Beacon Broadside

Black History Month: Personal Histories

The most powerful stories are often those told by the people who lived them, so on the last day of Black History Month, we're highlighting personal histories written by African-Americans. These books do more than narrate the events of one life: they illuminate our shared histories and highlight how individuals are both affected by and alter the times in which they live. Read all of our Black History Month posts. 

Today is the last day to enter our Black History Month Giveaway. Find out more at Beacon.org! 

 

Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence by Geoffrey Canada 

Long before the avalanche of praise for his work—from Oprah Winfrey, from President Bill Clinton, from President Barack Obama—long before he became known for his talk show appearances, Members Project spots, and documentaries like Waiting for "Superman", Geoffrey Canada was a small boy growing up scared on the mean streets of the South Bronx. His childhood world was one where "sidewalk boys" learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Then the streets changed, and the stakes got even higher. In his candid and riveting memoir, Canada relives a childhood in which violence stalked every street corner.

Geoffrey Canada grew up in the South Bronx. He received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Bowdoin College and a Master's Degree in Education from the Harvard School of Education. Since 1990, he has been the President and Chief Executive Officer for Harlem Children's Zone, an organization that offers a comprehensive range of services in a nearly 100 block area in Central Harlem and serves over 10,000 children. TheNew York Times Magazine called the Zone Project "… one of the most ambitious social experiments of our time. It combines educational, social and medical services. It starts at birth and follows children to college. It meshes those services into an interlocking web, and then it drops that web over an entire neighborhood … The objective is to create a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through." 

The work of Mr. Canada and HCZ has become a national model and has been the subject of many profiles in the media. Their work has been featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "60 Minutes," "The Today Show," "Good Morning America," "Nightline," "CBS This Morning," "The Charlie Rose Show," National Public Radio's "On Point," as well in articles in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, and Newsday. 

Mr. Canada was a recipient of the first Heinz Award in 1994. In 2004, he was given the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education and Child Magazine's Children's Champion Award. In October 2005, Mr. Canada was named one of "America's Best Leaders" by U.S. News and World Report. A third-degree black belt, Mr. Canada continues to teach the principles of Tae Kwon Do to community youth along with anti-violence and conflict-resolution techniques. 

Mr. Canada is also the East Coast Regional Coordinator for the Black Community Crusade for Children. The Crusade is a nationwide effort to make saving black children the top priority in the black community. This initiative is coordinated by Marian Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund. 

The National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol called Mr. Canada, "One of the few authentic heroes of New York and one of the best friends children have, or ever will have, in our nation."

Fist Stick Knife Gun is also available as a graphic novel adaptation by Jamar Nicholas.

Watch a New York Times profile of Geoffrey Canada.

Read chapter 20 from Fist Stick Knife Gun on Scribd.

---

Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention by Amy Alexander 

From the Rodney King riots to the racial inequities of the new digital media, Amy Alexander has chronicled the biggest race and class stories of the modern era in American journalism. Beginning in the bare-knuckled newsrooms of 1980s San Francisco, her career spans a period of industry-wide economic collapse and tremendous national demographic changes.

Despite reporting in some of the country's most diverse cities, including San Francisco, Boston, and Miami, Alexander consistently encountered a stubbornly white, male press corps and a surprising lack of news concerning the ethnic communities in these multicultural metropolises. Driven to shed light on the race and class struggles taking place in the United States, Alexander embarked on a rollercoaster career marked by cultural conflicts within newsrooms. Along the way, her identity as a black woman journalist changed dramatically, an evolution that coincided with sweeping changes in the media industry and the advent of the Internet.

Armed with census data and news-industry demographic research, Alexander explains how the so-called New Media is reenacting Old Media's biases. She argues that the idea of newsroom diversity-at best an afterthought in good economic times-has all but fallen off the table as the industry fights for its economic life, a dynamic that will ultimately speed the demise of venerable news outlets. Moreover, for the shrinking number of journalists of color who currently work at big news organizations, the lingering ethos of having to be "twice as good" as their white counterparts continues; it is a reality that threatens to stifle another generation of practitioners from "non-traditional" backgrounds. 

In this hard-hitting account, Alexander evaluates her own career in the context of the continually evolving story of America's growing ethnic populations and the homogenous newsrooms producing our nation's too often monochromatic coverage. This veteran journalist examines the major news stories that were entrenched in the great race debate of the past three decades, stories like those of Elián González, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair, Tavis Smiley, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, and the election of Barack Obama. 

Uncovering Race offers sharp analysis of how race, gender, and class come to bear on newsrooms, and takes aim at mainstream media's failure to successfully cover a browner, younger nation-a failure that Alexander argues is speeding news organizations' demise faster than the Internet. 

Follow Amy Alexander on Twitter.

Read a post featuring Amy Alexander's work on The Root.

Listen to Amy Alexander on WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show.

---

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin's first nonfiction book has become a classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written.

'He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter. . . . Jimmy's essays articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity."
-Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review 

Watch a video about James Baldwin on YouTube.

Read Kai Wright on James Baldwin at Beacon Broadside.

---

Here I Stand by Paul Robeson 

"This amazing man, this great intellect, this magnificent genius with his overwhelming love of humanity is a devastating challenge to a society built on hypocrisy, greed and profit-seeking at the expense of common humanity."
-The New York Times

"[Robeson's] nobility, his language, his encouragement and his praise put me forever in his debt because it inspired me fully . . . to be like him, and to use my life as he had used his, to put into it the commitment of the liberation of his people and all people."
-Harry Belafonte in Restoring Hope

Robeson's international achievements as a singer and actor in starring roles on stage and screen made him the most celebrated black American of his day, but his outspoken criticism of racism in the United States, his strong support of African independence, and his fascination with the Soviet Union placed him under the debilitating scrutiny of McCarthyism. Blacklisted, his famed voice silenced, Here I Stand offered a bold answer to his accusers. It remains today a defiant challenge to the prevailing fear and racism that continues to characterize American society.

"Robeson's book is a perennial, first published in 1958, and now a voice from a different time. It anticipates for black persons the 'moral support of the American majority' with an intensity that now seems evangelical. It's full of a probably tragic hope. It should be read."
-The Boston Globe

Watch Paul Robeson sing for Australian workers.

Read Paul Robeson's bio at American Masters.

Media Roundup: Anita Hill, Boomerang Kids, and What Great-Grandma Really Ate

Boomerang benefits: adult children return home "new and improved." Katherine Newman in Time Ideas. We hope so: about a fifth of men aged 25 to 34 are back at home! For more, listen to this interview on Marketplace Money.

Anita Hill discussed housing and poverty with Melissa Harris-Perry on her new (and fantastic) MSNBC Sunday morning show. Also check out her turn as a Sunday morning pundit on a panel with Maria Teresa Kumar, Harry Smith and Michael Steele. And read our Storify collection of the best tweets about the show.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"What Would Great-Grandma Eat?"  Aaron Bobrow-Strain in the Chronicle Review. A tasty excerpt:

For many foodies in contemporary America, of course, the past has no pitfalls. For them, yesteryear is a land where everyone grew up instinctively knowing the difference between "real" and "fake" food—wisdom we seem to have lost. Recently this attitude has crystallized in a popular axiom echoed from the pages of Pollan's Food Rules to the set of Oprah: If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it.

It's a simple, homey rule with immediate nostalgic appeal. I can even look past its questionable cultural assumptions. (My great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized many of my favorite Ethiopian, Thai, and Mexican dishes as human food.) But, as I dug into the history of battles over bread, I realized that this whole nostalgic perspective had a bigger problem: What if Great-Grandmother was just as conflicted about food as we are?

While researching my book, I discovered that my own great-grandmother's relation to her family's staple food was far less straightforward than I would have assumed. Her story suggests a lot about the contradictory mix of anxieties and aspirations tugging at the mind of early-20th-century eaters when they chose their bread.

A review of Hanne Blank's Straight on Indian Country Today Media Network looks at how the book speaks to two-spirit people. 

 

Lewis Baldwin on Capturing the True Spirit of King

May we pray. Eternal God, our Father, help us to love Thee with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and our neighbors as ourselves. And help us to realize that we have a moral responsibility to be good and conscientious but also to be intelligent. And grant that we will always reach out for that which is high, realizing that we are made for the stars, created for the everlasting, born for eternity. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. From "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits.

Lewis V. Baldwin is professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University and an ordained Baptist minister. An expert on black-church traditions, he is author of The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr.; There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the editor of "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits, the first and only collection of prayers by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"Thou, Dear God": Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits represent the culmination of years of research and scholarship on the life, vision, and activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. I have authored five books on King, served as a co-author of two, and, recently, as the editor of the collection of King's prayers. All of these books take seriously the issue of King's cultural identity and legacy. My aim over the last two or more decades has been to capture as much as possible what constituted the essence of this phenomenal and often controversial figure. "Thou, Dear God" tell me that the answer ultimately lies in the core of King's spirituality, which includes, among other things, his prayers and his prayer life. These are a vital part of that cultural and spiritual bond which connects King to generations of his forebears and to that larger and broader history of Christian spirituality. They are also a part of that spiritual bond that links King to people of different faith claims and ideologies. Any perspective to the contrary misses the point of "Thou, Dear God."

Photo of Lewis V. Baldwin by Daniel Dubois.

Read "Prayers for Social Justice" from "Thou, Dear God" on Scribd.

Purchase in hardcover or ebook at Beacon | Independent Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Powells 

Watch the book trailer on YouTube. 

Uncovering The History of Heterosexuality

Today's post is from Hanne Blank, author of Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Blank is a writer, historian, and public speaker whose work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse. An independent scholar, she is the author of Virgin: The Untouched History and seven other books that explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, the body, and culture. 

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post. 

Since I began to tell people that I was working on the project that ultimately became my new book, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, I've been getting two major, fascinating reactions to it.

One is straightforward disbelief. How on earth, I have been asked more than once, could I consider writing a history of something that has demonstrably always existed, world without end, "male and female created He them," amen? What sort of history could there possibly be to write?

This is, conveniently, also a reasonably straightforward question to answer. Just asking someone to define "heterosexual" is usually enough to illuminate the fact that it's far from a simplistic matter of the fact that males and females exist in the world and are capable of reproducing sexually. All the other things that come up, from love and sexual desire to religion, marriage, and even ticking off the "married, filing jointly" box on one's tax form make it pretty clear that there are definitely parts of what "heterosexual" is that must have some kind of background, some kind of story, some sort of connection to history. Too, people are usually ready to acknowledge that the word "heterosexual" had to come from somewhere, and that this also constitutes a bit of history.

It seems to me that people come to acknowledge that heterosexuality can have a history in much the same way that they come to acknowledge that food can have a history. People have always, obviously, eaten food. But they haven't always eaten the same things in the same ways, or prepared them identically, or ascribed the same meanings to the food they eat. Heterosexuality -- or at least relationships between men and women, which is not entirely the same thing -- is not so different.

The other reaction I get is more complicated, and harder to respond to. Many people, particularly among my queer and feminist friends, have expressed the view that working on the history of heterosexuality is redundant, and possibly a sort of Uncle Tom-ish betrayal. Haven't heterosexuals got enough of a share of our culture's bandwidth already? Does heterosexuality really deserve to have political progressives like me spending time and effort, energy and intellect, to boost its signal?

On the surface, this seems like a very good question. And yet the history of heterosexuality itself reveals, at a stroke, the ways in which any honest history tends to undermine and complicate the structures of power and privilege.

Heterosexuality does, yes, broadcast its priorities far and wide, in our culture, with top billing and extreme prejudice. But it is notoriously, even ludicrously, bad at self-reflection and self-analysis. I've noted many times that it isn't the straight people who've managed to actually get a purchase on the history of heterosexuality. It's the queers -- Michel Foucault and Jonathan Ned Katz, to name the two most visible and important of the heterosexuality scholars who made it possible for me to even consider writing this book -- who've taken on the task of revealing what makes heterosexuality tick.

It's not a simple task, after all. All of us, queer and not queer, are born and bred, enculturated and explicitly educated to see heterosexuality as being not just normal, but Just The Way Things Are. It often seems to take a queer perspective, and queer outsiderness, to get any purchase on the idea that this might not be entirely true, and that perhaps, heterosexuality is instead One Of Many Ways That Things Might Be.

The fact of the matter is that as much as we might want to believe that we ought not lend our attention to the enormous sociocultural juggernaut that is heterosexuality on the grounds that paying attention to it only gives it more energy with which to thrive, none of us live our lives outside of the heterosexual matrix. Even if we despise the heteronormative hegemony, even if we fight the heterosexism of the patriarchy we live in with every waking thought, the fact remains that the less we know about it, the less effective our resistance can be. As much as I dislike thinking of heterosexuality as "the enemy" -- it's not, it's just an idea we use to think with -- we still need to know our enemies. Just as we need to know our friends. Just as we need, quite frankly, to know ourselves.

Each and every one of us, no matter what our own sexual orientation may be or how we may identify, has had to forge that sexual orientation or identity in the long shadow of heterosexuality. It influences every one of us, in every part of our lives. It shapes who we are and how we think. It influences how everyone we talk to thinks. And this ultimately is why it's a worthwhile project to know how it got that power, that reach, and that capacity to determine the shape of our culture and our lives.

It's also why studying the history of heterosexuality is, inevitably, not a thing that lends force and credence to that huge cultural presence, but rather takes it apart, looks at the pieces, and pronounces many of them curiously arbitrary and rather strange. Just like looking at the history of food makes us ask questions about why, for instance, we eat rabbit but not rat, why we make associations between moral virtue and the green astringency of kale but not the sweet purity of sugar, looking at the history of heterosexuality makes us wonder similar things about our attitudes concerning who desires and loves and has sex with whom, and in what permutations of biological sex.

I do understand the fear that having scholars and writers look too long and hard at the history of heterosexuality might seem to lend credence to its claims of superiority. Yet having been through the process of taking that long hard look -- and written a book that will take anyone else who cares to join me on the same journey -- I can only say that it is an experience that can only end up exposing both heterosexuality's forest and its trees.

Beginning with the very foundations, merely in asserting that heterosexuality has a history and explaining how that's possible, a look at the history of heterosexuality confirms nothing so much as the radical notion that human experience is no monolith, and that even the most weighty and powerful of our cultural institutions is only as inevitable, and only as eternal, as any of its myriad individual parts.

Black History Month: Visions of Equality

We continue our Black History Month series with a look at books that address the problem of inequality and provide visions of a better future for people of all races. 

Enter our giveaway at Beacon.org for a chance to win these or other great books on Black History. 

---

 

Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home by Anita Hill

In 1991, Anita Hill's courageous testimony during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings sparked a national conversation on sexual harassment and women's equality in politics and the workplace. Today, she turns her attention to another potent and enduring symbol of economic success and equality-the home. Hill details how the current housing crisis, resulting in the devastation of so many families, so many communities, and even whole cities, imperils every American's ability to achieve the American Dream.

Hill takes us on a journey that begins with her own family story and ends with the subprime mortgage meltdown. Along the way, she invites us into homes across America, rural and urban, and introduces us to some extraordinary African American women. As slavery ended, Mollie Elliott, Hill's ancestor, found herself with an infant son and no husband. Yet, she bravely set course to define for generations to come what it meant to be a free person of color. On the eve of the civil rights and women's rights movements, Lorraine Hansberry's childhood experience of her family's fight against racial restrictions in a Chicago neighborhood ended tragically for the Hansberry family. Yet, that episode shaped Lorraine's hopeful account of early suburban integration in her iconic American drama A Raisin in the Sun. Two decades later, Marla, a divorced mother, endeavors to keep her children safe from a growing gang presence in 1980s Los Angeles. Her story sheds light on the fears and anxiety countless parents faced during an era of growing neighborhood isolation, and that continue today. In the midst of the 2008 recession, hairdresser Anjanette Booker's dogged determination to keep her Baltimore home and her salon reflects a commitment to her own independence and to her community's economic and social viability. Finally, Hill shares her own journey to a place and a state of being at home that brought her from her roots in rural Oklahoma to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, and connects her own search for home with that of women and men set adrift during the foreclosure crisis.

The ability to secure a place that provides access to every opportunity our country has to offer is central to the American Dream. To achieve that ideal, Hill argues, we and our leaders must engage in a new conversation about what it takes to be at home in America. Pointing out that the inclusive democracy our Constitution promises is bigger than the current debate about legal rights, she presents concrete proposals that encourage us to reimagine equality. Hill offers a twenty-first-century vision of America-not a vision of migration, but one of roots; not one simply of tolerance, but one of belonging; not just of rights, but also of community-a community of equals.

Like Anita Hill on Facebook.

Watch Anita Hill discussing Reimagining Equality on Andrea Mitchell Reports.

---

 

Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence by Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt

In 1935, at the height of his powers, Howard Thurman, one of the most influential African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, took a pivotal trip to India that would forever change him-and that would ultimately shape the course of the civil rights movement in the United States.

When Thurman (1899-1981) became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, he found himself called upon to create a new version of American Christianity, one that eschewed self-imposed racial and religious boundaries, and equipped itself to confront the enormous social injustices that plagued the United States during this period. Gandhi's philosophy and practice of satyagraha, or "soul force," would have a momentous impact on Thurman, showing him the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance.

After the journey to India, Thurman's distinctly American translation of satyagraha into a Black Christian context became one of the key inspirations for the civil rights movement, fulfilling Gandhi's prescient words that "it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world." Thurman went on to found one of the first explicitly interracial congregations in the United States and to deeply influence an entire generation of black ministers-among them Martin Luther King Jr.

Visions of a Better World depicts a visionary leader at a transformative moment in his life. Drawing from previously untapped archival material and obscurely published works, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt explore, for the first time, Thurman's development into a towering theologian who would profoundly affect American Christianity-and American history.

Read the introduction to Visions of a Better World on Scribd.

---

 

Race Matters by Cornel West

The fundamental litmus test for American democracy-its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture-remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line.

First published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America. 

Race Matters contains West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

Like Cornel West on Facebook.

---

 

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelly

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From "the preeminent historian of black popular culture" (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

Listen to Robin D. G. Kelly discuss Freedom Dreams on the Forum network.

Contraception and Abortion: Wins and Losses in Two Wars on Women's Health

Today's post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us. Joffe is a professor in the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco (however, the views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Regents of the University of California, UCSF, or the UCSF Medical Center). This post originally appeared at RHRealityCheck.

The last ten days or so we have seen Republicans, and their religious allies, wage a war against contraception—and bungle it badly. With poll after poll showing that a majority of Americans support contraceptive coverage in health reform, and with the 98 percent figure (of American women who have ever used contraception in the context of heterosexual sex) endlessly repeated in the media, the Republicans nonetheless push ahead with this attack, providing a welcome gift to the Obama reelection campaign and much material to political artists and comics. I have lost count of the number of parodies that have been inspired by that now gone viral picture of five male clerics testifying at the Congressional hearing called by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). A picture that of course immediately brings to mind another image of a similar tone deaf moment on the part of social conservatives, the nine men surrounding President George W. Bush as he became the first president to sign a ban on a particular technique of performing abortion, in the case of so-called “partial birth abortion.” It’s no wonder that the term “patriarchy” has made a comeback in the blogs!

The well-publicized refusal of Issa to permit the testimony of a female witness put forward by the Democrats (Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student planning to speak to the health consequences of being denied contraception at Catholic universities) only added to the disastrous p.r. of that event. And the “aspirin between her knees” remark of Rick Santorum’s major funder later that day didn’t help either.

But while the media is momentarily fixated on the second big story this month of a losing fight against family planning (remember the Susan G. Komen Fund fiasco?), less attention has been paid to a related war that is not going well at all. The assault on abortion that has resulted from the 2010 elections--the Republican takeover of Congress and many statehouses and governorships--has arguably produced the most serious threat to abortion access since the Roe decision in 1973. What we mainly have heard about this situation are the statistics, the unprecedented number of abortion restrictions introduced and eventually passed in state legislatures at a time when one might assume politicians’ focus would be on the economy.

But there are real people behind the numbers and details of the restrictions. And the enormous toll that the abortion wars take on individual women seeking the procedure and the providers who try to help them are insufficiently appreciated by the general public. Consider the case of Jennie McCormick, a destitute Idaho woman, a single mother of three, who, facing an unwanted pregnancy and unable to travel several hours to the nearest abortion clinic, ordered abortion medication over the Internet, and is now facing criminal charges. She has also been stigmatized in her own community to a degree to which the fictional Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter fame could relate. Here is a description of her daily life, as described in a British newspaper:

When Jennie Linn McCormack walks the streets of Pocatello, the town in southern Idaho where she was born, raised, and still lives, she attempts to disguise her face by covering it with a thick woollen scarf. It doesn't really work. In the supermarket, people stop and point. At fast-food outlets, they hiss "it's her"! In the local church, that supposed bastion of forgiveness, fire-and-brimstone preachers devote entire sermons to accusing her of mortal sin…."I feel like my life is over," Ms McCormack says. "I now stay home all the time. I have no friends. I can't work. I don't want to take my kids out in public. People can be really mean about what has happened."….

Consider as well the case of Amy Hagstrom Miller, who directs a number of abortion clinics in Texas, under the name of Whole Woman’s Health. Being an abortion provider in red-state Texas is always challenging, but especially in the past year. Hagstrom Miller has had to contend with implementing the state’s new sonogram law, which requires that women come to an abortion clinic at least 24 hours before their scheduled abortion, and receive a sonogram from the same physician who will perform their abortion. Additionally, the physician must give the patient a detailed description of her fetus’ development. The state has made it very clear to abortion facilities that it will enforce the law through inspections and will revoke the licenses of those doctors not in compliance.

It is not the fact of sonograms per se that is causing headaches for Hagstrom Miller. Rather it is the way the law is written. Patients at her facilities routinely receive sonograms. But the ultrasound used to be performed by a trained technician, the ultrasound was done abdominally and not through the more intrusive vaginal probe required by the law, and patients have not had to make two separate visits.

So now Hagstrom Miller has to contend with the frustrations of many of her patients, who typically have to take additional time off work and pay for extra childcare. She also has to deal with the scheduling nightmare of making sure the same physician who performs the ultrasound is available to perform that patient’s abortion. Hagstrom Miller is convinced that this new rule achieves nothing more than putting more obstacles in the way of both provider and patient, and has not achieved its stated objective of changing women’s minds. “It’s had no effect whatsoever on our abortion census.”

But coping with the sonogram law is not the only thing that preoccupies Hagstrom Miller. For the past year, her clinics have been subject to an unrelenting campaign of harassment by the notorious anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue. To give just one example, her facilities have been subject to no less than 13 surprise investigations by various state agencies, including the state health department, the Texas Commission on Environmental Equality, the state Pharmacy Board, and seven of the physicians associated with Whole Woman’s Health were formally investigated. All these investigations were triggered by “citizen complaints” made to various bureaucracies. Among the “citizens” making such complaints is Cheryl Sullinger, the OR operative whose name was found in the car of Scott Roeder, who assassinated Dr. George Tiller in May 2009, and who herself has spent time in jail for her anti-abortion activity.

To give a flavor of what Whole Woman’s Health has had to put up with as a result of Operation Rescue’s campaign, one of the complaints alleged that aborted fetuses were discarded in clinic dumpsters. So clinics’ staff and visitors were subjected to the bizarre sight of public health nurses in Hazmat suits pawing through dumpsters, routinely opening and photographing the content of every bag, on order of the state health department--and finding nothing incriminating.

When I asked Hagstrom Miller to reflect on her dual difficulties with both the new state sonogram law and the actions of Operation Rescue, she responded:

“This past year has been one of the most difficult of my career in abortion care. It is almost surreal to be constantly challenged for the very thing we have been recognized for doing well…The very state agencies that have licensed us have to take the word of people who have a stated goal of closing abortion facilities by any means necessary. Even when, time and time again, we are cleared of the accusations, they (opponents) are successful in that they have tied up our time, spirits, money and energy and distracted us from the good work we could be doing with women and families in our communities.”

Unlike Jennie McCormick, the young Idaho women mentioned above, Hagstrom Miller is not isolated and without resources. Indeed, she is a cherished member of the closeknit national community of abortion providers, and operates daily in a world of loving family and friends. But the situation of both of them reveal one of the greatest challenges facing the reproductive freedom movement: how to connect for the public the two reproductive wars currently being waged—the contraceptive one that that thus far seems a slam dunk victory, and the abortion one that we are losing, and about which the public is no doubt weary.

In the real world, these two issues of contraception and abortion exist on the same continuum. The use of both are affirmations of the belief in nonprocreative sex. At Whole Women’s Health, and at most other abortion providing facilities, patients are provided with birth control information and services. It is reasonable to assume that Ms. McCormick, only marginally employed, did not have access to reliable contraception. This connectedness of birth control and abortion is of course a major reason that social conservatives oppose the former. And it is a key reason why the 98 percent-ers should more vigorously support the latter.

The Prayers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Prayer and the Discipline of Nonviolence

God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem.

Martin Luther King, Jr. From "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits.

Lewis V. Baldwin is professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University and an ordained Baptist minister. An expert on black-church traditions, he is author of The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr.; There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the editor of "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits, the first and only collection of prayers by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Prayer and nonviolence interacted and influenced each other in King's personal life and in the context of the movement he led. In his "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail" (1963), King spoke of "self-purification" as one of the four steps in nonviolent direct action campaigns, the others being the collection of facts to determine if injustice exists, attempts at negotiation, and direct action. Self-purification actually means the practice of the disciplines of prayer, meditation, fasting, and nonviolence.   King's prayers in "Thou, Dear God" constitute a vital part of what he understood as the spiritual dimensions of nonviolence. This is most certainly important for social activists who see a connection between spirituality and their quests for social change and social transformation. Socially active individuals and communities of faith can benefit immensely from a sensitive and careful reading of the prayers in "Thou, Dear God."

Photo of Lewis V. Baldwin by Daniel Dubois.

Read "Prayers for Social Justice" from "Thou, Dear God" on Scribd.

Purchase in hardcover or ebook at Beacon | Independent Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Powells 

Watch the book trailer on YouTube. 

How is ‘Ex-Gay’ a Sexual Orientation?

Matt Kailey is a transsexual man and an award-winning author, blogger, and community leader, as well as a nationally recognized speaker and trainer on transgender issues. He is the author of Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide to the Transsexual Experience (Beacon Press), a Lambda Literary Award finalist and Rocky Mountain News local bestseller, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, from anthologies to professional journals.

I don’t care for the current labels that we have for sexual orientation. I think they are confusing and confining, and I don’t think they truly represent the broad range of sexual and romantic attractions that actually exist in the species.

While labels such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, and even pansexual, omnisexual, and queer can help with self-definition and the formation of communities, they can also result in shame, guilt, or concern when someone’s attractions happen to fall outside of the label that the person has adopted, or when someone is told that his, her, or hir attractions are wrong.

Regardless, it appears that these labels are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, and I am willing to go along with both their intended meanings and the meanings that each individual ascribes to them as he, she, or ze defines his/her/hir own sexual identity. However, I simply can’t accept the notion that “ex-gay” is a sexual orientation.

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (how original – could they not come up with something on their own without stealing from the marvelous organization PFLAG?) are calling for the reprimand of a Maryland school superintendent, saying that his statements broke the school district’s own nondiscrimination policy regarding sexual orientation.

It seems that PFOX sent flyers home with students telling them that no one is “born gay,” and that gay and lesbian students can change their orientation if they want to. Apparently the superintendent criticized the flyers, and now PFOX is complaining that he violated the district’s nondiscrimination policy because ex-gay is a sexual orientation, too!

Sorry, PFOX, I don’t buy it. If a gay or lesbian person can truly change his or her sexual orientation, then that person is no longer gay – right? That’s what “ex-gay” means – right? So if a person is “ex-gay,” then he or she is “straight” – right?

And if an “ex-gay” person is not straight, then, given the dearth of labels that we currently have available to us, that means that he or she is gay – right? So there is no such thing as “ex-gay” – not really. Is that what you’re saying?

Or maybe what you really mean is that we should expand our labels to account for all possible sexual identities and orientations. If that’s the case, then you would certainly support the labels “pansexual,” “omnisexual,” and “queer” – right?

Or maybe what you mean is that we should just get rid of labels altogether and allow each individual to love whomever he, she, or ze happens to fall in love with – no questions asked, no judgments made, and no labels needed.

If that last one is where you’re going with this, PFOX, then I would support it wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that I’m a little off base.

But I think you’re grasping at straws with your “ex-gay is a sexual orientation” argument. It’s not – not unless you are willing to move outside of the categories that we have now, and doing that is going to be dangerous for your side.

Be careful what you let out of the box. You might not be able to get it back in.

Black History Month: The Fight for Civil Rights

We continue our Black History Month series by looking at Beacon's books covering the Civil Rights Era, in particular the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

The King Legacy is the home of the writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Beacon Press. A partnership between the King Estate and Beacon, the series has brought out six books in the past two years: "All Labor Has Dignity," Why We Can't Wait, The Trumpet of Conscience, Stride Toward Freedom, Where Do We Go from Here, and "Thou, Dear God."  With the assistance of General Editorial Advisor Clayborne Carson, who currently serves as Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, Beacon Press is publishing both new editions of work published during King's lifetime as well as whole new collections of his writing.

Like the King Legacy on Facebook to learn more about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writing and life, and watch this interview with Beacon Press Executive Editor Gayatri Patnaik to learn more about the King Legacy. 

Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Often applauded as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most incisive and eloquent book, Why We Can’t Wait recounts the Birmingham campaign in vivid detail, while underscoring why 1963 was such a crucial year for the civil rights movement. During this time, Birmingham, Alabama, was perhaps the most racially segregated city in the United States, but the campaign launched by Fred Shuttlesworth, King, and others demonstrated to the world the power of nonviolent direct action. King examines the history of the civil rights struggle and the tasks that future generations must accomplish to bring about full equality. The book also includes the extraordinary “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which King wrote in April of 1963.

Read an excerpt from Why We Can't Wait on Scribd.

View the teacher's guide: PDF or HTML. 

Read about all of the books in the King Legacy series.

---

 

MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image by Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Bob Adelman

MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image is an unprecedented collection of black-and-white photographs combined with stirring quotations by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This treasured collection includes images by legendary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bob Adelman, and Flip Schulke, and is an unparalleled photobiography that presents intimate moments from King's personal and public journey. We see King in all his manifestations-as a new father and doting husband, as a civil rights champion leading racial protests, and as a charismatic speaker preaching electrifying sermons. Triumphant events like King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech and marching in Montgomery are beautifully captured, as are private moments of him reflecting on his Nobel Peace Prize or working in his study.

Threaded together, these words and images chronicle how Dr. King was not only a driving force for change but also a continually evolving individual. A collection to savor and celebrate, these great photographs are an enduring testament to the life and legacy of an international icon.

Watch the book trailer for MLK: A Celebration in Word and Image on YouTube.

Watch an interview with Bob Adelman on CBS News.

---

 

Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the March on Washington by Charles Euchner

"The March on Washington was a demand to make the Constitution of the United States work for black people—to cash the blank check, as Dr. King put it that day …Euchner’s superb book brings it all back in vivid detail."
-Roger Wilkins, author of Jefferson's Pillow

On August 28, 1963, over a quarter-million people-two-thirds black and one-third white-held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever. In this major reinterpretation of the Great Day-the peak of the movement-Charles Euchner brings back the tension and promise of the march. Building on countless interviews, archives, FBI files, and private recordings, this hour-by-hour account offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those key players and ordinary people who converged on the National Mall to fight for civil rights in the March on Washington. 

Watch a video about the book at YouTube.

Listen to an All Things Considered story about the book at NPR.org.

 

Kamala Harris's Bold Stand for CA Communities: Pursuing Banks Who Fleeced Homeowners

Anita Hill is a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. Hill is also the author of Speaking Truth to Power, in which she detailed her experience as a witness in Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. She writes and lectures widely on issues of race and gender equality.

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris's role in last week's $26 billion settlement with five of the nation's leading banks shows how critical it is for states and local governments take a stand on behalf of homeowners. Last September, according to a story that ran Monday in the New York Times, she walked away from negotiations in the multi-state process. Some of her peers accused her of grandstanding. She stood her ground and negotiated the largest share of the settlement that may rise above the amount announced last week. The money Harris negotiated is more than a mere chance to compensate people duped by the banks, it begins to restore a critical part of our national identity lost to individual and corporate greed that trumped moral and even sound economic judgment. 

In Reimagining Equality, I outlined how the foreclosure epidemic threatened America's identity as a place where one comes to finds a home and builds from there a sense of belonging to a community and a nation.

Recently, in a speech to a crowd gathered at a neighborhood community center, President Obama explained why the threat to home ownership wreaks more than economic havoc.

"This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes, the place where we invest our nest egg, place where we raise our family, the place where we plant roots in a community, the place where we build memories," Obama said.

Since October, I've visited a over a dozen cities and spoken to countless individuals who hold on cautiously to their belief in homeownership as a tenet of the American Dream. In New Orleans, people who are still recovering from the ravages of Katrina sat beside people who struggle to pay mortgages that have escalated out of control. In Detroit, I visited neighborhoods smattered with boarded up houses that stand along side occupied residences. Yet a neighborhood school, lead by one exceptionally courageous and committed principal and her dedicated teachers, flourishes. The schools and the children that pour out of those homes remind me that a new generation of children will live surrounded by a "new normal" of devastation. Will the best and brightest of them have a reason to stay to raise their children in their old neighborhoods?

Not everyone I met has a home that is underwater; some don't own homes at all. But they all have an investment in the idea that home is critical to them in finding a place in a thriving democracy.

The multi-state settlement will go far in showing that their trust in a government that will protect their chance to "plant roots in a community" is not misplaced. Yet, the agreement reached by the Attorneys General should not preclude state and local governments from pursuing banks who fleeced consumers. Those entities know all too well the devastating impact of the housing crisis. They also know that it will take more than even the billions on the table today to restore communities so that they are once again places where people can raise their families.

10 Surprising Facts About Heterosexuality

Today's post is from Hanne Blank, author of Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Blank is a writer, historian, and public speaker whose work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse. An independent scholar, she is the author of Virgin: The Untouched History and seven other books that explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, the body, and culture. 

This post originally appeared at Huffington Post. 

When I began work on my book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, I often got teased by friends who wondered whether, in working on the history of something so commonplace, I was going to come across anything that wasn't already common knowledge. Surely, they thought, it would all be very straightforward, very vanilla, very Leave It to Beaver, and if there were anything in there they didn't already know about, they'd be surprised.

As it turned out, this was far from true. The history of heterosexuality is actually a motherlode of remarkable and sometimes deeply strange stuff, from the broad-brush conceptual to the kinds of tidbits you add to your cocktail-party repertoire. Not only does the history of heterosexuality offer up surprises that make you rethink what "heterosexual" is and means, it also makes you realize how little we really know about this thing about which most of us assume we already know everything we need to. The following are 10 of my personal favorites.

1. May 6, 1868

The words "heterosexual" and "homosexual" were coined on this day in a letter written by Austro-Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny to the German legal eagle and proto-gay rights crusader Karl Ulrichs.

Technically speaking, before that fateful Wednesday, it was impossible for anyone in the world to be either a heterosexual or a homosexual, because the words didn't exist yet. [Image: First mention of the word "homosexual" and "heterosexual" (in a letter from the Austro-Hungarianwriter / from) Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1868 Photo: Hungarian National Library.]

Not Kirchberg and Feenstra. [Photo: NBC Universal]

2. Kirchberg vs Feenstra

Married American women didn't gain full legal control over their own financial assets until after this landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1981. In overturning "head and master" laws that gave husbands a legal upper hand over financial decision making within marriages, this decision finally made it illegal for a husband like Louisianan Joan Feenstra's, awaiting trial for sexually molesting his daughter, to decide to do something classy like mortgage the house for which his wife had paid in order to pay his legal bills. (And no, that date's not a typo: 1981.)

3. The "Science" of Mutual Heterosexual Orgasm

The ideal that men and women should have mutually orgasmic sex developed during the same time period as the idea of "heterosexuality" did, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This novel notion helped establish the new notion of distinctively "heterosexual" desire and pleasure as scientific and medically proper.

By 1922, Dr. Walter Robie would write that married coitus had to be "mutually pleasurable and simultaneously climactic... if it is to be scientifically correct."

4. Science Has Never Defined "Heterosexual"

Never mind the question of whether there's such a thing as distinctively "gay genes" or "gay brains"; we don't even know if there's such a thing as straight ones. Physical and biomedical science have yet to define or even confirm the empirical existence of heterosexuality... no one's ever even tried.

This means that scientific research being conducted on the question of what makes people gay is being done without a properly characterized control to compare with. That's bad science. 

5. Survey Says... We Lie a Lot About Sex

If you think you're better off trusting the statistics in sex surveys than what your friends say about their sex lives for an idea of what "normal heterosexuality" looks like, think again.

Research done on the accuracy of self-reporting in sexuality surveys, including a 2009 study in the Journal of Sex Research, demonstrates that in sex research as in life, what people claim about their sex lives often doesn't match up to reality. A better bet is to consider sex research stats as a representation of what's possible, not what's typical. 

6. Freud, Father of Foreplay

Though men and women have engaged in various forms of non-intercourse sexual activity since time immemorial, the idea that there was a necessary opening act to sexual intercourse called "foreplay" is something we owe to Sigmund Freud and a handful of other psychologists and medical types around the turn of the 20th century.

7. When Going Down Meant Going... Down

Some late 19th-century authorities and physicians believed very sincerely that any woman who was interested in having a man perform oral sex on her was a sadist, and any man who complied was dangerously passive and submissive. Performing oral sex on women, they believed, was a "gateway drug" that led inevitably to ever more depraved acts of submission, and could possibly drag men all the way down to what they saw as the bottom of the heap, making them into the kind of men who provided oral sex to other men.

8. What's Love Got to Do With It

For most of Western history, it was considered shameful to feel or display too much romantic emotion toward a spouse. Treating one's wife "as one would a mistress" was excessive and unseemly; as the Lady's Magazine lectured its English readership in 1774, "the intent of matrimony is not for man and his wife to be always taken up with each other, but jointly to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence, and educate their children with discretion." Love, shmove, marriage was a job -- not an adventure. 

9. Great-Great Grandma Used Birth Control

A passionate commitment to contraception was a part of many male-female relationships long before the Pill or even commercial condoms came on the scene. Statistical research shows that men and women began to limit their fertility during the 19th century, with birthrates among American white women declining from an average of seven babies per woman in 1800 to only about three and a half in 1900... not the sort of drop that happens spontaneously.

What were great-great grandma and grandpa using? Probably withdrawal.

10. Heterosexual? Thank a Gay Rights Activist

"Heterosexual" is not, and never was, a scientific term. Nor is "homosexual." Both were coined in the context of what we'd now call gay rights activism, during a campaign of pamphleteering and letter-writing in opposition to a mid-19th-century German sodomy law.

The idea behind the words "heterosexual" and "homosexual" was to demonstrate through language that these were merely two ways in which human beings could be sexual, distinct and equal, with the implication that sodomy laws should apply equally to everyone... or else to no one at all. 

Survey photo from Bigstock.

Watch Hanne Blank talk about her new book, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

Lessons in Spirituality: MLK's Prayers As a Teaching Resource

Lord teach me to unselfishly serve humanity.    

Martin Luther King, Jr. From "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits.

Lewis V. Baldwin is professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University and an ordained Baptist minister. An expert on black-church traditions, he is author of The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr.; There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the editor of "Thou, Dear God": Prayers That Open Hearts and Spirits, the first and only collection of prayers by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was both a prayer leader and a prayer teacher. This is how he understood much of his responsibility in his capacity as preacher, pastor, and civil rights leader. The prayers found in "Thou, Dear God": Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits support this claim. They are indeed quite instructive and useful for churches and other communities of faith that are seeking new avenues toward spiritual enlightenment and development. The prayers suggest spiritual approaches which could transform and uplift persons, while improving their own sense of what it means to function in positive, creative, and constructive ways in the world. In short, the prayers should be read for both their spiritual and educational value. Otherwise, an important dimension of what they offer gets lost.

Photo of Lewis V. Baldwin by Daniel Dubois.

Read "Prayers for Social Justice" from "Thou, Dear God" on Scribd.

Purchase in hardcover or ebook at Beacon | Independent Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Powells 

Watch the book trailer on YouTube. 

Impunity for the Bush Administration Won't Last

Elizabeth Holtzman is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She won national attention for her role on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate and was subsequently elected district attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn). Holtzman is the author, with Cynthia Cooper, of Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution, and What We Can Do about It.

This post originally appeared at the Huffington Post.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama announced a new special unit to investigate abusive lending and packaging of mortgage risk that led to the housing and financial crisis. These abuses began years ago, under the Bush administration and possibly before. Yet since it's widely felt that impunity for banks and financial institutions hurts our economy and undermines our rule of law, the president's proposal was well received.

In the same way, treating Bush administration officials with impunity for their criminal actions undermines the Constitution and the rule of law, which is why we need a special prosecutor to investigate them. Impunity for the powerful doesn't just breed cynicism and anger in the public; it helps ensure that misconduct, criminal or otherwise, will be repeated. It creates a dual system of justice, corroding democracy itself. The longer we wait, the greater the damage and the higher the price we pay.

Take the Iraq War. The Bush team falsely told Congress that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threatened us with a "mushroom cloud" and that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots. They said a military effort would be a "cakewalk," lasting five months and costing $50 billion. In fact it lasted over eight years, cost more than $1 trillion, killed more than four thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and injured tens of thousands of our troops.

If it seems as though there should be a law against this, there is; it just hasn't been enforced.

Conspiracy to defraud Congress is a federal crime; a proper inquiry into whether the Bush administration violated the law is required. So is a comprehensive investigation into the origins of the war, whether or not criminal activity was involved. So far, the U.S. has refused to undertake a full-scale inquiry to ascertain "what the president knew and when he knew it."

Doing so wouldn't be quixotic or backward-looking. Other democracies have acted. Britain and the Netherlands undertook investigations of their involvement in the Iraq War, so why can't we? Britain conducted extensive hearings, calling former Prime Minister Tony Blair, among others, to testify. While the British inquiry panel has not yet issued its conclusions, the Netherlands inquiry found Parliament was deceived and that the Iraq war was contrary to international law.

Lying to Congress and the American people to sell a war is an especially dangerous thing to treat with impunity. Presidents need to know that they will suffer serious consequences if they try it -- that they could realistically be found guilty of a federal crime, or, if the misconduct doesn't rise to that level, that official inquiries and disclosures could shame them forever, damaging their standing and legacy.

Other misdeeds of President Bush and Vice President Cheney also require review: Torture and mistreatment of prisoners violate the anti-torture statue and possibly the watered-down War Crimes Act. Authorizing illegal wiretapping violates the federal anti-wiretapping law. Both would carry a criminal penalty and both must be investigated.

Refusing to review possible criminal misconduct by the Bush administration also cripples American power. It makes it harder for the U.S. to condemn impunity abroad. How effectively can we argue for the rule of law in Syria or Iraq or anywhere else if we don't apply it fully here at home? 

And it leaves Americans open to foreign prosecution. If we refuse to act, other countries will investigate and prosecute U.S. officials who may have violated criminal or international law. If their citizens were mistreated in Guantanamo, or torture took place on their soil, they can claim jurisdiction. Right now, Spain is launching an inquiry into top Bush administration lawyers who greenlighted torture.

In the long run, no matter how much the U.S. tries to duck accountability, there will no impunity. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was finally prosecuted for torture and murder, despite 27 years of evading it.

In the U.S., there is no statute of limitations for certain cases of torture, including when death results. One day, there will be prosecutions for the misdeeds of the Bush administration. Then the whole story of torturing and mistreating detainees will be spread out on the table of history for all to see. The question is, how long will we have to live with impunity and how much more damage to American democracy and power will we suffer until that day comes?

Faking it For the Dean

Carl Elliott is the author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Elliott is a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, the Believer, Slate, the London Review of Books, and the American Prospect. His six previous books include Better Than Well, Prozac As a Way of Life, Rules of Insanity, and A Philosophical Disease.

This post originally appeared at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog. 

A number of years ago, a university public-relations official approached me with an invitation. Her office was coordinating a series of columns called “Health Talk and You,” which were published in about 50 newspapers around the state. The columns were short, simple, and straightforward – about 500 words, she said. Would I be interested in taking part? Without giving the question much thought, I said yes.

Then I read her email more carefully. I had initially thought I was being asked to write an article. In fact, however, I was being asked to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline. A reporter would interview me on the topic of my choice and write an article based on the interview. When I called the public relations officer back, I explained that it seemed deceptive to take credit for an article that I didn’t actually write. She bristled; the conversation turned chilly; and by the time we hung up, we had both agreed that I would make a very poor “author.”

Given how badly that brief conversation went, it was probably best that I didn’t mention my other reservation about the article. What bothered me was not just the deception. I was also afraid someone might think I had actually written the kind of embarrassing propaganda and mindless fluff typically generated by a public-relations office. Seeing that column appear in a newspaper under my name would have been like watching myself recite the prepared text in a hostage video.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with fakery, given the right circumstances. I can read a ghosted celebrity autobiography with the same pleasurable suspension of disbelief with which I watch professional wrestlers. It’s just that I never really thought of the university as the aesthetic equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation.

Of course, it is possible that I overreacted. After all, the ghosted columns had been appearing for years, presumably under the names of other faculty members. Maybe my colleagues simply put the columns in the same category as the throwaway newsletters, promotional flyers, annual reports and spam email generated by administrative offices all over the university. Nobody even reads that material, much less worries about its provenance. Or maybe they thought the columns were like speeches delivered by university presidents or high-ranking deans, which most of us simply assume to be written by a ghostwriter. “Bureaucratic plagiarism” is the term used by Gavin Moodie to describe this kind of fuzziness around authorship, and as he points out, it raises an uncomfortable question. If we don’t allow university students to hire ghostwriters, why do we allow it for university administrators?

When plagiarism lands an administrator in trouble, it is usually plagiarism of the more familiar variety. Last summer, for example, Philip Baker, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta, delivered a convocation speech that was lifted — word for word, according to medical students following on their smartphones — from a Stanford University commencement address by Harvard surgeon and New Yorker staff writer, Atul Gawande. Baker was eventually forced to resign.

Simply employing a ghostwriter, however, is often not seen as a problem — unless the ghostwriter is also a plagiarist. In 2007, for example, when several newspaper columns published by William Meehan, the president of Jacksonville State University, were found to contain material plagiarized from various websites, his excuse was that the columns had actually been ghosted by the director of the university news bureau. (Meehan was later accused, apparently with credible evidence, of having plagiarized parts of hisdoctoral dissertation.) Similarly, when the president of Wesley College, Scott D. Miller, was accused of plagiarizing sections of a speech written by the president of Connecticut College, he told reporters that he had “a number of people who do some drafting for me.” Miller said, “I don’t remember the specifics of who wrote it.”

Of course, paying a ghost to write your speeches is not like paying a ghost to write your doctoral dissertation or your academic articles. Neither is rubber-stamping an administrative document produced by an assistant. As Brian Martin has pointed out, bureaucratic plagiarism (or what he calls “institutionalized plagiarism”) is standard practice in many large, hierarchical organizations, where well-paid, high-status leaders take credit for written material produced by others who rank below them on the organizational ladder. University administrators sometimes compare themselves to corporate executives, who are not generally criticized for having ghostwriters on staff. But administrators, of course, are not executives. Most of them are tenured members of the faculty. Should they be judged by the norms and standards of corporations? Or should they be judged by the standards usually applied to faculty and students?

Of course, administrators could not really be expected to produce such a vast amount of written material without a small army of “communications professionals.” Yet, as Benjamin Ginsberg argues in his excellent book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University, all this written material is subsidized by student tuition, which continues to rise dramatically. Wouldn’t the budget for university-subsidized ghostwriters be a good place to start cutting? Also, paying ghosts to write for senior administrators seems unfair to the rest of us. As Ginsberg says, “faculty members who plagiarize must do so at their own expense.”

Read an excerpt from White Coat, Black Hat on Scribd.

Read the White Coat, Black Hat reader's guide.

Wrestler photo from BigStock.

Black History Month: The History and Legacy of Slavery

At Beacon Press, we have published many books that examine the most troubling parts of our history and culture. In honor of Black History Month, here are a few of the titles we've brought out in recent years that look at slavery and its lasting impact on American society.

Kindred by Octavia Butler

"Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again."
—Harlan Ellison

A 2012 World Book Night USA selection

While Kindred is a work of fiction, it is one of those books that vividly illuminates history through imaginative storytelling. We couldn't make a list of Beacon Press books on the legacy of slavery without including it. 

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

Read the first two chapters of Kindred on Scribd.

View the reading group guide: HTML or PDF. 

View the discussion guide for UU communities: HTML or PDF.

---

 

Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History by Thomas Norman DeWolf

"I cannot recommend it highly enough. The book is terrific."
—Harry Smith, anchor, The Early Show, CBS

"DeWolf's intimate confrontation with white America's 'unearned privilege' sears the conscience." 
—Kirkus Reviews

In 2001, Thomas DeWolf discovered that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for transporting at least ten thousand Africans. This is his memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced their ancestors' steps through the notorious triangle trade route—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states. 

Listen to Thomas DeWolf on Uprising Radio. 

Watch Thomas DeWolf discuss Inheriting the Trade. 

 

---

 

The Sounds of Slavery by Shane White and Graham White

"Shane White and Graham White's book is a joy."
-Branford Marsalis

The singing of slaves on plantations, while chopping weeds in cotton fields, or while working at a corn shucking; the sound of a slave preacher delivering a sermon or an elderly slave telling Brer Rabbit stories to children; newly freed blacks exchanging greetings or whistling on southern city streets--all these and many more made up the sounds of slavery.

Shane White and Graham White break new ground and bring history vividly to life through an exploration of the varied and nuanced sounds of slavery. Moving through a complex soundscape, White and White use anecdotes and firsthand accounts to illuminate the depth of slave culture and history, where each sound played a critical role in defining the slave's world, expressing movments of joy, defiance, and pain. The authors also recover some of the surprise and shock these sounds evoked in white listeners--some dismissed them as primitive while others marveled at their skill and beauty. This book expands our historical ear from the 1700s through the 1850s and continues into the modern era, drawing connections between the rich aural history and such beloved American music as the blues. Allowing us to eavesdrop on the past, The Sounds of Slavery is the closest modern listeners will ever get to experiencing the diverse sounds that surrounded slave life. 

Listen to 18 tracks of songs discussed in the book at Beacon.org.

"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" on YouTube.

---

 

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty by Cassandra Pybus

During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled from their masters to find freedom with the British. Having emancipated themselves--and with rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears--these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their lives.

This alternative narrative includes the stories of dozens of individuals--including Harry, one of George Washington's slaves--who left America and forged difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, this pathbreaking work will alter the way we think about the American Revolution.

Read the first chapter (.pdf)

Watch Cassandra Pybus discuss Epic Journeys of Freedom at Cambridge Forum.

Breast Cancer Doesn't Play Politics

Today's post is by Patricia Harman, a certified nurse midwife and author who lives and works near Morgantown, West Viriginia. Her first book, The Blue Cotton Gown, was called “luminescent, ruthlessly authentic, humane, and brilliantly written” by author Samuel Shem. Her second book, Arms Wide Open, was described by Tina Cassidy, author of Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born, as "A sparkling, vivid story of how a midwife is born-and survives." 

Recent events involving Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the nation’s leading breast cancer advocacy group, illustrate how vulnerable women’s health care options are. Last Tuesday the organization announced they were cutting their funding to Planned Parenthood, which amounted to about $680,000 in 2011. By Thursday, under tremendous pressure internally and externally, the charitable foundation reversed its decision.

As a nurse-midwife and women’s health care provider, I see the issue from the front-line when my patients who don’t have insurance come to me with breast problems. Follow me into my exam room and you’ll see what I mean.

Forty-five-year-old Gail Wilson lies on the table with her left breast exposed. I don’t even have to touch her to see there’s a mass. A lump the size of a quail’s egg shows in the upper right quadrant and I inwardly cringe.

“It’s bad isn’t it?” Gail asks me.

“Well, it’s not good, but not all lumps are cancer. How long have you had it?”

“About a year.”

“A year! Weren’t you worried?"

“Not at first, but finally my husband insisted I get an exam. He was laid off at the shirt factory three years ago and we don’t have health insurance…” Her voice trails off apologetically. “There isn’t a Planned Parenthood in my area and it took a few months to find a provider that would see me.” I let out my air wondering how and where I will get this woman a mammogram. I can do her visit for free, but it’s $350, at the hospital, for the scan.

It takes me four days and I’m getting worried, when I finally find a program through the health department that will fund Mrs. Wilson’s mammogram. Unfortunately the news isn’t good; the test shows breast cancer, stage 4, with metastasis into the lymph nodes. Gail waited too long. She won’t last the year.

Approximately 1 in 8 U.S. women will develop breast cancer during their life time, that’s around 300,000 new cases each year and 20% of those women don’t have health insurance.

In a nation as rich as the United States, it is a travesty that people like Gail and her family cannot get diagnostic tests when they need them, cannot get an examination when they’re ill, cannot get medication when it’s prescribed.

The Susan Komen incident should be a wake up call. There are those on the religious right who are willing to sacrifice important health care services to the poor in order to advance their pro-life agenda. Until everyone has access to care, no matter what our personal beliefs about pregnancy termination, we must support Planned Parenthood and other women’s health organizations like it. That’s Pro-life too.

Fragile Beginnings: Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU

Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year. In this gripping medical narrative, Dr. Adam Wolfberg brings readers into the complex world of newborn intensive care, where brilliant but imperfect doctors do all they can to coax life into their tiny, injured patients. As a specialist in high-risk obstetrics and the father of a child born prematurely, Wolfberg explores the profound questions raised by such fragile beginnings, both from the front lines of the NICU and from his daughter’s bedside.

His daughter Larissa was born weighing under two pounds, and he describes the precipitous birth at six months that left her tenuously hanging on to life in an incubator. Ultrasound had diagnosed a devastating hemorrhage in her brain that doctors reasoned would give her only a 50 percent chance of having a normal IQ. Through Larissa’s early hospital course, Wolfberg examines the limitations of newborn intensive care medicine, the science of “neuroplasticity,” and the dilemmas that surround decision making at the beginning of life.

Wolfberg also takes us into the lab where researchers are working to improve the futures of children born too soon. He follows a young scientist, Jason Carmel, who was inspired to study how the brain adapts to injury when his twin brother was paralyzed in an accident. Through lucid medical reporting, Wolfberg details current scientific practices and discoveries, and explores the profound emotional and ethical issues raised by the advancing technology that allows us to save the lives of increasingly undeveloped preemies.

As they make decisions about life-saving care in the first hours of a premature infant’s life, doctors and parents must grapple with profound moral and medical questions: How aggressively should doctors try to save the life of a premature baby, who will be severely neurologically and physically impaired? What might that child’s quality of life be like after millions of dollars are spent on her care? Wolfberg traces the fits and starts of the physicians, government policy makers, and lawyers who have struggled over the years to find the best way to make these wrenching decisions. Written from Adam Wolfberg’s unique experience as a reporter, as a medical specialist and researcher, and as the father of a prematurely born daughter, Fragile Beginnings lays bare the struggles, discoveries, and triumphs of the newborn intensive care unit.

Read a review of Fragile Beginnings in the Boston Globe.

Read Adam Wolfberg's blog at Huffington Post.

Read Chapter 1 of Fragile Beginnings on Scribd.

Watch the book trailer on YouTube.

Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution--and What We Can Do About It

“Here at last is a book for everyone who is outraged—or just bewildered—that Bush, Cheney and other top officials escaped prosecution for their many flagrant violations of the law. Will there really be no consequences for the men who lied us into war, compromised our civil liberties, and made "waterboarding" and "Guantanamo" household words? Passionately, clearly and concisely, Elizabeth Holtzman lays out how it happened, how the Bush Administration secretly sought to immunize itself from prosecution, and how we can still hold the perpetrators accountable.” —Katha Pollitt, author of Subject to Debate

“This book makes a vital contribution to addressing the abuses of power of the Bush administration. Unfortunately today, nearly three years after the end of the George W. Bush administration, our nation still labors under the many excesses of that era. Holtzman’s book offers a cogent and elaborate account of that time period and important insights into how we can prevent those from recurring.”—John Conyers Jr., author of The Constitution in Crisis

"Elizabeth Holtzman, who helped bring President Nixon to justice in the Watergate hearings, now takes on the bigger, deeper and even more crucial task of investigating—and exposing—exactly how President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney started an illegal war, subverted civil liberties, human rights and the law itself, and then used the national trauma following 9/11 to cover it up. Start to read Cheating Justice, and you won't be able to put it down."— Gloria Steinem, co-founder Ms. Magazine, writer and feminist activist

Buy from Beacon Press | Independent Bookstore | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Powells

Despite the many misdeeds of and abuses of criminal law by the Bush administration, there has been no accountability. Former U.S. representative Elizabeth Holtzman pairs with lawyer and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper to explain why we can't "just move on." They lay bare how the Bush-Cheney administration broke a multitude of laws and betrayed American values, and exactly why and precisely how we, the people, must bring them to justice for their crimes, their cover-ups, and their deceit.

Backed by strong evidence gleaned from "astounding" research, Holtzman and Cooper argue that the Bush administration not only violated various U.S. laws but also changed many laws to escape prosecution for their crimes later. The authors demonstrate how a failure to hold George W. Bush and Dick Cheney accountable would set a dangerous precedent for the future leadership of America.

Bush and Cheney deceived Congress and the people to drive us into a war in Iraq; they claimed the right to wiretap illegally and to eavesdrop on citizens; and they authorized torture, upending laws and breaching international treaty obligations. Yet, both Bush and Cheney are boldly unabashed about their offenses. In his memoir, President Bush makes no apologies for his decision to start a war in Iraq, though no weapons of mass destruction, the ostensible reason for the war, were found there. And once out of office, Bush proudly said, "Damn right," about his approval of waterboarding, a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. Recent revelations about the extent and depth of their crimes, catalogued in detail here, make the need for accountability imperative.

As a member of Congress and part of the committee that investigated and held hearings on the conduct of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, Elizabeth Holtzman condemns Bush's adoption of Nixon's claim that he acted in the interest of national security. Using Watergate-era reforms as a model, Holtzman details the steps necessary to undo the damage that the Bush-Cheney administration inflicted and explains how we can establish new protections to block future presidents from similarly abusing the law. Cheating Justice is not only a call to empower the American people, and a firm insistence that the nation's leaders are not above the law; it is also a blueprint by one of America's top legal minds for bringing Bush to justice and protecting the future of our democracy. 

Read the Kirkus Review of Cheating Justice.  

Read the Introduction to Cheating Justice on Scribd.

Recipes for Eating Crow, or "Why Are We Promoting Books for Other Press?"

Yes, the unthinkable happened on Sunday, and the New England Patriots lost (by a derrière) to the New York Giants. Our sadness at watching Tom Brady's last second Hail Mary pass hit the turf was mitigated by our excitement at promoting two books for Other Press throughout the week. Our #pubbowl wager, which came with lots of good-natured trash-talking and humor, had the publisher whose home team lost (that would be us) on the hook to promote two of the other publisher's titles for a week on the web, featuring the two titles on their web site and promoting the titles across social media platforms.

The two books chosen for our promotion are The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker and How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

In addition, the publisher whose team brought home the trophy (that would be Other Press) is giving away a selection of its books to a handful of winners selected from online entries. 

Visit the Beacon Press website to find out more about these two books and to enter the giveaway. And visit the Other Press website to read about the other groundbreaking books they publish.

Countdown to Beacon Press vs. Other Press (or Patriots vs. Giants, if that's what you care about)

With the approaching 6:30pm kickoff of Super Bowl XLVI between the New England Patriots and the (soon to be weeping in their locker room) New York Giants, the publishing world celebrates another great matchup off the gridiron. Boston's Beacon Press and New York's Other Press are teaming up for a special web promotion: the publisher whose home team loses (Beacon's New England Patriots or, if the Patriots are abducted by aliens, Other's New York Giants) will promote two of the other publisher's titles for a week on the web, featuring the two titles on their web site and promoting the titles across social media platforms. In addition, the publisher whose team brings home the trophy will give away a selection of its books to a handful of winners selected from online entries, and both publishers will use their web presences to endorse the giveaway.

The classic New York-Boston sports rivalry struck the publishers, both independent presses, as a ripe opportunity to engage in some fun, harmless, book-loving competition. (Also, it seemed to Beacon Press an easy way to let Tom Brady help earn it some free publicity.) Beacon Press is an independent publisher of serious non-fiction and fiction, emphasizing religion, history, current affairs, political science, gay/lesbian/gender studies, education, African-American studies, women's studies, child and family issues and nature and the environment (as well as a few sports books). Other Press is an independent publisher of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from America and around the world-non-fiction and fiction-that explore how psychic, cultural, historical, and literary shifts inform our vision of the world and of each other. 

Details of the giveaway will be posted online after the inevitable Pats victory (if you want to sign up early, click here! ). In the meantime, follow the conversation on Twitter (@beaconpressbks, @otherpress, #pubbowl) and Facebook (Beacon Press fan page, Other Press fan page).