Beacon Broadside

The Toll and Rewards of Conflict Journalism

Amy Alexander is the author of the forthcoming book Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention. The 2008 Alfred Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute, she has been a staff writer at the San Francisco Examiner, Fresno Bee, and Miami Herald, and has been a contributing writer at the Nation, Boston Globe, and Washington Post. She was media columnist at Africana (later, AOL's BlackVoices) and has written for the Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Black Issues Book Review, MSNBC.com, Salon, and The Root, among other publications. Alexander has also been a regular commentator on National Public Radio and was associate producer of NPR's Tell Me More, with Michel Martin. She is co-author, with Alvin F. Pouissant, of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans.

Earlier this week, on April 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 80 attacks had been made on members of the press in Libya since political unrest began there during March. The attacks that led to the deaths of photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington were among that figure. News of the two photojournalists’ deaths rocked the media industry, spurring coverage that was more somber than anything in recent memory, including reports of the attacks on high-profile cable network news personalities that took place earlier in the spring in Egypt.

The deaths of Hondros, a veteran photojournalist for an international news agency, and Hetherington, a photojournalist and filmmaker, also brought to me memories of domestic unrest that I covered nineteen years ago. At that time – Los Angeles, April 29, 1992 – no journalists were killed in the line of duty. But there were many close calls. In hindsight, I now see clearly a through-line from that two decade-old conflagration that runs directly to our contemporary political reality. And it highlights the inherent tension that exists in the concept of democracy.

American journalists have long been the shock troops in the centuries-old battle between democracy and monarchy. But how to square the contextual realities of 18th Century America, when our democracy was first forged, with the realities of today? Can American journalists still expect that their role as Watchdogs of Democracy is secure? What happens when citizens no longer need journalistic shock troops to capture, project and validate citizens’ struggle for democracy? Apart from any early ideological reluctance that sometimes led political or corporate leaders to try to stop journalists from recording civil unrest – see the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968 – what happens to journalism’s role as the watchdogs of democracy when citizens stop trusting the Fourth Estate? And what will conflict journalism look like now that citizens have acquired the tools to record their own stories of protest against affronts to democracy?

The core definition of democracy, as Aristotle saw it, is this: "In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme."

In Los Angeles, on April 29, 1992, “poor people” took to the streets to protest what they viewed as the unfair acquittal of four white police officers who had been captured on videotape beating a black male motorist a year earlier. So it was that on April 29, 1992, I was dispatched by the Fresno Bee to the streets of LA within hours after the four white LA city police officers were acquitted.

Call it a riot, an uprising or civil unrest. What I experienced over the next four days was chaotic, frightening-- but also exhilarating, at least for someone who takes seriously the role of recording the various manifestations of democracy in action. Messy, loud, and dangerous though they sometimes may be, the efforts of “poor people” to defend and preserve their role in a democratic society have to be recorded. But, as we saw from the tragic deaths of Hondros and Hetherington in Libya recently, recording those efforts in their most volatile expression can exact a major toll on those who undertake the task.

In LA of 1992, for example, I personally saw journalists harassed and beaten by protestors. On the first night of the upheaval, at a corner not far from Florence and Normandie avenues in the South Central district of LA, I watched hundreds of residents (Latino, African-American, white and other ethnicities) take to the streets breaking windows at corner markets, furniture stores, eateries and other businesses.

As I lived it, the members of the press who came up for direct confrontation were broadcast journalists. I wrote about one such incident that I witnessed in an online journal of African American news and opinion, Africana.com. (Read Amy Alexander's posts from Africana.com (pdfs):  Part 1|  Part 2 |  Part 3) I began by describing how I and two other journalists-- a photographer, Russell Yip, and a senior reporter, Marji Lambert-- had jumped into a company car within an hour of the verdict and raced three hours south of the San Joaquin Valley into South Central Los Angeles. After we arrived at a section of South Central that was already ablaze, we parked, and walked into the neighborhood not far from Florence and Normandie avenues; along a commercial strip, thousands of residents gathered, chanting, yelling, smashing windows and taunting police officers who stood near their cruisers along the side-streets:

As I took in the scene, a white television cameraman came lurching up the street. Looking over his shoulder, he moved quickly, a heavy video camera swinging from his hand at his side rather than from atop his shoulder as it should have been. Two young black men followed closely behind him, yelling as they closed in. One reached out and pushed the cameraman.

The cameraman stumbled, his face red and stunned. He kept walking, though, and the tense procession moved down the block, out of sight. I met the eyes of the Fresno Bee photographer. We exchanged an "oh, s—t” look and kept silent.

Uniformed police officers, their black and white cruisers idling nearby, stood at the end of the block. I veered over to speak with them, walking deliberately near the engines in the street. I stopped to speak with a white officer (I didn't see any black cops). I wanted to know the police department's direction – would they arrest looters or fire starters? How many arrests had they made thus far? Did he know of any officer-involved shootings? Leaning against the grill of his car, the officer smiled at my questions. He couldn't comment, he said, because he wasn't a department spokesman.

I looked over his dark blue uniform, its steel handcuffs, gun and wood baton clanking slightly when he adjusted his weight. A white helmet obscured all but a crescent of his face, and his eyes were light. He seemed interested in the activity, but was firmly planted well away from it. The radio at his waist began squawking. Turning his back to me, he reached for the handset that dangled from a cord strung over his shoulder. I walked away.

The lack of interaction between law enforcement officials and the protestors during the earliest hours of the Los Angeles riots in 1992 was evident – and quite unsettling. Ironic, to say the least. The actions of police officers who had beaten the black male motorist, Rodney King, had lit the match that ultimately led to the rioting; the cops were the focus of the anger that residents now poured onto the streets of LA. I understood that anger, yet I also knew that the protesting could spiral out of control if the officers on scene did not step in, during that first night. But they did not: somewhere along their chain of command, a decision had been made that the officers would not engage in battle with the “protestors.” And as the night wore on, and protesting steadily morphed into flat-out looting and destruction of private property throughout downtown LA and surrounding neighborhoods, we journalists worried about our own safety as we reported amidst the fracas.

Ultimately, we three Bee journalists spent a week in Los Angeles, delivering as many as four stories daily to McClatchy Newspapers and to subscribers of the McClatchy News Service. The Associated Press gave us and other out of town teams work space at its offices at Second Street and Figueroa Boulevard in downtown LA. And because we had arrived so soon after the riots began, we had secured hotel rooms not far out of the city, at the northern edge of Hollywood, for ourselves and for other McClatchy reporters and photographers who eventually joined us.

These conditions were far from the combat-like experiences that Chris Hondros, Tim Hetherington and other journalists experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other “hotspots” in 2011.

Here is another important distinction between the challenges contemporary journalists covering conflicts now face, and what I experienced in LA twenty years ago: I also felt, acutely, that as a black woman, I enjoyed an advantage over many of my reporter colleagues in Los Angeles during the unrest.

More than once, I was approached by black or Latino residents who were on the streets, and asked which news organization I worked for. I managed to talk these residents down but I felt instinctively that they might had reacted differently were I white. When I watched the March 2011 footage of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper being jostled and knocked around as he tried to report on the unrest that took place in Cairo, Egypt, I couldn’t help but wonder if his pale skin and white/gray hair was somehow impeding his ability to gather news under those circumstances.

Yet while two decades and many thousands of miles separate my experiences covering the LA riots from the current events in North Africa and the Mid-East, the mechanics of news-gathering in such conditions, and the goal of those who enter such circumstances willingly, remain the same: Tell the story of what is happening on the ground. Avoid judging those who seek to guard or exercise democracy with action that you may find frightening or, yes, dangerous. I cannot answer the question of whether engaging in this work is “worth dying for,” I only know that in 1992, I felt utterly compelled to be in Los Angeles, recording the events of that week.

Read Amy Alexander's posts from Africana.com (pdfs):
Part 1|  Part 2 |  Part 3

Waiting for Superman, the Education Debate, and America's Future

The critically-acclaimed documentary Waiting for Superman opens nationwide today, and one of the key educators featured in the film is Geoffrey Canada. Canada is President and CEO of Harlem Children's Zone, an organization described by President Barack Obama as "an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children in a neighborhood where they were never supposed to have a chance."

Beacon Press was proud to publish Canada's two books, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (now available in a new edition) and Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America, as well as a new graphic book adaptation of Fist Stick Knife Gun. The graphic version, which was adapted by comic artist Jamar Nicholas, was recently praised by Publisher's Weekly as "exactly the sort of broadly appealing and gripping nonfiction graphic novel that librarians need to be adding to their shelves."

We are equally proud to see Canada given prominent voice in the debate about how to improve educational opportunities for all children in America. Click on the links below to find out more about Geoffrey Canada, the Harlem Children's Zone, and Waiting for Superman.

Geoffrey Canada Members Project video, where he speaks about Mike, his childhood protector and a major figure in Fist Stick Knife Gun.

Time Magazine feature article on Waiting for Superman

New York Times review of Waiting for Superman

Oprah Winfrey's Waiting for Superman resource page

Geoffrey Canada on The Today Show

As Waiting for Superman highlights the challenges faced by our educational system, Beacon offers several titles that provide perspectives on how to address them.

The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School
by Linda Nathan

The Boston Arts Academy comprises an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student body, yet 94 percent of its graduates are accepted to college. This remarkable success rate, writes Principal Linda Nathan, is in large part due to asking the right questions and being open to seeking solutions collaboratively with faculty, parents, and the students themselves.

 

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools

Editors: Theresa Perry, Robert P. Moses, Ernesto Cortés Jr., Lisa Delpit, Joan T. Wynne

Legendary civil rights leader and education activist Robert Moses invited one hundred prominent African American and Latino intellectuals and activists to meet to discuss a proposal for a campaign to guarantee a quality education for all children as a constitutional right-a movement that would "transform current approaches to educational inequity, all of which have failed miserably to yield results for our children." The response was overwhelming, and people literally started organizing on the spot.

 

In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization
by Deborah Meier

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.

Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.

In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.

Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

 

These and many more titles can be found on the Beacon Press website. 

Forget the Beer Summit. Shirley Sherrod’s Story Begins Our Conversation on Race

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century.

If you've watched the full video of the speech given by former USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod at the NAACP Freedom Fund breakfast, then you know that a hideous injustice has been perpetrated against a thoughtful, smart, sensitive, reflective, principled African American woman. She movingly described her journey as a child who had to work in the fields in the deep South to becoming a representative of the USDA. The result of this journey was her recognition that "it's not about black or white, it's about the poor." As Sherrod told her audience, "we have to work together." It's the ultimate irony that she lamented at the end of her speech that "it's a shame that we don't have white people and black people in this audience."

In fact, Sherrod's speech should be required listening for those who want to understand the arc of race and racism in America and the possibilities for redemption in this country. The world into which Mrs. Sherrod was born is one that can poison you or strengthen you. Mrs. Sherrod chose the latter path. According to Mrs. Sherrod, her father was murdered by white men who were acquitted, despite the presence of eyewitnesses at the crime scene. Her family home was threatened by violent whites. Her mother protected the family home with a gun and with courage. Sherrod decided early-on to devote her life to helping the less fortunate. She learned that the less fortunate are black and white. And she learned and encouraged her listeners to hold themselves accountable and look beyond "black and white." Sherrod's story and her compelling telling of it at the NAACP breakfast should be regarded as the opening statement in the "conversation on race" that keeps getting hijacked in this country.

Matt Kailey: Forgive Me for Loving ‘TRANSform Me’

Matt Kailey is the author of Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide to the Transsexual Experience. Kailey is the managing editor of Out Front Colorado and the Denver Transgender & Transsexual Issues Examiner at Examiner.com. He blogs at Tranifesto, where this post originally appeared.

When I heard about a new makeover reality show where the subjects are unhappy and insecure, the makeover artists are trans women, and the whole premise is that the trans aspect of the makeover team is a big surprise, all I could think was, "Houston, we have multiple problems."

In VH1's new reality show, TRANSform Me, unhappy women send in a videotape explaining why they need a makeover. Those who are chosen are told that the makeover artists will arrive at their home on a certain day and time to transform them. What they don't know is that the three members of the emergency makeover team are all transgender women (I would call them transsexual women myself, but over the last few years, the two terms have become synonymous, so I use the language that the women themselves use).

The show was conceived by Laverne Cox, a trans woman who has been on several television shows and has won a GLAAD award her appearance on I Want to Work for Diddy. The other trans team members are makeup artist Jamie Clayton and model Nina Poon. Needless to say, these three women are gorgeous and incredibly sexy, and they play it to the max.

Even though I have never been opposed to makeovers, unlike many other feminists I know (yes, I consider myself a feminist), the two major problems that I foresaw were: 1. that the "surprise" of the show was that the makeover artists were trans women, setting up the possibility that the makeover subjects would be freaked out or repulsed, much to the delight of non-trans viewers, and 2. that the whole show revolved around the premise that unattractive, unhappy women could be transformed into happy, confident women simply because they suddenly looked "beautiful."

I basically saw an army of offended trans people protesting that the show exploited trans women by making them a possibly unwelcome "surprise," and an army of offended activists, both trans and non-trans, upset that the show objectified all women by making physical beauty the gold standard for happiness. And there may be an offended army out there, but I'm not one of the soldiers. I love this show.

The Death of Howard Zinn Mourned by Many

The Boston Globe's James Carroll shares a truly remarkable story rooted in Zinn's anti-Vietnam War efforts: 

HOWARD ZINN had just buckled his seat belt when the flight attendant’s voice came over the speakers with the pre-flight routine - the welcome aboard and identification of crew members. At mention of the pilot's name, Zinn’s eyes lifted, and he wondered - could it be the same man? Years before, Zinn, and fellow anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan, had traveled to Hanoi for the purpose of accepting the release from North Vietnam of three American prisoners of war - downed US flyers. They were the first prisoners to be released, but the condition was that they be handed over not to American officials, but to representatives of the anti-war movement.

The three prisoners were subdued and skeptical - obviously beaten down by their ordeal. The empathy Zinn felt was rooted in his own having been an Army Air Forces bombardier during World War II. Zinn and Berrigan reassured them, and soon the five men were flown out of Hanoi - freedom! While changing planes in Laos, they were intercepted by the US ambassador, who took custody of the POWs. Zinn wished them luck, and that was the last he had ever seen of them.

But now he had just heard the name of one of the three - the man at the controls of his airliner. Could it be? When the flight was underway, Zinn asked an attendant to tell the pilot his name. Soon, the captain came walking down the aisle. They recognized each other, exchanged a friendly greeting - and that was it. Some moments in life are too multi-layered for words. When Zinn told me this story, he said he was glad to see the man looking well, but that their brief meeting left him feeling sad. Beyond acknowledgment, there was simply no way to reckon with what they had shared. For Zinn's part, he realized that the intense bond he felt with the former POW was unbroken.

Also in the Globe this weekend, Alice Walker shared her memories of Zinn. She, like Marian Wright Edelman, was one of Zinn's students at Spelman College:

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned $17 a week working 12-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: "Why, there's nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!"

Bob Herbert in the New York Times calls Zinn "a treasure and an inspiration," but questions the use of the term "radical" to describe the man and his work:

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

The folks at HowardZinn.org have a very active and growing Howard Zinn Fan Page at Facebook, where many more links are being shared.

Last Thursday's Daily Show ended with a Moment of Zinn. Here's the entire interview from 2005 (click here to watch if the embedded clip does not appear below) in which former President George W. Bush comes up short in comparison to Christopher Columbus.

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David R. Dow: Legal Group Abandons Death Penalty, But Will it Bring "Tectonic" Change to Texas?

Today's post is from David R. Dow, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Houston and the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service, is the author of Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row, as well as a memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution, which will be published by Twelve in February.

It is dangerous to disagree with Adam Liptak’s legal analysis, but I think I am going to have to. Liptak’s column in yesterday’s New York Times discusses the decision of the American Law Institute to abandon the death penalty. 

(The ALI is a supposedly elite group comprised of around 4000 lawyers, judges, and academics. I say "supposedly" because I am a member, and so I think I can say that membership has a lot to do with whom you know. As a federal judge whose name I will not reveal once said, the major qualifications for getting appointed to the federal bench are: (i) having a law license, and (ii) being friends with your U.S. Senator (or being a friend of a friend). The same might be said for membership in the ALI.  But I digress.)

Liptak points out that when the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, after a brief four-year hiatus, the framework shared by the death penalty laws that the Court upheld was created by the ALI. Essentially, this framework was designed to insure that the death penalty be reserved for the so-called worst of the worst.

Over time, a deep fissure developed in death penalty law. On the one hand, defendants facing the death penalty were allowed to place before the jury any and all so-called mitigating evidence -- that is, evidence that would warrant a life sentence, rather than a death sentence. On the other hand, juries could not be given too much discretion, because the consequences of too much discretion tend to be impermissible discrimination. So states had to channel the jury's discretion to try to wall off the factors juries were not supposed to take into account, while permitting them to take into account everything else.

In short, death penalty law had at its very heart a fundamental contradiction. Juries were to base their decision on personal characteristics of the defendant so as to identify the worst of the worst. Yet certain personal characteristics (like race and sexual orientation, for example) are irrelevant. Consequently, basing a decision on personal characteristics of the defendant is a recipe for all kinds of impermissible discrimination.

S. Craig Watkins: Twitterball: Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Ochocinco and the Future of Sports

Today's post is from S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Watkins writes about youth, media, technology, and society. He is an Associate Professor of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. This post originally appeared at the Young and the Digital blog.

 Recently I was watching ESPN's Sportcenter Live when producers of the show interrupted the program with a breaking news report. Minutes earlier, Tiger Woods, the world's most famous athlete, used his website to post a public apology to his wife and kids and combat the rumors that were rapidly spreading about his private life. With the stroke of a keyboard Tiger used his website to, at least momentarily, reframe the press coverage about his recent troubles.

ESPN was not the only news outlet that immediately reported on the statement. Several other major news media organizations ran front page stories on their websites, too. What really caught my eye was the fact that each of the stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times used one source for their initial reporting-- Tiger Woods.

After observing how Team Tiger was able to spin the news reporting I began to think about how social media is transforming the culture of sports. A few weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with Eddie Matz, senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. Eddie was writing a piece on professional athletes' use of social media platforms like Twitter.

Shortly before my chat with Eddie former Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson found himself in serious trouble and, eventually (albeit briefly), out of a job after he used a gay slur in a Twitter post. The firestorm that confronted Johnson was yet another reminder of how the sportsworld, like virtually every other institution in America, has been forced to grapple with the spread of social media. As a generation of athletes accustomed to social media and the "always on" norms of digital media culture enter pro sports the executives of billion dollars sports franchises have been forced to upgrade their knowledge about social media. In many NFL training camps this summer several teams instituted a no-social media policy out of fear that team secrets, strategy, and practices could be openly shared. In September the NFL established a formal policy regarding the use social media by players.

Eddie asked me what I thought about the use of social media by pro athletes. We talked about several things but here are six ways in which social media is changing the business and culture of professional sports.

Eboo Patel: The Murderer at Fort Hood

Today's post is from Eboo Patel, the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. Patel is the founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based institution building the global interfaith youth movement, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Initiatives, where he is working to realize President Obama’s priority of interfaith cooperation. He writes "The Faith Divide", a featured blog on religion for the Washington Post, where this post originally appeared.

I'm writing from Toronto, where last night I gave a plenary address on Muslim-Jewish cooperation to the Biennial conference of the Union for Reform Judaism. Backstage after the address, my friend Rabbi David Saperstein gave me a grim look and said, "The shooter had a Muslim name."

He called his wife who works for NPR, and his face got more grim as I heard him say:

"Are you sure he was a Muslim? Are you sure he was a Muslim?"

He hung up the phone and turned to me. "This is our worst nightmare." 

Rabbi Saperstein knows there will be a thousand voices broadcasting the news that a Muslim opened fire at Fort Hood in Texas yesterday - the implication being, of course, that this act represents Islam. He knows how distorting that perception is for Muslims, and how dangerous that distortion is for America.

Link Roundup: Rural Youths, A Picnic in North Korea, Sexual Assault in the Military

Review of Hollowing Out the Middle on the Daily Yonder blog:

Most impressively, the authors keyed into what concerns rural youths about their adult lives and how these quandaries fuel the exodus of young people from rural places. Their dilemma, in short, is between remaining as adults in rural communities where they sacrifice educational or economic opportunities or leaving beloved rural places for expanded options in urban areas. Rural kids find that they must negotiate between their commitment to place and their commitment to the American ideal of individualist achievement, an ideal increasingly difficult to reach as the economic foundations of many rural communities continue to crumble. “When moving up implies moving out,” what should young people do?

In this weekend's New York Times, Marie Myung-Ok Lee (author of the novel Somebody's Daughter) discussed a recent trip to North Korea with her mother.

We sweltered through customs at the hands of men in gray Mao suits and women in neutral “Mad-Men”-era outfits, every heart topped by a pin of Kim Il-sung. Then over the next few days we were shown carefully presented slices of Pyongyang: the subway, for example, which we rode for a single stop, where elaborate murals of a workers’ paradise were lighted by chandeliers. We went to endless museums and parks but were sternly instructed not to speak to any locals. We took meals at restaurants where we were the only customers, and the food seemed to come from the same Western-facsimile kitchen: bread with swirls, bland fried flounder, mayonnaise-based salad served in a martini glass. Finally my mother, weary of the utter weirdness of the place, told our tour guide in Korean that we needed to try some real North Korean food.

Penny Coleman poses a difficult question: does military service condition men to commit sexual assault?

Yet for decades, in spite of the terrible numbers, the military has managed with astonishing success to get away with responding to grievances like Krause's with silence, or denial, or by blaming "a few bad apples." But when individual soldiers take the blame, the system gets off the hook.

And it can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread -- for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators.

Interfaith Youth Core founder and Obama faith advisor Eboo Patel was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News and World Report; documentary photographer and journalist David Bacon was named an Utne Reader Visionary. Beacon Press sends out its congratulations to both of them for these much-deserved accolades. 

Frederick S. Lane: C-Street, Privacy, and the Separation of Church and State

Today's post is from Frederick S. Lane, an author, attorney, expert witness, and lecturer who has appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. His fifth book, American Privacy: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Our Most Contested Right, will be published by Beacon Press in November 2009. For additional information, visit www.FrederickLane.com

Few addresses have gained so much notoriety so quickly as 133 C Street SE in Washington, D.C. The slim brick townhouse, nestled on a quiet street behind the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, was recently outed as an enclave of fundamentalist Washington insiders by Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and a contributing editor to Harper's and Rolling Stone. (Editor's note: Sharlet is also co-editor, with Peter Manseau, of Believer Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith.) With typical Christian duality, C Street has reportedly been a place for some members of Congress both to hold assignations with non-spousal partners and to seek refuge from them.

Last month, I stayed half a block from 133 C Street while in Washington doing research for a book. It was like bumping into Dennis Kucinich in a DC bookstore (which also happened during my visit); buildings, like people, can take on a weird sense of familiarity when you've seen them repeatedly on television or the Internet. As I walked or jogged past the townhouse each morning, it occurred to me that C Street is neatly located at the intersection of my last two books, The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court and American Privacy: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Our Most Contested Right. The recent spotlight shining through the curtained windows of C Street begs an important question: can we defend a pluralistic democracy from religious zealots without critically wounding core American values, such as freedom of religion and the right to privacy? Not coincidentally, that's a question that has become particularly pressing since 9/11.

Photo of the C Street house that is home to "The Family," taken by the author.

So just how far into C Street should the media (or governmental) spotlight shine? The answer lies in a bit of constitutional topology. In its various decisions on privacy, the Supreme Court has ruled that there is a zone of privacy that surrounds each of us, a zone limned in large part by the rights guaranteed to us in the Constitution. For private individuals, that zone of privacy is a portable sphere that surrounds us and protects us, to varying degrees, from unreasonable governmental interference. But for elected officials, like the Congressional denizens of C Street, the zone of privacy is more like a toroid, or doughnut, hanging around their midsection.

Bill Ayers to appear on Good Morning America

Bill Ayers will discuss the reissue of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist with Chris Cuomo on tomorrow's Good Morning America. (UPDATE: link to story)

Beacon Press had planned to publish a new edition of Fugitive Days with a new afterword in April 2009 after reverting the paperback rights from Penguin books in April of 2008.  Because of the intense interest in Bill Ayers generated by the McCain/Palin campaign, Beacon decided to move up publication to November.  However, since Mr. Ayers did not want to inject himself or his own story any further into the election debate, we agreed to hold release of the new edition and media interviews about the book until after the elections.

Ayers posted here last January about the final Bush State of the Union address. We posted a note from Beacon Press about Bill last summer when his name was first brought up in the Democratic Presidential debates. And we've extensively linked to press coverage of Ayers in recent months. Here's a few of the most recent links:

Bill Ayers Speaks: Washington Post

Mr. Ayers's Neighborhood: New Yorker Blog

Ex-Radical Talks of Education and Justice, Not Obama: New York Times

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver, Ayers interviews, Race and the Election

"The Poet Goes to Indiana" by Mary Oliver was featured on the Writer's Almanac recently.

Bill Ayers was interviewed by the Washington Post for this piece that ran that day after the election—the New Yorker's David Remnick was there, too. Last week, Garry Trudeau offered this commentary on the pre-election media.

On Slate, one more eloquent defense of scholar Rashid Khalidi made it in before the election.

Colm Tóibín wrote this piece for the New York Review of Books about similarities between Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son.

Kevin Scott appeared on New Hampshire Public Radio to discuss The Porning of America.

Amy Alexander and Dr. Alvin Pouissaint co-wrote a pre-election article for The Root about managing the stress of history and led this post-election discussion about African-American reactions at Washington Post.

Latoya Peterson analyzed the ways we talked about race and identity during the campaign.

Jay Wexler submits a Supreme Court Humor Special Report on the "F-Word and S-Word Case" (except that he uses bad words). Frederick Lane discussed the lower court ruling here.

Recent Posts on Beacon Broadside

Memories of Studs Terkel from One of Thousands of Good Friends

Before the Victory Celebration: Religious Scholars in Chicago

Thoughts on Race, Identity and the Obamas

Greenspan Passes the Buck

Memories of Studs Terkel from One of Thousands of Good Friends

Studs Terkel passed away last week at the age of 96. Rick Ayers, the author of Studs Terkel's Working: A Teaching Guide (New Press, 2002) and Great Books for High School Kids (Beacon Press), shares here some of his memories of the great oral historian.

When my friends and I met Studs Terkel, in 1963, we were a bunch of high school suburban rebels, living twenty miles west of Chicago. We sought freedom by turning our dial to the black music stations, WVON and WYNR – discovering the beat of Bo Diddley and the heart of Aretha Franklin. And we also came across WFMT, Chicago's "fine arts" radio station. We would sit up with the funky and eclectic folk and blues show, Midnight Special, on Saturday nights and listen to Studs Terkel interviews in the mornings.

One day we ventured down to the loop to take a record album in to the Midnight Special producer. As we sat in the WFMT studio, Studs came bustling out, all distracted and busy, his hair flying, a sheaf of papers, notes and records under his arm. In all his hurry, though, he stopped and said, "Hello, you young people, what are you doing here?" He immediately gave us all of his focus. Leaning over, then sitting on the edge of a chair, he wanted to find out all about us. Soon he boiled down his search to a central question, one he came back to again and again in our years of acquaintance, "I wonder, though, what made you bunch of suburban kids – you're supposed to be training to be bank managers, you're supposed to be practicing your swing at the country club – what made you come down here to Chicago, what made you dissatisfied with your world? What is making these kids from the suburbs go down south, go on picket lines? What makes you tick?"

With that, we began to think differently about ourselves. We weren't just confused and bored and dissatisfied. We were a phenomenon. We were pioneers. We were interesting. You can't imagine what that means to a teenager.

In many ways, the interviewer, the documenter, tells you back your story with more clarity than you told it. If the interviewer is sloppy, selfish, or narrow, you will resent the story he tells and deny its truth. If he is Studs, you recognize its essential truth and begin to understand yourself, and your life, better.

Link Roundup: Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Recent Reviews

Scott Horton, in his always excellent blog at Harpers, skewers the "New McCarthyism" in a defense of Rashid Khalidi. More commentary in support of Khalidi, a respected scholar at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, is flooding the web and mainstream media. Check out this piece in the Washington Post and this DailyKos diary responding to it, and this video posted at Talking Points Memo where John Judis concedes that this campaign is even dirtier than the Bush-Dukakis campaign.

Bill Ayers recently spoke on education in New York.

Rev. Forrest Church discussed his memoir Love & Death and his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer on NPR's Fresh Air.

Kate Clinton proposes action for Nov. 5th, whether or not Prop. 8 is defeated in California.

Looking for some good reading? Five librarians got together to compile this list of the Best of the Best of University Presses. Watch their presentation on BookTV. Two Beacon Press books, Once in a Promised Land and Without a Map, made the list.

A quick look at some reviews of recent Beacon Press releases:

PopMatters on The Porning of America

New Orleans Times-Picayune on Confessions of an Eco-Sinner

Cape Cod Times on The Muse of the Revolution

Winston-Salem Journal on Saving Paradise

And recently on Beacon Broadside:

Greenspan Passes the Buck by Marilyn Sewell

Zombie Jamboree in Texas by Glenn Branch

Factory Farms, Dirty Water, and the Bible: Part One and Part Two by Mark Winne

Transsexuals Are Not “Human Monsters”

Today's post is from Matt Kailey, the author of Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide the Transsexual Experience (Beacon Press, 2005), the editor of Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices (Johnson Books, 2007), and the managing editor of Out Front Colorado, Colorado's oldest and largest GLBT publication.

The online teaser was intriguing: '"Human monsters" a reality.' Having lived through the first few years of the 21st century, I wholeheartedly agreed. But when I clicked on the link, I discovered that it led not to a story about current political figures, but to a CNN article about an '80s Olympic athlete who was unknowingly given steroids by her coaches in order to enhance her performance.

East German shot putter Heidi Krieger thought she was taking vitamins, but later discovered, as her body began to masculinize, that she was being given the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol, a drug that, according to the article, "changed a woman into a man." As Krieger continued on the steroids, she noted changes not only in her physical appearance, but also in her feelings.

"I felt much more attracted to women and just felt like a man. But I knew I was not (a) lesbian," Krieger told CNN.

Good thinking, because lesbians don't feel like men. But I digress.

In 1997, Krieger had a "sex-change operation" and became Andreas Krieger. Details of this particular "operation" were not made public, and I would like to know more, because I find it fascinating that there is one magical "sex-change operation" that will do the trick. But I digress. Krieger is now married and runs an army surplus store. He says he does not want to be seen as a victim, but he presents himself as quite unhappy with his situation and with the circumstances surrounding his "sex-change operation."

Monday Link Roundup: Bill Ayers and Stanley Fish, SCOTUS, YouTube

We recently posted about Beacon Press author Bill Ayers and his connection to Barack Obama. Stanley Fish posted about the controversy on his blog at the New York Times, and "confesses" his own association with Bill Ayers:

Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

It goes without saying that Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright, who was on Bill Moyers Journal this past weekend and spoke at the NAACP's Freedom Fund dinner yesterday, has also given the presidential candidate some trouble in the mainstream media. While the blogosphere is still debating the impact of Wright's appearances, the radical image he and his church have been given in the media does not match the experience of Suzanne Shea, who visited the church he led for over thirty years.

Over at Slate last week, Dahlia Lithwick got some conversation going about the incoming New York Times SCOTUS beat reporter, Adam Liptak. Mark Tushnet, author of the forthcoming I Dissent, was one of many readers to comment on how Liptak might rethink the task of reporting on the highest court in the land.

Read an excerpt of Nan Mooney's Not Keeping Up With Our Parents over at Utne.com.

And David Gessner, who posted here last week about the problems of environmental writing, is back on YouTube with a very funny approach to keeping students engaged in a lecture. You can find the video on Beacon Broadside's YouTube video log. While you're over there (and before you get distracted by cats playing piano), check out an older video of David skiing the beach.
 

Suzanne Strempek Shea on Weekend Edition

For those of you who have been enjoying Suzanne Strempek Shea's posts from the roadtrip that inspired Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, tune in to Weekend Edition on NPR tomorrow, Easter morning, to hear an interview with Shea conducted by Liane Hansen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the story on the NPR website.]

And if you haven't read the posts, here they are:

Celtic Celebrations
Barack Obama's church
Christmas Eve in Bethlehem

"Mission Accomplished": O'Reilly Declares Victory in the War on Christmas

by Frederick S. Lane

Forty or so years ago, a U.S. Senator from Vermont by the name of George Aiken wisely advised both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon that the United States should simply declare victory in Vietnam and bring its troops home. Unfortunately, neither listened to him. His advice, sadly, is still relevant. When President George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 and declared "Mission Accomplished," he only got it half right; he overlooked the bit about bringing the troops home.

And then there's Bill O'Reilly, the bombastic host of Fox News's "The O'Reilly Factor," and a cultural warrior who finally seems to have taken Aiken's advice to heart. In the December 13 episode of his show, O'Reilly announced that Fox News had won the so-called "war on Christmas." Well, that is a relief. The only question is whether O'Reilly will follow all of Aiken's advice and call home the Fox troops scouring the countryside for the last signs of the anti-Christmas resistance.

"The far left secular progressive community is furious, furious, I tell you about losing the war on Christmas…. [A]ll over the country, the sights and signs of Christmas are on display. Few department stores are telling employees not to say a 'Merry Christmas.' And the Taliban-like oppression of the holiday has largely ceased, but the SPs are not happy about that."