Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Beacon Press is lowering the price of the eBook edition of Why We Can’t Wait to $1.99 on April 16th for one day.
April 16th marks the 50th anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a passionate response by Dr. King to eight white clergymen who argued that racial segregation should be fought in the courts and not by protest in the streets. The letter is Dr. King’s answer to claims that he was an outside agitator when he was, in reality, a peaceful protester, saying, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” served as the catalyst for the publication of Why We Can’t Wait, which Dr. King began writing in the fall of 1963. The book attempted to explain the “Negro Revolution” by drawing on the history of black oppression in the United States and the growing frustration among African Americans of the neglect of civil rights issues by both political parties. Originally published in 1964 by Harper & Row, Why We Can’t Wait received glowing reviews and further reflects the importance of Dr. King’s letter and his commitment to nonviolent, peaceful protest. It was reissued in 2011 as part of The King Legacy series from Beacon Press.
In 1963, Birmingham was often called the most segregated city in America. After accepting an invitation to engage in a non-violent direct-action program sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s affiliate, Dr. King was forced to choose between helping to raise bail money for hundreds who were already incarcerated for peaceful protest in a massive direct action campaign attacking the city’s segregation system among Birmingham’s merchants, or go to jail himself. According to Dorothy Cotton, who wrote the introduction to the 2010 edition of the book, Dr. King “came face to face with himself as a leader.” He had encouraged others to accept suffering and to accept jail time, and now there was no other alternative.
Ralph Abernathy, left, and Dr. King, are taken by a policeman after they led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham. (AP/Wide World)
After being jailed on April 12th under the pretense of parading without a permit, Dr. King writes his letter to express disappointment with the “white moderate” community that makes up the white churches, who he believes are more concerned with order than with justice. Dr. King urges for the use of nonviolent direct action, which creates and fosters a tension in a community which has constantly refused to negotiate and is finally forced to confront the issue of segregation. For him, this kind of constructive, nonviolent tension is necessary for growth.
Throughout the letter he outlined the four basic steps to nonviolent campaigns: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether or not injustices exist, 2) negotiation, 3) self-purification, and 4) direct action.
He underlines the definitions of the two kinds of laws: just and unjust. A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God, while an unjust law is one that is out of harmony with the moral code. For Dr. King, segregation is not only politically, socially, and economically unsound, but also morally wrong and sinful—the highest kind of unjust law and for him, “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” Underlining the pent up frustrations of the African American community, Dr. King reminds the eight clergymen that to sit around and wait for acceptance and desegregation is impossible. Because freedom must be demanded by the oppressed, Dr. King argues that the best way is to march, and that it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Dr. King was eventually released from jail on April 20th.
The letter began on the margins of scraps of newspaper while Dr. King was isolated in jail. He eventually finished it on a pad his attorneys were permitted to leave with him. Dr. King’s letter circulated and was published in a variety of formats: first as a pamphlet distributed by the American Friends Service Committee, and then as an article in the Christian Century, the New York Post,Ebony, and Christianity and Crisis. The first half of the letter was published in the Congressional Record after being introduced into testimony before Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D-NY). In July of 1963, Dr. King published an excerpt from the letter in the Financial Post, retitled “Why the Negro Won’t Wait.” It appeared in its entirety in Why We Can’t Wait. On the 50th anniversary of its publication, Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” reminds the world why we can’t wait, and why we must continue to struggle toward a nation of peace and social justice.
Yom HaShoah began this past Sunday at sundown, beginning Holocaust Remembrance Week. The following books explore the Holocaust and its impact through different perspectives: from inside the camps to the Jewish neighborhoods in New York City, recounting personal history and contemplating how to move forward from tragedy.
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family.
Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl's death in 1997, Man's Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
by Rena Kornreich Gelissen and Heather Dune Macadam
Sent to Auschwitz on the first Jewish transport, Rena Kornreich survived the Nazi death camps for over three years. While there she was reunited with her sister Danka. Each day became a struggle to fulfill the promise Rena made to her mother when the family was forced to split apart--a promise to take care of her sister.
One of the few Holocaust memoirs about the lives of women in the camps, Rena's Promise is a compelling story of the fleeting human connections that fostered determination and made survival a possibility. From the bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters, to the links between prisoners, and even prisoners and guards, Rena's Promise reminds us of the humanity and hope that survives inordinate inhumanity.
This unusual memoir is the story of a self-described "dark, pudgy, mean, defiant little brat," born in Berlin in 1929 of a half-Jewish mother and a Catholic father and sent to a concentration camp almost, it seems, as a bureaucratic formality. Raised Catholic, Cordelia Edvardson had little in common with her fellow inmates, some of whom despised her as a "German swine." Singled out for punishment, she was selected to act as a secretary for the monstrous "angel of Auschwitz," Josef Mengele. Impressionistic and naïve, Edvardson's third-person memoir retains a highly effective childlike quality ("she had learned that anything can happen, no matter what and no matter when, and for inexplicable reasons") that holds even in the most horrifying episodes. After World War II ended, Edvardson moved to Sweden, where this book was first published. She then converted to Judaism and moved to Israel.
William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, and he is the author of many books on education, including Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, On the Side of the Child, and A Kind and Just Parent. His new memoir will be published by Beacon Press in Fall 2013.
The road to the massive cheating scandal in Atlanta runs right through the White House.
The former superintendent, Dr. Beverly L. Hall, and her 34 obedient subordinates now face criminal charges, but the central role played by a group of un-indicted and largely unacknowledged co-conspirators, her powerful enablers, is barely noted.
Beyond her “strong relationship with the business elite” who reportedly made her “untouchable” in Atlanta, she was a national super-star for more than a decade because her work embodied the shared educational policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. In the testing frenzy that characterized both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top Dr. Hall was a winner, consistently praised over many years by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for raising test scores, hosted at the White House in 2009 as superintendent of the year, and appointed in 2010 by President Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences. When the Atlanta scandal broke in 2011 Secretary Duncan rushed to assure the public that it was “very isolated” and “an easy one to fix.”
That’s not true. According to a recently released study by the independent monitoring group FairTest, cheating is “widespread” and fully documented in 37 states and Washington D.C.
The deeper problem is reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” both incentivizes cheating and is a worthless proxy for learning.
I recently interviewed leaders at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools—the school Arne Duncan attended for 12 years and the school where the Obamas, the Duncans, and the Emanuels sent their children—and asked what role test scores played in teacher evaluations there. The answer was none. I pressed the point and was told that in their view test scores have no value in helping to understand or identify good teaching. None.
Claire Conner’s father was a national spokesperson for the John Birch Society for more than thirty years; her mother was also a staunch follower. Conner holds a degree in English from the University of Dallas and a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin. Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right(coming in July from Beacon Press) gives an inside look at one of the most radical right-wing movements in American history and shows how it impacts our politics today.
Every year, during
Holocaust Remembrance Week, the people of the United States promise to “never
forget” the six million who perished in Hitler’s death camps. I make the same
promise. Then I add my own personal vow—to never forget Dr. Revilo P. Oliver, a
classics professor from the University of Illinois and a founding member of the
John Birch Society. Using an energized, anti-Communist right wing network,
Oliver peddled his revised history of World War II; one in which the Jews
invented the Holocaust and foisted the story of their imaginary persecution on
an unsuspecting world. I heard Oliver spin his vile “Holohoax” ideas right in
my parents’ living room.
In late 1958, my
parents became the first two members of the John Birch Society in Chicago. They
were welcomed into the brand new organization by founder, Robert Welch, who
introduced them to Oliver. Welch and Oliver were personal and professional
friends. Over the years, Welch often described Oliver as one of the “ablest
speakers on the Americanist side.”
Any friend of Welch
got a warm welcome from my parents. The first time I met the man, however, he
gave me the creeps. His long face was exaggerated by black hair slicked back
with greasy pomade, bushy eyebrows and beady eyes and wide handlebar mustache.
I never saw Oliver smile. But his lips often curled in a nasty snarl,
especially when he was berating someone who dared to disagree.
Oliver was a frequent
contributor to National Review,
William F. Buckley’s magazine, and to the John Birch Society’s magazine, American Opinion. In the pages of these
journals, he expressed some of his most controversial positions including a
1965 slam against the United States for “an insane, but terribly effective,
effort to destroy the American people and Western civilization by subsidizing .
. . the breeding of the intellectually, physically, and morally unfit.”
Oliver peppered his
speeches and his articles with racial slurs and discredited historical
assumption. In his role as a member of the John Birch Society speakers’ bureau,
he railed against Communist subversion inside our government while insisting that
President Roosevelt tricked the United States into World War II in order to
help his friend, Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator.
Along with this
interpretation of World War II, Oliver peddled his version of the Holocaust,
one in stark contrast to everything I’d learned from our Jewish neighbors and
my own father. Gone were the yellow stars and the death camps. Gone were the
gas chambers and crematoria. Even the witness of American soldiers who
liberated Buchenwald and Dachau was repudiated. Instead, Oliver said that there
were no gas chambers and no exterminations.
My parents parroted
Oliver. The Holocaust stopped being so terrible, the death camps turned into
detention camps. Jews were imprisoned because they were traitors, not because
of their faith. The “Final Solution” became fiction, and the Nazis were loyal
military men following orders.
I’d met Jews with
tattoos on their arms. I’d seen photographs from Buchenwald. I knew that
millions of men, women and children were gassed and their ashes coated everything
when the fires roared. I knew all of this as well as I knew my name. I was not
even 14 and I thought my parents had lost their minds. Dr. Oliver had helped
them
No matter what Revilo
Oliver said, he continued to serve (with my father) on the John Birch Society
National Council, the inner circle of the organization. My parents drank in
everything he said and repeated most of it, almost verbatim. Robert Welch heaped
praise on Oliver for his outstanding contributions to the Birch cause.
All of this Oliver
devotion stopped abruptly in July of 1966, when Oliver headlined the New
England Rally for God, Family, and Country, an annual Birch-sponsored festival
held in Boston and billed as a reunion for conservative Americans. In his
speech, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy, Oliver talked about “vaporizing” Jews as
part of the “beatific vision.”
Oliver’s statements
generated an avalanche of negative press, followed by internal Birch turmoil on
how to respond. Oliver had said all of this and more for years and every single
member of the Birch leadership had heard him. But time this was different. Oliver’s
public and blatant racism sounded like it echoed John Birch Society policies.
And the press covered it.
In early August,
Welch told council members that Oliver had resigned. In a split-second, he
vanished from my parents’ conversation. They pretended that Oliver had never
been a Birch leader or a personal friend.
Revilo Oliver lived
the rest of his life as a hero to neo-Nazis, skin heads and white supremacists.
His views never moderated. In 1982, twelve years before his death by suicide,
Oliver wrote that democracy would only be possible by “deporting, vaporizing,
or otherwise disposing of swarms of Jews, Congoids (Africans), Mongoloids and
mongrels (mixed-race) that now infest our territory.”
Oliver put an
indelible mark on the John Birch Society, built a network of Holocaust deniers and
recruited countless followers to spread his message of hate. This year, the theme of the Holocaust
Remembrance is “heeding the warning signs.” There is no warning sign of more
significance than the continuing presence of Holocaust denial in our public
life. We can’t begin to understand today’s deniers if we don’t take a hard look
at the man who fueled the denial movement.
Today is also the Interfaith Youth Core's Better Together day, a time to wear blue to raise awareness of interfaith cooperation. Read more about it here.
One hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote, "The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."
History proved DuBois correct. His century saw the struggles against, and ultimately the victory over, systems that separated and subjugated people based on race—from colonialism in India to Jim Crow in the U.S. to apartheid in South Africa.
No American did more than Martin Luther King, Jr., to address the problem of the color line. He spearheaded the marches that revealed the brutality of segregation, made speeches that reminded Americans that the promise of their nation applied to all citizens and expertly pressured the nation's leaders in Washington to pass landmark civil rights legislation.
But to confine King's role in history only to the color line—as giant as that challenge is, and as dramatic as King's contribution was—is to reduce his greatness. In one of his final books, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, King showed that race was one part of his broader concern with human relations at large: "This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited ... a great 'world house' in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu ... Because we can never again live apart, we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace."
This ethos, as King's examples make clear, applies not only to the question of race, but to faith as well. In the same way as the headlines of the 20th century read of conflict between races, headlines in our times are full of violence between people of different religions. Indeed, what the color line was to the 20th century, the faith line might be to the 21st.
Faith as a bridge
King's life has as much to say to us on the question of interfaith cooperation as it did on the matter of interracial harmony. A prince of the black church, deeply rooted in his own Baptist tradition, King viewed his faith as a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.
When, as a seminary student, King was introduced to the satyagraha ("love-force") philosophy of the Indian Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi, King did not reject it because it came from a different religion. Instead, he sought to find resonances between Gandhi's Hinduism and his own interpretation of Christianity. Indeed, it was Gandhi's movement in India that provided King with a 20th century version of what Jesus would do. King patterned nearly all the strategy and tactics of the civil rights movement—from boycotts to marches to readily accepting jail time—after Gandhi's leadership in India. King called Gandhi "the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force."
Following Gandhi was King's first step on a long journey of learning about the shared social justice values across the world's religions, and partnering with faith leaders of all backgrounds in the struggle for civil rights. In 1959, more than a decade after the Mahatma's death, King traveled to India to meet with people continuing the work Gandhi had started. He was surprised and inspired to meet Indians of all faith backgrounds working for equality and harmony, discovering in their own traditions the same inspiration for love and peace that King found in Christianity.
King's experience with religious diversity in India shaped the rest of his life. He readily formed a friendship with the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, finding a common bond in their love of the Hebrew prophets. The two walked arm-in-arm in the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
Later, Heschel wrote, "Our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying."
King's friendship with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh inspired one of his most controversial moves, the decision to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. In his letter nominating Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize, King wrote, "He is a holy man... His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to a world brotherhood, to humanity."
In his famous sermon "A Time to Break Silence," King was unequivocal about his Christian commitment and at the same time summarized his view of the powerful commonality across all faiths: "This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality" is that the force of love is "the supreme unifying principle of life."
We live at a time of religious conflict abroad and religious tension at home. This would no doubt have dismayed King, who viewed faith as an inspiration to serve and connect, not to destroy and divide. During King's time, groups ranging from white supremacists to black militants believed that the races were better apart. Today, the same is said of division along the lines of faith.
King insisted that we are always better together. Indeed, that pluralism is part of divine plan. To paraphrase one of his most enduring statements: The world is not divided between black and white or Christian and Muslim, but between those who would live together as brothers and those who would perish together as fools.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a
house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In
this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he
lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the
need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With
a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to
global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources
and technology to eradicate poverty.
by Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Lewis V. Baldwin
An unprecedented and timely
collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King—in his own words
Too many people continue to think
of Dr. King only as "a southern civil rights leader" or "an
American Gandhi," thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people
around the world. "In a Single Garment of Destiny"is the
first book to treat King's positions on global liberation struggles through the
prism of his own words and activities.
From the pages of this extraordinary collection, King emerges not only as an
advocate for global human rights but also as a towering figure who collaborated
with Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert J. Luthuli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other national
and international figures in addressing a multitude of issues we still struggle
with today-from racism, poverty, and war to religious bigotry and intolerance.
Introduced and edited by distinguished King scholar Lewis Baldwin, this volume
breaks new ground in our understanding of King.
Featuring the essay: "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence."
An inspiring call for Americans to defend the values of
inclusiveness and pluralism by one of our best-known American Muslim leaders
There is no better time to stand up for your values than when they are under
attack.
In the decade following the attacks of 9/11, suspicion and animosity toward
American Muslims has increased rather than subsided. Alarmist, hateful rhetoric
once relegated to the fringes of political discourse has now become
frighteningly mainstream, with pundits and politicians routinely invoking the
specter of Islam as a menacing, deeply anti-American force.
In Sacred Ground, author and renowned interfaith leader Eboo
Patel says this prejudice is not just a problem for Muslims but a challenge to
the very idea of America. Patel shows us that Americans from George Washington
to Martin Luther King Jr. have been "interfaith leaders,"
illustrating how the forces of pluralism in America have time and again
defeated the forces of prejudice. And now a new generation needs to rise up and
confront the anti-Muslim prejudice of our era. To this end, Patel offers a
primer in the art and science of interfaith work, bringing to life the growing
body of research on how faith can be a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier
of division and sharing stories from the frontlines of interfaith activism.
Patel asks us to share in his vision of a better America—a robustly pluralistic
country in which our commonalities are more important than our differences, and
in which difference enriches, rather than threatens, our religious traditions.
Pluralism, Patel boldly argues, is at the heart of the American project, and
this visionary book will inspire Americans of all faiths to make this country a
place where diverse traditions can thrive side by side.
A renowned Muslim activist's personal story of building a global interfaith youth movement that might just change the world. Includes a new afterword by the author.
Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel's story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people-and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.
by Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt. Foreword by Walter Earl Fluker
The first biographical exploration of one of the most important African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century—Howard Thurman—and of the pivotal trip he took to India that ultimately shaped the course of the civil rights movement.
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.
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.
Richly informative, calmly passionate and much needed, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks” completes the portrait of a working-class activist who looked poverty and discrimination squarely in the face and never stopped rebelling against them, in the segregated South and in the segregated North.
Author Jeanne Theoharis appeared this morning on Democracy Now! with Claudette Colvin, a civil-rights pioneer who was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery in March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks. Jeanne discusses Claudette’s story in the context of her research into the local civil-rights movement at the time, and suggests Colvin’s case help set the stage for Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s a really special 35-minute interview.
MakeitMissoula.com review: "Several times while reading the book, I had to just stop, sit back and admire a chunk of imagery crafted by a man who can just flat-out write. "
Mountain West News review: "Montana needs a book like this. We need to remember the past. We need to be mindful of the present. We need to say thanks to all those who strife to do the right thing. We need more journalists like Brad Tyer to keep us humble."
Michael Bronski, the author of A Queer History of the United States and a Harvard professor, notes that sentimental arguments have become increasingly prevalent, and successful, in social movements over the last century. "Uncle Tom's Cabin was far more effective than quoting biblical texts or making a constitutional argument and abolitionist writings are filled with the tragedy of children being torn away from their mothers," Bronski said in an interview. "Suffragists mostly only used legal arguments but later, second wave feminism did better portraying a talented 12-year-old girl who wanted to play field hockey (or become a doctor) than in arguing for equal wages for female factory workers."
While the Court mulls, however, we'd like to clear up some misunderstanding. Take the "recent" institution of gay marriage, as Justice Samuel Alito seems bent on calling it. Alito is trying to dissuade any major ruling on the grounds that evidence on the effects of same-sex marriage is too little, too soon: "You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones and the internet?" he asked. "We do not have the ability to see the future."
Fortunately, we don't have to. We mere humans may not wear the robes of soothsayers (or Justices, for that matter), Mr. Alito, but we do have access to local libraries and the benefit of hindsight. While, yes, the formal institution of gay marriage is recent, author Rodger Streitmatter reminds us that gay folks have been resourcefully affirming their own versions of marriage for centuries. In fact, they've found ways of making it work with or without our questionably-gay-Uncle Sam's nodding approval.
My Mother's Wars is the memoir that Mary, a Latvian Jew and New York immigrant, “was never able to write.” Faderman shares her spirited mother’s story from life-altering experiences (the Nazi's brutal annihilation of Preil, the shetl where Mary was born) to mundane city moments. Each are rendered with poetry and frankness. Beginning in 1914, Faderman chronicles Mary’s futile love affair with commitment-phobic Moishe, the wrenching isolation of immigration and the insidious backdrop of antisemitism. Mary may not have been able to tell her story, but it’s testament to her incredible life that her daughter did it for her.
Kirkus Reviews: “An invaluable guide for doctors and patients on how to ‘recognize and navigate the emotional subtexts’ of the doctor-patient relationship.”
Susie Bright, in addition to being a best-selling author, activist, and podcast host, is editor at large for Audible. Susie's blog, The Bright List, keeps readers and listeners apprised of new audiobooks.
This month brings the Audible release of three titles from one of my favorite independent scholars, Hanne Blank. Blank’s curiosity and thorough, critical thinking have brought fresh insights into the fields of human sexuality and history. Her warm, witty, and clever writing has brought me much enjoyment.
The title says it all--here’s the real story on how the very idea of “straightness” is a new, and quite flimsy, category if you look at how people have thought of sexuality all along.
—Funny, brainy, provocative nonfiction. A page-turner.
Like Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow,Straight addresses gender, sex and biology, but goes on to explore historical and political attitudes, and perceptions of straightness and homosexuality.
From the “discovery” of the Hymen in ancient times to abstinence-only education in schools and purity balls today, Blank writes about the history of our preoccupation with "virginity." In her analysis, we can see the social construction of virginity, the sexism implicit in it, and the malleable definition of virginity over time.
Everything you think you know about virginity is up for debate. Blank writes with a great deal of humor and perception: "Of all the countries of the developed world, the United States is the only one that has to date created a federal agenda having specifically to do with the virginity of its citizens."
Narrated with friendly authority by Fran Tunno who also read Straight.
This is one of my favorite sex-ed books about any subject. I hadn’t thought about it one way or another, “size and sex”-- but there’s a lot to it. This isn’t a PC plea for acceptance, it’s really about FAT SEX, the reality and the creativity! Skinny people love this book too!
“Big Big Love is a ginormous blessing to people everywhere. Not only is it a superb sex manual, it’s positively radical, fun to read, and life affirming—big time.
"We know that “people of size” enjoy sex as much as anyone, but to talk about it so frankly, to show it, and give explicit details about the ins and outs of it, is as transgressive as it gets in our culture of “thin is sexy.” This book is well worth its weight in gold.”
—Annie Sprinkle, PhD
Narrated by Johanna Taylor who I absolutely believed as Hanne.
In February, we celebrated Black History Month, and now we are reaching the end of Women's History Month. This got us thinking about how we define our shared histories through different perspectives, and how those various ways of seeing history can illuminate one another. In particular, we were interested in examining the intersection of Women's History and Disability History, so we knew exactly who to Skype for an interview.
Kim E. Nielsen is a professor of history and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She lives in Green Bay, and is the author ofA Disability History of the United Statesand two books on Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy.
Our interview was conducted by Grace Lapointe, an editorial intern at Beacon. Lapointe graduated from Stonehill College with a degree in English in 2011. She enjoys reading and writing fiction and would love to work in publishing someday. Disability history interests her personally because she has cerebral palsy.
Grace Lapointe: Did you find that researching American history through the lens of disability is similar to writing women's history, black history, or LGBT history? Or is there a different approach?
Kim E. Nielsen: In some ways it's similar: recovering pasts that have not been examined too much but really are central to the American story. It's a similar approach of claiming communities and identities that mattered, looking at sources that may not have been looked at before, and looking at sources with new questions.
Who is considered female has some variability over time, but it's relatively consistent. We define that around anatomy: vaginas, ovaries, and this kind of thing. Gender varies over time, but we still tend to know who fits into that category of "female."
But who is defined as disabled varies all the time, historically. It's so contextual, and sometimes very apparent, sometimes not apparent. Sometimes it changes over one's lifetime. That category of disability is so fluid and so permeable. It's trying to write the history of an ever-moving point. And so, I found that challenging but also really exciting. I always think about how my body today tends to be read as non-disabled, but I wear glasses and contacts. And a couple hundred years ago, this would have been a really significant impairment for me. So in that regard even, whether or not I would be identified as disabled changes over time.
Today I'm wearing pants, and that is not read as anything. But in the 1890s, if I was a woman who went out and wore pants, that could be read as a sign of a very deep mental illness. So, the definition of what's a disability changes all the time. The definition of what is a female does change, and there are variations, but it's not quite as slippery as disability.
GL: How does the history of disability in America relate to women's history? Was being female ever considered effectively disabling?
KN: Well, I think they're related at a really base level because lots of disabled people are women. But I also think that being female has been considered to be a disabling condition at different points in time, especially dependent upon race or class. Even for relatively privileged women, their bodies were considered to be defective, weak, and incapable throughout much of US history. So I think they overlap in that regard. The assumption was that women's brains were inadequate and in essence, deformed muscles, and that those ovaries had a big impact on the rest of their bodies. The arguments against women's education were simply that their bodies and brains were too disabled to withstand higher education.
Women, children, enslaved people, and people with disabilities have tended to share a similar legal status, having a limited legal identity and having their legal ability to act covered by somebody else. They have not been able to make legal decisions. So, if we go all the way back to the Constitution, people categorized as idiots were not given rights. But then, all women were not given some of those same rights. And slaves and children were not. So they shared that same legal category as well. They've shared the presumption of being incompetent.
GL: You mentioned in the introduction to the book that women and people with disabilities live disproportionately in poverty in the US. Are there any societal factors that create this disparity?
KN: One limit was educational access. It wasn't until 1973 that school districts even had to educate students with disabilities. Many of them refused to do so. So that's contributed to poverty. And I think still there's restricted or inferior educational access and segregation in education for students with disabilities. And then, when they go in the employment arena, people face discrimination and harassment. I think some people with disabilities face really low expectations, sometimes even from parents and schoolteachers their whole lives, and those low expectations sometimes limit the expectations people have for themselves, too.
Limited housing options can contribute to levels of poverty. Limited public transportation can limit what jobs people can get. My understanding is that people assume accommodations are going to be expensive in the workplace, and the vast majority, according to the Department of Labor, cost less than $500. But employers have it in their brains that it's going to be incredibly expensive.
Then you have the social segregation. We still live in a culture in which advancements often happen outside of the workplace, and when people with disabilities aren't included in that--the golfing on Sunday afternoons, going to a bar--the social segregation contributes to poverty as well.
GL: What are some of the biggest and most unique obstacles that women with disabilities faced throughout US history?
KN: I think that the various ways in which women with disabilities have been defined as inadequate to reproduce has been a relatively unique bar that they have encountered. It could be discouraging marriage or forced sterilization of women with disabilities. But it was assuming that women with disabilities are not fit to reproduce and also not fit to make their own sexual decisions. We know that women with disabilities have faced a lot of sexual assault and harassment throughout history, much greater than the already-too-high rate for women in general. So I think that these things are related, but that assumption that women with disabilities could not make their own sexual decisions while being placed in situations where they were sexually vulnerable.
At the same time, there’s the assumption that they can't be good mothers and that it's best for the nation if their reproductive capabilities are limited. Even today, disability is still something that is taken into consideration in custody cases. And parents with disabilities, particularly mothers, have a much greater chance of having limited access to their own children. All the studies today say that parents with disabilities are just as good and just as bad as parents without disabilities.
GL: Did disability rights activists use any similar tactics to women's rights activists, or did they interact with members of other equal rights groups at all?
KN: Some of the 19th century women's rights activists, like Dorothea Dix, advocated for reform of asylums and the improvement of insane asylums. So in that way, they advocated for people with disabilities.
But at the same time, there were suffragists who really tried to elevate themselves by disparaging people with disabilities. They were basically saying, "Look, you characterized us marvelous suffragists with these idiots, enslaved people, and American Indians as non-voters, but we're much better than they are." So they accepted the ableism that dismissed people with disabilities and the racism that dismissed others, but tried to distinguish themselves as better.
Particularly in the post-World War II period, disabled activists used strategies of simply insisting that as human beings, we have rights and should make our own decisions. Political protest, organizing, and lobbying strategies have been very much the same.
The civil rights legislation has often impacted more than one group. And there's been a lot of overlap. In the early disability rights movement, feminist groups, racial freedom groups, and some of the gay, lesbian, and queer movements were actively involved. They saw they had a common cause around rights and claiming personhood. That didn't mean they got together all the time, or they perfectly agreed on everything. When you have people involved in multiple movements and when there's the realization that if you can discriminate against that person, then people can discriminate against me, we all have common cause. I think those are the moments when things really happen.
If you're following the news today, or seeing all the red equality icons on Facebook, you areno doubt thinking about marriage equality. The Supreme Court hears arguments in two cases this week—Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor—that have the potential to tip the judicial scales in favor of greater legal equality for LGBT families. Here's a selection of reading that will help you dig deeper.
Does the Bible prohibit homosexuality? No, says Bible scholar and activist Jay Michaelson. But not only that: Michaelson also shows that the vast majority of our shared religious traditions support the full equality and dignity of LGBT people. In this accessible, passionate, and provocative book, Michaelson argues for equality, not despite religion but because of it.
For more than a century before gay marriage became a hot-button political issue, same-sex unions flourished in America. Pairs of men and pairs of women joined together in committed unions, standing by each other “for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” for periods of thirty or forty—sometimes as many as fifty—years. In short, they loved and supported each other every bit as much as any husband and wife.
In Outlaw Marriages, cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter reveals how some of these unions didn’t merely improve the quality of life for the two people involved but also enriched the American culture.
Among the high-profile couples whose lives and loves are illuminated in the following pages are Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, literary icon Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, author James Baldwin and Lucien Happersberger, and artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage reframes the family-rights debate by arguing that marriage shouldn't bestow special legal privileges upon couples because people, both heterosexual and LGBT, live in a variety of relationships-including unmarried couples of any sexual orientation, single-parent households, extended biological family units, and myriad other familial configurations. Nancy D. Polikoff shows how the law can value all families, and why it must.
Engaging and largely untold, From the Closet to the Courtroom explores how five pivotal lawsuits have altered LGBT history. Beginning each case narrative at the center-with the litigants and their lawyers-law professor Carlos Ball follows the stories behind each crucial lawsuit. He traces the parties from their communities to the courtroom, while deftly weaving in rich sociohistorical context and analyzing the lasting legal and political impact of each judicial outcome.
Will same-sex couples destroy "traditional" marriage, soon to be followed by the collapse of all civilization? That charge has been leveled throughout history whenever the marriage rules change. But marriage, as E. J. Graff shows in this lively, fascinating tour through the history of marriage in the West, has always been a social battleground, its rules constantly shifting to fit each era and economy. The marriage debates have been especially tumultuous for the past hundred and fifty years-in ways that lead directly to today's debate over whether marriage could mean not just Boy + Girl = Babies, but also Girl + Girl = Love.
A memoir-meets-exposé that examines our fraught relationship with the West and our attempts to clean up a toxic environmental legacy
In 2002, Texas journalist Brad Tyer strapped a canoe on his truck and moved to Montana, a state that has long exerted a mythic pull on America's imagination as an unspoiled landscape. The son of an engineer who reclaimed wastewater, Tyer was looking for a pristine river to call his own. What he found instead was a century's worth of industrial poison clotting the Clark Fork River, a decades-long engineering project to clean it up, and a forgotten town named Opportunity.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Montana exploited the richest copper deposits in the world, fueling the electric growth of twentieth-century America and building some of the nation's most outlandish fortunes. The toxic byproduct of those fortunes-what didn't spill into the river-was dumped in Opportunity.
In the twenty-first century, Montana's draw is no longer metal, but landscape: the blue-ribbon trout streams and unspoiled wilderness of the nation's "last best place." To match reality to the myth, affluent exurbanites and well-meaning environmentalists are trying to restore the Clark Fork River to its "natural state." In the process, millions of tons of toxic soils are being removed and dumped-once again-in Opportunity. As Tyer investigates Opportunity's history, he wrestles with questions of environmental justice and the ethics of burdening one community with an entire region's waste.
Stalled at the intersection of a fading extractive economy and a fledgling restoration boom, Opportunity's story is a secret history of the American Dream, and a key to understanding the country's-and increasingly the globe's-demand for modern convenience.
As Tyer explores the degradations of the landscape, he also probes the parallel emotional geography of familial estrangement. Part personal history and part reportorial narrative, Opportunity, Montanais a story of progress and its price, of copper and water, of father and son, and of our attempts to redeem the mistakes of the past.
Brad Tyer is the managing editor of The Texas Observer in Austin. His writing has appeared in Outside, High Country News, the New York Times Book Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Drake, Texas Monthly, No Depression, and the Dallas Morning News. He's been awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant, and a Fishtrap writing residency.
Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 to Elijah and Delilah Jacobs. When Harriet’s mother died in 1819, she was sent to live with her mother’s owner
and mistress, Margaret Horniblow, and was welcomed into the family. But, Margaret died when Harriet was 11, and instead of being emancipated like she had hoped, she was bequeathed to her mistress’s three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda. Because of Mary’s young age, her father Dr. James Norcom became Harriet’s master.
After years of unwanted sexual advances and abuse at the hands of Dr. Norcom, Harriet went into hiding above her grandmother’s home. For nearly seven years she confined herself in a small crawlspace between the storeroom and the roof waiting for
her chance to escape, all the while listening to her children grow up in the
home underneath her. In 1842, with the help of a friend, Harriet finally
escaped. Harriet died in Washington, DC, on March 7, 1897, and was buried in
Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The following passages are taken from her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. It is one of the earliest works by an African American woman writer. Originally self-published in 1861 under the pen name Linda Brent, itwas for generations thought to be a work of fiction until its
authenticity was verified in the 1980s.
In this section, Jacobs describes the small crawlspace in which she lived for nearly seven years.
“The garret was only nine feet long, and seven wide. The highest part was three feet
high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission
for either light or air. My uncle Philip, who was a carpenter, had very
skillfully made a concealed trap door, which communicated with the storeroom.
He had been doing this while I was waiting in the swamp. The storeroom opened
upon a piazza. To this hole I was conveyed as soon as I entered the house. The
air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I
could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I
could not turn on the other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran
over my bed; but I was weary, and I slept such sleep as the wretched may, when
a tempest has passed over them. Morning came. I knew it only by the noises I
heard; for in my small den day and night were all the same. I suffered for air
even more than for light. But I was not comfortless. I heard the voices of my
children. There was joy and there was sadness in the sound. It made my tears
flow. How I longed to speak to them! I was eager to look on their faces; but
there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep. This continued
darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position
day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I would have chosen this, rather
than my lot as a slave.”
Next, Jacobs explains how she spent her first Christmas in hiding.
“Even slave mothers try to gladden the hearts of their little ones on that occasion. Benny and Ellen had their Christmas stockings filled. Their imprisoned mother could not have the privilege of witnessing their surprise and joy. But I had the
pleasure of peeping at them as they went into the street with their new suits
on. I heard Benny ask a little playmate whether Santa Claus brought him any
thing. 'Yes,' replied the boy; 'but Santa Claus ain’t a real man. It’s the
children’s mothers that put things into the stockings.' 'No, that can’t be,' replied Benny, 'for Santa Claus brought Ellen and me these new clothes, and my
mother has been gone this long time.'
"How I longed to
tell him that his mother made those garments, and that many a tear fell on them
while she worked!
"On this
occasion, I was warned to keep extremely quiet, because two guests had been
invited. One was the town constable, and the other was a free colored man, who
tried to pass himself off for white, and who was always ready to do any mean work
for the sake of currying favor with white people. My grandmother had a motive
for inviting them. She managed to take them all over the house. All the rooms
on the lower floor were thrown open for them to pass in and out; and after
dinner, they were invited up stairs to look at a fine mocking bird my uncle had
just brought home. There, too, the rooms were all thrown open, that they might
look in. When I heard them talking on the piazza, my heart almost stood still.
I knew this colored man had spent many nights hunting for me. Every body knew
he had the blood of a slave father in his veins; but for the sake of passing
himself off for white, he was ready to kiss the slaveholders’ feet. How I
despised him! As for the constable, he wore no false colors. The duties of his
office were despicable, but he was superior to his companion, inasmuch as he
did not pretend to be what he was not. Any white man, who could raise money
enough to buy a slave, would have considered himself degraded by being a
constable; but the office enabled its possessor to exercise authority. If he
found any slave out after nine o’clock, he could whip him as much as he liked;
and that was a privilege to be coveted. When the guests were ready to depart,
my grandmother gave each of them some of her nice pudding, as a present for
their wives. Through my peep-hole I saw them go out of the gate, and I was glad
when it closed after them. So passed the first Christmas in my den.”
Finally, Jacobs
relates a critical moment in which she was able to briefly speak to the father
of her children, a newly elected congressman, and ask him to free their
children.
“The day before
his departure for Washington I made arrangements, towards evening, to get from
my hiding-place into the store room below. I found myself so stiff and clumsy
that it was with great difficulty I could hitch from one resting place to
another. When I reached the storeroom my ankles gave way under me, and I sank
exhausted on the floor. It seemed as if I could never use my limbs again. But
the purpose I had in view roused all the strength I had. I crawled on my hands
and knees to the window, and, screened behind a barrel, I waited for his
coming. The clock struck nine, and I knew the steamboat would leave between ten
and eleven. My hopes were failing. But presently I heard his voice, saying to
some one, 'Wait for me a moment. I wish to see aunt Martha.' When he came out,
as he passed the window, I said, 'Stop one moment, and let me speak for my
children.' He started, hesitated, and then passed on, and went out of the gate.
I closed the shutter I had partially opened, and sank down behind the barrel. I
had suffered much; but seldom had I experienced a leaner pang than I then felt.
Had my children, then, become of so little consequence to him? And had he so
little feeling for their wretched mother that he would not listen a moment
while she pleaded for them? Painful memories were so busy within me, that I
forgot I had not hooked the shutter, till I heard some one opening it. I looked
up. He had come back. 'Who called me?' said he, in a low tone. 'I did,' I
replied. 'Oh, Linda,' said he, 'I knew your voice; but I was afraid to answer,
lest my friend should hear me. Why do you come here? Is it possible you risk
yourself in this house? They are mad to allow it. I shall expect to hear that
you are all ruined.' I did not wish to implicate him, by letting him know my
place of concealment; so I merely said, 'I thought you would come to bid
grandmother good by, and so I came here to speak a few words to you about
emancipating my children. Many changes may take place during the six months you
are gone to Washington and it does not seem right for you to expose them to the
risk of such changes. I want nothing for myself; all I ask is, that you will
free my children, or authorize some friend to do it, before you go.'
"He promised he
would do it, and also expressed a readiness to make any arrangements whereby I
could be purchased."
Today is World Water Day. Observed every March 22nd, World Water Day reminds people around the globe about the importance of freshwater and urges them to advocate for the sustainable use of freshwater resources.
This year’s theme is water cooperation, a rallying cry to recognize water as a resource that we are all entitled to and for which management responsibility is shared. On the surface, coming together as a global community for the good of water sustainability seems simple. But freshwater is becoming a scarce resource—one that is not evenly distributed around the world. And, with climate change shifting growing seasons and sea levels, our understanding of water’s boundaries and availabily is becoming even more muddled. To ensure a viable future, water must be a shared, not bought and sold to the highest bidder, not polluted and ignored at the detriment of our communities.
In addition to the small steps towards water conservation that people
can take each day, World Water Day asks us to look toward the future,
understand the realities of the water crisis that we as a planet are
facing, and take steps to change it.
At Beacon Press, we have published a number of books over the last decade that explore water usage and sustainability concerns from a variety of perspectives. Below are six titles that focus on the many ways access to water affects our lives, and uncover how the lack of collaboration by individuals, corporations, and government agencies has put us on a perilous path towards international water shortages.
The first book to call for a national water ethic, Blue Revolution is a powerful meditation on water and community in America. The book combines investigative reporting with solutions from around the globe to show how local communities and entire nations can come together to stretch vanishing water supplies and protect themselves from increasingly devastating floods. Barnett challenges the conventional wisdom that the United States can build its way out of water crisis and argues that no solution would be more powerful than an ethic for water—embraced not only by citizens, but by government and major water users including the energy and agricultural sectors.
Read chapter one, "The Illusion of Water Abundance;" view five principles for developing a water ethic in your community.
Journalist Brad Tyer moved to Montana looking for big skies, clear waters, and change of scenery. But, soon after he arrived he discovered that “the treasure state” had buried secrets. Opportunity, Montana explores how a century of copper mining devastated the Clark Fork River, which runs through the state of Montana, as it took on the bulk of the pollutants and industrial waste. In the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated the river as a Superfund site in need of environmental clean-up—one of seventeen in the state. It took twenty years for the EPA and the responsible parties to agree on what to do about it, and another ten before any change would be seen. How do you fix a broken river, Tyer asks? The financial implications, estimated to be 1.3 billion dollars, were just the beginning. First, 400 acres of toxic sediment had to be dug up and disposed of, and as Tyer discovered, mining waste doesn’t go away, it just gets moved and covered up. For the second time in Montana’s copper history, that burden would fall on the small town of Opportunity.
In the last decade, the inventory of dams in the United States has been reduced by nearly 500. Though many of those have been small, privately-owned ventures, the positive impact has led to proposals for larger dam removal projects nationally. In Recovering A Lost River, Hawley advocates for the removal of dams and the restoration of the rich and thriving environments that can be found in and around free flowing water. Assessing the current state of freshwater ecosystems nationally, he reports that a third of freshwater species are threatened or endangered, forty percent of freshwater bodies in America are too polluted for swimming or fishing, and half of the nation’s wetlands are gone. This book is a call to action for overcoming corporate and federal obstacles in order to restore free flowing waterways and reinvigorate long suffering wildernesses.
In 2007, When the Rivers Run Dry was a groundbreaking exploration on the state of water sources around the world, and the looming possibility of a world-wide water shortage. It is now considered to be required reading for anyone looking to understand the water crisis.
In 2012, Fred Pearce revisited the issue of water sustainability in The Land Grabbers, exploring how the need for abundant water in industrial agriculture has resulted in wealthy countries and powerful corporations in need of water seeking to obtain it, while impoverished countries with access to water are looking to profit from it. These practices have led to the exploitation of vulnerable land, people, and water, with the potential for devastating consequences.
In 2001, at the age of twenty-two, Rajeev Goyal joined the Peace Corps. Assigned to teach English in Nepal, he found himself in the remote mountain town of Namje where villagers spend most of their day walking to and from a far-off stream to fetch water. Goyal sets out to create a water project that would pump water directly into the town, in hopes of improving every part of village life, from health and prosperity to education. With the support and dedication of the villagers, the mission is successful, but the long-term consequences of development go beyond anything Goyal could have imagined. The Springs of Namje explores how water can hold back or propel a community forward.
As a sociologist who writes at Psychology Today, I must admit that there is some very bad sociology out there. And like bad psychology, bad sociology can be incredibly harmful to individuals and our culture at large. Such is the case with the obviously flawed study produced by sociologist Mark Regnerus last year that was supposedly a measure of the children of gay parents. Of course, it really measured no such thing, but it claimed to.
The study was a case of comparing apples and oranges and insisting you’ve measured bananas. Because Regnerus could not find a large enough sample of adult children of gay and lesbian parents, he decided to ask adult children of divorced parents whether or not their parents had ever had a same sex relationship. This is a problem. The relationship could have been one time or thirty years. The relationship could have resulted in a gay or lesbian identity or not. We don’t know because Regnerus decided that apples were a close enough measure of bananas. To make matters worse he compared those apples to oranges: he compared the outcomes of adult children of divorced parents to adult children of still married parents and found, not surprisingly, that these adult children were more likely to be depressed, unemployed and alcoholic than those whose parents were still together. I say not surprisingly because even a bad sociologist knows that marriage is highly correlated with socio-economic status. It would make sense that children who grow up in less wealthy and less educated households are more likely to be less wealthy, less educated, more unemployed, and yes, even depressed and alcoholic. Poverty creates all sorts of stress in a person’s life that wealth and well-being do not. That is just sociology of the obvious.
Normally no one would care that there is some bad sociology out there (and believe me there is), but this work is being used in a variety of court cases that will decide the fate of gay marriage, gay adoption laws and in many other ways the legal future of gay families. And here's the really scary thing: the study was funded by the ultra-conservative Witherspoon Institute to the tune of $700,000 specifically to influence the Supreme Court of the United States decisions. That's right: the conservative funders of the study and the conservative sociologist who conducted it were assuming that the results would show gay families are worse than straight families and recent emails between them retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests prove it. An article published in the American Independent and the HuffingtonPost reveals that:
The documents, recently obtained through public-records requests by The American Independent and published in collaboration with The Huffington Post, show that the Witherspoon Institute recruited a professor from a major university to carry out a study that was designed to manipulate public policy. In communicating with donors about the research project, Witherspoon’s president clearly expected results unfavorable to the gay-marriage movement.
To make matters worse, the peer-review process of this article that was published in Social Science Research seems to have been both highly compromised and highly rushed. Despite an internal audit by Social Science Research, the editors have been unable to explain why the article was submitted before data was fully collected, why reviewers were rushed to approve or disapprove its publication in such a short time frame, why two of the three reviewers were connected to Regnerus, and why they have not yet retracted the study.
This strange marriage of the anti-gay agenda of the Witherspoon Institute, which is connected through one of its founders to the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative researcher in Regnerus who has publicly staked his claim for heterosexual marriage as the best option for all of us, and some seriously flawed statistics will now be influencing court decisions and gay families for decades to come.
Despite an amicus brief filed by the American Sociological Association stating that Regenerus' study
provides no support for the conclusions that same-sex parents are inferior parents or that the children of same-sex parents experience worse outcomes"
it will still be considered in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court case to decide the constitutionality of California's Prop 8.
Which is just what the Witherspoon Institute wanted. And Regnerus too. But anyone who cares about families, all families, not to mention the integrity of social science, should refuse an invitation to the wedding of bad sociology, anti-family values and just plain mean-spiritedness that this study represents.
Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as of ethnic and immigrant history. She is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Woman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men, I Begin My Life All Over, and her memoir Naked in the Promised Land.
Last Thursday, Faderman read from her new book, My Mother's Wars, at one of our favorite bookstores, the Brookline Booksmith. We recorded her reading a few passages from the book, and we're happy to share those videos with you here.
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
In the first passage, Faderman reads about her mother's participation in a garment workers' strike.
In the third passage, Mary has discovered that she is pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions. Unmarried, Mary faces the prospect of single motherhood.
An examination of the failure of the United States as a broker in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, through three key historical moments
For more than seven decades the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people has raged on with no end in sight, and for much of that time, the United States has been involved as a mediator in the conflict. In this book, acclaimed historian Rashid Khalidi zeroes in on the United States's role as the purported impartial broker in this failed peace process.
Khalidi closely analyzes three historical moments that illuminate how the United States' involvement has, in fact, thwarted progress toward peace between Israel and Palestine. The first moment he investigates is the "Reagan Plan" of 1982, when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin refused to accept the Reagan administration's proposal to reframe the Camp David Accords more impartially. The second moment covers the period after the Madrid Peace Conference, from 1991 to 1993, during which negotiations between Israel and Palestine were brokered by the United States until the signing of the secretly negotiated Oslo accords. Finally, Khalidi takes on President Barack Obama's retreat from plans to insist on halting the settlements in the West Bank.
Through in-depth research into and keen analysis of these three moments, as well as his own firsthand experience as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 pre-Oslo negotiations in Washington, DC, Khalidi reveals how the United States and Israel have actively colluded to prevent a Palestinian state and resolve the situation in Israel's favor. Brokers of Deceit bares the truth about why peace in the Middle East has been impossible to achieve: for decades, US policymakers have masqueraded as unbiased agents working to bring the two sides together, when, in fact, they have been the agents of continuing injustice, effectively preventing the difficult but essential steps needed to achieve peace in the region.
Rashid Khalidi is the author of several books about the Middle East, including Palestinian Identity, Resurrecting Empire, The Iron Cage, and Sowing Crisis. His writing on Middle Eastern history and politics has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many journals. For his work on the Middle East, Professor Khalidi has received fellowships and grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.
In the Media
Click here to read a post by Khalidi at the Foreign Policy website.
“Unpacking these episodes in sharp, take-no-prisoners prose,
Khalidi maintains that the U.S. and Israel, ‘by far the most powerful actors in
the Middle East,’ through successive administrations and a variety of key
officials … have conspired to deny Palestinians any semblance of
self-determination. A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined,
if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.” —Kirkus Reviews
“What has happened to the Palestinian people since 1948 is one of the great
crimes of modern history. Of course, Israel bears primary responsibility for
this tragedy. However, as Rashid Khalidi shows in his smart new book, American
presidents from Truman to Obama have sided with Israel at almost every turn and
helped it inflict immense pain and humiliation on the Palestinians. At the same
time, they have employed high-sounding but dishonest rhetoric to cover up
Israel’s brutal behavior. As Brokers of Deceit makes clear,
the United States richly deserves to be called ‘Israel’s lawyer.’” —John J.
Mearsheimer, coauthor of The Israel Lobby
Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian negotiator and recently released
documents, Rashid Khalidi mounts a frontal attack on the myths and
misconceptions that have come to surround America’s role in the so-called ‘peace
process,’ which is all process and no peace. The title is not too strong: the
book demonstrates conclusively that far from serving as an honest broker, the
United States continues to act as Israel’s lawyer—with dire consequences for
its own interests, for the Palestinians, and for the entire region. Professor
Khalidi deserves much credit for his superb exposition of the fatal gap between
the rhetoric and reality of American diplomacy on this critically important
issue.” —Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford
and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World
“Khalidi has combined history, common sense, and his firsthand understanding of
Arab-Israeli peace talks, as brokered by Washington, to make the case that
American national security interests would be best served by a just peace in
the Middle East. Instead, he writes with great sadness, Washington’s efforts to
be an honest broker fall ‘somewhere between high irony and farce’—and put
democratic America, with its avowed commitment to freedom for all, in the
position of enabling the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people. This
is an important book” —Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
“For those of us who believe that a two-state solution is the path to justice
and peace for Israel and Palestine, Rashid Khalidi’s trenchant analysis is
powerful and disturbing. The United States has failed repeatedly to be an
honest broker, accepting the status quo of Israeli occupation and settlements
when a true peace agreement would be deeply in the interest of all parties,
Israel, Palestine, and the US itself. Khalidi emphasizes that the deceptions of
language and deed have serious long-term costs and that the United States might
soon impose and incur still greater costs through ill-conceived policies
vis-à-vis Syria, Iran, and other countries in the Middle East.” —Jeffrey D.
Sachs, author of The End of Poverty
“Rashid Khalidi is arguably the foremost U.S. historian of the modern Middle
East.” —Warren I. Cohen, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“With a deep knowledge of the Middle East and a felicitous literary style,
Khalidi . . . examines the history of U.S. involvement in the area against the
backdrop of European colonialism.” —Ronald Steel, The Nation
“Khalidi’s role is as a historian, working to show how historical forces,
largely ignored in the U.S., have shaped the modern Middle East. He takes
particular delight in demolishing the various clichés used to describe the
Middle East, bred out of what he terms ‘America’s historical amnesia.’” —Chris
Hedges, New York Times
In honor of Women's History Month, Beacon is celebrating classics of women's history, literature, and feminist thought. Celebrate with us at Beacon.org.
Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a world-renowned radical feminist philosopher. When her groundbreaking work, Gyn/Ecology, was first released by Beacon in 1978, one reviewer called it “the most important book to come out of the feminist movement since Daly’s last book, Beyond God the Father.”
“In this deeply original,
provocative book, outrage, hilarity, grief, profanity, lyricism and moral
daring join in bursting the accustomed bounds even of feminist discourse.” —The
New York Times Book Review
“Daly’s insights into the background of radical
feminism…are brilliant, and her synthesis of theology, mythology, philosophy,
history, and medicine is absolutely overwhelming.” —Library Journal
“Gyn/Ecology is a great leap forward
in feminist theory…It defies simplistic categorizations of political theory,
philosophy of religion, or even poetry. The book is all of these yet none,
because it goes beyond them.” —Janice Raymond, New Women’s Times
Feminist Review
“A vivid and exciting work, destined to become
of landmark in the radical feminist process.” —Chrysalis
“Brilliant and soaring, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology is
the most amazing book I’ve ever read. It set me spinning. A wonderfully
dangerous book.” —Gena Corea
“Daly writes with deep healing anger and
uncompromising vision. Her book gives a shock of awakening such as is found in
the works of Simone de Beauvoir.” —Publishers Weekly
New York TimesWellBlog regular contributor Danielle Ofri has been praised for turning the triumphs and trials of medicine into riveting and compassionate stories. This eBook exclusive edition offers 98 pages of her best work for $3.99.
This eBook original exhibits Danielle Ofri's range and skill as a storyteller as well as her empathy and astuteness as a doctor. Her vivid prose brings the reader into bustling hospitals, tense exam rooms, and Ofri's own life, giving an up-close look at the fast-paced, life-and-death drama of becoming a doctor. She tells of a young man uncertain of his future who comes into the clinic with a stomach complaint but for whom Dr. Ofri sees that the most useful "treatment" she can offer him is SAT tutoring. She writes of a desperate struggle to communicate with a critically ill patient who only speaks Mandarin, of a doctor whose experience in the NICU leaves her paralyzed with PTSD, and of her own struggles with the fear of making fatal errors, the dangers of overconfidence, and the impossible attempts to balance the empathy necessary for good care with the distance necessary for self-preservation. Through these stories of her patients, colleagues, and her own experiences, Intensive Care offers poignant insight into the medical world, and into the hearts and minds of doctors and their patients. These stories are drawn from the author’s previous books and one is from her forthcoming book, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.
Praise for Danielle Ofri
“The world of patient and doctor exists in a special sacred space. Danielle Ofri brings us into that place where science and the soul meet. Her vivid and moving prose enriches the mind and turns the heart. We are privileged to journey with her from her days as a student to her emergence as a physician working among those most in need.” —Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think
“A gifted storyteller … Ofri describes how her patients’ histories stirred her to practice medicine more compassionately, inspired her with their hope and fortitude.” —Sarah Halzack, The Washington Post
“Danielle Ofri is a finely gifted writer, a born storyteller as well as a born physician, and through these … brilliantly written episodes covering the years from studenthood to the end of her medical residency, we get not only a deep sense of the high drama of life and death that must face anyone working in a great hospital but a feeling for the making of a physician's mind and soul, and for her bravery and vulnerabilities as she goes through the long years of apprenticeship.” —Oliver Sacks, MD, author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
“Danielle Ofri stands observing at the crossroads of the remarkable lives that intersect at Bellevue. She is dogged, perceptive, unafraid, and willing to probe her own motives, as well as those of others. This is what it takes for a good physician to arrive at the truth, and these same qualities make her an essayist of the first order.” —Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner and My Own Country
“Dr. Ofri is an exemplary model of professional compassion. Her beautiful stories linger at the curtains of disease, of class and culture of life, and of inevitable death. The stories challenge us to create new narratives of caring and listening.” —Bruce Hirsch, Tikkun
“Danielle Ofri has so much to say about the remarkable intimacies between doctor and patient, about the bonds and the barriers, and above all about how doctors come to understand their powers and their limitations.” —Perri Klass, MD, author of A Not Entirely Benign Procedure and The Mercy Rule
“Her writing tumbles forth with color and emotion. She demonstrates an ear for dialogue, a humility about the limits of her medical training, and an extraordinary capacity to be touched by human suffering. . . . an important addition to the literary canon of medicine.” —Jan Gardner, The Boston Globe
David Chura is the author of I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup, and he has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.
Over the last few months, Chura's blog, Kids in the System, has featured a series called "Teachers in Their Own Words." Chura invited "a variety of teachers from different educational settings to share their experiences, to talk about why they teach and who they teach, and to tell the stories that keep them in the classroom." It's made for enlightening, inspirational reading. We asked him a few questions about the series for Beacon Broadside.
David Chura will speak at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Boston this Saturday, as part of Beacon's panel on Literary Nonfiction and Social Activism. See him—along with Courtney Martin, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Marianne Leone, and Beacon Director Helene Atwan—at 9am Saturday in Room 206, level 2. Get more information on AWP panels featuring Beacon authors, and be sure to visit us in the Bookfair at booth 1214 for author signings and a 35% discount on all books.
What inspired you to ask other teachers to write about their
experiences?
The educational debate is lively, fierce at times, and filled with
voices—of economists, politicians, business executives, unions, academics,
educational experts. The one voice that is under represented, if not silent, is
that of classroom teachers, the folks on the front lines of education. But that
silence hasn’t been my experience. In my many conversations with teachers that
I know, and in my correspondence with those from across the country who have
reached out to me through the internet, teachers have a lot to say. Yes,
they’re concerned about the policies that are being made about curriculum,
about standardized testing, about teacher evaluation. But what they are really
talking about is what matters most to them: the everyday classroom and the kids
that they teach and nurture and care about, and about how they can do their
best for their students. The absence of teachers’ voices in the educational
debate has bothered and saddened me. In order to break that silence I began the
series, “Teachers in Their Own Words,” inviting teachers to write about what is
most on their minds.
Teaching is a demanding job under the best conditions. How do
teachers who have additional challenges—of teaching kids in lockup, overcoming
ESL difficulties, getting through to kids who have been abused—find the
strength to do what they do?
I think all teachers but especially those working
with special needs students ask themselves that question: how—and why—do I keep
doing this? The answer is pretty simple. They’re nourished by the steps—little steps, big steps, leaps and bounds, and sometimes a
mere eighth of an inch forward—that their students make, students for whom any
progress is a struggle of effort against some pretty hefty odds. Teachers
facing the extra challenge of special needs students learn to appreciate not
just the successes of their students (and there are many) but also to value the
effort that these kids put into their work. Why teach in challenging
classrooms? Galway Kinell put it nicely: “everything flowers, from
within, of self-blessing /though sometimes it is
necessary/to reteach a thing its loveliness.” Who wouldn’t show up day after
day for that?
Given that the educational system is always under heavy scrutiny
and budget pressure, do you think that teachers have to, in some way, be
activists?
Being a teacher, almost by definition, means being an activist.
And given the present economic and educational climate, teachers as agents of
change seem even more imperative. For a teacher, that change happens daily in
the classroom as he or she is alert to the needs of students: it may be for a
winter coat, a pair of eyeglasses to see the board, or a dental checkup; or it
may be a need for protection from bullies, from abusive treatment at home, from
danger in the streets on the way to school. Any teacher knows that these needs must
be attended to as soon as possible—there’s no time for the bickering of experts—in
order to ensure student safety and wellbeing. In turn, dealing with those needs
on the everyday level often has compelled teachers to become involved in the larger
national debate on such issues as economic disparity, gun control and health
care. The insights teachers bring to these issues comes from their knowledge and
experience of the whole child and their
firsthand awareness of the impact that these and other social issues have on
kids’ development and education. It’s a perspective only teachers can bring to our
national discourse about what is best for our children. It’s a voice we need to
listen to.
An acclaimed writer on her mother's tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia
A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.
The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.
Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family.
Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.
"This is an exquisite piece of history—both resonantly personal and full of revelatory moments in the history of women and of New York in the early days of the garment workers union and the shadow of the Holocaust." —Dorothy Allison
"Faderman's story of her immigrant mother is so vividly imagined that you can taste the borscht Mary eats, squirm at the claustrophobia of her tiny rented room, and be swept up in the sensual delight that will betray her." —Janice Steinberg, the author ofThe Tin Horse
"This book is a work of originality, written with such imaginative sympathy that I read it with unabating pleasure from beginning to end." —Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments "Lillian Faderman is an extraordinary storyteller, one of the few who can tell a painful story, with a complex ending—and imbue it with humor, sensuality and earthy grace, in every sentence." —Amy Bloom, author of Away
"My Mother's Wars tells the aching story of immigrant factory workers in the decades preceding World War II -- sad lives made sadder by the terrified knowledge that their families in Europe are being extinguished. The book is part memoir, part reconstruction … and all artistry." —Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision
Beacon Broadside, a project of Beacon Press, is an online venue for essays, news items, and dispatches from respected writers, thinkers, and activists about our times.
