the toll-free number on the glossy page I held, but I cant get through.

I quickly read the ad and spotted the language indicating the coins were neither solid gold nor actual coins, but shiny medal-lions commemorating Americas freedom. When I pointed this out to Mom her face fell with disappointment and shame, then guilt as she remembered that shed already given some of the aides the toll-free number.

They probably got a busy signal, too, I told her. A few days later, Moms mail, ordinarily limited to cata-

logs and an assortment of solicitations for Catholic charities, included a small package. I handed it to her, and she immediately

opened it with the unabashed enthusiasm of a child at Christ-mas, slitting through the packing tape on the box with the metal nail file that was always on the side table by her chair. Inside was a gold-colored ring with a large purple stone, which Mom imme-diately placed on the ring finger of her right hand, struggling to push it over a knuckle distorted and enlarged by arthritis. Once past the inflammation, the ring hung loosely, but Mom looked as thrilled as if it held a diamond that had been placed on her finger by her beloved.

This was free, she said, explaining that it was one of three rings she had picked out as gifts for joining the Jewelry-of-the-Month club. One of them is cubic zirconia, she said, in a way that let me know how thrilling the day would be when that ring arrived. She quickly added that she could return any of the monthly selections for a full refund.

I had never seen any rings on her fingers other than her sim-ple platinum wedding band and an engagement ring with a small sapphire in an unadorned, classic setting. While the top drawer of moms dresser contained boxes of costume jewelry bedded in cotton, they were all small, tasteful pieces made by Monet or Trifari.

Mom extended her arm to display the ring.Youve never had anything like it, I said. I know, she replied, with deep contentment. When Mom first moved near me, I imagined taking her to

concerts, movies, plays. Often when I arrived to pick her up, tickets in hand, shed become fearful that there might not be a readily accessible restroom or that the weather would turn foul, and shed decide to stay in her apartment. In the weeks after the purple ring arrived, Mom expressed a desire to go shopping, to go out for lunch, to see a musical. She had resisted joining the bridge group, fearing her own mental skills might have dimmed and made her into the bridge player everyone tolerated but no one wanted as a partner. Now she arranged for an aide to take her to join bridge games whenever they needed a fourth.

Mom is coming out of her shell, I thought with relief. Settling in. Adjusting. This is good. Id never seen her out of her shell.

I WANT TO HAVE A PARTY, MOM SAID TO ME ONE DAY. What kind of party? I said, glancing around the small

apartment. Oh, I dont know. She paused, thinking. I could tell she

hadnt gotten very far in her plans. I could have a shower for the kids, she said, finally, referring to my son and his fiance. Mom and I met with the staff at the facility, who showed us the differ-ent rooms available for private parties. The catering staff pre-sented menu options, and Mom engaged them with stories about the days when she managed food service for a school district.

From deep inside of me and long ago, I recognized a longing for a mother Id never known: this mother. This mother, who

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knew her own wants. This mother, who could express joy and enthusiasm instead of anxiety and judgment. A mother willing to take chances, explore the unknown, strike up conversations with celebrities, make bold fashion statements, throw parties that defied convention.

I remembered the last time my sisters and I had been together with Mom, a dinner to celebrate her eightieth birthday. Because of our differences in age and distance, it had been more than thirty years since wed all been together. Looking around the table at the restaurant where wed gathered, I thought about how I would feel if I were Mom. That year I had a daughter who had left home to go to college and a teenage son with a new drivers license and friends who were more interesting than his parents. My daughter had been home for Christmas, and my joy at having both my children around the dinner table was fresh. I tried not to imagine waiting thirty years to have my children together again and wondered how my mother had tolerated the way our family had splintered and dispersed to the farthest reaches of the country.

Mom wore a pale-blue chiffon dress that night. Her white hair, thinning on top, was freshly styled and sprayed into place. Her exceptionally fair skin, shielded throughout her life from the sun, was remarkably smooth and white. In the photos the waiter took of us, the four of us surrounding Mom, awkwardly

Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2014: Quandary

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