Book Review: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Few find it surprising that Jim Crow arose following the collapse of slavery. The development is described in history books as regrettable but predictable given the virulent racism that gripped the South and the political dynamics of the time. What is remarkable is that hardly anyone seems to imagine that similar political dynamics may have produced another caste system in the years following the collapse of Jim Crow—one that exists today.

— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The thesis of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is exactly what the title implies: the U.S. criminal justice system has become a formal if unnamed means of anti-Black racial discrimination and social exclusion analogous to though distinct from Jim Crow. In the United States, Alexander argues, all aspects of this system — from policing to prosecutions to sentences to prisons to post-release restrictions — have not only a disparate impact on racial minorities, Blacks in particular, but were actively designed as a racial caste system and means of social control in the wake of Jim Crow’s collapse. And yet, because the system is officially race neutral and overt racial hostility by individual actors generally cannot be proven, the bulk of society goes around acting as though this racial caste system does not actually exist.

Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

ETA (8/29/2012): Rebecca Kumar’s open letter regarding this book is important to read and intellectually engage with. Most specifically, I agree that it is important for both Skloot and reviewers — particularly white reviewers, including myself — to acknowledge that the “creative non-fiction” in which the book traffics is not “entirely fact,” as I previously called it, but by its nature involves some degree of fabrication. That fabrication cannot be a neutral act, particularly not when it involves a white woman taking license over the life of an already-exploited Black woman who, through her death, is incapable of speaking for herself. Failing to acknowledge the license taken further moves the act beyond “not neutral” into the realm of insidious racism.

Kumar is further right to point out the notable acclaim and financial gain that Skloot has obtained through her work in this very popular book, which ties into the long legacy of white advancement on the backs of Black suffering. This is particularly fraught considering Skloot’s notable lack of political analysis or argument regarding the subjects of her work (medical racism and violence, economic racism, ableism, etc.), something which I previously noted and yet quite jarringly failed to properly engage with. These are matters that I should have engaged with from the beginning, and their omission is inexcusable.

Trigger Warning for sometimes graphic descriptions of human experimentation and medical research on non-consenting individuals

There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It’s the late 1940s and she hasn’t yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her — a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.”

No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died.

Her real name is Henrietta Lacks.

— The opening words of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman, a tobacco farmer. She knew that something was wrong when she went to seek health care at the free “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was diagnosed with a highly aggressive cervical cancer, and during her treatment — without her consent or knowledge — they cut out a piece of her. The cancer cells they cut are still alive today, are growing as I write this, are growing as you read it, are being bought, being sold, and being used for so many different kinds of research, I doubt there’s anyone who could name them all.

Henrietta Lacks died an excruciatingly painful death in 1951. And her cells have helped to develop seemingly endless medical advancements since then, and continue to develop them now. But just like Henrietta Lacks was never told that they cut out a piece of her cervix, her family was never told that here cells were still alive. The Lacks family only learned through a long series of events over 20 years later. Though those cells have made billions of dollars for various companies — both directly through the selling of HeLa to researchers, and indirectly through the selling of medicines and treatments HeLa has been integral in developing — they have not made a cent for the Lacks family. Indeed, at the time the book was written, many of Henrietta’s children and grandchildren continued to struggle financially, and several did not have health insurance to access the care that only exists because their mother and grandmother died.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, written by Rebecca Skloot and released in 2010, is about all of this.

Book Review: Promises I Can Keep

I’m the kind of person who hoards books, and finds difficulty getting the the time to read them all within what most people would consider to be an even remotely reasonable timeframe. While that’s something I’m working on getting under control, the consequence is that I’m also the kind of person, who, if she ever actually writes a book review, writes it long after the book has been released.

Such is the case with Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, released in 2005. As the title would suggest, this book is about low-income mothers who have had children outside of marriage, and why this often demonized (or pitied) demographic has grown.

The shortened conclusion is that low-income single mothers are overwhelmingly purposely choosing to carry pregnancies to term and desperately desire to have their children. Under the classist, and for women of color (the interview subjects were split evenly among women who are white, African American, and of Puerto Rican descent), racist, circumstances in which these women live, college and middle-class financial stability are not seen as attainable goals — or at least, not as attainable goals that having children will significantly hinder — and so choosing to wait until after these supposed milestones to have children frequently makes little to no sense.

Low-income single mothers being presented as rational decision makers, women who are making the choices best suited to their circumstances (rather than accident prone leeches on the system), is a rare thing indeed, and that’s why I was drawn to the book. To that end alone, I certainly thought that it was a worthwhile read, and would recommend it to others. But, at the same time, I also found that it had a few significant faults.

So You Want To Be A Rock n Roll Star

[cross-posted from Femniste]

About a month ago, I wrote a post about Guitar Hero III. The main gist was that as a big-time previous fan of the series, I was thoroughly unimpressed with the the changes that have been made to the game, which are quite misogynist, exploitative of women and completely insensitive to the fact that the game has a female audience. To my great surprise, the post became a big hit (and troll target) and was linked to in all kinds of forums and blogs that would normally never give me a second glance. This was also to my slight dismay, because I didn’t spend much time on that post, and frankly, I don’t think that it’s very good. Anyway, lesson learned.

The point is that I now feel compelled if not required to say a few words about Rock Band.

We Don’t Need Another Wave

I just finished reading We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches From The Next Generation of Feminists, edited by Melody Berger. It is a collection of over 30 essays by young feminists talking about why feminism is still relevant today, how the movement is evolving and ways to work on new issues and methods.

Of course, with any anthology there is going to be a mixture of quality, and therefore I enjoyed some essays more than others. I did find it to be a fun and intellectually stimulating read, though.

I found the book to be quite diverse. It managed to include many women of color from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, several queer activists and a couple that were both.

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

I just finished reading Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. From the title, it’s clear that this is a book about adoption. To me, it was about what happens when we don’t give women choices.

“Girl who went away,” according to Fessler, is a term that most women and men who grew up in the years between the end of WWII and the Roe v. Wade decision would instantly recognize. It was code for a woman with an unplanned “illegitimate” pregnancy. The girls “went away” in futile attempt to hide the pregnancy and to save their family from embarrassment, before relinquishing their child for adoption. They went to live with distant family members, or more often a maternity home for unwed mothers, where pregnant girls and young women were generally forced in, went through labor and kicked out as though on an assembly line.

The book is an oral history. The bulk is made up of extended first person narratives of women who surrendered their children for adoption. Interspersed between the narratives are chapters by Fessler that better explain various aspects of the surrendering process- becoming pregnant, confessing the pregnancy, being sent away during the pregnancy, giving birth, surrendering and grief- with historical details and statistics. I actually learned a lot from these sections, but it was the narratives that stuck with me. The first one made me tear up. And the worst part was just how shockingly similar each and every story was.

The word “surrender” is not accidental. It is incredibly deliberate and highly political. Usually, when talking about adoption, mothers are referred to as “giving away” their babies. But “giving away” not only implies a false sense that the mother did not want her child, it also implies that the mother had a choice. And a choice is the last thing that these women had.

A Question of Choice by Sarah Weddington

I recently finished reading A Question of Choice by Sarah Weddington. Sarah Weddington is one of the two lawyers who originally filed Roe v. Wade, and the woman who argued the case in front of the Supreme Court. Though the effort was certainly not hers entirely, we do owe her a huge debt of gratitude, since legal abortion never would have happened how and as soon as it did without her.

That’s why I picked up this book. A Question of Choice could be considered an autobiography, a detailed, personalized account of the Roe case, or a history of reproductive rights in America from shortly before Roe was filed to the early 90s, when the book was written. The fact that Weddington couldn’t quite make up her mind about what the book was going to be is definitely its greatest weakness.

The good news is that the book is good enough to make the lack of cohesion worth it.

Small Victories Still Deserve to be Celebrated

Whoa, another crazy day today with my PP internship . . . I promise that I will work out a system very shortly for putting up posts in a timely manner on days when I’m interning. In the meantime, thanks for your patience. I’m going to reward it now with some (mostly) good news!

Firstly, today marked the first federal minimum wage increase in a decade. It is now $5.85. By this day in 2009, it will be $7.25. That’s still nowhere near a living wage, so don’t celebrate too much. But let’s tip our hats to the Dems, anyway, for getting done in less than a year what the GOP congress refused to do for over a decade.

Equally awesome (and with equal caveats), Washington State started recognizing same-sex civil unions yesterday. They are now the sixth state in the U.S. to do so (in addition to the District of Columbia, which also allows civil unions, and Massachusetts, which allows same-sex marriage). Of course, the goal here is equality, and that means full rights and recognition availability in the form of marriage. Gay-rights advocates have vowed to keep fighting, but in the meantime they’re enjoying being treated just a teensy bit more like actual human beings.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

When it comes to “classic” literature, I’m a tough sell. Without a doubt, I prefer modern literature because I prefer modern language and modern narrative styles. I find most of the classics to be over-rated, with the real strength being in theme and basic storyline, not the actual storytelling. I also have a lot of difficulty getting past the misogyny and racism in a lot of classics, no matter how representative of the times it may be.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I became engrossed in The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I picked it up precisely because I had heard of its supposedly feminist themes, but I was highly skeptical of it actually living up.  What I found was a compelling story and constant awareness and criticism of the gendered roles and power-relationships between the characters.

The Awakening is the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in the late 1800s. Through a friendship with a single male (Robert Lebrun), which slowly turns to sexual desire, she begins to question her life as a married woman, how she is treated by her husband and the place of women in society in general. The “awakening” in the book is both a sexual awakening, and an awakening to the restrictiveness of her place in society.

[Spoilers begin here, after the jump]

Killing the Black Body

I just finished reading Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts for the Pandagon book club. Amanda’s thoughts on it are great and fairly comprehensive, so check them out, and go participate in the discussion if you’ve read the book yourself.

I’m pretty sure that this book was on my wish list already, before it was announced as the July Pandagon book. I wanted to read it because I’m always trying to learn more about reproductive rights and the history of reproductive rights, but also because I’m currently trying to learn more about issues that affect women of color. I’ve long-heard the argument that white feminists (like myself) tend to ignore reproductive rights issues that women of color face in favor of a focus on keeping abortion legal, even if it’s only readily available to middle and upper-class women. Other than an awareness of past eugenics and forced sterilization campaigns, as well as the knowledge that abortion access is largely restricted to women of color due to the scarcity of clinics and the lack of public funds for the procedure, I really honestly did not know what those issues were, though.