anonymous cowgirl

Tufts University, 6pm

You can’t understand what’s happening right now in America. We are living in a country that is only 4% of world’s population yet produces 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas, has 25% of the world’s prisons. Some think we have a disposable planet, disposable people.
A green economy must be strong enough to lift millions of people out of poverty.
We don’t have any disposable species, resources, people, children, neighborhoods. It’s all precious. The Creator didn’t make any junk.

We have to refashion our economy. It takes a series of intellectual breakthroughs. My journey started with an emotional breakdown, a spiritual exhaustion. Read the rest of this entry »

In February and March, two articles were published in two of the top psychology journals. They were both about interracial interactions, and each, by itself, made sense. Put side by side, however, there’s something else going on…and frankly, I need help figuring it out. So I call on you, dear readers, to let me know your thoughts on this.

I’ve put the full text of the abstracts at the bottom for your reference, copyright owned by the journals, mind you. I’ll summarize them here in my terms first:

1. “Expect the unexpected”: Robyn Mallett and colleagues found that White people tend to expect that interactions with Black people will go much worse than they actually do. (This is a forecasting error.) This happens because White people, preparing for an interracial interaction, focus on the differences between them and Black people, and if they are just told to focus on the similarities, then they expect (accurately) more pleasant interactions. (I don’t think they show data about expectations for Black participants.)

2. “Beyond Contact”: Tamar Seguy and colleagues (including Jack Dovidio - he’s good people) look at power and conversation topic preferences in interracial interactions: White people want to talk about similarities, Black people want to talk about differences. Actually, Black people also want to talk about similarities just as much as White people do, but they want to talk about power disparities way more than White people do. This is driven by motivation for change in group-based power. In fact, those who most wanted to talk about power disparities are: highly identified Black folks, and the race-conscious White folks (compared to others of their racial background). The ones who most wanted to talk about commonalities are highly identified White folks.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am married to a Master.

If you water house plants daily, regularly, (unnaturally, considering rain fall patterns), they tend to develop roots that are close to the surface, superficial. If you let the soil dry out just a bit, the plants are challenged; the roots have to go deeper to find sustenance, to grow in ways that provide more stability for the health of the entire organism.
When we, as humans, detach ourselves from our regular physical intake of food/ water/ sex/ material needs… we spend just a few precious hours, a few precious days of the year, trying to grow our roots deeper into the soil, to reach out for a stability that does not come from the material and superficial.

In “Make This Earth Day Your Last” over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich forced me to struggle with my current attitudes about sustainability and systems change. I thought I would blog my process.

In summary: Gestures are not enough. What is required is a transformation of consciousness, and a united understanding of our interconnection. Given this context, I can regularly ask myself whether our work is changing systems, or whether it is simply green jewelry, adorning the surface of the university.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by the live blogging efforts over at Baha’i Thought, and Phillipe’s writings on Two Americas and the different experience of Blacks and Whites in the U.S., I thought I’d post this. Ian Haney Lopez gave a talk at Tufts University on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008. The talk was entitled “Race and School Integration: A Critique of Colorblindness.” Dr. Lopez is a professor of Law at UC-Berkeley. The talk centered around the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of race-blind policies, available at Findlaw.com: Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 case (June 2007).

In the Parents Involved case, the Supreme Court determined that using race as a criterion for determining which school a child will attend is unconstitutional, thereby upholding a long-standing legal idea: “Our constitution is colorblind.” This famous line was penned by Justice Harlan in his dissenting opinion in “Plessy v Ferguson,” and it has been used both for good and evil by all manner of folk.

There was no wifi connection at the auditorium, but I’ve uploaded my notes from the talk below the fold. Sorry if the notes are sloppy. I’ll try to go back through and link to relevant court cases with pull quotes later on. I’m actually thinking about throwing it all on a “Critique of Colorblindness” resource page. Stay tuned.

Lopez suggests that the ideology of “colorblindness” has actually paved the way for a new kind of racism. I’m especially intrigued by Lopez’s idea that colorblindness is used both as a shield to protect modern-day segregation, and as a sword to cut down more egalitarian measures. Lopez argued that the Court’s 2007 ruling in “Parents Involved” has effectively redefined racism for the national legal system. That is, as long as school administrators aren’t stupid enough to say, “I’m using this policy to keep the black kids out,” they’re completely protected by the constitution. To make policy that enables segregation, even on thinly veiled references to race will still be protected by the constitution. You know the references he’s talking about. “It’s so hard to teach those kids. They come from communities marred by a culture of failure, or an entitlement culture, or gang violence, or they don’t speak English.” As long as you don’t specifically say, “Black people,” or “Latinos,” you’re free and clear from a constitutional perspective. With this decision, the Court has embraced a colorblind view of the world that says, “Keep race out of your decision-making processes, and everything will be fine. If we don’t pay attention to race, these problems will go away.”

Read the rest of this entry »

My RSS reader tells me that a new painting is up over at limonana. The Conference of the Birds is beautiful. I can’t get over the cartoonish curve of the horizon line, the minimalist trees, and the dense, almost moiré patterns of gold leaves (or something) beneath the horizon.

The artist’s work and contact information is available at shirinsahba.com.

Hello everyone! This is Negin. I am posting on anonymous cowgirl now in collaboration with Lev. This oughta increase the frequency of posting. It will, if nothing else, increase the number of cowgirls involved in this operation to a grand total of one. (Can’t let y’all forget I’m from Texas.)

My purpose in posting tonight is to share the song I made up spontaneously tonight. It is called Mr. Picky Man:

Mr. Picky Man wants to hug his wife,
But only if they stand on the bathroom mat.
Mr. Picky Man wants to kiss his wife,
But only if she doesn’t purse her lips like that.

Oh, oh, Mr. Picky Man. I love you, Mr. Picky Man.

-end song-

Our hope in adding me on to this blog is to share a little taste of what marriage looks like from the inside - how hard it is to maintain unity with someone you’ve decided to share eternity with. Maybe this first unit will provide insights and learnings for how to create and maintain unity in larger circles.

My lesson: address each other with ridiculous and playful nicknames. This reminds you how much you love the other person, including their quirks. This strategy may not be something that the more entrenched conflict scenarios are ready for immediately, but it’s worth warming up to.

Also, a little less cheekily: I hope to post occasional thoughts about my research projects and the status of race and gender and privilege and justice on our beloved planet, and I’d love feedback. Being a grad student can be somewhat isolating at times.

Talk To Me is the best movie of the year.

Say what you like about the Coen brothers, Denzel, and everyone else, but Don Cheadle, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Taraji Henson, Mike Epps and director Kasi Lemmons made the best movie of the year.

Between neighborhood children’s classes, the job search, finishing projects and preparing for pilgrimage, I’m going to steer clear of the blog for another few weeks. Once I get a regular job, maybe I’ll start posting regularly. Until I do, it just seems like a source of procrastination. Go read Baha’i Thought and Black America instead.

I’ve begun a new project page, accessible from the frontpage of mollusc.org. It’s called Farmer’s Market Technology, but it’s really a general investigation of technology for urban agriculture. We coined ubifarm here, but Brian’s brilliant wordsmithing has also suggested pervasive agriculture and communicative soil. Whatever the term, let’s keep investigating how sensors, locative technology, RSS feeds, etc. can support pervasive urban agriculture.

Having more or less completed my first project, Seasonal Feed, I’m realizing something Malcolm covered at length: Information is only useful when you have context. Technologists love to talk about universal access. “We’ll be able to access the web from anywhere,” they say. But we don’t want universal access — we want contextualized access. We don’t want all of the information; we want the information that will be helpful given where we are.

With Seasonal Feed, I have successfully grabbed a list of seasonal vegetables from a regularly updated site, and transformed it into an RSS feed that can be used for any number of new projects. But I don’t want that general/universal information. I want the information in relation to my life. What vegetables are available at my local farmer’s market right now? Seasonal Feed can’t tell me that collards aren’t on the list (even though they’re in season). It can’t tell me that Hanson’s farm at Davis Square still has peaches, even though they’re almost out of season. The first solution I can think of requires people and community. It requires that I interact with the market manager at my local farmer’s market, and offer to help in the production of contextual information. Sort of cool, when you think about it.