Life And Times Of Jae

Today is January 27, 2017, the day that Marissa Alexander isl finally freed from house detention and all forms of state confinement!! Here is a statement from Marissa and her family: 

“We are grateful to God that this chapter of Marissa’s life will come to a close on January 27, 2017. We are sincerely thankful and appreciative to all who rallied, supported and prayed for Marissa’s release. As she enters a new chapter, with endless possibilities, we ask that you will continue to support Marissa through her non-profit organization that was established to end domestic violence and injustice in the criminal justice system, The Marissa Alexander Justice Project. Without you, today would not be possible. Thank you again and again.”

Free Marissa Now statement at the link above. Marissa Alexander Justice Project: http://forgottenmajority.net/index.php/category/marissa-alexander-justice-project/

Billy Williams just finished his first college semester and did so with the all-impressive 4.0 GPA. Instead of celebrating his accomplishments with friends and family, he decided to drop out of college entirely.

Billy made a facebook post that is now going viral in which he explains his reasoning for dropping out:

“Now that I’ve finished my first semester I think it’s safe to say… fu*k COLLEGE. Now before all you of you go batsh*t crazy… I have a few points to make. 1. Yes I have dropped out after finishing my first semester (with a 4.0 GPA). And it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Not because I am averse to learning, but actually the exact opposite. 2. YOU ARE BEING SCAMMED. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will see it some day. Heck you may have already seen it if you’ve been through college. You are being put thousands into debt to learn things you will never even use. Wasting 4 years of your life to be stuck at a paycheck that grows slower than the rate of inflation. Paying $200 for a $6 textbook. Being taught by teacher’s who have never done what they’re teaching. Average income has increased 5x over the last 40 years while cost of college has increased 18x. You’re spending thousands of dollars to learn information you won’t ever even use just to get a piece of paper. I once even had an engineer tell me “I learned more in my first 30 days working than in my 5 years of college.” What does that tell you about this system? There are about a million more ways you’re being scammed into this.. just watch the video i’m gonna comment if you want to see more. 3. Colleges are REQUIRING people to spend money taking gen. ed. courses to learn about the quadratic formula (and other sh*t they will never use) when they could be giving classes on MARRIAGE and HOW TO DO YOUR TAXES. 4. Gosh there are so many more reasons I could add, but just comment if you disagree or have reasons to add. I’d love to add to the discussion. TAG a friend in college, Tag your parents, share this if you agree, disagree. Let’s just talk about it. Heck post a picture of yourself flipping off something you think is unjust in our society.”

Billy is right too that the price of college continues to soar.

Ray Franke, a professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston said:

“If you look at the long-term trend of college tuition, it has been rising almost six percent above the rate of inflation. That’s brought immense pressure from the media and general public, asking whether college is still worth it.”

In 2015, Harvard’s annual tuition and fees (not including room and board) would cost a person $45,278, which is more than 17 times the 1971-72 cost. If annual increases of tuition had simply tracked the inflation rate since 1971, 2016’s tuition would be just $15,189.

According to CNBC, college enrollment peaked in 2011, and has been decreasing ever since. This is no doubt in part to a family’s ability to pay the tuition, room and board and other related expenses. For example, in order to pay for a year of college at Harvard today would take the median household income nearly one year of paychecks. Back in 1971, it would have taken about 13 weeks of paychecks per the household median income.

Today the student debt is over $1.26 trillion dollars with over 44 million Americans in debt from student loans. 2016’s graduates on average are over $36,000 dollars in debt, which is up 6% from just one year ago.

The First Full Trailer For Issa Rae’s New Show ‘Insecure’ Is Out & It’s Giving Us Life

Blavity writes:

Many people wanted to know why she chose the name Insecure, and Rae explained that she wanted to chronicle a specific experience for Black women. “It’s because there’s this narrative that’s going around that’s awesome, that Black women are fierce, they’re strong, they’re flawless,” Rae said in a video post on Twitter. “But I know that life. And my friends definitely don’t know that life. I wanted to center a show around, like, weak Black women and the uncertainty they feel on that journey to get to greatness. It’s like the prequel to #BlackGirlMagic.”

I studied every book I could find on childbirth and parenting in my local library when I was pregnant for the third time with my first viable pregnancy nineteen years ago. I was a young Native/mixed woman and my partner a young Native man, but I had been adopted and raised by a white family. Knowing I was going to be a mother with so little connection to my culture made me anxious to learn about where I really came from.

The book options from my library were pretty limited, so it was probably a miracle that I found out anything about babywearing at all. It didn’t even occur to me that there are still Native women who use traditional cradle boards, so I bought a front-carrier of the sort that is no longer available. When my son was three days old, I wore him on the bus to his first appointment at the pediatrician. I found carrying him to be an empowering practice. It helped to keep him calm, and it kept my hands free to type long letters to his father, to handle the laundry, and otherwise be able to do the things I needed to do.

It wasn’t until about seven years later, when I had a Nicaraguan partner, that I had the opportunity to see Central American mothers wearing their babies on their backs in blankets. In the last 10 years, thanks to the internet, I have seen a resurgence in accessible information about babywearing. Unfortunately, most information and marketing is geared towards middle class white women, often with selling points about this great “new” phenomenon and requiring expensive contraptions, while disregarding the communities of color in which babywearing has been the norm since the beginning of time. This is evident in the lack of Black and Brown families present in most marketing campaigns and even social media. Four years ago I started a Tumblr dedicated to just showing people of color babywearing, and it was difficult to find pictures to post (this has since improved somewhat). It was also met with anger from white women who said that there was no need for a blog just for families of color and that it was “exclusionary.” They seemed to totally miss the irony of that term.

From the Quiche Maya of Guatemala to the Zulu of South Africa to the Hmong of the mountains of Asia, babywearing has always existed and been maintained by many women despite colonization and demands to assimilate to European/USian standards that subsume our traditional cultures. Like the history of babywearing, the tradition of belly-binding has also been maintained by many marginalized people and yet I knew nothing of it. Only just this summer I was taught as part of my doula training by International Center for Traditional Childbearing how to use the baby wrap during pregnancy for belly support and after pregnancy for belly binding. Suddenly, so many of the traditional clothing styles that incorporate elaborate scarves at the hips or wrapped around the waist in Nepal, Tibet, Egypt, my own tribe, and other cultures make new sense.

Imagine my surprise then to see this Mothering.com article being widely shared on social media by white lady birth workers who I thought should know better. The author, a white woman, says she “discovered” belly wrapping as a means of supporting her pelvis and belly during her second pregnancy. While babywearing has become more common, belly wrapping is still a total marvel to white women but like babywearing, white women have happily capitalized on the chance to “teach” these skills. For some reason, they feel compelled to market workshops with exotic-sounding names like “Mexican Rebozo Use” and “African Belly Binding” to get their fellow white ladies interested. I am not suggesting that white women should not practice belly support/binding and babywearing. The benefits of both are so great that they should be widely known and practiced.

What I am uncomfortable with is white women who write articles in which they say they “discovered” these techniques and speak as authorities without ever giving credit to the history and cultural truth of these techniques. Giving credit means much more than using a “foreign” word and pretty “ethnic” print on your website and flyers. It also means delving deeper than referencing the “quaint” practices of one or two cultures that you have no significant connection to. I have a problem with white women birth workers teaching workshops, and being paid to do so, in which they introduce other predominantly white women to these techniques without questioning why they feel they are the experts on the subject, why they are teaching predominantly white women, how appropriative they are being, and how to more thoroughly integrate credit where due and a proper understanding of the history and cultural significance of such practices in non-white communities. It is a problem for me that when I try to share knowledge from my own cultures with fellow marginalized women seeking that cultural connection, I am spoken over by white women who went to a training or read a book, but have never actually worked with someone from my cultures.

Parents of color often talk about how we are met with two common reactions when we do things that we have reclaimed as part of connecting with our own cultures. Either people tell us that we are “backwards” and that these things are “primitive,” they tell us that there is science (because what our ancestors did obviously was not based in any science) and new theory, etc. Or they exoticize us and our cultural practices wanting to hear all about it and, if we are open to sharing, they suddenly become “experts” on the subject and we shortly thereafter find them teaching or writing obnoxious articles such as the one linked here. Much like many other “natural parenting” methods that have become popular again in white cultures, there is little introspection of how colonization has tried desperately to break families of color from breastfeeding, babywearing, and other traditional healing methods. Midwives and doulas have become associated with a degree of privilege, often completely inaccessible to the most marginalized communities who would actually benefit the most from such access. Home birth is taken for granted as something that a white family can choose, but families of color for whom it was a family norm in the past are now forced to accept invasive medical procedures under threat of having their children removed from the home with charges of medical neglect.

It is worth noting that traditional forms of babywearing and belly-binding did not require owning multiple $50-200 wraps or strappy carriers. All one needs is a long scarf, piece of fabric, or blanket. One can argue that it was only a matter of time before wraps became commercialized, and that marketing of wraps is responding to a demand. On the other hand, I would suggest that such marketing is exactly what makes these options seem “not for you” to many poor parents of color for whom such an expense is simply not realistic. Instead of teaching that belly-binding and babywearing can be done with one item, and showing how any scarf of a certain size can be functional, marketing suggests that babywearing is complex and expensive. For poor and non-white women who are also at a higher risk of accusations of neglectful caregiving, the question of safety is also very real. Marketers are quick to imply that carriers and wraps are necessary for safety despite the fact that women all over the world continue to wear their babies with a thin cotton scarf and no problems. It isn’t about the type or cost of your wrap, it is about being knowledgeable about how to use it safely. Access to the traditional knowledge of our ancestors and support to acknowledge that wisdom and methodology is a key missing ingredient because it has been appropriated by white women who fail to do outreach to the communities from which they have stolen the traditions.

When white supremacists and black respectability politicians (aka white supremacists in blackface) start to sing that same, tired false-history song about the Civil Rights Movement, hit them with the hee:

“Such historical revisionism is both dangerous and comfortable—dangerous because it grossly distorts how the civil rights movement actually proceeded, and comfortable because it allows many Americans to keep today’s movement at arm’s length. This repeated comparison has become one of the ways that many justify hand-wringing on the sidelines—as if they would act, given a righteous movement like King’s, but today’s activists are simply too excessive, too disruptive and too unrespectable.

Calling out these myths is more than setting the historical record straight. The ‘propaganda of history,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois reminded us a century ago, becomes a way of 'giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment'—for soothing and justifying inaction in the face of persistent racial inequality.”

- Jeanne Theoharis, “MLK Would Never Shut Down a Freeway, and 6 Other Myths About the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter”

Dear Respectability Politicians:

Please explain what this person did wrong. He didn’t have a weapon, sagging pants or anything. He was EXTRA compliant, educated, and gainfully employed. And yet, the police still shot him anyway.

According to you, that shouldn’t have happened. Please explain why it did. Thank you.

This article contains graphic depictions and descriptions of police violence/anti-blackness. Discretion is advised. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * “A therapist who works with people with disabilities is telling his story after he said police shot him while he was trying to help his patient with autism.

Cellphone video was released Wednesday afternoon showing Charles Kinsey lying on the ground with his hands in the air, telling officers that weapons are not necessary. ‘When I went to the ground, I went to the ground with my hands up,’ Kinsey said, 'and I am laying there just like this. Telling them again there is no need for firearms. He is autistic. He has a toy truck in his hand.”

In his hospital bed and wearing bandages, Kinsey said, he was attempting to calm an autistic patient who ran away from a group home. Kinsey could be heard in the video saying, “All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavior therapist at a group home.”

He is also heard asking his patient to calm down. 'Rinaldo, please be still, Rinaldo. Sit down, Rinaldo. Lay on your stomach.’

The ordeal went on for a few minutes before Kinsey said one of the officers shot him. 'I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising,’ Kinsey said. 'I thought it was a mosquito bite, and when it hit me I had my hands in the air, and I’m thinking I just got shot! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me were, ‘I don’t know.'”

That cop’s "I don’t know” speaks volumes to me. It suggests, to me, that he’s operating on racist programming so embedded, so subconscious, so genetic that it’s on autopilot. It’s almost like he’s a racist drone or a racist android being controlled from a racist electronic panel. HORRIFYING.

Thank goodness the Kinsey survived. If he didn’t, we’d be hearing from cops how he reached for a gun, attacked police officers, and how the cops feared for their lives–EVEN if this video existed. In fact, I guarantee you that even with the man’s testimony and the video, racists and respectability politicians are going to say: “He wasn’t unarmed enough. He wasn’t well-dressed enough. He wasn’t articulate enough. He wasn’t compliant enough. He’s wasn’t laying down enough. His arms weren’t raised high enough.” To rationalize racism, people have the ability to disregard reality.

[Photo description: Outdoors. Daytime. In a park-like area. A man, Charles Kinsey is lying on the ground with his hands in the air. Next to him, a man, Rinaldo, is sitting.]