Women I Admire: Dominique Dawes

As a young black gymnast, Dominique Dawes was my idol. As a child my walls were bare except a big Dominique Dawes poster squished by my bottom bunk, wishing me goodnight and reminding me what excellence could look like.

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http://www.browsebiography.com/images/5/1620-Dominique%20Dawes_biography.jpg
Like most children I looked for representations of myself, and was lucky enough to live in a place where I could find them. They added the black American girl doll (Addy) during my childhood, I had a great black power library by my house, and a school full of educated and progressive teachers who knew that Black history was American history. I knew of Nadia Comenici of course, and did book reports on Olga Korbut and Mary-Lou Retton (same year I did a report on Josephine Baker) but no one held a candle to ‘Awesome Dawesome’.

Ultimately I was far too tall to be a great gymnast. Even the tallest gymnasts I saw on TV, who seemed to tower above all the others, was Svetlana Khorkina who clocked in at a whopping 5′ 5″. By 5th grade, I was 5′ 7″ Though it took me years to realize it, it just wasn’t meant to be.

P.S.

Women I Admire: Sissy Spacek

I always say that in the movie of my life I would want to be played by Sissy Spacek. Many people don’t get it, she looks nothing like me, I know, I’m black, and she’s white. But as a minority, I don’t have the luxury of a huge selection of people in movies who look like me. But more importantly, I don’t think it would matter, Sissy is a queen and I’m sure she would find a way to play me anyway, black or not.

Why do I identify so much with her? Like most actors, I identify more with her characters on screen, than her real life, (which I don’t know a whole lot about except that she has been married to the same man for 40 years, which is a triumph in and of itself). I first saw her as Carrie, the ultimate revenge fantasy for a high school misfit (actually, don’t tell anyone but I saw Carrie 2 first, it came out when I was having a rough time in Middle School). I also loved her in Badlands, where she played an adventuresome prairie girl, who takes up with a charming stranger and goes on a violent crime spree in the heartland. In 3 Women, she plays the awkward and demure character of Pinky, who has a nervous breakdown and changes drastically as the movie goes on. I could go on, but I won’t.

In her personal upbringing, Sissy Spacek was a self-described tomboy. Her character Holly turned into a bit of a tomboy, after learning to shoot a gun, but she also played the very feminine Pinky and Loretta Lynn. She’s played introverts and extroverts, Type As, type Bs and everything in between. What strikes me about Spacek is her ability to be sensitive without seeming frail on incapable. When I picture a sensitive person, I think of Sissy Spacek.

I tend to fall into the trap of thinking that actors are bad people. As an introvert, I don’t have a huge amount of respect for extroverts, but actors are some of the worst it seems, because they feed on the love and energy of others, and they make their living lying. Sissy Spacek almost makes me think that actors may not be so bad.

Admission

“They’re angry at you, all the time. After a while, it just grinds you down…
The applicants are angry because I can’t see how special they are. Their parents are angry because I let in some other kid with a lower SAT score. The alumni are angry because they got into Princeton, but their brilliant kid got denied. The faculty’s angry because we took the athlete, not the genius, but the football players know that its easier to get in if you throw the discus, and all the violinists and pianists are pretty sure you have an edge if you play something strange, like a tuba or the harpsichord. All the New Yorkers believe that everyone out there from South Dakota gets in automatically, but out there in South Dakota they think they don’t stand a chance at a place like Princeton. The working-class kids are convinced we’re selling admission to the highest bidder. Simone is angry at us because we’re elitist, but the elite know for sure that we’re giving their places away to every black or Hispanic kid who applies. Nonlegacy kids are pissed of because they read somewhere that legacy kids are twice as likely to be admitted. But I’ve watched my boss get up in front of a packed house at reunions and tell all those loyal alumni that two-thirds of their kids are going to be rejected. Let me tell you, they’re not thrilled about that. When I go out to visit schools, the kids are mad at me because they know I’m going to dangle this beautiful thing in front of them and encourage them to apply, and then reject their applications. The college counselors, the private ones who charge thousands of dollars, they’re furious at us, because we’re furious at them, and if we even smell them on an application it pisses us off, which makes it hard for them to sell their services to the parents, who are already angry at us and are now going to be angry at them, too.”

“Can i just say, as a mother of a prospective applicant…that it’s very frustrating. We’re all trying to figure out what you want. And it feels like every time we figure out the rules, you just change them. One year it’s ‘well-rounded students.’ The next it’s minorities who play the flute,’ then as if remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be about her, she rephrased her conclusion. “these kids want to be able to give you what you want.’

And therein, thought Portia…resided the problem…

‘We’re very much aware of that,’she told them. ‘we understand the frustration. And I don’t think there’s anyone in my field right now who isn’t worried about what this is doing to the kids. And I don’t just mean the competition, though that’s bad enough. I mean what the process is doing to them psychologically…We’ve got twenty-five percent of all college applications in this country going to one percent of the schools. And that one percent includes the only fifteen American colleges who accept less than twenty percent of their applicants. We know there are parents who are doing everything they can to game the system. They’re having their kids diagnosed ADHD or learning disabled so they can get extra time on the SAT. Now that ETS has stopped denoting which students have been given extra time, there’s no reason not to. But the message. To the kids. They’ve been tutored in everything, for years, whether they need it or not. So what they come to understand is: I’m not good enough to do it on my own. I need help to be successful…

And how can that not carry forward into their adult lives? I think it already impacts their experience as college students. We have students who freak out when they no longer have that support. They’re e-mailing their tutors and sending them their papers for review. They feel fraudulent…

I had a pretty scary conversation last year with one of my friend Rachel’s babysitters. She’s a senior at Princeton now. She told me a lot of her friends have a kind of disassociation. They’ve spent years assembling this perfect self to display to use — to people who are going to make these important decisions about htem. But sometimes they don’t feel they’re that person at all. They don’t feel smart or capable in the least, and of course when they get to Princeton they’re surrounded by their peers, who have done just as good a job of assembling this competent veneer, then they feel as if they’re the only fake in the bunch. This girl, Samantha was telling me there’s so much self-doubt. When I heard that, I suddenly felt as if I’ve been doing these kids a disservice.
They expect a lot from themselves.
Oh my God. So much. I honestly wonder if they’re not creating, or at least abetting, this surge of anxiety and depression in college-aged kids. And then there’s the other side of the coin. Which the babysitter also pointed out to me. Which is that some of them get to college and they just let all those balls they’ve been juggling for years fall out of their hands. They’ve worked themselves into the ground to get in. They feel like they missed out on slacking off. So now that they’re in, they’re going to have that lazy teenager thing they never had in high school. Seriously the whole system. I wonder about it sometimes. But this where we are. In a few years, it will probably look different.”

Admission, Jean Hanff Korelitz

Late post with some quotes from Admission (pulpy novel the Tina Fey movie is based on) which I read earlier this summer while studying for the GREs. Illuminating a little of the complex many in my generation share. How did I get here? Why did I get here as opposed to someone else? How do I make the best of it? Not hugely different from other generations post-adolescent quandaries except in the magnitude of inequality.

Also:
To the White Girls Who Didn’t Get Into the College of their Dreams
It’s different for grad school but my 2 cents is that I want to be somewhere that wants to have me, not someplace where I’m the last person they pick off the wait-list.

Safe Streets Map update

Continued from Works In Progress: III

I had a great discussion with the geonerds a couple weeks ago (on my new public twitter account @Brobdingnag). It really helped me to narrow down what kind of map I want to make, and how it is (or isn’t) related to crime. Click the timestamp to see (most of) the discussion:

Like everything, it’s much more political than I expected. As Stephanie May asked ‘Do you want to avoid crime or homeless people?’ Right now I’m more interested in perceived threat (feeling of safety) than actual crime*. The most walkable neighborhoods are going to be higher in crime since high density is correlated with high crime. That said, I still think you can pinpoint particular ‘sketchy’ corners and try to avoid those particular corners or blocks, the kind of things that locals know, and tourists might not. I’m not talking about avoiding whole neighborhoods, just walking down Valencia instead of Mission. I still think the appeal of the map would be that it’s dynamic, it wouldn’t put a permanent bad stamp on a neighborhood or corner.

I made a quick list of potential data sources:

One of the things we talked about was the gendered nature of this perceived safety; that there are places where a man might feel safe enough, and a woman might not. This is related to my street harassment post, there are neighborhoods such that if I was walking around alone at night and got mugged/raped people might first ask ‘what were you doing alone in that neighborhood?’ rather than ‘are you okay?’ It would be interesting to try show the nature of this difference.

Also, some interesting stuff on the street harassment front the other week. Came across this great blogpost on racialized street harassment on the new hairpin spinoff blog The Toast:
Mea Culpa

and got a into an interesting discussion regarding the Jezebel article:
But Where where are you Really from? (again, click the timestamp for more of the discussion):


When is it a compliment and when is it harassment? Sometimes it’s hard to know.

Still trying to figure out the best way to start on this map and the smartest way to approach some of these issues without sounding obtuse or idiotic (and still maintaining the shred of street-cred I may have). I’ve been reading about Feminist Geography (a subject I never really understood until now), particularly Katherine McKittrick and feel I may have found my niche in the field (for the time being).

*I am the first to admit there are controversial and problematic aspects to this map, so many, in fact, that I don’t know where to start. I’d like to address these in a delicate, thoughtful and well-informed fashion, but they are hot-button issues or race/gender and fear. Don’t think I’m not going to deal with the difference between actual and perceived threat, especially given the recent Trayvon Martin verdict. As a black woman I do not think myself exempt from racial profiling, though obviously, it’s complicated. There are affluent white neighborhoods I don’t want to be around at night because people will think I’m a thief in a hoodie, or, depending on what I’m wearing, a prostitute. Saw this really interesting article on Trayvon Martin and perceived threat:
Gender Justice Feminism

Works in Progress III: Crime-Avoidant Walking Directions

The most recent project I’ve been thinking about is a map app that occurred to me while I was walking from Cal Train to BART in San Francisco. I stumbled upon a supremely sketchy block full of vagrants and smelling of urine. Returning back from a trip, everything of value that I owned was in my backpack and I just prayed I wouldn’t get mugged. I wondered to myself if GoogleMaps took crime stats into account when giving walking directions. As a GIS analyst myself it struck me this seemed to me like a fairly do-able project.

A simple google search yielded a number of articles from early 2012 when Microsoft filed a patent for this type of technology. http://www.npr.org/2012/01/25/145337346/this-app-was-made-for-walking-but-is-it-racist The technology was controversial because a map that avoids crime-ridden areas of most cities seems like a racist map. If the crime data is pin-pointed and updates dynamically I don’t think there should be too much of a problem with racial repercussions, but it’s something to keep thinking about.

I wondered whether or not Microsoft’s mapping software (BingMaps) was now taking weather or crime stats into account. Since the patent is public record, I emailed one of the names on the patent to ask about the patent and see if I could be of any help. He said “I don’t know of any work at Microsoft to exploit this idea. I am not planning to do anything in this area.” I’ll run the idea by my geonerds this week, see if there are any next steps.

Works in Progress II: Prison stats

When I found out that a friend of mine was imprisoned at San Quentin I was reading Dreaming in French. The book talks about Angela Davis’ experience with the Soledad Brothers at San Quentin. When I saw that she would be speaking in my area I bought some books for her to sign. ‘Are Prisons Obsolete‘ was short enough for me to finish in the week leading up to her talk. It reminded me of this clip from black power mixtape:

The introduction to the book was full of mind-boggling statistics. For my job I had been using the d3 library to make data visualizations, so this seemed like a great opportunity to make a compelling infographic about these statistics. I haven’t done so yet, but here are some of the stats I want to use:

-Only 5% of world population lives in the US, but it holds 20% of prison population
-There are 2x as mental mentally in in prisons/jails than in all psychiatric hospitals combined
In 1990 1/4 black men between the ages of 20 and 29 have been incarcerated…
by 1995 it was 32.2%
-Many minorities are more likely to be in prison than educated

Fastest growing portion of the prison population is black women
Up 78% in 5 years
-There are more women in prison now than in the entire decade of the 70s

California Statistics

in 2002:
there are 157,979 people incarcerated
20,000 for immigration detention
35.2% Latino
30% black
29% white

I’d like to make a CA prison timeline, showing their proliferation during the Reagan Era and how they continue to be built at alarming rates:
1852 San Quentin
1880 Folsom
1952-55 9 prisons built
1962-65 3 jails
1980s (Reagan Era) 9 prisons
90s 12 new prisons
Takes 100 years for 1st 9 prisons, last 9 in 10 yrs
Now 33 prisons, 38 camps, 16 correctional facilities and 15 prisoner mother facilities

Works in Progress I: So I Had this Idea for a Show

I’m toying with the idea of creating a podcast. As an avid podcast listener the idea of putting my hat in the ring is daunting but also exciting. My idea is to talk about music. I know that getting the format right is important and updating on a schedule is key. My ambitious* idea is to have one song (or piece) a week: once a month the song would be recent (a term I’ll define later) and once a month the song would be ‘classical music’ (again, something I’ll define later). I would feature guests to talk about certain pieces, including people I know in musicology departments, musicians and I know, as well as other family and friends. We would use the music to talk about other things, for example:
the Star Trek Soundtrack
-theramin history and usage
-autism and race
Amadou and Miriam
-World music/African music market
-disability
Beck – Song Reader
-“slow music movement” (like slow food for music)
-history of parlor music
-Beck and Scientology, does it matter?

I have no idea how long such a conversation might last, I’m thinking maybe 10-30 mns. This is my example script/notes for a Star Trek Soundtrack show.

Introduction:
Guest (I have a certain UCLA musicologist in mind for this some)
Some questions:
Are you a Star Trek Fan? How did you first come across the franchise? Which is your favorite series?

Body:
What was your impression of the soundtrack?

The original Star Trek theme is known for being an early use of the theremin (though according to Wikipedia it wasn’t). The theremin is an early electronic instrument named for its inventor Leon Theremin. It is recognizable for its use in sci-fi soundtracks.

Star Trek the original series is also known for its progressive treatment of race (the first interracial kiss on TV!). The crew featured all the major ethnicities, Sulu representing Asians, Uhura for Africa, Chekhov Eastern European, Scotty, Western European, Kirk, America (I guess). What struck me watching the movie now was how short-sighted this view multicultural view was. In the future all races will work together, in equality, but they won’t reproduce with each other? There were no mixed-race characters. Weirdly, Khan seems to represent a multi-racial Asian, dissecting his full name Khan Noonian Singh you might get, Khan: Central Asian, Noonian: Middle Eastern, and Singh: South Asian (YES I realize this is total racist speculation, that’s how Roddenbery seems to Roll). The Khan as terrorist Osama Bin Laden analogy seems too easy so we won’t talk about that.

In addition to the diversity on earth, the original series featured a representative of an extraterrestrial race with Spock the Vulcan. It was interesting to me how Vulcan tendancies were very in line with the autistic spectrum. Autism is having a moment in America, according to the PSAs, 1 in 50 children will develop autism. Some possible causes I’ve heard are: assertive mating, high income, computer culture, and vaccines, etc.

Conclusion:
In conclusion, don’t see Star Trek for the music, it’s not that great. And frankly, the movie’s not that great either, but I was entertained throughout. I hope you were just as entertained by this conversation.
This has been — podcast, with our special guest —– —–
Shouout to — (probably my mom, who will be my one listener)
you can find more information at the website (which I’ll create) etc.
Outro

Let me know if you have ideas for titles, sponsors, words of wisdom/warning, etc.

*I know this schedule is extremely ambitious, especially since I haven’t been able to maintain a schedule for this blog lately, (and I’ve been unemployed!) but I think once I get started it will easier to maintain.

Queens of Black Bohemia

Some of my favorite podcasts are the Culture Gabfests with music critic Jody Rosen. I’ll never forget his comments from a podcast 3 years ago that there’s a hunger in black bohemia for heroes. I am always on the lookout for the new heroes of black Bohemia. Here are is a playlist of black bohemian queens to tide us over for the next big thing, in roughly chronological order:

Nina Simone


Phoebe Snow:

Zap Mama:

Lauryn Hill:

Les Nubians:

The Noisettes:


Santogold:

Janelle Monae:


Left off Eryka Badu, Sade, Jill Scott, Grace Jones and others. But interested to hear what others think.

9/4/2013 Added Laura Mvula:

Thanks to Slate Culture Gabfest.

Things that made me cry

This is a list of things that have made me cry in the last month or so:

I had originally thought to put the list in order of what should have made me cry but I don’t think such an order exists. I am trying to be kinder to myself about being a highly sensitive person. Recognizing that I am part of a larger group (20% of individuals) who share this genetic trait and that there isn’t anything wrong with it.

This feels related to this post from around this time last year.