The Legacy of Lynchings in Halloween Decorations

Halloween is a time for "gallows humor," but macabre displays of fake bodies swaying from trees are not a laughing matter for those who understand the legacy of lynching in America.

From Crystal Lake, Florida, to Stratford, Connecticut, hanging dummies have been stirring up debate and protest. This year, however, we’ve had almost non-stop news coverage of noose-related incidents following the events in Jena, Louisiana. Could it be that we still need a primer on one of the more violent chapters of America’s history?

An article in the SF Gate talks more generally about the spate of noose incidents that have made news recently. Sherrilyn Ifill, a Beacon author whose book On the Courthouse Lawn chronicles the history of lynching in America, addresses the disconnect between white and black perceptions of the image of the noose:

"Many white people are unaware of the incredible power of the lynching story for African Americans," said Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and a former civil rights attorney. "Lynching was a message crime. It served to tell the black community that there were boundaries. Don't get too educated. Don't vote. Don't get too wealthy. Don't look at a white woman.

"It was not just used to punish an individual, but to serve as a threat to others."

What can you do to be more sensitive to the racial overtones of certain types of Halloween imagery? Diary of an Anxious Black Woman offers a few tips on how to avoid racist subtexts in your Halloween decorations, costumes, and how you interact with trick or treaters. It's an excellent, informative read.

Happy Halloween!

How to solve the problem of illegal immigration with the stroke of a pen

by Aviva Chomsky

As I’ve been doing interviews and talks over the past several months about my book, "They Take Our Jobs!" And 20 Other Myths About Immigration, I've become more and more convinced that a key, central issue that's hampering those of us who support immigrant rights is the absence of a basic, fundamental ability to say “immigrant rights are human rights.” No politician or talk-show commentator is going to risk saying this—but we have to.

Although I stand by my arguments about the myths I try to deconstruct in the book (Immigrants DON’T take American jobs! Immigrants DO pay taxes! Immigrants ARE learning English!) I also, deep down, think these arguments miss the point. Immigrants are human beings who have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status from the rest of the country’s inhabitants. The only thing that makes immigrants different from anybody else is the fact that they are denied the basic rights that the rest of us have. There is simply no humanly acceptable reason to define a group of people as different and deny them rights.

The Aging of Anxiety

A few weeks back, the New York Times had a great piece on "the greying of the Web." Older people are giving the lie to the grey-haired Luddite stereotype and taking the 'Net with blogs and their own social networking sites where they connect, share stories, gripe, and cheer just like the younger folks do.

At Beacon, we're happy to see the elder blogs giving some attention to 60 On Up: The Truth About Aging in America. Lillian Rubin takes a candid look at the problems and promise of longevity, and her “sharp, brazenly honest exposé” has struck a chord with many people out on the elder blogs and in the more traditional media venues.

Al and Me

by Fred Pearce

Nobel prizewinner Al Gore and I go back a long way. True, I've only met him once. I shook the hand of the man who used to be the next President of the United States, the latest controversial recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, when his climate-change roadshow came to Cambridge in the UK earlier this year.

I was impressed by his first environment book, written before he was even Vice President. But my optimism turned to dust when he failed to turn his knowledge into action while sharing power with Bill Clinton. Gore claims that he did what he could back then, but when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated in 1997, Gore dropped by for a few hours and then found something more important to do back home.

Still, I admire his reinvention as a film star with a message. By and large, whatever the British judge Michael Burton said last week, An Inconvenient Truth is backed up by sound science. Gore would probably admit that it contains some fairly substantial simplifications, even occasional over-simplifications. Of course, this is a film made by a politician for a broad audience, not a scientific thesis, but did he exaggerate the science, as the judge alleged?

Of Hoopoes and Hummus: Resisting Pessimism in the West Bank

by Philip C. Winslow

Driving north out of Jerusalem after twelve months away was like settling back to watch a favorite film. The olive trees and stony hills baked under the late summer sun and the eroded limestone cliffs at Wadi Harimiya— “thieves,” in Arabic—looked as smooth as they must have thousands of years ago. There used to be a tough Israeli army checkpoint at Harimiya, and Israeli settlers once fired a few shots at me and my assistant just south of there when I was a field operations officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The September air smelled hot and clean, and we made it to Qalqilya, in the northern West Bank, with no delays. I even spotted a hoopoe, my favorite bird, with its exotic flight and plumage. As a foreign visitor I could afford to watch birds. Palestinians, who still queued for hours at the grimy checkpoints, wouldn’t have cared whether I was enjoying the scenery. Their lives had not changed for years, and in this territory, about the size of Delaware, more than 500 obstacles of various types, plus the formidable West Bank barrier, kept them from moving freely.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

by Mary Oliver

Edna St. Vincent Millay's library at Steepletop. Photo by Molly Malone Cook from the book Our World.

Edna St. Vincent Millay died on October 19, 1950; she was 58. It was a too short, turbulent, diligent life—a life of life, a life of work. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She was the chosen representative figure of the ’20s, beautiful, flamboyant, honorable to the spirits of love and of art, yet, in those early years, mischievous, even racy. In book after book, she wrote more deeply, more quietly, with a lyrical finery, a feminist stance, an affinity with the natural world, an understanding of the necessity in the world for kindness, for participation.

The Poet Goes to Fenway

Beacon's own beloved Mary Oliver has a poem in the Boston Globe about  baseball, more specifically about our own, beloved Red Sox. It seemed appropriate to send you all to read it today, as the office buzzes with anticipation/dread (in typical Sox fan fashion) over tonight's do-or-die game.

We are also buzzing about tomorrow's blog post, by Mary Oliver about Edna St. Vincent Millay, who died fifty-seven years ago tomorrow. Millay's house is one of many locales featured in the beautiful Our World, a collection of photos taken by the late Molly Malone Cook and accompanied with journal entries and essays by Oliver.

Use the comments field to share your own favorite sports poems, or just to say, "Go Sox!"

One Boy, One Gene, and The Purpose of Life

This week, we've been thinking about families, and in particular relationships between generations. Today, Clare Dunsford talks about the specific challenges and rewards of raising a child with special needs and his own special way of looking at the world.

by Clare Dunsford

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask my eighteen-year-old son with some hesitation one day, suddenly aware of his strong jaw with its newly fledged beard. Looking at my handsome son, I’m not so sure I want to hear the answer to my question. J.P.’s options for the future are limited by the genetic mutation that colors everything in his life. J.P. has Fragile X syndrome, a mutation on a gene on the X chromosome that suppresses the production of a vital protein, dubbed FMR-1. The lack of this protein causes a short attention span, speech and language deficits, behavioral problems, anxiety and unstable moods, and learning impairment, often resulting, as in J.P.’s case, in mental retardation.

On this particular day, my son startles me with his reply to my mundane question: “I want to be just who I am.”  I am used to his gnomic pronouncements—“my Zen-baby,” I used to call him when he was younger. But this time his words take my breath away.

A Fall in The Night

Jonathan Silin wrote My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents to chronicle his experiences learning to care for his elderly parents when their independence began to slip away. Although his years of intimate daily contact with his parents ended with their deaths, his relationship with and understanding of them continues to grow and change.

by Jonathan Silin

I fell this summer. Not a public spill, like the one an old friend took when the heel of her shoe broke off as she stepped up to the podium to say a few heartfelt words at my partner’s memorial service. No, this was more like the fall, instantaneous and without warning, that my 89 year-old father experienced while standing at the sink and brushing his teeth, and which was either the cause of the broken hip diagnosed the following day or the result of an already existing fracture.

Eboo Patel on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Eboo Patel, a Beacon author who blogs at the Washington Post/Newsweek website, has a a fiery post about the controversial author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticism of Islam and embrace of Western values are, in Patel's view, based on misconceptions about what both Islam and the West stand for:

To all those who claim Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the new face of the West:

If your ulterior motive is to deepen a narrative intended to make Muslims in North America and Europe seem and feel forever foreign - to write an entire religion out of entire continents for the foreseeable future - I suggest you reflect deeply on your bedrock principles and your core identity.

If you think the West is about marginalizing large groups of people and maligning their traditions, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali is defending it. If you believe, as I do, that the West is characterized by reason and pluralism, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali is attacking its essence.

‘Eid

by Laila Halaby

Small or large.

Here or there.

That is ‘Eid.

When ‘Eid (either of them—‘Eid al Fitr follows Ramadan and ‘Eid al Adha will be in December) is there, it is a celebration that involves visiting and eating and happiness. Stuffed cabbage and grape leaves, tender lamb, mountains of rice, all consumed in houses at their cleanest, homes whose occupants have pushed aside their troubles for a few days.

When ‘Eid is here, it is all about the telephone and the children getting excited for their gifts, new clothes, and more good food.

Taking Care of Out Teens

by Kai Wright

The gay community has always been trapped by a damnable catch-22: our best weapons in the fight for sexual freedom are our individual choices to proudly declare ourselves queer; yet our greatest challenge is still the insidious pressure to hide.

So it’s no wonder that, nearly forty years after the Stonewall uprising, so much of our politics still turns on delivering a single message to gay folks: come out and stand proudly as who you are. We march our Pride celebrations down main streets worldwide every June. We laud LGBT celebrities who refuse to obfuscate about their sexuality. And every Oct. 11 we celebrate National Coming Out Day.

That urgency is surely appropriate, because the closet is a poisonous place. Those lingering in shame face life with both emotional and physical handicaps. And they harm others—history is littered with closeted gay men and women who have led self-destructive campaigns to demonize others who refuse to stay quiet or accept second-class status. From congressional offices to high school classrooms, people who are struggling to repress their own sexuality are often the most insistent about keeping everyone else in the shadows, too.   

Entitled to an Opinion

by Marcus Eriksen

Two young soldiers, along with five fellow service members, penned a letter from Baghdad to the New York Times in which they vented their frustration and opposition to a war they knew intimately. A few weeks later, they were both killed in the line of duty. Despite marginal pundits like Rush Limbaugh referring to them as “Phony Soldiers” for speaking against the war, the rest of us should take careful note to acknowledge any message of dissent in the ranks that is delivered through a maze of complacency and conformity to our door step.

"Compassionate Conservatism" and the "Undeserving Poor"

by Annelise Orleck

On Wednesday October 3, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that allocated $35 billion over the next five years to expand the number of children eligible for the successful and popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which presently provides the only access to medical care for 6.6 million of the nation’s poorest children. Both houses of Congress approved a bill late this September that would have added at least another 3.4 million children to the program, significantly reducing the number of children who presently have no medical coverage. The President’s veto threatens the survival of the program, as the legislation that originally created SCHIP has come due for reauthorization. If the veto is sustained, children currently covered under the program will once again be without insurance, and the number of children in the U.S. without access to a physician’s care and to vital medicines will continue to grow.

Indigenous Peoples Day

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“I'm convinced that indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity.” Evo Morales, Aymara, President of Bolivia, Democracy Now! September 26, 2007.

Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas. That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization. However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding, for one thing, that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Fasting for Peace

Religious leaders of all faiths are joining together this coming Monday, October 8th, for an Interfaith Fast to End the War in Iraq. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, co-author of The Tent of Abraham, forwarded this call to participate, which you can read in full at his Shalom Center blog:

In grief we see that our culture, our society, our public policies, are honeycombed with violence. Daily murders in the streets of our cities, recurrent mass murders in our schools, violence in our families, on our television programs, our films, our computer games—and in Iraq.

On October 8 we will gather to focus on the last and bloodiest of these. We must end the shattering of Iraqi and American lives by offering American generosity and support—but not control—for international and nongovernmental efforts to assist Iraqis in making peace and rebuilding their country, while swiftly and safely bringing home all American troops.

Today we call for Americans to join in a fast from sunrise to sunset on Monday, October 8, to bring the spiritual renewal and empowerment of fasting to bear on healing ourselves.

Of course, Monday is also a civic holiday—one with highly problematic provenance. Next week we'll get an explanation of the alternative to Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples Day, from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. We're also honoring National Coming Out Day next Thursday with thoughts from Kai Wright and Massachusetts State Representative Carl Sciortino. Remember to check that RSS feed!

Memories of Burma, 1998

Editor's Note: Today, thousands of bloggers around the world are taking part in an International Bloggers Day for Burma. Instead of the usual blogging, they've put up just one post with a image (like the one here) showing their support for the peaceful revolution brought to the streets by thousands of Buddhist monks. We applaud these bloggers for their attention to this struggle, but instead of going dark today ourselves we wanted to share with you this story, from scholar and Beacon author Sarah LeVine, which gives some context to the great acts of courage we've recently witnessed and the vicious reprisals in their wake.

by Sarah LeVine

In mid-September when I began to hear news reports that thousands of monks—and a few days later, nuns as well—were out in the streets of Yangon and other Myanmar cities demonstrating against the government, I could hardly believe my ears.

In April 1998 I joined a group of Nepalese Theravada Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Myanmar. Led by a nun who had been trained many years before in what was then Burma, we flew from Kathmandu to Bangkok, a veritable fleshpot, where we visited temples and hung out with Nepalese novices; and then we flew on to Yangon where, though it was a charming well-laid-out city and the people were strikingly attractive, the military were much in evidence and the atmosphere was palpably repressive and austere.

The Disappearance of Burmese Monks

In a comment on yesterday's post about International Non-Violence Day, one reader prodded us to address the alarming situation in Burma/Myanmar. Many of us are probably wondering what we can do to educate ourselves about the country and to help bring an end to the egregious human rights violations being committed there. Here's a quick overview of some resources to help you learn more and take action.

International Non-Violence Day

October 2 is Gandhi's birthday and also the first International Non-Violence Day. Does this mean that the headlines tomorrow will be devoid of murder, war, and oppression? Unlikely, but it does give us a chance to reflect of the teachings of Gandhi and what they mean to us today.

Book Challenging vs. Challenging Books

by Rick Ayers

An essay on censorship and “book challenging” in schools for Beacon’s new blog would seem a pretty simple piece to write, considering the audience of book lovers and progressives. Narrow-minded right-wingers ban books; thoughtful, well-read people, people who read books published by Beacon Press, want freedom.

Recently, in a class I teach for future high school teachers at the University of San Francisco, a student caused me to think about the complexity of this issue.