smh...

I still haven't figured out if that means "shaking my head" or "so much hate," but either way...
Fed up by my own continuing anger and frustration that is further exacerbated by all the social media commentary responding to the response to the Zimmerman verdict, I've reinitiated my facebook deactivation and am beginning a 20 day social media vacation.

All I can say is captured by part of my January post, so I'm reposting it here:

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi. 

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.

Why Everyone Hates the Farm Bill (Except Not Really)

Well, Facebook is down and that apparently makes me a 100% more prolific blogger.

Yes, I just said that Facebook is down. Ok, don't go check--the truth is that it was only down for 5 minutest earlier this evening.

But nothing like the Farm Bill to bring a girl back to blogging. You can take the girl out of AFE, but you can't take the AFE out of the girl. Ya hear that @katmerrigan and @ashleyrdtx?
The House is expected to take up the Farm Bill tomorrow, or more accurately to take up "its" farm bill, which is different than the one the Senate passed earlier this month.

Most folks have probably heard about the major SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) cuts in the House bill, which are way bigger than the substantial SNAP cuts passed in the Senate bill, and amount to $20 billion which is equivalent to half of the total amount the federal government pays towards food banks and food charities, according to Bittman.

But did you know that nobody, and absolutely nobody likes the House Farm Bill? Well, according to the NYTimes, at least. Not the liberals (which I can validate from what I've been reading on my email feed and hearing in the halls of my office), not the conservatives, not the agricultural economists. And judging by the fact that the President issued a Statement of Administrative Policy (SAP) threatening to veto it, not the centrists either.

So, you might wonder, how could a bill dreadful enough to be panned by Agriculture Economists round the country (that's a joke, people. Ag Economists notoriously hate most policy proposals that have a shred of political viability) have enough of a chance of passing that the Speaker would dare put it on the House floor?

Any student of Farm Bill history could answer that one. Pork. And lots of it. And by pork I mean, catfish, temperate japonica rice (aka sushi), christmas trees, alfalfa, marble, and a whole lotta crop insurance. And not to imply that my side is immune to said pork, you'd also get incentives for the consumption of fruits and vegetables by low-income individuals, efforts to increase participation of small scale farmers in federal nutrition programs, and a review of the public health benefits of white potatoes on low-income Americans (actually, I'm not sure who that last one is to appease-- the "potato" people or the "low-income Americans" people).

And just to make you feel like you live in an even saner country, when the House debated this afternoon on the "rule" for how the Farm Bill will be considered when it comes to the floor--meaning how open the debate and allowances for amendments will be--it simultaneously was considering a bill "to protect pain-capable unborn children in the District of Columbia, and for other purposes."

MLK and Gun Violence: Reflections on racial justice and what can we learn from Medgar Evers' widow

This year as Martin Luther King Day approached, I relished the many recent opportunities in my personal and professional to reflect on what the legacy of Reverend MLK Jr's vision for racial justice means for white Americans today. In particular, 2 weeks ago I co-facilitated a training on racial justice for a multi-racial group of colleagues, a segment of whom, a group of mostly white males embedded in the public safety and military worlds, were deeply resentful of the challenge that recognizing the persistence of structural racism and white privilege meant for them. By the end of the training, most of the small group of nay-sayers was willing, perhaps if only to please us, to admit that some element of structural racism does still exist--that, in their words, "personal responsibility isn't always enough," though reluctant to utter this sentence without appending that "it should be [enough]."

While the experience of hostility in the training was deeply draining and certainly took an emotional toll on both the facilitators and the others in the group, it felt like a rare opportunity to present a new framework to folks who weren't already at least on the precipice of adopting it on their own anyway. In other words, in our polarized society, this seemed like the unusual experience of not preaching the choir, and opportunity that I cherish.

While the training strives to move people through several parts of a pathway to understand the multiple realities of race that exist and have historically existed in America, what we hope to ultimately drive participants to, is the essence of MLK's later work, in which low income and struggling people of all races could come together and recognize their common humanity, and common needs which are not already prioritized by the prevailing economic and political systems in the US, clearly still true today. 

This year's MLK day represents something of a nexxus in which the re-election of our first black president will be feted on the national observation of our most celebrated racial justice leader; so President Obama's choice of Myrlie Evers-Williams to give the invocation at his 2nd and final public inauguration. Evers-Williams is most famous as the widow of Medgar Evers, who was NAACP secretary for the state of Mississippi, when he was murdered in 1963 by Byron De Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Council, who lived freely for nearly three decades until he was finally convicted of the crime in 1994. Notably, prior to surviving her husband's murder and lack of any kind of prompt justice, she had survived their home being firebombed in 1962, multiple death threats from the KKK, and went on to be a leading national civil rights advocate to this day, including continuing the fight to bring De Beckwith to justice and later becoming the national NAACP chair.

What the rationale is behind the President's choice of Evers-Williams is an interesting question- he could be playing into the popular American narrative in which we celebrate and mourn those heroes who gave their time and in some cases their lives to the cause of becoming a "more perfect nation," accepting the parallel narrative in which we have supposedly reached or come close to achieving a post-racial society. However, given what Obama chose to say in his first campaign's one famous "race" speech (oh, what some of us would give for the version of him that uttered that speech to resurface), I would postulate that he is making a different claim, which perhaps we will hear reference to in her invocation.

In this claim, the questions of race and racism embedded deep within our systems and psyches are still very real and present, all the more important that we hear from someone like Evers-Williams on a national stage before it is too late. Someone who experienced a judicial system which did not convict the person who was well known to have killed her husband into the mid 90's, a time by which the prevailing narrative insists racism had ceased to hold any power. Whereas the latent racism has sprung up in the form of personal attacks on President Obama, very thinly veiled in coded language (sometimes) free of explicit reference to race, the real narrative understands that the root causes and solutions, the "real" racism, does not begin or end with one man, but with the structures and systems that shape our lives, white, black, and all shades of brown.

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi.

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.