I try not to do too many reading-list posts, mainly because I know that most of us have our own gigantic stacks of reading to get to. But! These pieces are simply dope and exciting, and written or shared with me by people I like. Plus, the collection represents, in a way, some key themes in my life right now: feminism, political work, and spirituality. So!
The lovely and talented author of This Moi (elder sister of ei powell) has a guest post up at Jezebel on the Man To Man (M2M) phenomenon — as experienced by herself, a keen and observant young woman of color, during a trip to a shooting range.
And! The Advance the Struggle collective (AS) published their analysis of the March 4th day of action (for public education in California + beyond), which breaks down, in very useful, insightful ways, the dis/advantages of two different tendencies among the anti-capitalist players involved, and how to combine their strengths into a “genuine class struggle left.” Personally, it helped me clarify and contextualize my experience participating in the SF March 4th committee, which I found pretty frustrating overall. In hindsight, I now understand a lot of the key ideological splits that I couldn’t articulate at the time. As AS puts it, “the [clashes] of approaches to radicalizing consciousness were key determinants in differentiating the political forces in the movement.” Also nifty to see analyzed summaries of all the different major actions in Cali, as well as efforts in Seattle. Check it out.
This poem, which my boss read to me during our latest reflection session (yes, I’m lucky enough to have good poetry in my work meetings!) immediately resonated with a fear that’s been haunting me ever since I started deepening my meditation practice last year.
Tree
by Jane Hirshfield
———
———
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books —
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Will it be possible for me to combine a lifelong commitment to practicing dharma (with the retreat experience and internal work required) while at the same time holding on to worldly commitments like partnerships and social justice work? Oftentimes I sense that someday, in this one lifetime, I’ll have to choose. Do you ever feel that way?
Finally, a little something by Ahmad Jamal, just because.
Happy Thursday, friends, and happy birthday Henry Mills!
I honestly don’t have much to say about this article from the NYT (lead photo taken directly in front of our home at Fools’ Court) on a potential new tourism trade in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (TL) district. The backward priorities, exploitation, and opportunism seem pretty obvious to me.
Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.
Appealing to whom? Not the people who live here, but outsiders — with money to spend. The bright side here, I suppose, is exposing the persistence of the trickle-down mentality that drives city planning. Promoting tourism will supposedly help businesses, which will supposedly help…homeless folks? Not likely. Most stores around here won’t even let you in to use the bathroom if you look like you’ve spent the night on the streets. Which might appear to be the case even if you do sleep inside, in a shelter or SRO: single-resident occupancy.
Just a couple days ago, at the feminist Marxist study group at the Faithful Fools, we talked with Diane, a longtime visitor to the Fools, about her experiences living in an SRO. It’s sort of like a jail, she said with a chuckle. You’re permitted a limited number of visits every month. (8 per month is the max at her place, she thinks.) Since you can’t have more than 3 people per room, a single mother with three children is out of luck. There are no kitchen facilities, turn-of-the-century wiring (making personal cooking devices surefire circuit overloaders), and one communal microwave for all 150 tenants. You’re supposed to get 24 hour’s notice before anyone comes to inspect your room, but managers rarely honor rules like that.
Diane teaching Ryan some dance moves.
Not to say that SROs are no better than sleeping in doorways. But investing in them as tourist attractions? How exactly is this helping to create, as Gavin Newsom claims, “a positive identity for the Tenderloin”? Why not tax rich people (a.k.a. wealthy tourists and corporations) and put funding directly into improving and expanding housing? Making it a human right in practice, not just in theory? Of course, the city instead assists landlords who evict low-income tenants in order to turn rental units into condominiums (through legislation like the Ellis Act, which Diane was explaining to us). Meanwhile, the thousands of housing units currently vacant could easily eliminate homelessness altogether.
Forget appealing to tourists. Personally, I’d rather the folks of the TL follow the lead of Homes Not Jails, who just a week ago occupied a vacant building, resisting eviction and declaring the duplex public property. Organizing in opposition to state-supported capitalist institutional violence would give the Tenderloin a much more “positive identity,” in my mind, than million-dollar slum museums and “hundreds of [fucking] plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood.”
Kind of like #followfriday, only more of a plain old celebration of the folks touching one Black girl’s heart this week.
Above, Miss Maxine, who slowly but surely welcomed me into her life after a rough start on Sunday. She’s almost as much of a delight as her owners, Chris and Donna.
Adrienne Maree Brown is just tremendous. Everybody should read her. You should read her. Like, starting now.
Aaron Tanaka is also tremendous. His blog is pretty much brand-new, but already one of my all-time favorites. Eclectic, on-point, funny, educational. Solid.
If you ever get the chance, spend some quality time with Carmen Barsody. Trust me on this one.
Last but not least, word has it that Advance the Struggle is about to publish a piece analyzing March 4th. Get excited!
Stumbled across this last night while foraging through YouTube. Timely. Just a couple days ago I was talking with some friends over breakfast about how to deal with anger. Raises big, complex questions about the best way to measure effectiveness. In the short run, expressing anger (i.e. fighting, verbally or physically) might seem like the best or even only way to counteract some harm that is occurring. This is especially true, as my domestic partner Noa pointed out, when dealing with institutional violence, which often masquerades as nonviolent, ‘neutral’ policy. Fighting openly against it, bringing forth the anger it engenders, is almost a necessary first step to naming the harm as harm: bringing symmetry through self-defense. (Or, more aptly, community-defense.)
But if we look closely and objectively at the effects of acting out our anger, we might arrive at different conclusions about its effectiveness. Even if it successfully puts a stop to a particular attack, what cost does it exact on our own psyche? Our own well-being? (After all, this is supposed to be self-defense, right? Not just from external factors, but from internal ones, too.)
TNH isn’t saying we should never get angry. Not at all. He argues that our actions actually become more clear-sighted and, yes, effective, when we can take the extra step of transforming our anger into another, positive energy, like compassion. This conversion neutralizes the toxic effects of raw anger, while conserving its power and precision. Or at least, that’s the claim. Some might find it difficult to believe. Isn’t some energy always lost through a conversion process? Don’t we risk getting stuck, mired and deactivated in all that inward focus?
I don’t have answers, really: I can only speak from my own experience. Which tells me that I’m just as likely, if not more so, to get stuck, mired, and deactivated in my own judgments, irritation, upset, fury, and depression. And also tells me that I’m most capable of speaking and acting with force and finesse when I’m coming from a place of caring, not rage.
An example. A couple weeks ago, I had a confrontation with the boyfriend of one of my Faithful Fools housemates. (We’ll call this boyfriend Rick.) Rick is currently homeless, which is one reason he spends a lot of time at Fools’ court with Kat. One particular week, though, we were hosting a dozen college students for their seven-day Alternative Spring Break and needed as much breathing room as possible. I had told Rick this, and that we would need him to steer clear of the Fools unless he was there for a public event. But one afternoon, mid-week, there he was in the living room, playing piano. He’d also been over the night before, staying with Kat, but I’d let that slide, understanding the desire to hang out and figuring he’d move on by morning.
Anyway, point is, by the time he was fiddling at the piano, I perceived that Rick was doing something that I (on behalf of other Fools, too) had asked him not to do. So I went over and inquired as to when he planned to leave.
He didn’t.
A fight ensues. I yell at Rick. Yell! Me! Mind you, this man is pushing 60: could easily be my father. But he isn’t listening, and I am pissed. Which, of course, means that I can’t listen very well, either.
Back and forth we go. Rick feels he had a right to be here — he’s with Kat. Kat, I remind him, was in on the decision to reserve the house for necessary personnel that week, and should have communicated that decision to him. Even if she hadn’t, I had told him directly. Rick feels that he should have been included in the decisionmaking process, since the outcome affected him. YOU DO NOT LIVE HERE, RICK, etc.
I can tell he’s getting heated too because his eyes are half-closed and sidecast, brows permanently arched. Can you look at me, please, Rick? I finally plead, hands on my hips. He’s still sitting on the piano bench. No, he says, not right now, I can feel myself getting angry and I’m trying to control myself because I like you, Katie, I really do…
And at that moment, I remember the fear inherent in anger. Sure, Rick is being obstinate, using his superior age as a tool for condescension, and generally, as I comment to him, making me feel disrespected in my own home. But there’s more beneath the stubbornness. Here he is, an older Black man clinging to a place of his own, a space to play his music and store his belongings and come home to. And now I, a young Black woman, come along and take it away. He gets the same messages from all sides, every day: “You don’t have the right to be here; get out.” Who wouldn’t want a little control, a little say, over the main place they spend their time?
So I take a chair, putting myself on his physical level, and listen. Not only tell him that I like him, too, but show it. I don’t back down, but I don’t shut down, either. I even joke and play a little. Eventually we come to a compromise; a couple hours later, he leaves. With a smile. And a compliment — he saw what I was made of today, he says, and he likes it.
And of course, we’re on better terms now than ever before. Every time I see him he gives me a kind of knowing grin, and makes some remark or another about my toughness. Buzzed from sangria at the Faithful Fools’ fundraising dinner that capped off the week, he advised Ryan: Marry that woman. She’s a keeper.
And I know I can be straight up with him without fearing the consequences. Confidence and compassion don’t have to undermine each other; they can grow together.
I think this is what TNH means when he talks about caring for our anger. The art of converting an enemy into a friend.
From a Facebook Note I wrote last night. (Friend me if we’re not friends already!)
Dear lovely people,
I hope this note finds you well! I’m writing it at the end of an exhausting day of work — cooking, grocery shopping, driving, hosting, facilitating — when all my body wants to do is sleep, but my mind’s got other plans.
Since reading Selma James’ “Sex, Race, and Class” and another work of hers and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s (“The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community“), both offered this week through a rad study group here in the Bay, I’ve been considering parallels between the role of nonprofits (like the one I work for, in exchange for room and board) and the un-waged domestic/reproductive/social labor of (mostly) women, as James and Della Costa explain it. Wanted to share my thoughts with y’all– as always, your insights are tremendously appreciated.
Arundhati Roy names a process by which NGO’s, in ministering to the needs created by gaps in both private and public capitalist enterprise, chill the potential for social resistance. “Non-profits’ real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right.” Folks who work for non-profits often acknowledge that their efforts amount to a Band-Aid approach: covering up the problem, but failing to reach its root causes. But Roy seems to reject the Band-Aid analogy. A metaphor she’d choose might be more like: taking painkillers to ‘heal’ a broken leg. The immediate pain might be numbed, but by continuing to walk on the leg, you’re only worsening the injury.
Similarly, Della Costa and James argue that both trade unions and nuclear families trap us in this painkiller predicament:
Like the trade union [or non-profit, in this case], the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial.
Unlike trade unions, though, which address the conditions of masculinized wage labor, non-profits often seem to institutionalize the work traditionally associated with feminized labor performed within the family. Need a hot meal? A soup kitchen will serve you one. Sick? A clinic will treat you. Want to come home to a lovely garden? No need to rely on Grandma or the wife: your local eco-NGO will build a permaculture paradise for the whole neighborhood.
There are exceptions, of course, like hotel worker unions which may parallel feminized family housework, or media non-profits that are basically mainstream corporations with an opportunistic tax status. But overall, I’m struck by the resemblance. Is the non-profit an incorporated version of James’ and Della Costa’s working-class woman? Complete with moral imperatives to ‘nurture,’ or in this case, ‘serve the community,’ all the while scraping by on allowances wheedled from donor husbands and grantmaker sugar daddies?
I know a lot of us are thinking and living similar questions right now, and I just wanted to share my own musings. Thank you for all the inspiration and strength you give me! I love all of you and miss those I don’t get to see.
hugs and more hugs,
katie
And let’s not forget that NGO work doesn’t replace the “second shift” of unpaid housework! After coming home from the non-profit you still gotta wash dishes. (In my case, throughout the day at the non-profit. And we wash lots of people’s dishes.)
The No Cuts movement in California, opposing the violence inherent in shifting the burden of the financial crisis to the working class (including students at public schools), is gaining steam all over, it seems. The next local fight I’m excited to focus on, after the March 4th day of strikes and actions to defend public education, is the oppressively expensive public transit system in the Bay Area — especially as higher-ups falsely pit riders against operators, claiming that since bus drivers don’t want to give up their pensions, users have no choice but to swallow higher fares and fewer routes. Gross.
More on that later, but in the meantime, check out this cheeky analysis of the UC Berkeley administration’s reactions (and non-reactions) to recent University of California controversies, including the street-dance-party action above.
Dear UCMeP Faithful,
We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization are morally outraged over recent events at the University of California.
We are talking about the band of terrorists disguised as students dancing to defend public education who, in the early morning hours of February 26, struck a vicious blow to everything UC Berkeley holds dear: its dumpsters and trash cans.
Within hours of this despicable event, Chancellor Bobby Birgeneau – writing from the same undisclosed location he has been bravely hiding in since December – sent an email to the entire campus community titled “Vandalism at Durant Hall.”
In this powerful missive, Birgeneau, “condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the overnight criminal vandalism in Durant Hall that spilled over onto Bancroft and Telegraph avenues.”
As increasingly belligerent acts of racism and homophobia shake UC Berkeley’s sister campuses, UCMeP would just like to commend the leaders of the UCB administration for their bold decision to not speak out against racism and homophobia this past Friday. We are proud that they have instead highlighted the real threat facing the UC: all those students, faculty, and employees vainly struggling to defend what’s left of public education.
That Chancellor Birgeneau has yet to publicly condemn the hanging of a noose in UCSD’s library or the vandalism of UC Davis’ LGBT center is more than appropriate. After all, why should the leader of UC Berkeley be concerned about goings-on at other campuses of the UC when he has burning trash cans on his own campus to contend with?
Friends, as Chancellor Birgeneau has recently demonstrated, racism, sexism, and hate speech are not the biggest enemies the University of California faces. The real foes are free speech, the right to dissent, and the tolerance of minority opinion.
We must battle these democratic evils with everything we’ve got.
It is toward dance parties and brief midnight occupations of construction sites that our moral outrage should be directed, not nooses and homophobia.
$600 for tuition, breakfast, and lunch. Dinner and lodging not included. (Not to mention the cost for me to travel to Massachusetts.)
Six hundred dollars? Probably closer to a thousand, all told? Now where’s the social engagement in that?
Of course, this is not a dilemma unique to the Zen Peacemakers. As nathan and I have been discussing lately, it’s a huge challenge to make a sangha’s economy reflect its philosophies. And when I called the ZPs to inquire about a sliding scale or some other option, it was clear that they were at least considering the contradiction between the symposium’s mission and its prohibitive costs. Within a couple of months, they had designed and posted a volunteer application, which would cover the cost of tuition — though still leaving the problem of travel and lodging. My new friend Ari, ZP assistant to Bernie Glassman, says they’re also pursuing possibilities for free places to stay: either camping on the property or staying with local sangha members. If you’re interested in attending, hit up the volunteer app! (Unless, of course, you can afford to pay — in which case you’d be helping make things more affordable for the rest of us.)
It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that the point of keeping entry costs low isn’t only a matter of accessibility. Of course, we want to make teachings and community-building events available to poor and working-class folks. But for a group explicitly interested in social justice or “social engagement,” there is also the problem of reproducing oppressive, class-based structures. Inclusion is not enough: we need transformation.
For example: what does it mean when social justice -oriented sanghas establish endowment funds, which invest donors’ contributions into the financial market, strengthening the capitalist structures that exploit and crush workers?
We don’t need to rely on this model. Check out this definition of a “dana economy” from the rad-sounding Eco-Dharma Center:
All our events are offered in the spirit of dana, a Sanskrit/pali term meaning giving and gift. The ethical practice of generosity expresses the transcendence of separate selfhood and constitutes a basic ethos at the heart of creative community. The economic forms of consumerism and capitalism highly condition our relationships in the world – encouraging us to experience ourselves as discrete subjective entities, producers or consumers, insulated from responsive engagement with others. Rather than emulate this, it is our intention to support economic relationships which contribute towards a culture of sharing.
We do not intend to enter into relationship with you as the providers of a service for a consumer. We intend to enter into a wholehearted human relationship with you, as co-producers and collaborators in the transformation of ourselves and our world. To support this intention we ask for contributions to make this work possible, rather than offering our work as a service to be bought. The basic principle of the Dana Economy is, “give what you can, take what you need”.
The suggested donations in our programme reflect the very basic income required to make the events viable. We do not have any independent means of financing the events and we do need that those attending offer financial support to make the events financially viable. If you can offer more, please do. If the incoming donations for an event are insufficient we will be unable to give them freely. So, please look at the suggested contributions and enter into the spirit of this approach by giving what you can. We are also willing to discuss donations in the form of skill sharing and offers of work to support the project.
I know we need to be realistic, and as Ari reminded me, most sanghas do not dedicate themselves exclusively to offering retreats, a la Goenkaji’s Vipassana centers, so that’s not a viable model for everyone. And I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to guilt-trip anybody. Rather, I’m eager to talk more, and more openly, about the real costs of maintaining sanghas, and how we can reproduce and sustain radical dana economies: economies of insight and generosity. I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts.
In addition to volunteering in order to earn my way at the Symposium, I’m hoping to host a workshop on using the Internet as a tool of dharma. So wish me luck! Seems like it’s a popularsubject these days, and I’m psyched to hear how others are theorizing it.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of info on the ZP’s newsletter — for which they often solicit contributions. I checked out the issue on prison meditation this month, and there were a number of really solid articles. (Also made me that much more eager to see Dhamma Brothers: a documentary on the introduction of a Goenka-style 10-day silent Vipassana course into an Alabama prison.)
Take care, y’all!
— — — — —
Zen Master Bernie Glassman and the Zen Peacemakers invite you to enjoy
The Zen Peacemakers founder, Bernie Glassman has created the a clearinghouse on Socially Engaged Buddhism in the West. We are pleased to invite you to receive our FREE monthly online publication.
You will learn about:
· Who?: Profiles, links and articles on the individuals and groups practicing service and working for social justice as Buddhist practice
· What?: Emerging service projects and social actions, including opportunities to train and get involved
· Why?: The history, ethical bases and philosophies that inspire the global movement of Buddhist communities towards social engagement
It’s been a lovely Wednesday. Bánh mì sandwiches and reading in Golden Gate Park with Ryan; trees and sun and tea and vegan coffee-whiskey-fudge gelato. Plus, I finished Jan Willis’ memoir, Dreaming Me (wisely re-subtitled, I think, in a later version: Black, Baptist And Buddhist — One Woman’s Spiritual Journey).
It’s well past my grandmotherly bedtime and I’m too tired to get into the autobio too much, but I will say it spoke to me, and I enjoyed it. Raised in the 1950’s in a Klan-rife Alabama town, Willis attended Cornell as one of the first waves of black Ivy League students. (She and my dad, apparently, likely rubbed shoulders during the Straight Takeover — in which an armed Black Students Association occupied the student union in the spring of ’69, protesting a local cross burning and demanding an Africana Studies department.) After graduating, she faced a soul-rattling decision between joining the Black Panther Party (the obligation, she believed, of “any thinking black person” in the U.S. at the time) or traveling to Nepal to study Buddhism. Gotta love choices like that.
One of my favorite passages:
Of course, the next day things would return to normal and I’d find myself again in a divided camp, with whites on one side and blacks on the other. This spiritual connection with all things did not erase the racism of the everyday world I inhabited.
Yup. And:
Talking with the Dalai Lama brought this truth home again. Buddhism was a process; one did not need to delude oneself or pretend to be other than oneself, and one did not have to become completely passive in order to embrace the notion of peace. Choosing peace did not mean rolling over and becoming a doormat. Pacifism did not mean passivism. Still, patience and clarity were essential.
And finally:
[Baptists] knew that misery and joy can stand side by side. Indeed, it is this very knowledge that black people call “the blues.”
…
The teachings, at least as interpreted by these African-Americans, were about overcoming suffering, about patience, strength, and the cultivation of true love. And they were delivered with compassion.
Having used the literary concept of “magical realism” on a few occasions to describe my experience at Goddard, I’ve lately begun exploring an idea of “spiritual realism.” It’s a phrase that speaks to many of my experiences in the last two years, and to my spiritual philosophy in general. I’m interested in the spirituality of everyday life, in the most mundane places — ugly, resplendent, boring, and everything in between. I’m especially drawn to spiritual practices that address the suffering inherent in social oppression. That’s why I practice Vipassana meditation at donation-based centers; that’s why I sit with a sangha led by and for people of color and queer folks (also on a donation basis); that’s why I live and work with the Faithful Fools, a street ministry in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.
Spiritual realism is the antidote, the flip-side, to the “spiritual materialism” against which Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche warns us.
I’ve got a lot of thoughts on it, but for now I want to share one of its proximate inspirations, left as a gift on my Facebook wall. Too good not to pass along: especially, I think, for those of us working for justice in some way. The goals can seem so urgent that it’s easy to overlook the larger realities — the importance of process. Thanks for the reminder, bk!
Kloncke 