Cheers for America’s Children of 2020!
How rousing and exhilarating is the spirit and energy of the many-hued cast of the musical Hamilton! How well it mirrors – in advance – the demographic change predicted to occur in the year 2020. That’s when, according to the US Census Bureau: Most of the nation’s children will not be of European descent. Or, to put it another way, Children of solely European descent or origin will be fewer in number in the US than the children of indigenous, and/or African, and/or Asian descent or origin, and certainly, much fewer in number than the children of “mixed” ancestral heritages. Question for all: What does this mean for me and “my people”? Do I feel excited by this change? Eager to add more shadings to my own family’s repertoire of choices and imaginings?...
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A Tale of Two Faces
What would have happened if they looked like this? Imagine if the boy on the left was found dead, incontestably shot and killed by the man on the right. How differently the course of events would have gone! Racism is, at its deepest core, about the pre-linguistic, pre-behavioral, “in your gut” feelings of (fully human) “people like us” versus “those dangerous others” (who may just be less-than-human, and thus are all the more dangerous, cunning, and animalistically endowed). At a level that does not easily allow for conscious self-examination, there is an unspoken fear of “their” danger to “us” which motivates words, actions, laws, and policies regarding “them”. The use of racial epithets, the creation of behavioral traditions (e.g. residential segregation) and the enactment of legal tactics (e.g. Jim Crow voting strategies) all stem subsequently from those deep-seated concerns...
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Forever in Our Hearts – Loki
This is the piece I wrote to be published in the “Forever in Our Hearts” section of the September, 2013 issue of the quarterly magazine, the Leo Letter (the official publication of the Leonberger Club of America) To write about our magnificent communicator, Loki, requires me to use words, which of course Loki could never produce. But that never stopped him from understanding our words and all of our other ways of communicating, both consciously and unconsciously, and of communicating his thoughts and feelings back to us In the days since his death, in between my audible sobs and silent tears, I have also smiled and even laughed about our Loki-boy. We had many affectionate names for him: Lokenberger, Puppy Boy, Buddy, Sweet Boy, Lok-man. Looking over some of the many pictures I have of him brings back so...
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To Fellow Members of the Leonberger Club of America: My Loki is Gone
This is the email I sent to the LeoList (an email list for members of the Leonberger Club of America) announcing Loki’s death. A great heart has stopped forever – our Loki boy’s… Our huge-hearted, people-loving Loki boy died yesterday (Tuesday) morning at the emergency animal clinic, leaving us in grief and tears. We’ve known for more than a year that he had laryngeal paralysis, but he was actually doing relatively well, even without a tie-back operation. We got a slow-feed bowl and fed him several small meals throughout the day, and kept his walks short and in the cool part of the day – which is usually not difficult to do here in the cool Pacific Northwest. It also helped that his personality was very calm. We had been having a wretched hot spell for the past few...
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The Montgomery Police Badge, the Harlem Shake, and Other Post-Pain Performative Gestures
Two recently televised events – Melissa Harris-Perry’s reaction, on her show, to the Harlem Shake dance craze, and Montgomery, Alabama Police Chief Kevin Murphy’s public apology to civil rights veteran Representative John Lewis – both caught my eye as being surprisingly relevant to the book project I am working on now regarding deadly prejudice in an entirely different historical and cultural context. The puzzle I am grappling with in my own work is deeply personal. As a Polish-American anthropologist who has spent over a decade teaching college students about genocide and the Holocaust, I want to be critically honest about the sociological workings of anti-Semitism in Poland, particularly around the time of the Nazi occupation there. At the same time, however, I still want to nourish my family’s connection to, and pride in, the land of my ancestors. Yes,...
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Williams-Sonoma as a Longing Machine
Back in July, Carina Chocano wrote an intriguing piece, “Pinterest, Tumblr, and the Trouble with ‘Curation’” about the “curation” or reblogging of other people’s ideas and images on sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest. The line in her piece that smacked me with its perfect arrangement of words was this one: “In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine.” “That’s it!” I responded, like Charlie Brown when he recognized the perfect appropriateness of the precise word which “The-Doctor-Is-In” Lucy had used to diagnose him in that famous Christmas video. Williams-Somona is a ne plus ultra longing machine! For years now our kitchen table has hosted, often for several days at a time, the various Williams-Sonoma catalogs that come in the mail, from month to month, from that wonderland. But it is holidays...
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Reflections about Snake Lake, Poland, Hate – and Your Senior Thesis
I wrote this blog post originally for the CSoc Blog – describing how Comparative Sociology faculty and senior thesis students spent a Saturday in early September from 10 am to 4 pm, working together to demystify the research process involved in producing a senior thesis. Just before leaving my house on a Saturday morning for the senior thesis retreat at the Tacoma Nature Center at Snake Lake on September 8, I briefly checked my Facebook news feed and came across this disturbing reproduction of a tweet that had been earlier posted to Twitter: “Someone needs to assassinate Obama…like ASAP #DieYouPieceOfShit” I barely had time to re-post the link and the quote with my own brief comment about the poster (“Right-wing hatred from a 16 year old girl”), before I had to leave for day’s event. But in the moments before the...
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For Those Who Mourn…
This post should be read after first reading my post “To my cousin Kathy (August 10, 1954 – April 15, 2012)” – below) As I begin writing this in a time zone three hours behind Buffalo’s, Kathy’s funeral must be just concluding. For all of you who, like me, mourn her loss very deeply, I want to share something I discovered quite by accident on my Facebook news feed not long ago: a link to the music of Zbigniew Preisner, the premier composer of film scores in Poland today. The following two YouTube links come from Preisner’s entire hour-long work, Requiem for My Friend, a work that so moved me that I bought and downloaded the complete album, and have been listening to it on my iPod or iTunes almost nonstop for the past two weeks. The words to the first of...
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