Spin
November 5, 2009
ALL SOULS Rest In Peace
November 2, 2009
Halloween:
1 more stabbing, 1 more homicide in Albany.
3 attacks in October within the same few blocks: 2 deaths, 2 stabbings, 1 shooting.
Neighborhood meeting: How to stem the flow of violence.
Violence doesn’t flow.
It explodes.
Out of thin air into thick thuds.
There isn’t a source of violence, no spring you can dam, no pike you can plug, no place you can fence off, no population you can keep out.
Violence comes in blows when all else has fallen away: all other measures, all other options.
Emergency rooms are the thin membrane between assault and murder. The thin line between life and death is measured not in intent but in a sad mix of intent and outcome.
Sometimes the body can be saved. The skin sewn up, the organs mended.
How can you mend a broken heart?
How can you mend so many hearts that have thrown all else to the wind and come to blows?
On this All Souls Day, I would really like to know.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Unfighting Evil in Inches
October 24, 2009
I opened my mouth and said that I wanted to be a part of fighting racism in America. Soon enough, I was given articles about hate crimes to read.
It was nightmare material. Never-sleep-again material. Prescription for tranquilizers material. Give-up-on-humanity material.
I did not have the stomach to read it cover to cover. There were mug shots of immensely ugly men with pock marks and wall eyes. Those mugs were juxtaposed with the picture of a beautiful little girl. The little girl was dead. The little girl was one of the victims of the hate crimes described in the article.
The men who looked like monsters, were the monsters responsible for such crimes.
But what am I supposed to do with this? If I know that evil exists, what can I do against it? What can I do to stop it? The short answer is, I don’t know.
In the mean time there are jerks in traffic, there are ordinary run-of-the mill pigs with lewd comments. There are the innocuous expressions of hatred and ill will all over.
In short, there is evil all around.
The surrounding question to me is this: When faced with evil, what must one do?
Superhero comics would have us believe that we must vanquish evil. So too would the lore of American culture with its love affair with struggle and combat.
When faced with evidence of unspeakable crimes, it makes me want to do unspeakable things to the criminals. But when defenses escalate, it becomes difficult to trace what is offense and what is defense.
Defense is clearly called for, but at a certain juncture, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
When violence is unpacked and deconstructed, it resides first within and begins from language. The crime of assault includes verbal assault. There is indeed a thin-as-a-smoketrail beginning to violence. And so, every word and every action matters.
When faced with evil, is it better to do as the self-help gurus and new age philosophers would have us do? Should we put on a happy face, focus only on the positive and wish the bad energies away?
I don’t think so.
Pretending something is so doesn’t make it so. It only makes it seem so.
Pretending that hate crimes do not occur does not make them go away.
If I take refuge in the local health food store and spritz myself with lavender and chamomile and think only happy thoughts domestic violence does not cease to exist. Nor does violence against Black people, Hispanics, Arabs, Muslims, Immigrants, Gays or Lesbians.
Spritzing myself with obliviousness doesn’t change reality. The reality is that America is one of the most violent countries on earth. Americans are responsible for the largest number of deaths on earth. No amount of positive thinking will make that untrue.
When and where does it become possible for peace to exist?
Well, there are some measures that include no violent by-products, collateral damage or moral dilemmas. When responding to evil, violence or hatred, you must first speak out. Secondly, you must speak out (even if your voice shakes). Thirdly, you must speak out. And finally, you must speak out again.
Hatred and violence must be opposed in order to be reduced. And so, the conundrum becomes: how do we fight violence without actually fighting?
I would like violence to simply stop. Globally. Is this so much to ask?
I know. You can’t always get what you want.
But in the short time that I have on earth (and any amount of time turns out to always be too short) maybe I can stem the flow of hatred and violence in America a little. I don’t know how. But I will try. I will fail. I will become tired. And then I will try again.
I would rather go to bed knowing that I tried and failed rather than not having tried at all.
What I want to see I will likely not see in my lifetime. But if I can speak out, then I mark for others that I am here. Like this, I signal that others will be heard by me.
Maybe not in my lifetime, but in the future I believe that violence against women and people of color must stop.
Mahatma Gandhi said:
When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.
The Zen Kensho wrote:
When you are tired, rest. When you see a hungry person, give him food. When you see someone sad, you are also sad. Only this. Moment to moment, you must keep your correct situation. All your actions are for other people. Put down I, my, me.
Tomorrow we can go back to fighting evil, one page at a time. I don’t know what it takes. But I think it begins with rest, and water, and food. And then waking up in the morning again and beginning again, however we can, with what we have at hand.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Albany’s Love for Corey Ellis
October 15, 2009
As a contender for the Democratic ticket for Mayor of Albany, Corey Ellis offered a glimpse of a leader who counted vacant buildings correctly, spoke of hard times honestly, demanded transparency in government, and presented the possibility of a real cooperation between regular people and city government.
Corey Ellis is a candidate with a huge groundswell of support below the radar. We don’t always see it, but it is there. Just ask around. And with the endorsement of the Working Families party, Corey Ellis is still in the race for Mayor of Albany: In for the win.
Along with long-time community champions Dominick Calsolaro and Barbara Smith, Corey Ellis has been a strong advocate for community policing. Ellis believes that community policing can bring our communities together and make our neighborhoods safer. Journalists such as David King for Metroland magazine know that for Corey Ellis, commitment to community is not an empty campaign slogan. It is his way of life.
Barbara Smith, the 2005 contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, appears to agree with Corey.
When a teenager was stabbed in the chest in South Albany this month, the police arrived after the incident. I wonder if community police might have already been there before the event? Could they have prevented it?
Rest in Peace, Edward Duffy d. October 16, 2009
Community organizers would say yes.
In a city now hollowed out and divided, Corey Ellis was Albany’s own slice of hope on the Democratic ticket. On the Working Families ticket, he still is. It is still all about Corey.
But the echoes of the Obama enthusiasm are more than skin-deep. Corey Ellis demands transparency in government and a meaningful relationship between city government and regular people. Corey Ellis is also part of a powerful movement in American culture that speaks to empowering each individual to call for peace.
As I write this the debate has been sparked as to whether Barack Obama has done enough yet to warrant the Nobel Peace prize. I don’t know. But perhaps the significance of Barack Obama’s honor is that Americans have remembered that there can be many Obamas: of all colors, shapes and sizes. Each one of us has within us the power to call for change, for justice, and for peace. Obama may merit the Nobel Peace prize simply for the ripple effects that occur when a powerful public persona calls for the audacity to believe in – and to hope for – change. It is this audacity that I see rippled around me in Albany. It expresses itself as love for Corey Ellis. This audacity is contagious, and can be seen in even the smallest of Albany’s residents.
With less than one tenth of the budget of the Mayor himself, there was no way Corey Ellis could compete with the glossy brochures and TV ads that kept business as usual the business of the day in Albany.
Corey Ellis should have counted himself lucky to get just one tenth of the vote in the Democratic primary.
But he didn’t get just one tenth of the vote.
Corey Ellis got almost half of the vote.
Corey got ten times more support per dollar than the Mayor. Without the frills. Without the bells and whistles.
A five year old in an inner-city cannot organize a peace vigil. And yet she did. A small community organizer should not be able to unseat an incumbent with more than ten times the connections and cash. And yet he can.
There’s something going on in Albany. Even if the major news networks don’t know it yet.
This near-tie, that seemed against the odds at the outset, bespoke of a change in tides. It was the groundswell that should not have happened. It was not bought. It was not expected. And yet it happened. Change has happened. And continues to happen.
Change has come to Albany. But can we see it?
As quietly as he entered the race, Ellis came back into the campaign on the Working Families ticket. Again, there were no bells or whistles.
I thought I would step outside and ask people today what they think of Corey Ellis, if they want him as Mayor, and why.
Corey Ellis, the man who could ease years of urban violence, vacant buildings, and financial corruption is still in it for the win.
Albany keeps talking about Corey. It is the talk of regular people who – recorded or not, seen or not – want Albany to change. It is the talk on the street before hope dares take hold.
For every few minutes I was outside in Albany, I found more people who want Corey Ellis for Mayor. It may be under the radar, it may be under-documented, but I know there’s something going on.
That new cat – you know the community organizer who became city councilman who gave the Mayor a run for it? He’s back. And it sounds like Albany has a whole lot of love for Corey Ellis.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Sunu the Terrorist
October 6, 2009
In September 2001 my husband at the time and I were visited by Jason the FBI agent and his shiny gun.
My ex-husband, a brooding Arabic loner, fit the profile for a visit. It seems that someone saw this, and said this. In the course of the visit, however, Jason soon understood that my ex-husband’s only plot was buying beer.
And although his affection for Dep Super Hold hair gel was somewhat suspicious, he was altogether cleared.
But we learned through this trial that there were other suspects that bore closer scrutiny.
Shortly after our interview and visit we were inculcated into the understanding that you can never be too sure of anyone, even someone in your own home.
In the coming months, we began to suspect that Sunu, was, without a doubt, a terrorist.
Sunu, we began to notice, was always sneaking around the kitchen at night, and we were never sure what he was up to.
Sunu was our cat. And he was fat.
At a certain juncture, we were shocked and upset to come across a picture of a cat that looked very much like Sunu in what appeared to be a terrorist training camp.
We had no idea this could be possible. He seemed like such a nice cat. We now understand that he was a “sleeper.”
Sunu had never confessed to having links to other Persian cats.
And because of our inability to trace his footsteps at night, we believe he may or may not have been linked to bigger cats.
A major clue was brought to our attention when we were informed that this, too, is also a cat:
You see, suspicion is always the first defense against being taken by surprise.
This sketch of a cat was found in association with a book that details eating people. Sunu is believed to resemble this cat:
We began to live in constant vigilance lest this animal try to get the best of us.
Everything we needed to know about being wise and on-guard we learned from our government and from 9/11.
In retrospect, we were never quite sure Sunu was not hiding something.
And certain movies have made this even more clear that there has been a plot by cats all along. They hate us. And they want to take over our way of life.
Eventually, we decided that it was too much of a liability to keep living with Sunu, and Sunu was incarcerated at a farm in an undisclosed location.
I am really not sure what he is up to up there. But I believe he must be under constant surveillance.
Sunu is one sneaky bastard. And although he may appear to be a lapcat, at night, you simply cannot know where he might go.
Trust no-one. If you see anything suspicious, tell someone.
Thank you for your attention to this important message.
Remember, we are all in this together. Everyone, except, of course, for Sunu.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Feeling Fine
October 5, 2009
Part of the American lore is the love affair with the dramatic struggle for progress.
Americans are acculturated with the freedom to reach for that better.
You are worth it.
But worth what?
And if you are always worth more, is that like human inflation?
How will we all ever keep up with all the more that we all are or must become?
In the pursuit of better we have shopping and sex and chocolate and beer and cigarettes and ambition and fantasy and hobbies and wine and liquor and issues and therapy and goals and…
an unending American confidence that each one of us will and must ultimately attempt to prevail in the rush towards better.
Of course things can always be better, from a certain slant. And then worse, and then better, and then worse, and then hopefully better…
And in this constant script of progress toward the better we have the dramatic reversals. When things go wrong, they must go deliciously awry. It is an excellent opportunity to don fire-engine red lipstick, strike a tragic pose and play the martyr.
But sometimes, it all seems a little too dramatic.
I know that when someone asks me how I am doing I should mention my struggle towards progress. I am struggling because I am too busy, or I am trying to build my own airplane, or I am trying to write a poem or story or article or blog that will change the world. Or at least my world. Is there any other world?
But really, I don’t want to read this script. Its rhythms bore me. The hard jumps on the ends of the sentences necessary to whine or kvetch or express or dramatize sound like the strange calls of an unnatural animal. I don’t want to sing that song.
I miss the custom of simply saying, “I am fine and how are you?” Period.
I also wish that all men wore felt fedoras. But I will try not to whine about that.
The standard, old fashioned polite script reply, “I am fine and how are you?” accomplishes important, and vanishing social functions.
First of all, it recognizes that we feel fine, or require that we feel fine, when basically, if alive enough to say “I am feeling fine” we are, thankfully, fine.
And secondly, saying, “and how are you?” allows us to concern ourselves not with ourselves, but with others.
Narcissism may be funny. Perhaps it is a small transgression. Narcissism is the delicious and useless pleasure that allows each of us, for one shining moment, to be a star in our own eyes, in our own lives.
But the impacts of narcissism are significant. Narcissism frays a social fabric that is already failing to bind us together. It obscures and prevents the more urgent need to care for greater and more urgent needs of others – with actions.
I recently heard a story of an elderly blind woman in my hometown. She had only one leg and lived in a nursing home. She had every reason to complain. But she never did. When asked how she could be so happy, she explained that all she wanted was to wake up each morning and listen to the radio. So every morning when she did, she felt immensely happy.
The orderlies in the nursing home found her so charming that they made sure to do her hair for her every day. She died recently, and she is missed.
Yesterday, a man who survived the Rwandan genocides stood up and in the room I was sitting in, and waved hello to everyone there. He beamed.
Maybe we are all already feeling fine, whether we remember it or not. I just thought I would mention this.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
How I Became Peach
September 30, 2009
In my daughter’s preschool, there was a White child who said to a Black child, “You are brown, and I am white.” The innocently intended comment went terribly awry. Not because the child had ill intent, but because the comment was immediately swarmed with hush-hush and the stigmatism of an unspoken power dynamic: a bloody past that would not be spoken of or aired in their classroom. The teachers on the scene, who were all White women, immediately decided with the school director: “We don’t talk about skin color at school.”
But…why? If topics of color are made invisible or hush-hush…are people of color made invisible and silenced? How can we teach issues of difference with justice and peace when issues of difference are forbidden topics?
I went home disturbed. Silencing of any kind usually disturbs me. Luckily, a wise teacher (and one of two African American teachers) brought in a book entitled The Colors of Us to talk to the kids about skin color, in spite of the director’s edict to avoid the subject.
My daughter is the color of Dulce de Leche with big chocolate chips for eyes. Since her infancy, I have been pushing dolls of color: Jasmine, Pocahontas, Kwanzaa Barbie and Diwali Barbie.
When she was 2, my daughter announced with a flash of gleeful recognition: “Mulan is Arabic like me!” Not wanting my toddler to lose her moment of identification or be annoyed by a speech in which I differentiate culture from culture I said, simply, “Why, yes she is!”
But no matter how I piled up Jasmine and Alladin…Shrek in Arabic, Sheherezade, Lalla and Majnoun, Princess Leila, and even the Barbie Nutcracker Saudi Arabian Import Version…alll she wanted was the Little Mermaid. Freakin’ Little Mermaid! Dominant white culture! But one day, I looked in the mirror, and there I was, with my peachy skin and my long auburn hair. Of course. I am the color of peaches with nutmeg sprinkles for freckles. My baby loves her mommy. So I decided to let her have that. Archetypes of grown-up ladies: Mommy and the Little Mermaid.
For now, her Korean, Afghani and African friends are all “Arabic like me.” And she marches proudly with her half Black, half Puerto Rican mini-sweetheart when they announce together in their kindegarten shouts: “We are Brown People!”
When I foisted myself on author, editor and activist Barbara Smith with my questions about race and racism, I walked away with homework. I have been ready to have this conversation all my life and am now gleefully scuba diving into the book, A Promise and a Way of Life: White Anti-Racist Activism by Becky Thompson. In the introduction she smartly delineates the challenges faced by white anti-racists. A primary question is: How do white anti-racist activists identify themselves as *against* whiteness and its inherent dominance and opression without obliterating themselves? Is being a white anti-racist a null-set? What self hatred does guilty white privilege or a bloody legacy contain?
Just as I have no use for hatred of others, nor do I see any need for self-hatred. The color of me has nothing to do with self-obliteration or self-erasure.
You see, my childhood, my family, had a color. It was the color of being Norwegian, counter-culture, intellectual, questioning authority…and the descendents of proud recent immigrants. If I had a nickel for every time my grandfather told me: “Remember you are Norwegian” I would be rich. When the word, “Remember” formed on his lips…I could hear in my head beforehand the next 3 words. I am Norwegian. I remember. It was the color of lingonberries and salmon. It was the color of bright red linens at Christmastime, sweet vinegary silt fish, and brown cheese called Gjetost.
It was the color of a lavender-as stalagtites-iced-over-sky when you are cross-country skiing and your grownup relatives are telling you just-a-little further through the icy wind until you can have hot cocoa.
Having this color filled my veins with something. Something other than a lack or a will to dominate. I love foolishly and without restraint. My heart breaks and bleeds. I cook like there is no tomorrow. I have rhythm. I speak out. My blood runs fast and hot.
In real terms, the culture of my family parlayed itself into exchanges and actions that ran parallel to the White domination inherent in American culture but did not cross over into it. This is not to say my family did not benefit from White privilege – there is no doubt that they did. But the shade and color of my family’s whiteness held a strength in their bones that simply seemed have more blood, more compassion, and more separateness. We didn’t have to suck the blood of anyone else to feel nourished. We didn’t have blood on our hands from this American history of slavery, and didn’t quite understand the horror of it or why or how it could come to be.
Pulled down from the snowy Canadian bordertown of Thief River Falls, my mother first saw a Black person on the bus in Minneapolis, Minnesota in about 1950. My mother tells me how she stared across the aisle at this boy her size with skin like chocolate and hair in swirls like raisins. My grandmother, Olga said, “What are you looking at? That boy is exactly like you. The only difference is the color of his skin. I have brown eyes, you have green eyes. He has brown skin, and you have white skin because you are Norwegian. That’s it. That’s all.” Satisfied, this summed up my Mother’s concept of skin color for life. Later, when Rosa Parks made her move, my mother knew she was right to do so. Her mother’s mother had told her so.
Being one of the few black-haired Norwegians (and likely from Lapplander descent) she was called “exotic” all of her life. Difference was not something other for my mother. My mother was different, and so difference was understood as a plurality.
We are all different. Period. Imbuing difference with domination or rationale for enslavement (or its ghost, discrimination) speaks of greed and laziness and cruelty. That, to my people, is and was distasteful, sinful.
My father’s father, A.D. Hartmark, remained so confused by Americans that he left his bank account in Norway open until his death in 1997, just in case he gave up on this strange, unholy country. The maybe thirty dollars left in a Norwegian bank signified that he would never relent to being an American. A Lutheran minister, my grandfather dedicated his life to founding and running The Door of Hope – one of the first (if not the first) shelters for alcoholics and drug addicts in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Brown, Peach, Tan, Black or White, he would bring you home drunk and wrinkled and sit by you for months or years or a lifetime until you left pressed and straight and hopeful. He went broke in the process of walking the walk that all men were his brothers, and none of them were too heavy.
So when I encounter the idea that I should eschew my whiteness in order to resist dominance and opression, the idea just washes over me like a wave washes over a starfish. When it pushes over me, I am still here.
But there are those White people, who attach an angry dominance to being white. The crayons in my daughter’s crayon box don’t try to kill each other unless I am having a strange dream in which they are possessed by demons…so I really don’t understand when people do this. But they do. And they are not my people. Nor will they ever be my people.
White supremacists, the KKK, or the more subtly (but just as deadly) racist groups that do not want to “change the complexion of their swimming pools” call to a snatch-and-grab / us-or-them mentality that makes my inherent acceptance into those groups on face value feel… sickening.
And so, if I were to identify as a color, it cannot be White in terms of the KKK, or the Neo-Nazis, or the Obama-haters. And if the Norwegians and the Peace Activists and the White anti-racist activists are White on the outside but full of heart-pumping blood on the inside, we just can’t be the same sort of white.
For now, until this country becomes a country that can answer questions of skin color as simply as my grandmother, or stop being the kind of unholy country that befuddled my grandfather, I will have to identify as peach: peach as a salmon, peach as The Little Mermaid. Because, not quite belonging to this world of hatred and racism, I may as well belong underwater to the world of corals and anemones.
It is my deepest joy and highest honor to be what my Dulce de Leche daughter sees me to be: Peach as the Little Mermaid, and out of this world.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Ice Skating Inside the Walls of the Taj Mahal
September 26, 2009
I recently had some time to myself. Instead of looking for where it is happening, I, as usual, ignored that strange construct of the phenomenon and went and sat in a corner.
Like Little Jack Horner, I find corners delicious. Also pudding. And pie.
So it was in a corner, in an undisclosed location that I tried ginger cardamon crème brulée.
That crème brulée tasted exactly like ice skating inside of the walls of the Taj Mahal.
Ice skating the way Peppermint Patty ice skates.
Maybe instead of sitting in a corner I should have been mixing it up.
But I doubt it.
Maybe I should have been working on booty reduction instead of booty expansion.
But I just don’t think so.
I have written a blog post with nothing to say, wherein you were probably hoping to learn something. Forgive me, the cardamom crème brulée was burnt sugared, so smooth, and so gold.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
All Our Firemen Look Alike
September 11, 2009
I have witnessed first-hand the heroism of firefighters.
I have heard the sirens. Seen the lights. I have watched a tidal wave of yellow coats, red coats, big hats, hard hats, rubber suits, long coats…all pouring out in red and yellow and orange lines from rumbling thundering engines…while red lights light-housed and flashed, while sirens cried their sharp, serious empathy.
I have watched firemen streaming into a burning building in a stunning, seamless choreography that would make Martha Graham green with envy.
It is, in a word, a breathtaking sight to behold.
Firefighters go into places from which ordinary people are told to flee. I will never understand how firefighters can steel their nerves, hold their breath and rush in.
It is a beautiful thing to watch firefighters move with synergy, in synchronicity, all alike.
But it is a troubling thing when firefighters all look alike.
Never did I imagine that in Albany, New York, the hometown I would one day return to, we had a fire department that was behaving anything but heroically.
In 1995 a Black man named Sebastian Banks had to sue the Albany City Fire Department for the chance to serve as a firefighter. It pains me to pause and mention, for the skeptical or boldly racist, that Banks was highly qualified for the job.
While the fire department who blocked his entrance to their department carried on as if the Civil Rights Movement had never occurred, Banks pressed on, refusing to be marginalized or shoved to the sidelines.
1995 was 6 years before 9/11, before white dust on my shoes and months of missing posters. Before the air smelled like plastic, burning flesh, and benzene. For months. Before we lost heroes of all colors who rushed into the World Trade Center to save as many lives as possible.
As I write this it is 9/11 again, 8 years later. It was 8:59 am on 9/11/2001 when I, blasé, turned around in the 2-seater of the Q train atop the Manhattan bridge and thought to myself:
Oh, that looks like a big fire, but they will take care of it.
My confused confidence was based on not only an uncomprehending state of shock but also on an utter and deep faith in the heroic, nearly superhuman abilities of firefighters. I, like so many people, truly feel that firefighters are heroes. I trust them. I look up to them. I am amazed by them. Their alarms have roused me from sleep and saved my life. Their arms and axes and hoses have saved my home from being burned to the ground.
The desire to be heroic stems not only for a desire to be strong, but a desire to protect, effect positive change, and to care for one another.
When heroic people are blocked from wearing the hero hat, there is something deeply wrong with that.
The civil suit against the city of Albany and its Fire Department in 1995 filed by Sebastian Banks resulted in a charge requiring the city to make tangible strides towards diversity in its Fire Department.
It is now 14 years later and there is still a mind-baffling, continued disparity between the demographics of the city of Albany and the demographics of its fire department; indicating the city’s undeniable and quantifiable failure to create diversity, despite the court-order to do so.
How does it hurt a city when the city fails to create diversity within the most coveted and visible city jobs?
It hurts a great deal. It hurts not only the good people excluded from the positions of leadership, but it hurts everyone’s abilities to see and understand people of all colors correctly and respectfully.
The small number of firefighters of color in Albany is only one example of how people who should not be marginalized, are still marginalized. I can only point to the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface, the problem is very deep indeed.
Having access to the opportunity to be this hero is a significant cultural signifier, and it has the potential to bind a community together. Denying access to this crucial role in a community creates divisiveness, inequality and ultimately ties into the further marginalization and socioeconomic oppression of vulnerable groups of people.
Why did Sebastian Banks, a man of color fully qualified to be a firefighter for the city of Albany (and more qualified than many of his competitors) have to sue the city just to get the job for which he was qualified?
This was not in the 1950s. This was in 1995.
I know, we know, and you must know in your bones that if all our firemen look alike, then something very wrong is afoot.
Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis reads his poem, All Their Stanzas Look Alike.
I got nothing. Nothing but some vague remarks that programs had begun. And kids loved the programs. Programs are a good start. But why are we only starting to reverse an embedded and entrenched history of racial discrimination 14 years after legally ordered to do so?
It is 2009. How, exactly, is Albany doing on the charge to create diversity and reverse centuries of racist exclusion?
In May of this year, 2009, the Albany Times Union reported that only eight of the city’s 237 firefighters are African-American — about 3.3 percent of the department, in a city where the population is 30.2 percent African-American, according to census data.
I have heard from some white residents of Albany that maybe there are so few African American firefighters because there are so few African Americans who were qualified to become firefighters.
I did not like this explanation. It too conveniently erased any possibility of an awareness of racism. So I asked other people. Not just why is this so, but what are the negative effects of this being the case?
I went home to my neighborhood and I heard:
“I don’t think it is put out there that Black kids are welcome to become firefighters.”
“I would imagine it’s really because to really get on… you need to have a father who was one, and so if you look at the dept., there will never be that many minorities, or people of color for that reason alone!”
I contacted professors, politicians, writers, lawyers, poets, neighbors, kids, artists – anyone I could interrupt and disturb and badger with this obvious, and unsettling question: Why is this a problem?
Many people responded.
“The police and fire departments in general (and in Albany specifically) already have a poor relationship with communities of color, and not having any familiar faces is not helping. Seeing more diversity in the department wouldn’t magically fix that, but it might signal that the city halfway gives a damn about mending relations with the community.”
“Failing to create diversity within a fire department perpetuates an unnecessary community division and prevents optimal community cooperation, breeding mistrust in the minority community, and continuing institutional and societal inequality.”
“The issue is one of access and representation. Why are the demographics of the fire department out of sync with the demographics of the city it serves? A series of questions need to be posed in order to answer that question since it is a serious one. Communities should find themselves reflected in their most important institutions for a whole host of reasons (grounding in the community experience; respect for community diversity; understanding the that the rights and responsibilities of the community belong to all members of the community equally).”
Questions of access and entitlement are crucial questions because the failure to level the playing field for the most qualified skews everyone’s perceptions about people of color. It simply cannot be true that being a white male makes you a better firefighter. If people in Albany allow this to be the face we are presenting…what was the Civil Rights movement for? Did Albany sleep through the last century?
Something is wrong indeed. And it is right in front of our eyes.
The question is, who gets to be the hero? Who is decorated as the hero? And, on the other hand, who is relegated to the margins, the sidelines, simply watching the parade? When we turn to that hero and say, “Thank God for you!” – who receives this praise? Is it the most ready, willing, qualified and able? Or just again the most typical, connected, male and pale?
In Albany, 1995 is a year that lasted 14 years.
I hope that when we remember on 9/11 we will not remember not just the heroes in hats but the heroes without. I hope we will look closely at the politics of where we gaze when we sing the praises of heroes.
If Albany is 30% people of color, I want my fire department to be 30% firefighters of color. I don’t think that is unreasonable. I think that reasonable people, as one person put it, view under-representation poorly. I do.
The problem is right in front of our eyes. But when will it change?
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
The Corey Ellis Effect
August 30, 2009
Corey Ellis left the house party tonight on the same song he came in on. If these were still the days of vinyl records, that would mean he stayed for about 45 minutes. But on IPod Shuffle-time, it is impossible to say how long he stayed. He was off to another appointment though, and he rushed like a river downhill to the next one.
It’s not just because I am a musical dinosaur that I have no idea how long Corey Ellis spoke to us. The Corey Ellis Effect was in full effect.
It’s a sort of time-warping feeling: exactly how you feel when waking up from a nap. I suppose it’s how Rip Van Winkle felt after his epically long snooze. Rip slept for 100 years in sleepy Upstate New York. People in Albany have slept under the fog of an old political machine for 300 years. No wonder waking up feels confusing. In our sleepy upstate little city, we are rarely roused from torpitude or complacence.
So what, exactly, is the Corey Ellis effect?
It’s a little like aspirin when one has a headache. It’s hard to tell when the air seems lighter or or the buzzing subsides. It’s a little like walking out into a sunny day after days of London fog. It’s a little like drinking a glass of water when you didn’t realize you were thirsty.
It’s like hearing your Mother Tongue after traveling in countries where talking in a foreign tongue has felt a little like playing scrabble. Not impossible, just not easy. Like dealing with Albany city government for building permits, or anything else: Not impossible, just not easy. Imagine if one day, you woke up and instead of a political machine running a sleepy government in a forgotten town you had an accountable government that worked for the people. Imagine if one day, you woke up, and it just felt easier.
I suppose it is the feeling of a movement. The blood circulating, the brain synapses connecting, sense being made. An electric cord plugged in turning on the light. Movement after inertia.
I don’t know how a movement begins, how it progresses or how it finally picks up an undeniable, unstoppable wave-upon-wave momentum.
I do know that there are some houses in Albany that will never be rid of water in their basements. At first glance it appears this is yet another curse upon us in this gray, cold, humid, little city with more than it’s share of rain.
But those who know the history of this city know that some houses were built on top of underground springs that run down to join the Hudson River. No matter what you do, underground, these streams just won’t stop running. They have a job to do. It is almost mythical. Something from a children’s tale.
Corey Ellis said tonight that Change is already happening. The world as we know it is not what it was. All we have to do is wake up and see it. All we have to do is stand up and join it.
Tonight I will dream of all the flooded houses in Albany, and all the people in them waking up, standing up, creeping down to the basements in their bathrobes and paper hats, gingerly stepping into their rowboats one by one, and letting the current take them underground until they all of them reach the Hudson River. From there we will sail underground, downstream until someone hears us and our story of this little old fearless city that could. And can. And will.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
