via Womanist Musings by Renee on 5/17/11
photo © 2009 Jessica S. | more info (via: Wylio)Whiteness is always looking for sell outs to encourage people of colour to be passive. Every once in awhile, they choose the wrong person, and it comes back to bite them directly in the ass. The Braves recently hosted a civil rights day in Georgia (I know, ironic considering their name), and they decided to honour Carlos Santana. It seems that17 May 2011
5 May 2011
A Tribute to a Long-Lost Child
via Women in Crime Ink by Deborah Blum on 5/4/11
by Deborah Blum
When I was researching my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, I started by making a list of famous homicidal poisons: cyanide and strychnine, arsenic and antimony. The resulting catalog quickly outgrew my plans for a book of relatively modest length. How would I decide which toxic substances belonged in my particular handbook?
Since my story was of two somewhat renegade scientists trying to establish - or more accurately, invent - the profession of forensic toxicology in Prohibition-era New York, I started researching poison homicides in that time period. I focused on murders from about 1918 to 1935 in that remarkable city. I wasn't looking for famous cases - it was murder as a fact of everyday life that interested me. Those small, slipped-away stories, the cases that haunted me, the lives altered that I couldn't forget, ended up defining my poisonous history of early 20th century America.
And that's why the chapter on arsenic began with a long-forgotten mass murder:
The weather, that summer of 1922, held steady at what the newspapers like to call “fair”, the skies a gas-flame blue, the temperatures hovering near 80 degrees. On the last day of July, as Lillian Goetz’s mother would forever recall, the morning was another warm one. She offered to make her daughter a box lunch, but Lillian refused. It was too hot to eat much; she’d just grab a quick sandwich at a lunch counter.
The 17-year-old daughter worked as a stenographer in a dress goods firm, occupying a small set of offices in the Townsend Building, at the bustling corner of 25th and Broadway. There were plenty of quick eateries nearby, tucked among the offices and shops and small hotels. Lillian, like many of her co-workers, often just stepped over to Shelbourne Restaurant and Bakery, just a half block south on Broadway.
The Shelbourne catered to the office trade, opening in the morning, closing in the early afternoon. Stenographers and secretaries in their bright summer hats and stylish short skirts, businessmen and office managers in their dark tailored suits crowded daily along its wooden counters and small square tables, hurrying through a meal of coffee, hot soup with fresh-baked rolls, sandwiches, and slices of the bakery’s renowned peach cake and berry pie.
According to police reports, on July 31, Lillian ordered a tongue sandwich, coffee, and a slice of huckleberry pie. It was the pie that killed her.
Five other people died as well and more than 60 went to the hospital that day. The scream of ambulances down Broadway was so constant that people called the police department thinking the city had caught fire. The lead suspect - although he would never be charged - was a baker at the Shelbourne, who'd caught a false rumor that he was about to be fired.
Arsenic, at the time, was remarkably easy to acquire. It was used in popular rodent poisons (my favorite had the very direct name Rough on Rats). It was used as a tonic, in brands such as Fowler's Solution. It was beloved by poison murderers because it was odorless and mostly tasteless. In a white powdery form, like arsenic trioxide, it folded almost invisibly into pastry dough.
Today, thanks to improved regulations, arsenic cannot be so casually acquired. Nor is it in the same homicidal demand. Forensic toxicology has made arsenic far too detectable a means of death. It's been identifiable in a corpse for well over 100 years, these days, in the barest trace amounts. And as a metallic element, it remains in the body (notably in the hair) for centuries. It serves, in fact, as a indelible marker of murder.
The fascinating, twisted story of arsenic then was an obvious choice for my book. The tale of little Lillian Goetz maybe less so. But there was this moment of heartbreak that just stayed with me. I read countless news stories about the Shelbourne killer. There's a moment, in one of them, in which her mother, Anna Goetz, is talking to the police about that rejected box lunch, caught at that point in which she knows, she's sure, that she could saved her daughter's life if she'd only insisted on that homemade meal.
Oh, I could see myself - the working mother of two boys - caught in that same moment, replaying that loop in which I might have rescued my child, could have kept her alive, kept him alive, if I'd only done things differently. One of the tasks that I'd set for myself in the book was - despite my real fascination with the wicked chemistry of poisons - to never glorify the subject. Poisoners represent human evil in my story. A lost child like Lillian reminds us of that, should remind us of that.
Still, when I received an e-mail recently with the subject line "Lillian Goetz", I had a moment where I worried that someone in the family didn't agree with me. In that, I was wonderfully wrong. The message came from Lillian's nephew Steve Goetz, a physiology teacher, and he wrote: When I began the chapter in your book covering arsenic, I was amazed to see Lillian Goetz's story featured. I had never realized that her death was a part of such a large and publicized event. Lillian was my aunt, my father Nelson's older sister. Her death by poison was rarely mentioned in the family, and most of the details were vague.
But though they rarely spoke of her, she was always there, a ghost in the house. Her death rewrote the way they lived. Steve was born in 1943 at Bronx Hospital, the facility that treated the dying girl: When my Grandfather, Lillian's father William Goetz, visited my mother who had given birth to me in 1943 at Bronx Hospital, he told her how very sad he felt revisiting the place. After Lillian's death, her parents (William and Annie) discarded all religious items in their house and were non-observant Jews from that point on. My grandmother Annie rarely left her apartment as long as I knew her, and my 98 year old mother told me the other day that that was also true since at least the early 1930's, when she first met Annie.
Steve also sent me the photograph that I've put at the top of this post. His grandmother, Annie Goetz is in the middle, with a very young Lillian holding one hand and her brother Nelson (Steve's father) holding the other. He even sent an image of the back of the photo, all names carefully written in that lovely cursive handwriting of the past with its lacy capital letters.
I've found myself studying their serious faces, taken during an era when people so rarely smiled for photographs. I've pondered Lillian's sober little face under that white hat, imagined her growing up into a dedicated, responsible young woman. But I know that doesn't really do her justice.
I wrote back to Steve Goetz, asking him if I could share the photo and family information and he answered me in the kindest way: "I had rarely thought about Lillian for most of my life - she seemed to be such a distant figure. I want to thank you for bringing her to life for me as a real person, in a way she had never existed for me before. My only tenuous link to her is her copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which I've had for many years. It contains a bookmark, a cut-out yellowed newspaper column called Our Rhyming Optimist. Aline Michaelis published 6 poems a week for her column from 1917 for the next 17 years. The poem Lillian saved is called "You Have Come Back."
Since I learned about, and was given the book, I've been intrigued that my aunt, coming from a family that seemed not to place a high priority on education or reading, should have this book of poetry. I've always felt that she must have been an interesting and sensitive person, that I would have liked to have gotten to know."
So this one's for you, Lillian. In remembrance, and regret. And a wish that you'd never ended up in my book.
4 May 2011
Those sexy, smelly Victorians
via kottke.org by Tim Carmody on 5/4/11
Here is my third installment in pulling down random books from my shelves and writing about them, under the belief that the internet is better when not all of it comes from the internet.
Eugen Weber is a wonderful, sassy cultural historian. His best-known book is probably Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1880-1914.
When I first moved to Philadelphia, one of my favorite things about staying up too late was catching episodes of his documentary series The Western Tradition on PBS at 3 AM. (Now you can stream the whole series free at Learner.org, which I just found out today.)
This is a passage from France Fin de Siecle, a really terrific book about art, culture, and literature in mid-to-late 19th-century France. And I swear to God, I think about this particular section all the time.
If one considers the scarceness of water and of facilities for its evacuation, it is not surprising that washing was rare and bathing rarer. Clean linen long remained an exceptional luxury, even among the middle classes. Better-off buildings enjoyed a single pump or tap in the courtyard. Getting water above the ground floor was rare and costly; in Nevers it became available on upper floors in the 1930s. Those who enjoyed it sooner, as in Paris, fared little better.
Baths especially were reserved for those with enough servants to bring the tub and fill it, then carry away the tub and dirty water. Balzac had referred to the charm of rich young women when they came out of their bath. Manuals of civility suggest that this would take place once a month, and it seems that ladies who actually took the plunge might soak for hours: an 1867 painting by Alfred Stevens shows a plump young blonde in a camisole dreaming in her bathtub, equipped with book, flowers, bracelet, and a jeweled watch in the soap-dish. Symbols of wealth and conspicuous consumption.
In a public lecture course Vacher de Lapouge affirmed that in France most women die without having once taken a bath. The same could be said of men, except for those exposed to military service. No wonder pretty ladies carried posies: everyone smelled and, often, so did they.
Teeth were seldom brushed and often bad. Only a few people in the 1890s used toothpowder, and toothbrushes were rarer than watches. Dentists too were rare: largely an American import, and one of the few such things the French never complained about. Because dentists were few and expensive, one would find lots of caries, with their train of infections and stomach troubles, it is likely that most heroes and heroines of nineteenth-century fiction had bad breath, like their real-life models.
Yep. That's why we call them "the unwashed masses."
It wasn't until the twentieth century that most people took a bath, washed their underwear, flushed a toilet, saw their own reflection in a mirror, or stopped dying at atrocious rates every time they gave birth to a child. How's that mistake looking now, Werner?
Tags: baths Eugen Weber France literature18 April 2011
Vintage Women’s Basketball Teams: So Funny!
via The Society Pages: All Blogs by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images on 4/17/11
In the center of this picture is my Great Grandmother, Adalene. I was quite young when she died, but I do remember her, frail and white-haired, threatening to spank me. I didn’t believe her, and was duly surprised at what came next.
This picture pleases me. It reminds me that women always had heart and spunk. That we’re all young once. That we’re not so “advanced” today; women were always awesome.
This is why the title of Buzzfeed‘s framing of a photographs of women basketball teams from the 1900s is so disappointing:
Liz Babiarz, who sent in the link, asks what’s so funny. I have to agree. They aren’t “strangely funny”; they’re awesomely awesome!
Many more at Buzzfeed.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
14 April 2011
Babies 'Conversating'
via The Society Pages: All Blogs by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images on 4/11/11
In this hilarious two minute video, twin toddlers practice having a conversation. They don’t really know words, but they know HOW to do it. They’ve figured out how to sound sure of themselves, how to sound inquisitive, how to gesticulate, how to aim their efforts at a second person, and how to take turns. They’ve learned, in other words, the rules of talking to another person, even before they’ve learned how to talk. A fun example of socialization.
For more really great examples of children learning to act like grown ups, see our posts on the baby worshipper, the baby preacher, and the baby Beyonce.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
11 April 2011
Searching for Kim Jones (a.k.a. Lil’ Kim): Black Girls Behind Bars
via Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women by Mariame Kaba on 4/10/11
[Cross-posted at Prison Culture]
Recently an article by Rachel Pfeffer titled “In Post-Racial America, Prisons Feast on Black Girls” has been making the rounds on social media. I am glad to see the attention that it has garnered. I hope that this attention translates to action. The article opens with these words:
African American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistant in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.
A recent study by Moore and Padavic points to how black girls are discriminated against in the juvenile justice system:
“As expected, compared to White girls, Black girls received more severe dispositions even after taking into account the seriousness of the offense, prior records, and age. This finding provides evidence of Black-White racial bias in the juvenile justice system. Hispanic girls, in contrast, were not disadvantaged vis-a-vis White girls.”
The authors acknowledge that their finding that Hispanic girls do not receive harsher punishment than their white peers is surprising in light of previous research that has pointed to Hispanic girls’ disadvantage (Miller, 1994). Other studies have found that 7 out of 10 cases involving White girls are dismissed, compared with only 3 of every 10 cases involving Black girls (Girls Incorporated, 2007, p.3).
Suffice it to say, Moore and Padavic’s research does confirm what we already knew anecdotally: black girls are discriminated against in the juvenile justice system. African American girls bear the brunt of multiple systems of oppression – racism, sexism, and poverty — and among girls, are at greatest risk of entering the juvenile justice system, as well as being treated more harshly once in the system.
I have worked with black girls for over 20 years now. I worked in grassroots organizations dedicated to addressing their needs, I have been on the board of several nonprofits that have focused on girls’ issues, and I have been an adult ally for over 8 years to a youth-led organization of mostly black girls here in Chicago.
A few years ago, I developed and ran a workshop for young black girls using Lil’ Kim as a window for opening up discussion about their own identities and inner lives. I ran this program for several weeks with my friend Francesca. It held some promise and I hope to return to it in the near future. This time, I want to include more discussion about the criminalization of black girls in the workshop. I also want to make the literacy improvement aspect of the workshop more explicit. In other words, a large part of the new workshop will be devoted to us reading together.
Sociologist (actually social psychologist) Charles Cooley invented the concept of the “looking glass self” and that idea is what animates my interest in Lil’ Kim. Cooley emphasized that other people represent the mirror or looking glass through which we perceive ourselves. This idea has significant implications for young Black women who seem to be particularly despised within the culture. In fact, I once read an interview conducted of R & B singer Jill Scott where she spoke about the general disregard with which Black women are treated in American society. She is quoted in Essence Magazine (August 2004) as saying: “Black women. We are so out of style…the problem is, it doesn’t seem like anybody’s loving sisters anymore. What happened?.”
A 2004 study by MEE productions found that:
“Black females are dissed by almost everyone. Young African American females hold little status within their communities, reflected in the name-calling and devaluing of young girls. Not only do males not trust females, but overwhelmingly, girls reported that they do not even trust each other.”
The sense that nobody loves Black women and young black ones in particular is pervasive. It is not surprising then to find that black girls who are considered disposable by everyone find themselves increasingly criminalized in the culture.
Tomorrow, I will post some reflections from the Lil’ Kim Workshop that Francesca and I facilitated in 2007. As I refine that workshop and hopefully run it again this Fall, I hope to continue to blog about it here. I welcome any ideas that readers want to share for the workshop curriculum.
Note: Here is a more involved definition of the Looking Glass Self concept that I referenced above:
Looking Glass Self- the process of developing a self-image on the basis of the messages we get from others, as we understand them. There are three components to the looking glass self: 1.We imagine how we appear to others; 2. We imagine what their judgment of that appearance must be; 3. We develop some self-feeling, such as pride or mortification, as a result of our imagining others’ judgment.
31 March 2011
I'm a Slut
Toronto activists take back the slut
Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work
1. Don’t put drugs in women’s drinks.
2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.
3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to rape her.
4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don’t rape her.
5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not rape her.
6. Never creep into a woman’s home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or rape her.
7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.
8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from raping women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when lurking in shadows.
9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.
10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.
11. Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don’t pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be raping her later. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.
In other words, the best way to prevent rape is to not rape anybody.
25 March 2011
Broken on All Sides... [ no repair in sight]
via racismreview.com by Jessie on 3/25/11
Matthew Pillischer has just completed a new documentary about race and criminal justice in that is worth checking out. Here’s a trailer for the film (6:58):
The film includes an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, which we’ve written about here before. While most third year law students are busy studying for the bar exam, Matthew Pillischer found time to produce and direct a documentary film about this important social justice issue. I don’t know how he did that, but I’m glad he did as his film promises to bring this important issue to a much wider audience.
24 March 2011
Book Announcement: The Ethics of Voting
via Public Reason by Jason Brennan on 3/23/11
Hi everyone,
I’m pleased to announce my book The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press) is now published. You can read the introduction here.
(I get about $3.00 in royalties if you buy it, so here are links to Amazon, which has sold out its initial batch, and Barnes and Noble.)
The main positions I defend in the book are:
1. There’s generally no duty to vote.
2. People can exercise exemplary civic virtue and pay whatever debts they have to society (if there are such things) without participating in politics. Political participation (and knowledge) is nothing special when it comes to civic virtue.
3. If people do vote, they have strong obligations to vote for what they justifiedly believe will serve the right ends of government, or otherwise they must abstain. This holds true even though individual votes are inconsequential. (I expanded and revised my argument from”Polluting the Polls”, as, for example, I realized that it didn’t cover cases of people voting for the right things for the wrong reasons, and it didn’t handle bad fringe voting very well.)
4. It’s okay to buy, trade, or sell votes, provided you don’t violate #3.
5. If social scientific work on voter behavior is correct, then most voters probably qualify as bad voters per my theory.
I’m going to be on CBC radio (I think on Sunday Edition) this weekend discussing some of these topics in light of the likely elections in Canada.
Stylish Typography and Illustrations by Brent Couchman
via Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials by paul0v2 on 3/24/11
Brent Couchman is a designer located in San Francisco. His works are totally amazing, very stylish with great use of colors to engage the viewer with such eye candy illustrations. Enjoy!
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You can find Brent at his website www.brentcouchman.com , at flickr, and dribble.
About the author
Hi there! I'm Paulo Canabarro, 25 year old web designer from Brazil currently living in Providence RI, USA. I'm truly passionate about design of all kinds. Finding and sharing inspiration has become part of my life. If you have any suggestions or requests just get @ me - pvpcanabarro@gmail.com For some cool stuff make sure to Follow me on twitter!
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