The Redstar Perspective

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

–

It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

Click here for a round-up of post-primary chatter.  I want to re-iterate what is buried in a long, late nite post below:

I like Obama’s call to increase the diversity of representation in the existing system.  Change at the top is key, but truly diversifying the ranks starts at the bottom - increase women or minority participation at the local level, and you’ll see change work its way up. 

Now, Obama’s campaign has done an amazing job at the grassroots level - their fundraising, their volunteer organization, their GOTV operation has been tremendous.  For this he is rightfully praised.  But how will this translate into the role of President? 

Organizing, no matter how routinized, depends on a symbolic position outside the system.  Obama knows this and speaks to this when he talks about changing Washington.  But, and I’m embarrassed to quote David Brooks here, “what if the 261,000 lobbyists” don’t get Obama’s message about unity?  Organizing, especially the Alinsky model to which Obama is frequently linked, is about bringing in outsiders to train community members to become leaders so that they can fight for change themselves.  Obama is doing an excellent job with inspiring and instilling skills via his campaign operations.  But this positions Obama as the consummate outsider, training others to take on the system for positive change.  How can we then elect this person to be the consummate insider? 

Strains of participatory democracy are prevalent in Obama’s campaign.  Participatory democracy, it should be noted, has highly positive impacts, mainly related to increasing people’s and groups’ sense of civic engagement and self-efficacy, and in practice at the local level, can lead to decision-making power.  But it is not a practice that layers very easily onto our political bureacracy, and, in its most reviled characterizations (from academic haters, mostly), is disparaged as process over results, or, that the process is the result.

There is a reason organizing is a distinct institution from bureacracy; there is a reason that social movements wax and wane, and that protest and direct action is appropriate in some instances and negotiating and deal-making is appropriate in others.  One thing that has been made dramatically obvious during this primary is that our current electoral system is not a fair and open one, and we’ve got two tremendous Democratic candidates to thank for exposing that with their breathtaking contest and its accompanying voter and citizen participation.  Perhaps one outcome of this campaign season will be a re-tooling our our electoral system, or more modestly, the Democratic Party’s rules.  But I’m skeptical.  Bureacracies are pretty entrenched; hence the staying power.  I hope that if Obama secures the nomination, his inside game is as good as his outside one. 

I’ve updated my blogroll, especially the Politics category, but also some overdue additions in my Feminist links.  Check ‘em out.  Introduce yourself.  Make friends.

I’m spending some time with the fam this evening (currently blocking one of my mom’s dogs from the box of Cheez-its beside me as I type), and will be back tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s some links to what I’m reading:

On-line:

Who Represents the Progressive Movement?

Periodically Speaking;

Count WHOSE Vote?;

“White” Like Who?;

and

Generation Gap.

 

Off-line:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears;

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City;

and Justice & the Politics of Difference.

 

Happy reading.

I’ve effectively narrowed my Google reader these days that if the blogs aren’t talking about the elections, I’m not reading them. But I feel compelled, obligated even, to talk about the shootings at NIU yesterday.

The most up-to-date reporting has two parallel threads: that the student was a well-liked, respected student (link above), and that he had recently stopped taking his medications (scripts not yet identifed). Especially after VA Tech, we’re familiar - if still unprepared to deal with - the *plotline* of untreated or *mis-managed* mental illness that weaves through these tragedies. At NIU, people seem mystified that this accomplished student deemed a contributing member of academic society could turn up and fire into a crowd of his peers at random and then kill himself. Nonetheless, I’m sure as the days pass the usual story of “we should have seen it coming” will continue to develop.

Listening to right-leaning talk radio the other night (here in MA that means Republicans arguing in favor of gun control), a former school board member and trustee was trying to explain that often this level of atrocity is not preventable. If MIT is any guide, I’m inclined to agree. Most campuses, sometimes surprisingly so, are accessible 24/7. MIT is a large, sprawling urban campus, with no clear borders and some doors that are never, ever locked. Most of the time, the few violent assaults (not necessarily on students) in the area of or around campus, whether by strangers or folks associated with a transitional house adjacent to one of the dorms, are minimized in formal release statements from MIT or Harvard police or the university administrations. Finally, last year, an eventful one in which MIT repeatedly showed up in the local and national press for one crisis after another, one of our students was stabbed in his dorm 10 times by an ex-girlfriend who was a student at Wellesley College; the major lesson learned from that experience was to belatedly tighten security at the dorms.

But I think this notion of “good kids gone bad” is under explored in this tragedy. (more…)

I’ve been marinating this particular post in my brain for a couple of weeks - it started when I was thinking about writing more about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto when I got back after taking Christmas week off.  And I’ve been contemplating writing it here since Red offered me the chance to sub in for her while she went away.  Red and I share a deep interest in plicy thinking, in developing new ideas and seeing where they lead.  Were she and I in the same city, this is what I would be bouncing back and forth with her over dinner.  In lieu of that - I miss you, too, Red - I’m putting my thoughts here.

President Bush has apparently settled on the traditional Lame Duck presidential route of “concentrating” on foreign plicy on his way out the door - laughably, in his case, because he’s been lousy at foreign policy, the messes he’s dealing with are largely of his own making, and his “Policy team” seems especially short on skill these days. Thinking about that has led me though to think about what comes next, why we are where we are in the world, and how we got here.

And here’s the thing - by accident or by design (though mostly, I think, by accident), Mr. Bush has forced a transition from Post World War 2 diplomacy into a new, somewhat uncharted territory: I don’t have a name for it yet, but it’s something like “Post Post Colonial” or “Post Yalta”… something that reflects the changes of 60 or so years of recent history.

(more…)

My time is almost up here (I’m hoping to fit in one or two more pithy thoughts), but I’d like to discuss my main task this week: housekeeping.  Red asked me to fill in, in part, to help keep her comment queue clean.  Unlike my comments section over at nycweboy, Red is inundated with spam comments of all sorts (the fact that it’s a sign of popularity, of course makes me wildly jealous), and left unchecked, almost 100 messages can be lined up in a matter of hours.

What I noticed, in fact, was that since last year, things have gotten exponentially worse.  Dozens of comments show up afer only 3 or 4 hours, and because I don’t want to miss any real ones, I’ve been scanning through the material.  And it’s awful - there’s a repeating porn message I’ve been deleting all day that’s really just unbelievably nasty.  And that doesn’t mention the ones who try “Nice post!” and some sneaky link as a way in. And I’m not trying to goose Red’s readership by bringing this up (it’s not like I posted a gratuitous shot of Pam Anderson or anything), but I feel like someone needs to say something, and I haven’t seen a lot of people remark on this.

There’s been some effort to control spam messages on e-mail boxes (there kind of had to be, because people were getting furious, and businesses were struggling to keep firewalls operational), but I think the governemnt response was entirely backwards: rather than make the problem the spammers, it made the probem us, by making us sign on to “do not mail” lists of dubious usefulness. The problem isn’t the fact that we have e-mail addresses or websites; the problem is that all sorts of dubious enterprises - financial scams, porn sites, car salesmen and God knows what else - seem to think all’s fair in the pursuit of audience and sales.  It’s that behavior that’s the problem, and that’s the thing that needs to be addressed.

It’s easy to let this discussion get bogged down in the nature of our 1st Amendment and in looking like… I don’t know… some sort of fascist, maybe? … by complaining.  But I don’t know anyone - no one - who is a fan of this stuff.  Like “thank goodness I got another message from some bank scam trying to access my information” or “gee, I had no idea big blonde women were so versatile!”  No, mostly we know what this is - a nuisance and where we want it to go - away.  And the dirty secret is, no one’s doing a damn thing about it.

Weboy here.  It appears our Red-headed mistress has decided to bask in the sun, without more posting.  Good.

I think it’s only fitting that my last post in Boston should be on Red’s site - it’s her town, and now I leave it to her. Red isn’t happy about the fact that I’ve moved back to New York (I am, after all, an NYC Weboy), but I think time has shown that one town can only contain the both of us for so long - at some point, no town is big enough.

Last night on my blog, I talked about the feeling that it’s over.  Today, walking around town, I was reminded that it’s not.  It was a beautiful day (take that, LA), and people all over reveled in the ability to skip the winter coat and play outdoors.  Boston, at heart, is an “outdoorsy” town - ruddy faced people who enjoy a brisk run or a game of pickup touch football on the quad (there’s a reason the northeastern college experience is so quintessential).  RedStar, our very own, confessed to me one rainy day that for years she got mistaken as the “field hockey” type… when really she’s probably a kindred spirit to nice Upper East Side girls who’s main competitive sport is shopping…. or nightclubbing.

I’d say I’m with her, but really, I’m not.  There’s a secret, solitary jock inside of me who likes a good run.  I may have felt a little lost, a bit out of place here in my two year residency… but we were getting there, Boston and I, on a mutual agreement of terms. In New York, it puts me in something akin to the “gym bunny” class of gay men, but without the Zone diet and the crazy abs. Healthy, and a little thinner… that would be fine.

Walking home today across the Public Garden, I was sad to see that the Swan Boats are on their winter hiatus.  As a kid, nothing thrilled me more than visits to the Garden, and a chance to ride around the (man made) lake.  Looking for Mack, Jack, Lack and Quack and all the other ducklings. My first gift to my nephew (the Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe), in fact was just that book. Now, with adult eyes, I see that the amazing lake is really just a man made pond, no deeper than a duckling’s legs.  But in Spring and Summer, with the Swan Boats circling, it still seems magical.  It’s not the worst memory to go home with.

Everyone loves a Boston Girl.  I still love mine - the inner one, and the Redheaded stepchild. Take care of our town, Red.

I’m working off a mac right now, and I don’t know where my icons are for bolding, linking, etc., so bear with me on this rough cut. - UPDATE: LINKS ADDED.  12/16/07.

See the last bunch of posts - and my colleagues in the blogosphere, inc. Brownfemipower, Kai and Cara - re: the literal battle over the future of public housing in NOLA. There’s a stay of execution for the moment, and we should give ourselves a collective moment of thankful pause before resuming the relentless pressure over this issue. But that’s not the point of this post, written during my dept.’s holiday party on this Friday afternoon.

I want to thank the blogosphere for helping me pass my general exams, which I did today, WITH DISTINCTION, a rarely invoked status here in my dept. In addition to my colleagues in the Gulf, who have educated me, often painfully, on framing, power, gender, identity, conflict and struggle, I’m indebted to my virtual peers here. The obvious is NYC Weboy, my unparalleled champion, and Prof. Zero is a close second, for hosting such a supportive environment to share my ideas and the personal struggles that inform my thinking. But it’s the debates of the broader community that I’ve been listening to, and reading, and thinking about, that I feel really helped me here at MIT and this morning in particular, especially when it comes to issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, power and equity/justice. Shout outs go to Pandagon, where I cut my teeth on the feminist blogosphere, Feministe, who’s writing I respect, Feministing, who seems to have the biggest market for throwing one’s hat in the ring, Shakesville, who’s mainstream progressiveness and f***ing hilarious snark never fails to please, and especially, Sylvia and Brownfemipower, for eloquent, provocative writing that truly leaves me thinking. Kai, Black Amazon (who also just met her own academic hurdles - check out this post!), Rachel’s Tavern, Racismreview, the Field Negro, The Curvature, Racewire, Racialicious, the Silence of our Friends and Outside the Toybox are also in my reader and in my mind. The M.A.S. wants to know why I love the blogosphere, and it’s because it’s my real intellectual community, where I shape and test my ideas.

Of course, my peeps keep me grounded and engaged and sane, and they’ll be getting their shoutouts offline. So thank you fellow bloggers. Today is a f***ing red letter day, filled with wine and good cheer and warm praise and proud, humbled tears and I hope you can all share in it with me!!

PS: If you want to add to this syllabus, pls offer your recommendations in the comments below!!

In eighth grade I discovered that I get a cold sweat when I’m nervous.  I used to noisily slide my sweaty palms down my desk for my Jr High Boyfriend, cuz I’m classy and attractive like that.  With less than four hours to go and another two hours of work in front of me, I am in a full, cold sweat.  Believe me, it feels AWESOME.  Right.

Fortunately, I’m not really stinky. 

I’m even showered and dressed in anticipation of being ALMOST DONE!!

Half way through question four, with 5 hours to go.  EEEEEE!!!

Please be ready for this last stretch with your cups of Gatorade and digital cameras!!  I’m coming!!

Weboy told me he likes my prison metaphor, so I’m sticking with it.

Finished up question 3 around 4pm (Thanks for the answer, Bill!).  And didn’t really get back to work until almost 2 hours ago, around 10pm tonight.  I can’t motivate; I feel like I’m saying the same thing repeatedly.  I have a worldview, I have an approach to problems.  I read and I read and I read, and I have found some amazing books and authors, but no matter how these questions are written, I feel like they keep leading me back to the same place.  I’d like to save us all the trouble of reading the 30+ pages of double-spaced text that will be e-mailed off tomorrow, and just refer my advisors to the three already completed questions.  Though they might secretly be thankful, I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed.

Anyway, so I treated myself a little bit tonight.  Hung out at the Dairy Burger for awhile, got into bed and watched an old Law & Order re-run (I LOVE the seasons from the early 90s…can you say “recessionitis?”  Mike Logan can.), and then I went to the gym.  My workout was mild, at best, but I watched Ugly Betty (or, more like it, looked at Henry from the neck down - there was a lot of muscles and ripped abs going on tonight), and got out of the house for an hour.  Much needed.

Best of all, I hit a couple of soft rock favorites on the dial that sounded positively exceptional as I cruised down Comm Av, behind the wheel for the first time since Sunday.  I was BLARING, BLARING the Bee Gee’s “How Deep is Your Love” and wailing along as I headed over the BU bridge, and fortunately I had to look for parking for a few minutes near school while I bopped and sang my way through Mary’s Boy Child.  Seriously, I have some ok taste in music (namely electronica, house, dance stuff) but the rest of my preferences map onto those of late-middle-aged black women, if the Classic R&B cd that I made for my friend Nikki’s wedding is any indication (I thought it was full of excellent dance hits, and she exclaimed that her mother was going to love it; the Jamnin’ 105.1 boat cruise I went on in NY Harbor in the early 2000s is another fitting memory).   I love it, but sometimes other people tell me my iTunes suck.  What they know.  All I’ve long known is I was born 20 years too late. 

Looking forward to getting my life back tomorrow night.  M.A.S. is planning some sort of Welcome Back party, but he’s being very hush hush about it all, possibly because he was informed only this afternoon that streamers et al. were expected. 

Thanks for all the support this week, but we’re not out of the woods yet!!

We are however, done with the metaphor portion of the program for the moment.

Hee.

And one question left.

All other three have been formatted.  Final draft is ready for this last question to be inserted.  At a minimum, I will have three relatively crisp and tight answers, and one slightly messier one thrown in at the end. 

SO TIRED.  The metaphor of treading water is in my head, though “Shake Your Groove Thang” is on my iPod.  (#467)

And revising my third question now.  30 hours to go.

…by another job well done by the Bush Administration:

…the nation’s teen birth rate rose for the first time in 15 years, surprising government health officials who had no immediate explanation. (A collective WTF?!?!? from the abstinence-only crowd, no doubt!!)

The birth rate had been dropping since its peak in 1991, although the decline had slowed in recent years. On Wednesday, government statisticians said it rose 3 percent from 2005 to 2006.

But several experts said they have been expecting a jump. They blame the increase on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education programs that do not teach how to use condoms and other contraception.  (Oh, right…)

Some key sexually transmitted disease rates have been rising, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. The rising teen pregnancy rate is part of the same phenomenon, said Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.

In response, Pres. Bush reminds the nation to give to the Marines Toys for Tots program, which is coincidentally experiencing a rising need for presents for kids, especially those who parents aren’t coming home anytime soon.

I’m finally working on the question I’ve been blogging about for months.  But I’m sleepy tonight, and took a break for an hour over at the M.A.S.’s.  He told me I don’t seem like myself - that’s what being on the inside does to you.  It changes you, man. 

Now I’m home, back in my gray garb and a cup of hot chocolate and some blueberries in front of me.  A note of caution to all the students, couch potatoes, hermits out there: if you sit around for three days in sweats, your jeans WILL FEEL TIGHT when you put them on.  I’m not sure it’s avoidable.  Best to avoid mirrors until at least 72 hours after the exam concludes.

I did catch up on 9 voicemails (Hi Weboy!) while I walked home.  People love me, and believe in me.  Right back at ya’ all.  The end is in sight. I’m trying to hang in there….

Was 2:00 pm today.  I finished my second question at 2:27pm.  I’m officially behind schedule.  Fortunately, no minutes are lost while blogging now, sort of like how junk food consumed on special occasions has no value.  (No, this is not the sort of logic I’m applying in my exam answers.)

Over here at General Exam Lockdown Central, I’m head to toe in gray waffle drabulousness.  Fortunately, they serve Peet’s coffee here.  And offer a range of iPod music selections.  (What do you think, will I shuffle through all 900 songs by Friday night? I’m on #197 now…make that #198.)  Writing this post is like visiting hours.  They’re about to end, as I finish Q2, and move on to the next. 

Have I mentioned how MIZ I am right now?????

FREE REDSTAR!!

 

12:28 a.m. I’ve just eaten, in the following order, green beans, 2/3 of a bag of veggie booty, a cup of lemon-ginger tea, 2 two-bite brownies, and some skim milk straight from the jug. 

My stomach’s going to feel AWESOME later.  About as good as my back feels sitting up in my kitchen chair right now (I’m about to move to the couch), and as good as my head feels having to TAKE THIS F********************ING EXAM (That was me screaming).

I told the M.A.S. to be prepared for some serious whining over the next 3 days.  Doesn’t look like you all will be spared either.

12:03 pm.  Back in front of the PC after a short, brisk walk around the ‘hood.  Went to bed around 3 am last night after some quick blog reads, a few downward dogs, and an old L&O from 1994.  Woke up to excerpts from the Bush press conf. that he’s even more of a bullish, uninformed a**hole than we thought (how does he manage to just keep on surprising like that?), which is a decidedly less pleasant way to start the day than being jolted out of bed by a car alarm or the doorbell.

Anyway, on to question 2 (I have to answer 4 this week).  I’m sure I’ll be back with more mindless chatter, such as the fact that I’m loving all over again this old French Connection sweater I bought in 2000.  I think that place is a rip off, but when I was super skinny post-back surgery, a lot of their stuff worked for me, and I was momentarily rich from my MBA internship at Pricewaterhouse Coopers (WORST job ever).  Anyway, I recently washed it for the first time ever (vs. dry cleaning, before you get any ideas) after deciding it was too old and worn out to take proper care of anymore.  Well, wouldn’t you know, it lost it’s bungy-esque clingy feel, as expected, but now it’s softer and looser and just perfectly lovely in a way I didn’t expect.  How nice - a new old pink sweater.

And with that, I leave you with Weboy’s list of his favorite Xmas music (just in time for the start of Hanukkah!!).  He never fails to deliver in his own unique way, enthusiastically endorsing Mariah and Whitney before tossing out the obscure Pearl Bailey gem.  Take a visit and let him know your faves and most hated.

But don’t forget about me over here!  The RP is my link to the outside world right now.  Check in on me, will ya?