Serene of the Oakland Serenes

In anticipation of the Mehserle verdict...

Here's what ACLU-NC Associate Director Kelli Evans has to say about community relations, free speech and interacting with police:

The shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police officers in January 2009 remains a tragic reminder of the need for serious efforts to rebuild trust between law enforcement and communities of color. No matter the verdict in the Mehserle trial, the need to rebuild community trust in law enforcement will remain. In too many American cities, racial tensions between the community and law enforcement run deep. Police oversight remains a critical issue in truly ensuring both public safety and public trust.

No doubt, Oakland residents and other people following the trial will have a wide range of emotions. Following the verdict, community members need to be able to peaceably exercise their First Amendment rights to demonstrate and to express their opinions about the ruling.

Any police response to demonstrations must respect the rights of the people to peacefully exercise their freedom of speech, no matter who they are or the reason for their protesting. It's important to be mindful that violence is never protected speech, but it is also important to remember that neither the mere possibility of violence, nor the bad acts of a few, can justify the blanket suppression of peaceful demonstrations and protests.

Check out the ACLU’s online guide to your rights when demonstrating or print out the one-page reference sheet. Have questions about your rights with the police? The ACLU also has some some practical tips for interacting with the police.

bcholmes

Yes, I heard about RaceFail '09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it's rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity—which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing —but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"—we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?

So I'd suggest that one should be open-eyed about the facts that the categories with which we think and write and read, are not innocent, and that we should do our best not to use them to replicate the worst aspects of the cultural bumf that put them in our heads in the first place. Does that mean being politically correct? If that is deemed to mean being conscious of and careful about the political ramifications of our writing, then surely that's the only decent way to proceed.

— "10 Questions with China Miéville"

It’s a health product, like band-aids. Only people who think menstruation is some kind of icky gross thing (aren’t those only fourteen-year-old boys?) should make a big deal about buying them for someone they love. I don’t fuss if I have to buy band-aids or jock-itch cream or an enema for my partner — their health is more important to me than some prurient “ewww” reaction that I outgrew in the fourth grade.

(As to why there are so many absorbencies, it’s to prevent toxic shock syndrome (TSS), which, though relatively rare, is fatal. Fatal is bad. Much worse than someone thinking you might be partnered with someone who — EWW! — menstruates.)

My partner says this when we occasionally have to deal with menstrual issues (say, blood on the sheets because of a surprise onset): “Well, I could solve that by not sleeping with women. I like sleeping with women, so I guess I just accept that a little blood is part of the package.”