Notes from a curious creature

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time. But it has a corollary.  You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right? Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.  A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

Like many others, I absolutely loved the most recent Doctor Who episode. I thought its portrayal of Rosa Parks was phenomenally moving, its use of music was fantastic, and in general it was really well done.

It was also incomplete. That’s not necessarily a criticism; as this article (conveniently about Rosa Parks!) from the Social Psychology Quarterly points out, there is a “symbolic power of oneness” that leads us to pinpoint specific leaders and create narratives about them that are powerful in and of themselves, but that necessarily includes the elision of lots of other facts, circumstances, and leaders. Because many, many people don’t know the true history of Rosa Parks - I certainly didn’t until I took a sociology class on social movements in college - I figured I’d give interested folks an opportunity to learn more.

The episode had a lot of small shoutouts to the true, complete history for people who knew what they were listening for, but I know a lot of people didn’t! Some cool things the episode did so you can scan for them in this information dump:

Jeanne Theoharis’s book, linked below, was one of the first (if not the first) to connect Parks’s decision on that particular night to the news that Emmett Till’s murders would walk free. In our first encounter with Parks in the episode, she warns Ryan that Emmett Till was from out of town, too.

When Ryan joins Parks and her husband and MLK Jr. and Fred Gray, Parks says to the men that he might be a candidate for the Youth Council. That Council was connected to the lawsuit that ended segregation in Montgomery through at least two young plaintiffs!

Also, Fred Gray is a name most folks probably didn’t recognize, which is a bummer because he was a BADASS - a black civil rights attorney and the one who contacted the group of African American woman who had been calling for a boycott and let them know that Parks’s arrest could be the spark they were waiting for.

Rosa Parks was not a random seamstress sitting on a bus who, out of the blue, decided to take a stand against blatant and egregious racism. Rosa Parks was a seasoned, life-long activist by the time she was on the bus driven by James Blake. She had been the secretary of the NAACP chapter in Montgomery for years. She and her husband met when he was fundraising for the Scottsboro Boys. Her personal hero wasn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. (although they were close friends!), it was Malcolm X. She was a black radical who described her experiences as a “life history of being rebellious” (cited at least in Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, if not other places as well). 

She also wasn’t the first, or last, black woman to refuse to stand up to make room for a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. In fact, the lawsuit that Rosa Parks was involved in (Browder v Gayle) had five key plaintiffs, of which Parks was only one (and not even the lead plaintiff!). In March 1955 - nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest in December of that year - a young, fifteen-year-old woman named Claudette Colvin, who was a member of the NAACP’s Youth Council that Parks suggested Ryan join, refused to give up her seat. 

 Claudette’s case was folded into the broader litigation that was started by Fred Gray, but like Parks, Claudette wasn’t the lead plaintiff. Why? Because she was fifteen and pregnant and it would’ve led to bad press. Another young woman, Mary Louise Smith, was also arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus. She also became a plaintiff, and was also not the lead plaintiff - this time because the lawyers were concerned she was too poor to be sympathetic to a jury. 

I also just want to mention the role of allies for a minute. Clifford “Cliff” Durr and his wife, Virginia Foster Durr, were two white activists in the Civil Rights movement. Cliff was a lawyer who was looking for an ideal case to challenge the Montgomery bus segregation laws as unconstitutional. He advised Fred Gray on the litigation, as Gray was relatively inexperienced at the time (he was only 25). The Durrs are super cool people and I highly recommend reading more about them; they’re great role models for allies like myself. Some cool facts about them: 

Virginia was close personal friends with Rosa Parks and with Eleanor Roosevelt

Virginia was Hugo Black’s sister-in-law (Black was a Supreme Court Justice who was a critical vote in tons of civil rights cases)

Virginia explicitly credited her time at Wellesley College as the reason she went from being a racist to being a civil rights activist (she was forced to eat with black students and protested it and was threatened with expulsion, and she went from that to being an influential civil rights activist. people can and do change!)

Virginia was instrumental in helping pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and lobbied to end the poll tax with Eleanor Roosevelt). 

Cliff refused to sign a loyalty oath as ordered by the Truman administration based on the House Un-American Activities Committee (aka McCarthyism) and ultimately left his government job for that reason. BUT, he was already on the FBI lists because of his wife’s activism around voting rights and racial equality and their mutual friendship with a member of the Communist Party, Jessica Mitford

Cliff also joined, and was later President of, the National Lawyers Guild, an extremely progressive legal organization that still exists today (I’m a member!).

While Gray handled Parks’s federal claims as part of the Browder case, Cliff was her attorney in state court (which were two separate lawsuits)

And, in a great example of true activism: Cliff lost almost all of his white clients because of the work he did in Montgomery, and his response was to double down on that work and devote the rest of his life to representing Civil Rights Movement activists, surviving based on primarily philanthropic financial support and his friends’ help.

Some cool books you might want to check out if you liked this: 

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (Danielle L. McGuire)

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Jeanne Theoharis) - I talked about this one above!

She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Herbert Kohl)

[horrifyingly, all of those books are, afaik, by white authors, so if anyone has any ideally academic books they want to link me by black authors please message me or just reblog this with the titles/names/authors/whatever!]

Channel 4 have invited a drill artist (a form of music that’s become notorious for violence in the UK) to use violent and misogynistic quotes from MPs in a piece.

They’re highlighting the words used in Parliament at a time when there’s a lot of attention on MPs behaviour. The Cox Report discussed last week was damning in its findings of bullying of staff in the House of Commons.

GeForce-Powered Augmented Reality Sandbox

I could be at any weight and I will never be healthy, because I am chronically ill. Someone might be chronically ill and fat, or they might be chronically ill and not fat, and it really doesn’t matter.

Ben Blum’s Medium article on the subject has been widely shared, and for good reason. Probably the story you think the experiment tells is just wrong.

The Lifespan of a Lie

Sesame Seeds

Cranberry

Pineapple

Peanut

Cashew

Pistachio

Brussel Sprouts

Cacao

Vanilla

Saffron

Kiwi

Pomegranate

Peanuts-you-eat grow underground, but they are NOT part of the peanut plant’s roots. Peanut plants are ambitious little fuckers and plant their seeds themselves. They flower like any perfectly reasonable legume, but once the flowers have been pollinated the plants do something called “pegging” (no really), in which they drill the stems where the flowers used to be into the ground. And that’s where the peanuts you eat form. Like so:

Tomorrow’s the big day!

Requirements for flower displays used in the Olympics - “The species cannot be associated with any sadness or death message in any country or culture”

Behavioral profiles of orcas at Sea World - “Please be advised that this whale was involved in the accidental drowning of a trainer at Sealand of the Pacific in 1991 and involved in an incident with a guest in his pool at 1999 at SWF.”

(”involved in an incident” is highly euphemistic; the guest was found dead with orca tooth marks all over him)

Contract for appearing on “The Bachelorette” - “Such hidden cameras, if any, shall not be positioned to intentionally capture images of you urinating or defecating in the bathroom”