I know, I know it has been forever. In my defense…I have none really, except busy writing for other places and figuring some things out behind the scenes here. Hood Feminism is going to be a solo act going forward, and I have been working out how to handle that part. Still figuring it out to be honest, but I have some political thoughts on education and suddenly remembered I can rant and provide content! Win/win!

So, as we talk about school choice & vouchers and Betsy DeVos being spectacularly unqualified, I see more and more people pointing to “failing” public schools as proof that American ed needs a revolution. Invariably they point to lower test scores at schools with a 99% poverty rate and no social services left after 12 rounds of budget cuts. They skip right over stories about lead in school water fountains and in homes across the country.  They pretend that school breakfast and lunch options are programs that “need” to be cut for the good of the children. Never mind the fact that hungry kids don’t learn, certainly don’t discuss the impact of poverty on students in public schools. Just cut funds for libraries, nurses, teachers, food, clean water, books, and then blame public education for low scores on tests that are fundamentally useless.

Meanwhile as a parent of two kids in public school, who went to public schools (Chicago Public Schools at that), I want some things out about how public education actually works when the funding is there and the kids can focus. It’s a ride, but let’s go.

I started public school at 3. There’s a whole story involving birth certificates that I won’t go into, but suffice to say I was a smart kid. I could read, do some basic math (shout out to PBS and the wonders of 321 Contact, Electric Company, and Sesame Street), I was also for a host of reasons what they called an “at-risk” kid. No father, lived with a grandparent, unstable living situations prior to that point…you know, I was slated to be one of those girls. A statistic that someone would insist could never succeed given my situation.

Except with access to quality public education I thrived. Lots of my old report cards talk about me not living up to my potential, but that was because I had C’s in the classes that didn’t interest me and A’s in the ones that did. The Iowa Test of Basic Skills in 3rd grade gave my school a clue on how to direct my talents. By 4th I was in Gifted & Talented classes and I was doing pretty well. My home life remained imperfect, my social skills could have been better, but suddenly the stories I wrote for myself at home had value. Because my teachers read them and my family had an idea that I wasn’t just a daydreamer. I went to K-12 in public schools. I joined the military to pay for college and went to a public university. I didn’t go to a private school until I got my Masters from DePaul and even that happened because they have a robust selection of evening and summer classes and the campus was next to my job in the Chicago federal building.

My husband is dyslexic. He started in a private Catholic school but they weren’t equipped to help him. Eventually his parents sent him to the local public school because by law they had to provide services. He went from not being able to read to being at the top of his class by the time he graduated from a public high school. We met in college, at a public university. We graduated together from the University of Illinois and now he’s the one at DePaul getting his MA. Neither of us ever considered sending our kids anywhere but public school.

My oldest son will graduate from a Chicago public high school in June. He will go to a public university in the fall, and much like his parents he will graduate in a few years and go on to follow his dreams. Because he had access to the same free public education that we did. Well not quite the same, see when I was a kid my school had a full time librarian, nurse, and a staff that cooked and cleaned to support the teachers, principal, and vice principal. Class sizes were small, between 20 and 25 kids on average. Art, music, gym and recess were standard. Afterschool and summer offerings were pretty robust, and I could choose between free options.

My husband is 4 years younger than me, and things had already begun to change by the time his parents transferred him into his public elementary school. The librarian was there part time. So was the nurse. Class sizes were closer to 30, he had gym and music but no art, and there were fewer support staff. He had summer options, though not as many as I did and many of the Gifted & Talented programs had already been cut.  But still, he did well and his parents made up for the things that were no longer available.

Fast forward to our kids. My oldest still had recess and gym, but we had to pay for most of his access to art and music. His school had a library and a librarian, but that had a lot to do with PTA fundraising. His brother is at the same school and every year there’s a little more gone. The cuts outpace the fundraising now, and the class sizes in the high 20’s to low 30’s when my oldest was in school there, are now mid 30’s to just shy of 40. It would be 40, but the building is old and the fire codes for most of the rooms max out at 38.

My youngest has an IEP because he’s on the autism spectrum. He gets his services because well the law mandates them and he has the parental support needed to combat a system that is faltering under the weight of not enough money and too many people convinced that at risk kids don’t deserve a chance.

When someone like DeVos compares education to choosing between Uber, Lyft and a taxi, and never stops to consider the people who ride public transit, bike, or walk, that betrays a fundamental lack of understanding not only education but our larger society. Sure, for upper middle class parents with a neuro typical child school choice probably sounds great. Heck, in many cities it probably could be great. But what about the kids who don’t come from that mold, the ones who need extra support or who can excel in some ways, but struggle in others? What about the kids that are hard to teach, harder still to help because of family issues? I could get counseling in 6th grade when I needed it because that was an in school service. My son gets speech therapy because his access to education is mandated by law so the school has to provide the extras that he needs.

What happens after public ed is gutted? I understand the appeal of the myth of choice. After all, in a big city you’ll have lots of options. One of them will probably work out, but what about those with mobility issues who can only find a school on the other side of the city? That 2 hour bus ride doesn’t lend itself to successful outcomes. What about suburban and rural areas where there are only a handful of schools and none want to take on a kid who needs extra support? We’ve already seen that vouchers don’t fix the problem,  that charter schools have not been the magic bullet either, in fact what we do know is that public ed works best when the funding isn’t subject to whims or dependent on test scores, when class sizes are small and the surrounding community is thriving.

Public education isn’t a handout, isn’t a gift given to the undeserving. It is an investment by a society into itself, and into its future. It’s one of the cornerstones of a healthy community, and behind all the smoke and mirrors, what’s on offer is a poisoned pill. It’s shiny, it sounds great in a distant way when you don’t think too hard about much funding public schools have lost to create this option. When you don’t ask yourself about the limits of the schools that are “better” because classrooms still have finite space, and what happens when those schools run out of space, and there are still kids that need an education, but now their local school has been gutted because the already threadbare budget has collapsed?

We have to think beyond the immediate, beyond the children in our house and think about what’s good for all children. Or we end up backing policies that will help some kids in the very short term and ruin access for most kids in the long term. A well funded well run public school system remains the best of all possible options for all possible children.

My old neighborhood, and the block where my sister was shot 11 years ago.

Eleven years ago–seven years after the murder of our brother–our sister nearly became a Chicago homicide statistic.

She was out with friends at a neighborhood restaurant when someone in her crew got in an argument with someone else. That someone else left the restaurant, returned with a gun, and attempted to murder everyone within 200 feet. The bullet shattered her femur. She had extensive physical therapy. Her mother, desperate to escape the violence, moved her to Milwaukee several months later.

The day after the shooting, my sister made it to Page 3 of the Chicago Tribune. She was the unidentified 14 year-old girl. Not much else was written about it. My sister was lucky, if you could call it that. We don’t know what happened to the gunman. It’s possible a more sinister fate may have befallen him, and person responsible for murdering our brother.

By now, you’ve read dozens of reviews and hot takes about Spike Lee’s latest film. Some mainstream critics have praised it, going as far as to say that Spike has given Chicago the “raucous, despairing, yet faintly hopeful tribute it deserves.”

It’s important to point out here that most of the people raving about Chiraq are not from here or have barely traveled south of Roosevelt Street.

Despite my reservations about the film, I walked over to the neighborhood theater to see it. For 118 minutes I rolled my eyes, exchanged exasperated looks with my husband, and shifted uncomfortably in my seat. The laughs were few and far between. The audible groans weren’t. I left the theater wondering if Lee realized his movie contradicted nearly everything he’s said on his press tour.

It isn’t entirely awful. It is a clumsy attempt by an obnoxious outsider to make sense of something we have struggled to understand for years. But it is not earnest. It is not heartfelt. It is hamfisted. It is exploitive. Most of all, it is dishonest. And it’s the dishonesty that really bothers me. When Lee tells an interviewer that “we [black people] must be vocal on both sides” he erases the work of people who have been here. It is a slap in the face to every person who has lit a candle for a slain child. It is an insult to every person who has marched through their neighborhood to keep the peace.

And he knows it. You can see it in the scenes between Angela Bassett’s Miss Helen and  Teyonah Paris’ Lysistrata, where Miss Helen masterfully explains how a combination of urban renewal and City Hall apathy can create a climate in which twenty people are shot in one weekend. You can see it in Father Corridan’s emotional eulogy, in which he, too, emphasizes the political apathy both locally and nationally. You see it as extras with cardboard signs crowd around a grieving Jennifer Hudson as she implores the public to put down the guns and help find her daughter’s killer. Perhaps, had Lee chosen these bits for the trailer instead of subjecting us to Paris instructing her fellow female warriors to Bundy Bounce  their way to peace while Cannon gracelessly attempts to ride a beat, the movie wouldn’t have caused such a stir. But Lee loves controversy, and never misses an opportunity to start some shit, even if it detracts from his work.

The movie ends just as awkwardly as it began, with warring factions calling a truce after falling to the power of the vajayjay and being rewarded with jobs and a brand new trauma center, the things the aforementioned People Who Have Been Here have fought to receive for years. It is a message steeped in politics of respectability. It is a tired song, with an even more tired refrain, and you are not better for hearing it. You are not better for watching it. You do not leave the auditorium inspired by what you’ve seen. You leave it frustrated. Bewildered. Waylaid. As we exited a theater one white woman said it was one of the best Spike Lee movies she’s seen; it is clear her bar is somewhere below the seventh circle of Hell.

But once she said it, I understood why so many folks–ones not of color–loved it so much. It absolves them of responsibility, placing the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of those suffering the most. They don’t have to examine their complicity in a system designed to destroy black and brown people. With this film, Lee has given them permission to let themselves off the hook while wagging their fingers at our dysfunction. It is the film’s sole accomplishment.

When Britteney Kapri broke down her issues with the film last month, it was a perfect articulation of everything most of us were thinking. “I don’t hate you,” she writes toward the end. “I just don’t trust you with my grief.” She shouldn’t. None of us should. This is one love letter Spike really could’ve kept to himself.

(Co-written by Monique Judge, originally published on Medium.)

It all started with a ruined Wednesday morning.

A tweet of mine had found its way into a Washington Post op-ed calling for the dismissal of University of Missouri professors accused of assaulting students at a rally celebrating the resignation of the school president. Normally, this wouldn’t bother me; I’d grown accustomed to journalists using my tweets in their stories without giving me so much as a heads up (which usually leaves me open to trolling), and my Twitter account has never been private. But, as I’d spent the last 48 hours ridding my mentions of trolls wanting to debate First Amendment rights and freedom of the press, I was in no mood to entertain any more, and there was something about this particular post that stunk.

When WaPo blogger Erik Wemple couldn’t get in contact with one of the professors he decided to publicly shame, he used a source that provided him with a screenshot of that professor’s locked Twitter account. They were a handful of fairly innocuous retweets from myself and several other black writers commenting on the press’s inability to handle the Mizzou protesters with care. (More on the rather interesting optics of this later.) We don’t know who the source is, because Wemple is protecting them. We don’t see any actual tweets from the professor himself to put those retweets into context. When I reached out to Wemple, he claimed the retweets provided insight into the professor’s thoughts. And when I asked about the use of the screencaps, Wemple responded:

So, I sent a letter raising my concerns to Wemple’s editor, James Downie. This was his response:

(To Downie’s credit, he apologized for misgendering me on Twitter.)

According to Wemple and Downie, the professor’s 390 Twitter followers negated any expectation of privacy he may have had. Since the professor didn’t make himself available to be interviewed, Wemple was well within his rights as a reporter to use the screencaps of the professor’s private account the source had provided as a statement, of sorts. I’m not sure what the reader was supposed to glean from this, other than the professor’s proficiency at using the “Retweet” button. In any case, it has left the professor open to another wave of trolls and undesirables ready to harass him and call for his head.

Twitter — and the tweets of private citizens being public domain — has long been a point of contention. While Hamilton Nolan’s snide declaration in Gawker last year may have served as the definitive answer for many working journalists, it might have also contributed to the rapid erosion of public trust. But there’s something about Nolan’s post that’s worth noting:

“If you do not want your Twitter to be public, you can make it private. Then it will not be public. If you do not make it private, it will be public.”

The professor did, in fact, make his account private. He did not intend for anyone beyond his 390 followers to see those tweets. He had, in fact, an expectation of privacy, which was violated by Erik Wemple and the Washington Post.

This isn’t the first time a journalist or a blogger has exercised questionable judgment in pursuit of pageviews. Last week, American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher published the locked tweets of a theologian he was briefly obsessed with taking down. (I won’t link to the exact post out of privacy for her, but it remains up for the world to see.) It is unclear whether Dreher followed her on Twitter himself, or if he, like Wemple, had an eager source willing to do his dirty work.

Makerbase Co-Founder and CEO Anil Dash highlights the problem with treating the tweets of private citizens like those of public figures in his Medium essay, “What Is Public?” An excerpt:

“It has so quickly become acceptable practice within mainstream web publishing companies to reuse people’s tweets as the substance of an article that special tools have sprung up to help them do so. But inside these newsrooms, there is no apparent debate over whether it’s any different to embed a tweet from the President of the United States or from a vulnerable young activist who might not have anticipated her words being attached to her real identity, where she can be targeted by anonymous harassers.”

In March 2014, BuzzFeed reporter Jessica Testa published an “article” comprised mainly of tweets she’d curated from a Twitter discussion that user Steenfox kicked off about sexual assault.

That article, and subsequent outrage became part of a larger debate surrounding the way journalists use tweets. According to Steenfox, Testa had not gotten her permission to use her face or her image in the story.

A subject as touchy as the one Steenfox and her followers were discussing requires a lot of care in reporting. The people sharing their stories were survivors of sexual assault, and deserved to have both their identities and their dignities protected.

Openly publishing the names and faces of those participating in the discussion for an article clearly meant to garner links for BuzzFeed was completely irresponsible, and opened them up for further attacks and harassment, as Steenfox said she experienced herself.

Her photo went viral, finding its way onto the Facebook feed of her younger brother.

“He says, ‘you’re all over BuzzFeed’,” Steenfox said. “He was startled.”

She later battled with BuzzFeed to remove her photo from their site.

Of Testa, Steenfox said, “For all she knows, my abuser could have found me. What if I was trying to hide from that person?”

Steenfox, and many others whose tweets were included in the story, felt exposed. It’s one thing to send out a tweet to an audience of a couple hundred people. Fox has a very large following, but her 17,000 followers in no way matches the reach of a site with millions of viewers per day.

Exposing a story to that size of an audience, especially one that may not necessarily had been granted to BuzzFeed, is dangerous and irresponsible journalism.

Steenfox was harassed and trolled when the story of her dust up with BuzzFeed made it on the Poynter Institute’s site, via an article penned by resident journalism ethics expert Kelly McBride.

For her part, McBride based her opinionated article on a false premise. She misunderstood why Steenfox was angry, and used as a source one of Steenfox’s tweets in which Fox was addressing Testa for not having gotten her permission.

The entire thing turned into a nightmare for Steenfox, who had people in her mentions accusing her of wanting ownership of public tweets and being upset that her “Twitter moment was gone.”

All Steenfox wanted was her privacy to be respected. At the time, she maintained a public Twitter account with over 10,000 followers. And though she understood what she was doing when she posited the question to her audience, she never intended for that audience to grow hundreds of times over in the span of one night.

The idea that tweets are public and therefore open to be seen by everyone is an argument that is used all the time in these situations, but that argument lacks nuance.

What many of these journalists fail to grasp is that a person tweeting to a small audience may very well understand that the public tweets are subject to being shared and seen by a larger audience, but the type of exposure that comes when a larger media outlet shares your story in no way compares to 100 people on your timeline retweeting your tweet.

Consider the example of the infamous Zola, who took to Twitter to share a cautionary tale of hookers, strippers, pimps, mayhem, and murder.

After the story was retweeted hundreds of times, Zola deleted the tweets from her account, but not before they had been captured via screenshots and saved to various Imgur accounts.

When larger media outlets picked up the story, nearly none bothered to attempt to track down Zola or verify the facts of the story. Most simply provided cheeky, borderline insulting writeups, linking to screenshots others had posted.

Only WaPo’s Caitlin Dewey sought the facts behind the tale. She tracked down the parties involved, even finding others who had been in similar situations with Jess and ‘Z’, the latter turning out to be a real-life pimp currently facing charges of human trafficking, among other things.

Zola has become something of a cult hero, with movie directors contacting her about a possible dramatization of her story.

Others who have had their tweets shared on large media outlets without their knowledge have not been so lucky. Many have suffered harassment, ridicule, and in some cases, unemployment. These are things they didn’t sign up for.

The Society of Professional Journalists addresses the need for journalists to exhibit compassion in its code of ethics under the heading Minimize Harm:

Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.

What Wemple, Testa, and other journalists have done defies the ethical code. They have chosen to hide behind the idea that posting it in a public forum makes it fair game.

The time for a new code of ethics in journalism is now. In the age of new media, with so many reporters opting to do their research on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of private citizens instead of going out and doing the digging on their own, new rules must be set in place to train journalists how to handle situations like these when they arise.

(Part Two will take a closer look at the consequences of having a tweet go viral, and what happens when it nearly costs you your job.)

If you’re not from Chicago, it may seem like Rahm Emanuel’s deep pockets and political ties should make him a shoe-in to be mayor for another four years. Yet for many Chicago residents, Rahm’s first term was more enraging than exciting. Voting in this mayoral election isn’t about who has the deepest pockets, it’s about the way the last four years have gone, and deciding which candidate is least likely to ruin the next four years of our collective lives. On one hand, you have current Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s curiously pitiful “Well yes, I was rude, overbearing, and I didn’t listen to you, but I’ll do better next time,” interspersed with “Chuy’s going to act like every other Chicago politician” and on the other you have his opponent, Cook County Commissioner Jesús G. “Chuy” García’s “Rahm did a terrible job, I can’t be any worse” mixed with “I’ll promise to do whatever it takes to get your votes.” Frankly, neither set of messages is remotely convincing, but they exemplify what’s going wrong in Chicago politics this year.

Like many residents of Chicago I’m angry at what happened over the last four years as mental health clinics, schools, and other resources were gutted, often with little or no input from affected residents. Rahm’s decision to cut funding for teachers right before announcing the building of a new $60 million-dollar school is probably more memorable than anything else he might say during a campaign. Whether the discussion is school funding, Rahm’s alleged poor treatment of a grieving mother who wanted answers about the closing of the mental health clinics, or any of a dozen other examples, in many ways Rahm’s bad behavior is the candidate, not the softer image he’s trying to peddle now. The idea of voting for Rahm to have a second term feels like deliberately choosing to vote for Voldemort.
Meanwhile Chuy’s campaign can’t help but be underwhelming, especially given the fact that his political record in Chicago is so bland as to be nearly forgettable. The most damning thing Rahm’s campaign can find about his history is that he voted for an unpopular but necessary property tax almost 30 years ago. However pragmatically Chuy may have voted over the years, the fact that he wasn’t the first, second or third choice to be Rahm’s opponent outweighs any flowery rhetoric his camp can write for him. This isn’t even a case of choosing between the devil you know, and the one that you don’t. It’s more, “Well do I pick the devil sitting at the table, or the one standing in front of it?” Chuy isn’t necessarily exciting or inspiring as candidates go, but he doesn’t need to be for his campaign to be a refreshing change.

Chicago politics are a contact sport in any year, because even with our creaky crooked machine, would-be politicians have to work their way into the system, and then work very hard to stay in it. Despite the implied anointing of Rahm’s candidacy via his ties to Mayor Daley and to the White House, no politician in Chicago can ever afford to rest on their laurels. A recession, a pension crisis, and a range of long standing financially questionable political decisions have upped the stakes so much that Rahm’s educational agenda alone would have been enough to put his seat at risk. Add the much-publicized shootings in Chicago’s most economically vulnerable neighborhoods, the announcement that police misconduct cases cost the city over $521 million in the last decade, school budget cuts that followed the closing of 50 schools, the refusal to explain the closing of six mental health clinics, the push to spend TIF (Tax Increment Financing) funds on a stadium for a private school, and the “solution” of shifting that funding to a hotel project? Rahm has consistently made choices that could torpedo any incumbent’s hopes for reelection.
While in office Rahm focused on plans that appealed to the upper middle class and outright wealthy voters who largely funded his first campaign run. And though he paid lip service to wanting the best for all of Chicago, many of his decisions have been detrimental to the lower middle class and low income voters who actually carried the last election for him. Much is made of racial segregation in Chicago, but in reality it’s often economic differences that divide Chicago’s North, South, and West sides from each other. Race and class are heavy factors here, candidates can’t afford to ignore either. I’m a middle class Black woman on the South side now, but I spent years in one of the lowest possible income brackets and like many I vote based on where I was, and where I am now.
Jesús G. “Chuy” García is for many voters a contender this year despite his history, not because of it. After nearly 30 years in Chicago politics, Chuy’s record doesn’t show that he’s the best candidate, so much as it shows that he is more in tune with the reality that Chicago voters live in places that aren’t the north side, and at socioeconomic levels below the Federal poverty line. Promises to support an elected school board, come up with a better financial plan for a foundering city budget, and do more to stop street violence sound good on paper. Unfortunately, without more concrete information, it is not as though voters can be sure he’ll keep all of his campaign promises. Unlike Karen Lewis, Chuy’s mild mannered “We will come up with a way to fix this” isn’t the firebrand rhetoric that swayed many voters to support the idea of her run for Mayor before illness made that impossible.

I can’t state for sure who will be the next mayor of Chicago. I know that as a native of Chicago’s South Side, a parent and a long time voter, my trip to the polls today wasn’t the optimistic bounce of someone excited about the future of Chicago politics. It is the pragmatic choice between the devil I know has ignored the needs of many constituents, and one who has at least had the good sense to try to work with voters who measure their income in hourly wages, and not in capital gains. Rahm might mean to keep his promises to do better, to listen more, and to make all of Chicago’s communities a priority. Chuy might be able to keep his promises to clean up the mess that predated Rahm’s term, as well as correct some of the things that went wrong under Rahm. Or they might both be full of it, and Chicago will stay mired in the same ugly mess that it has been in for decades.
Voting in a Republican, a different Democrat, or an Independent has been touted as the answer so many times, and every time the choices have come down to picking who voters thought would do the least harm. Because a single candidate can’t remake the whole system no matter how much we wish they had the power. This is democracy, this is politics in an era where best choice for the job may never even run, and even if they do, they might never have the funding needed to mount a successful campaign.

Patricia Arquette’s onstage comments from the Oscars were a meme before the show even finished airing. She was lauded for speaking up for equal pay for women, and bringing up the “Women earn 78 cents to every dollar a man earns” which sounds really awful. But which men? Which women? The answers of course are to a white man’s dollar and that white women make that 78 cents, while Asian women make an average of 90 cents to that dollar. Black, Latina, and Indigenous women make substantially less from 65 cents all the way down to 54 cents. So it’s important to talk about equal pay in a context of the reality that some women are making substantially less than others. And that white and Asian men and women earn more than many other groups including Black, Latino & Indigenous men. If we’re going to talk about equal pay in this age of demands that women “Lean In” let’s talk about who is getting hired, and for what jobs. Let’s talk about racial bias in hiring that means that qualified people of color (and yes that includes women, because despite the clumsy alienating phrase women and people of color, women of color do exist) may not get hired at all, much less have a chance to fight for pay equal to a white man’s.

Of course that takes us into the rest of Patricia Arquette’s comments at the Oscars. The ones made backstage in the press room that said “And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.” because that’s where things go sideways. While a federal amendment guaranteeing equal pay for women sounds great, it doesn’t do much to get marginalized people any closer to actually being hired. It doesn’t do anything to correct structural inequalities that make it harder for some people to get hired at all. It certainly doesn’t address the fact that calls like Arquette’s which specifically cite stats based on white women aren’t actually inclusive, or respectful of the work that marginalized people have been doing to get the minimum wage raised to a living wage, to get better protections for transgender people in the work place, to make child care affordable, to get better protections for people in care giving positions, to keep programs like Job Corps alive etc. Where are those voices when women veterans are facing higher rates of homelessness, or when low income women are penalized for being poor?

White women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, yet more than one lawsuit against it has been filed by white women who claim that the limited success of POC unfairly disenfranchised them. So it rings incredibly false to see not only Arquette’s speech demanding the support of marginalized people so that white women can achieve pay equality, but the words of organizations lauding her for saying white women’s pay is an issue that everyone should be focusing on, as though white women are the ones who have been waiting the longest for access to opportunity. Equality doesn’t trickle down, liberation rhetoric isn’t meant to be the lubrication for the advancement of white women at the expense of everyone else. So why are we still having these same teach ins about the facts of inequality? Intersectionality isn’t a difficult concept with hard to grasp tenets that fly above the heads of people in positions of power. It is literally taking the step back and asking yourself, “If X affects me and people like me in this way, how does it affect others?” and then doing the (not at all) heavy lifting of listening to the lived experiences of people who are not like you.

Arquette’s most ardent defenders will laud her as a feminist, call any critiques of her words last night divisive and short sighted. It’s the same routine every time, yet those same feminist voices are mysteriously silent when discussions of a living wage, discriminatory hiring, educational and other social inequalities that primarily impact POC and other marginalized people come up. Equal pay for equal work is incredibly important, of course so is equal access to opportunity. So is equal protection under the law, and equal respect for the work being that done that actually has helped white women all along. If your calls for solidarity aren’t informed, inclusive, and intentional in focusing on ending inequality for everyone then all you’re doing is demanding that you be supported in your quest to be an equal oppressor. I’m certain Arquette’s intentions were to be feminist, but that doesn’t make what she said intersectional, that doesn’t negate the harmful impact of her behavior or that of her supporters.

Flavia Dodzan said it best, “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit” and it still applies today. What is Patricia Arquette’s feminism? What is yours? What equality can be found when the face of feminism is all about leaning in to making as much as a white man, and not about making sure that every woman can afford to eat, can access education, healthcare, affordable housing and other basic needs? It’s great to pursue your dreams, it’s even better when everyone else can pursue theirs too because they’re not struggling to to gain entry to a living wage. Equal pay is one of the last steps on the road to equality, not the first one for all women so stop insisting that it matters more than anything else, stop demanding that other people struggling to survive drop what they’re doing in fights you don’t participate in, to support your desire to have even more than you already do. Or you know…keep going with the bullshit feminism that hurts far more people than it helps.

The sad reality is that Arquette’s comments were just the latest in a long line of such incidents. They aren’t going to be the last examples of this problem either. Whether we’re talking comments made on E!’s Fashion Police about Zendaya’s Oscar night look or the way that some of Arquette’s defenders have used offensive rhetoric against any critics of her speech the reality is that in many ways a refusal to hear that feminism isn’t one size fits all is actively hurting progressive causes. Imagine what could be done with this kind of feminist star power if it was actually used to benefit the most vulnerable people in the progressive movement instead of being used against them? Everyone’s feminism is imperfect, because everyone is imperfect but if you’re not trying to be more inclusive, then what exactly are you doing calling yourself a part of any progressive movement?

I started tweeting this list, but umm…I have a book problem. It’s possible I’ve never met a history book I wouldn’t at least skim. And many that found their way home with me. I blame used bookstores like Powells, Afterwords, O’Gara & Wilson’s, & whatever stores I might wander into when I’m on vacation. And libraries. And reading apps. And…it’s me isn’t it? It’s me. This is an incomplete list because well…I really do have a lot of books in various formats. I was a book dragon in a former life.

The Souls of Black Folk  by W.E.B. Du Bois

Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton

Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch

Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization Paperback by Arnold R. Hirsch

Romanticism, Revolution, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 by Caryn Cosse Bell

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas S. Massey

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

At the Dark End of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves by Adam Hochschild

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby

For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Chana Kai Lee

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis

Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 by George Reid Andrews

The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson

The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture by Neil Foley

In my defense my focus in undergrad was Afro American history & it sparked an interest in other histories that has maybe led my wallet astray some times. Maybe. What books do you think I should be reading? What histories fascinate you?