My Thoughts on Cops, Race, Ferguson, Justice, and Whose Side I'm On

A demonstration in New York City protesting
the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO.
(Photo via WikiMedia Commons)

When I was about 18, I got into an argument with my best friend* over an article about a man who committed suicide by cop. 

I said something like, “It’s disgusting that getting shot by the police is so predictable that someone can actually plan to commit suicide this way.”

My friend countered, “You know who I feel sorry for? The cop. Imagine having to live the rest of your life knowing that you killed someone just doing your job, and that person used you to commit suicide.”

I don’t remember what I replied to him, but I remember still feeling angry and unconvinced. My friend is white. I am not. That day, I was unable to articulate to him that race had everything to do with where our sympathies lay.

Nevertheless, my friend’s words stuck with me.

I actually have family members who were cops—family members who are not on the brown side of my family—but I have never talked with them in depth about what it was like to be on the job. One of them said to me, “It’s pretty much like [the reality TV show] Cops.” Having seen snippets of the show, I was afraid to ask more. I was too much of a coward to confront the possibility that people I love might be doing things that would enrage me if I knew. (We already have plenty we disagree on.)

I have also met cops that I like (usually police of color), who have been personable, fair, and concerned, who have exactly embodied the ideal of law enforcement as it should be.

Sometimes, news of a policeman killed during duty has sent me into a reverie, trying to imagine what it would be like to have every work day present the possibility of death. I have read writings by and about cops, describing how seemingly innocuous situations can turn bad, or how someone who presents as non-threatening might be extremely dangerous. I can sympathize with the idea that confronting the worst side of human nature, day in and day out, can taint a person’s view of the world and transform every individual into an object of suspicion.

Since Monday, I have been reading with a kind of grim resignation everything I can about the killing of Mike Brown. I read Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony, which I don’t believe for a minute, and Dorian Johnson’s testimony, which includes details that comport exactly with my own experiences of cops’ attitudes and speech with me and with other people of color.

These two accounts encapsulate two world views. In the first, Mike Brown is the belligerent aggressor, who escalates nothing into something, who is huge and terrifying, and Wilson must defend himself. In the second, Darren Wilson is the demon, and Brown must fight for his life.

The two accounts are parallel, yet mirrored. But no matter which account the reader believes, the end is the same: Wilson has a gun, and Brown does not. Wilson gets a hearing, but Brown gets executed.

The gap between these two accounts seems like a chasm. After all, they can’t both be true.

But I wish cops could understand that what they feel—being on high alert, aware that people going about their business might be hiding a threat, knowing that any day they could die at the hands of someone irrational, stupid, or hot-headed—is exactly how African Americans, especially black men, feel around them.

Cops and black men are having parallel yet mirror experiences of each other.

On the face of it, this could provide some common ground, the beginning of understanding. In reality, we know that the construction of race, a construction hundreds of years old and woven inextricably into the fabric of Western culture, functions precisely to perpetuate the divide. An illusion with very material consequences.

I have lived in places where police are not upholders of the law, but agents of bribery and corruption. The kind of life most of us want, with stability and security, is only possible in our current society with a professional, trained, and funded police force. 

It’s hard to hold both ideas in my head, that I want to have cops patrolling my streets at the same time that I also fear them, not just for myself, but for my some of my friends, and some of my kids’ friends who are brown and black boys and will grow up to be brown and black men. I can feel sympathy for an individual cop in a tight situation having to make a tough call (and let me be clear that Darren Wilson is NOT that cop). But such sympathy cannot erase the continuing rage I feel at an institution that regularly mows down men of color and  incarcerates them at a staggering rate.

I don’t have a solution. Rational discussions and state-sponsored “conversations about race” serve mostly to create the appearance of progress and building bridges without shifting the institutional bedrock that supports the structure of the status-quo. Violence usually hurts communities already suffering the most, but sometimes it is the only language that state power understands and responds to. (I am not calling for violence. I am simply looking at history.)

I do know that if cops have any kind of sincere desire to change this dynamic, it is incumbent upon them to listen and learn. Cops have power and resources; impoverished communities do not, which is why the equation of armed white cop + unarmed black man ends with the same tragic result again and again (while armed white men roam freely).

Ultimately, what police are supposed to stand for and what people in the streets are calling for is the same thing: justice. But the scales are weighted, and Americans need to take clear-eyed look at the ways race creates that imbalance. The scales have never hung equal, but until they do, we will have no peace.

* Read about my run-in with a cop and a vigilante with this same best friend here, as part of my reflection on the injustice of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. 

LINKS:

A petition to President Obama and the US Attorney General to press federal charges against Darren Wilson

A wishlist of books for the Ferguson Library

The NAACP march, Journey for Justice, beginning on Saturday, November 29
 

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 3

Cousin Mary teaching my dad and me
her mother's secret kata recipe
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure, and Part 2, where I unpack the dynamics between cooking and gender in my own family history.

In Part 3, I want to break down the argument presented in the study, “The Joy of Cooking?”, step by step. First, the authors assert that working mothers feel duty-bound to cook because of pressure from a traditional ideal of motherhood coupled with pressure from various “food gurus” who are advocating for Americans to cook more often at home. In the course of interviewing women to support this theory, they also uncover several barriers that make cooking difficult for their interviewees: poverty, work pressures, transportation, housing, child care. Finally, they propose a number of possible “creative solutions” to feed families without forcing mothers into the kitchen. 

The authors of the study seem to contend that no working mother wants to cook, but does so due to external obligations. They write, “Mothers felt responsible for preparing healthy meals for their children and keenly experienced the gap between the romanticized version of cooking and the realities of their lives.” Women are feeling even more pressure, they argue, because “modern-day food gurus” such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Rachel Ray, as well as political figures like Michelle Obama, “advocate a return to the kitchen.” (I’m just going to note here that Pollan’s book, Cooked, includes a gender analysis that demonstrates he is aware of these issues.) 

Of course, the ideal of motherhood exists; of course, mothers constantly feel guilty for not living up to it. But to say that mothers are manipulated to this extent simply by unrealistic standards is to ignore the ways that we defy these standards on a daily basis. A search for “good enough mother” turns up the words of many mothers who are rejecting the ideal. Periodically, studies come out that “prove” that stay-at-home mothers are best for their children, or that day cares will damage children irreparably. Do working mothers feel horribly guilty when these studies come out? Yes. And then they go back to work, either by choice or by necessity, knowing that their work is helping their children by providing the financial support they need and by modeling working womanhood. (And those studies get refuted.)

So while I don’t deny that ideology is a factor in mothers feeling oppressed by cooking, I would add that to pin the blame solely on idealized motherhood and foodies is to miss the point. 

If the ideal—and the sexism contained within it—is truly at issue, then how do partnerships that are less traditionally gendered look? I asked several mothers and fathers about how they divide cooking and other domestic work, and I received a range of responses. (Because this post will be long, I’ll include direct most quotes in a coda to this series.) I heard from stay-at-home and work-at-home dads who actively enjoy and take pride in cooking. I heard from opposite-gender couples who split cooking 50/50. I heard from same-gender couples where one partner did most of the domestic tasks. I heard from single mothers who are struggling to do it all. From a small sample, I received a breadth of possible family configurations, each negotiating cooking and domestic tasks in their own way. 

In the diversity of responses, one consistency stood out for me. Many women in opposite-gender couples, who had generally egalitarian relationships, said they cook because their male partners simply lacked know-how. No one had taught their men to cook when they were young. As adults, the men had little time or motivation to learn, so if their female partners wanted to eat decently, then they cooked. 

If families abandon cooking entirely, then we lose one path to gender equity: men who cook. I am fortunate that my son loves to help me in the kitchen. I count teaching him to cook amongst my small, daily feminist acts. One day, after picking up my son from preschool, my daughter asked him, “Do you want to play ‘Frozen’?” “No,” my son replied. “I want to help Mama make dinner.” Heart cockles: warmed. 

If gender dynamics and motherhood ideals can’t fully explain the problem of working mothers and cooking, what else is at play? One clue is revealed in this quote from Elaine, a white, middle-class married mother interviewed for the study: “When we get home it’s such a rush. I just don’t know what happens to the time. I am so frustrated. That’s why I get so angry! I get frustrated ‘cause I’m like, I wanna make this good meal that’s really healthy and I like to cook ‘cause it’s kind of my way to show them that I love them, ‘This is my love for you guys!’ And then I wind up at the end just, you know, grrr! Mad at the food because it takes me so long. It’s like, how can it take an hour for me to do this when I’ve already cut up the carrots and the celery and all I’m doing is shoving it into a bowl?” (emphasis mine) 

Elaine says herself that she likes to cook, but she is frustrated that she doesn’t have the time to cook the way she wants to for her family. I hear her longing for a certain kind of connection that a home-cooked family meal can bring, but time pressures turn a leisure activity into a stressful obligation. 

The study authors themselves name many of the barriers to cooking: food costs, particularly for healthy foods; basic food insecurity; long work hours; unpredictable schedules; differing family schedules; inadequate transportation; and long commutes to work. Some mothers live in particularly dire situations: “During the month we spent with Flora, a poor black mother who was currently separated from her husband, she was living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a cockroach- and flea-infested hotel room with two double beds. They prepared all of their food in a small microwave, rinsing their utensils in the bathroom sink.” 

Is cooking really the problem here? 

Would Flora benefit more if she were released from a gendered obligation to cook? Or would she perhaps find more relief if her city had a program to house the homeless like Salt Lake City’s? 

Sign from the New York City strike
of McDonald's workers this summer.
(Photo by Annette Bernhardt,
from WikiMedia Commons)

At the same time I read this study, which features at least four parents who work in the fast food industry, I also read William Finnegan’s article in The New Yorker about the efforts of McDonald’s workers to unionize and raise the minimum wage. Most of the workers he interviews have jobs at two different locations, if not three, and yet their hours are held under forty hours a week to keep them part-time. One mother who has worked at McDonald’s for fourteen years makes $8.50/hour, a 50 cent increase over the base pay—which is minimum wage—in a city where a living wage for a single parent with a child is calculated to be $30.02/hour. Finnegan writes, “American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance,” which includes food stamps. 

Moreover, employees do not get regular shifts. Instead, every Saturday evening, hours are posted for the following week. Each worker receives a thin strip of paper with her or his schedule. Imagine what this unpredictability means for parents trying to arrange child care. 

As if this level of exploitation isn’t enough, some workers don’t even get paid for the hours they put in. Finnegan reports, “Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forces them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.” 

This kind of treatment is inhumane, for parents and non-parents alike. And it isn’t just the fast food industry. American workers put in longer hours for less pay than their counterparts in other developed countries, and they also take fewer vacations. No legal limits exist to prevent American workers from answering e-mails and analyzing spreadsheets when ostensibly having family time at home. 

Rather than an accusation against cooking for causing misery amongst working women, I would like to see an indictment of a brutal work culture engendered by skyrocketing inequality. I would like to see an examination of farm subsidies that make processed foods artificially cheap while making raw foods unattainably expensive. I would like to see a report on the economic conditions that create food deserts in certain neighborhoods when food is so abundant in others. I would like to see a denunciation of a political climate that makes raising the national minimum wage to a paltry $15/hour an impossibility. I would like to see rage against weak and ineffective initiatives to end poverty while the top 0.1 percent continue to attain new heights of wealth. 

The study authors suggest in their conclusion a variety of “creative solutions” to feed families healthy meals without continuing to overburden mothers. They suggest town suppers and healthy food trucks, to-go meals that parents pick up at their children’s schools to heat up at home. 

While I am interested in collectivist solutions, the logistics bring up more questions. Where would the food come from? Who would grow it? What food traditions would be represented? How would it all get funded? If families buy the meals, how could the meals be affordable yet made with good quality, fresh ingredients? 

The main question I have is, who would prepare these foods? How much would they get paid? What hours would they work? Because I can imagine, all too easily, that these programs would rely on part-time workers juggling two jobs, some of them parents. Parents who would work long hours to prepare food for parents, who are working too much to prepare food. Alternatively, I can imagine stay-at-home moms being asked to volunteer their labor, just as they are tasked with filling in labor gaps in their children’s schools. 

This isn’t a solution. It’s a displacement of the problem. 

The answer to the question, “Why do working mothers find it so hard to cook?” is not an easy one, but cooking itself is not the problem. The way most Americans, not just working mothers, find it difficult-to-impossible to engage in one of the most fundamental human activities is but one symptom of a cancer in American culture. 

So what can we do? We can insist on connection. We are all linked: the farmers who grow our food, the migrant workers who harvest it, the drivers who transport it, the grocers who stock it, the corner-store owners who sell it, the food workers who prep and cook it, the parents who bring it home, the children who either eat it or complain about it. 

Cooking can be feminist or anti-feminist. But insisting on a more just and equal world is feminist to the core.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 2 (#365FeministSelfie 2)

#365FeministSelfie, August 26
Banana muffin for my son's birthday
celebration at school

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure.

Second in my #365FeministSelfie series 

I grew up with three main parental figures in my life: my mother, my father, and my paternal grandmother. Their stories illustrate three very different narratives of gender and cooking. 

My grandmother cared for me nearly every day after school and many weekends. In Armenian culture in general and for my grandmother specifically, food held a central place. She turned out traditional Armenian dishes—tas kebab, kefta, dolma, yalanchi—dishes that could take all day to prepare, without even calculating in the time to grocery shop and clean up. She also made decent American fare: spaghetti, meat loaf, chicken marinated in red wine, garlic, and a little brown sugar. 

Both of my parents could count on her to feed me if they were unable to pick me up before dinnertime. She would call me to the table; when I lagged, she would inevitably chastise in her Long Island accent, “Anoosh, it’s gettin’ cold!” Obviously, my grandmother could cook like this, and care for me, because she was a housewife. For her, this represented a step up from her pre-married life, when she worked to support her parents and younger brother during the Depression and World War II. 

My mother, on the other hand, held a full-time job as a middle- and high school teacher at a K–12 private school. On the nights she fed me dinner, we ate primarily what I call insta-food: buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, packets of ramen embellished with chopped scallions and cubed spam, frozen fish fingers. I remember my mother saying to me once with irritation that when she was married to my dad, he expected her to put on dinner parties. As with many second wave feminists, my mother embraced the life of a professional at the same time she rejected the foremost task of the domestic: cooking. 

My father, on the other hand, had a reverse experience. Naturally, he had expected to lead a professional life. He had not, however, expected to find himself the sole caretaker of his child for half of every week. Raised on my grandmother’s cooking, he felt obligated as a parent to provide home-cooked meals. At a time when men were being encouraged to “embrace their feminine side,” my dad decided to learn how to cook. On weekends and when I was with my mother, he would put on an apron and cook up giant pots of staples like spaghetti sauce, black bean soup (a dish he’d eaten while in Peace Corps in Costa Rica), tas kebab, and adobo (a Filipino tradition from my mother’s family) and store portions in the chest freezer he kept in the basement. (He learned this from my grandmother, who likewise had a second freezer built like the obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Dinners at my dad’s were always a complete meal: protein, starch, and a vegetable. 

When I reached high school, my dad made a new household rule: whoever cooked, the other person had to clean up. I had never felt particularly drawn to cooking, but I knew which side of that equation I wanted to be on. I pulled down cookbooks from the shelf over the telephone and started searching for easy recipes. 

And I liked it. 

Cooking took thought, but in a different way from, for example, writing an essay for an Advanced Placement course. I had the satisfaction of accomplishing something material, but without the drudgery and dirt of other types of housework. Cooking could be artistic, both in flavor and in visual appeal. It could be improvisational and experimental. And it created connection, whether it was simply a shared meal with my dad, or a batch of cookies that I gave out to friends. 

#365FeministSelfie, February 3
Making quiche, a recipe
my friend Zara gave me

The act of cooking itself created connection, too. I might spend a Saturday afternoon with my grandma as she baked a batch of churag, a kind of sweetened bread. Many recipes for churag exist, but my grandmother’s recipe was specific to her origins in Marzevan, a town near the Black Sea. Although she grew up in Istanbul, her family kept their country recipes. As we braided dough, she would tell me about her years in the orphanage after her family migrated to the United States to escape the Armenian Massacre, or her cross-country bus trip to California, or her journey to become an artist. Cooking was both the opportunity and the vector to pass down family history. 

As I’ve recounted before, my mother and I had a fractured relationship during my childhood (better now). Some of my best memories, little islands of ideal mother-daughter moments, are baking with her, the one cooking activity she seemed to enjoy. Every aspect of sifting flour—the click-click-click rhythm of the handle, the sight of flour piling up in a drift, the dusty itch in my nose, and the anticipation of cake—is suffused with feelings of love and comfort. 

I can’t help but want to pass this down to my own children. 

Cooking is a microcosm of my family’s dynamics. It promotes tolerance of difference, because my husband is vegetarian and I am not. It embodies my family history through smell and taste. It retains the identity and memory of my immigrant origins. It symbolizes our togetherness and our cohesion as a family, not only when we sit down together to a meal, but also as we assemble it together, sometimes with a lemon from our tree or tomatoes from our garden. 

It can also provide a platform for strife, which is still a part of family life. Sometimes I want my kids to help, and they don’t want to. Sometimes they want to help, and I just want to make a meal in peace, alone. Sometimes I create a dish with love and devotion, and they just don’t like it. 

On the other hand, I have those times when my son says, “Thank you, Mama, for making a yummy dinner!” 

I persist in the face of my children’s disapprobation of my cooking because I want them to know that if you live a rich and varied life, you aren’t going to like everything. 

When I lived in Senegal, I ate some things that I did not care for: a slimy okra-based dish called suppu kànja, dried sea snails called yéet. In Fiji, I downed some chicken livers that not even cumin, coriander, and turmeric could make palatable for me. These were meals I ate in people’s houses, people who were not rich by the standards of their own countries, much less ours. The women prepared food for me with kindness and generosity, and yes, it took them hours to make, and to turn up my nose at it would have been the pinnacle of ingratitude. (These dishes were the exceptions—in the main, I love Senegalese, Fijian, and Indo-Fijian cuisine.) 

The first time I tried bitter melon at my great-aunt’s house in Hawai’i, I didn’t like that, either. Everyone laughed as my mouth puckered and my eyes started to water. When I was served bitter melon in Fiji, I was prepared for it, and I started to acquire a taste for it. Eventually, I learned how to prepare it myself, and I found a recipe for it I like. (My husband is still resisting its charms, however.) 

Cooking is not just about feeding the body. Food is heritage, tradition, family lore. It holds valuable knowledge about plant variety, preparation, and use. Our farms are becoming vast corporations; our fields are becoming monocultures. Do we want the same to happen to our kitchens and our bellies and our palates? 

I feel very lucky to live in a city where I can find nearly every ingredient that I can imagine to cook with: grape leaves for dolma and yalanchis, bitter melon for ginisang ampalaya, epazote for beans, cassava for Fijian pudding and West African stews. I can’t find these in my local supermarket, but instead must go to “ethnic” groceries and farmers markets. The simple act of food shopping ties me into the specificity of my place: people, communities, traditions, and economic networks that are marginalized yet still so central to what makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles. 

And so I choose to keep cooking. But for many mothers, to cook or not to cook is not a choice they can make, but a decision bounded on many sides by traditional sex roles, economic pressures, food insecurity, and poor urban planning. In Part 3, I address the authors’ argument point by point and examine some of the structural barriers to cooking, as well as some of the ways parents are trying to reconfigure domesticity to be more gender equal.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 1

Barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen... and feminist
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen... the iconic image of a woman in need of feminism. Interesting to me that we say “in the kitchen.” “Barefoot” is self-evident, as is “pregnant.” “In the kitchen” is oddly coy. What is she doing in there? Well, she could be doing a lot of things, just as I do: washing dishes, paying bills, chatting with a friend. Doing a science experiment with a child. Heck, she could be sitting at the counter with The New York Times and a cup of coffee. 

But we know that’s not what she’s doing. We know she’s cooking. 

Recently, three sociologists at North Carolina State University published a study entitled “The Joy of Cooking?” pushing back against the narrative that a home-cooked meal is an essential part of familial harmony and a key step in reforming the food system. “The message that good parents—and in particular, good mothers—cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of ‘good’ mothering.” This ideal, they argue, serves only to push working women back into the kitchen, where they find cooking unfulfilling. Moreover, their efforts are often met by family members with disinterest or complaints. Cooking, they assert, only continues to oppress women. 

A few writers picked this up, including Amanda Marcotte in Slate and Anna North in The New York Times. Predictably, a conservative in “The Federalist” responded: “It’s I guess what you can expect from feminists—sniping that the stress for women of at-home cooking isn’t worth the benefits.” 

So is cooking anti-feminist? 

I have certainly had my share of family meals where I have labored over the actual cooking—never mind the shopping beforehand—for at least an hour, only to have my efforts rebuffed by my kids. I have certainly experienced my share of anger and frustration over it, seasoned with the peculiar bitterness that comes from the ingratitude of children. I actively dislike cooking with my kids, because it takes twice as long, and the resulting mess is twice as big. I am a work-at-home mother, which means that my work hours end when school does, and shopping and food prep, tasks I accomplish faster and more easily without offspring, take a bite out of my precious work day. 

Yet I am not ready to concede the kitchen. 

What makes cooking oppressive? The authors detail the challenges facing the women they interviewed: unpredictable work hours, long commutes, difficulties procuring fresh foods and using them before they spoil. Cooking, they argue, is an unnecessary stressor in these women’s already-overburdened lives, so why not just taking cooking out of the equation? 

The irony is that at least two of the women, Wanda and Leanne, work in fast food, as does Wanda’s husband, while another, Greely, has her own catering company. They can’t cook at home because, between work hours and commuting, they are too busy providing food for other people—perhaps some of them overburdened parents like themselves without time to cook. 

The line between domestic work and wage work is highly charged for women, and is further tangled up in class and race. A century and more ago, upper-class women, usually white, were expected to eschew all forms of work. “Housekeeping” for these women meant managing the servants, who performed all the actual labor of domestic tasks. In contrast, middle-class women handled much or all of their own domestic work. Their exemption from wage work delineated their difference from lower-class women. For women of the lower classes, of all races, domestic work was wage work. One glaring exception, pre-Civil War, was enslaved women, who received no wages at all for the tasks they performed, either in the house or in the fields. African-American women who were freed still performed domestic tasks, but freedom made the difference in doing the work for nothing versus doing the work for pay. 

During the first and second waves of feminism, many white women agitated for the right to work; many women of color, on the other hand, wanted the right to leisure. Since then, women have gained the right to wage work—if not to pay equity with men—but the right to leisure remains elusive for many in the United States, women and men. 

Is cooking work or leisure? It can be hard to say. For a cook at McDonald’s, providing food is her job. When she comes home, the pressures that spill over from her wage work—time constraints, financial limits, physical exhaustion—make cooking stressful and anything but leisurely. 

What about a stay-at-home mother? For her, cooking might be a leisure activity and a pleasure, a domestic task she chooses to do. Alternatively, maybe she works—and cooks—at home because child care costs more than she would earn out of the house, and so economic necessity makes the choice for her. Either way, she does it and receives no compensation, even though the annual value of a stay-at-home mother’s labor is calculated to be $112,962. 

When parents work outside the home, the family often outsources those jobs and pays for them. Restaurant workers (likely immigrants of both genders) prep and cook the food. Day care workers or nannies (usually women) care for the children. Maids (women again) clean the house. When these jobs are paid, they count as part of the GDP. 

But to reduce cooking to labor is to collapse it into a singular, capitalistic dimension. Food and cooking have larger resonances than simply economics, however, as the study authors acknowledge when they discuss the ideological values placed on “the family meal.” Yet even this analysis is reductive and ignores the many other possible emotional and cultural dimensions of food, cooking, and the struggle for gender equity. 

In Part 2, I unpack the relationships between cooking and gender by recollecting my own experiences with cooking, food, and family from childhood.

In Part 3, I respond to the authors’ argument point by point. 

Where Do We Go After #CancelColbert?

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This post is available on Salon.com: “#CancelColbert accomplished nothing: why social change movements must be inclusive.”

Thanks to Mimi Khúc, who read an early draft of this post. Thanks also to the many friends on Facebook whose discussions helped develop my thoughts on these issues.  

Feminist Quickies: My Own #365FeministSelfie Series

Tired Mama Working
Each word is its own feminist topic!
Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian

This winter has sucked. In spite—or perhaps because—of our record-breaking warm winter in L.A.,* my kids have been sick a lot, particularly with nasty coughs that linger and linger, sometimes disappearing briefly only to return with a vengeance.

During the month of December, it seemed that we all had one cold that we were simply passing back and forth between each other like some kind of high school basketball drill. Then in January, my grandmother (my last surviving grandparent) contracted a lung infection and spent about a month in the hospital, a forced confinement that made her lonely and depressed. Shortly after she was released, my son got sick again—this time with croup!—got better and attended school for a week, then caught another cold with nonstop coughing and was diagnosed with asthma.

I remember last week as one marathon viewing of the anodyne Canadian cartoon Caillou barely heard over the droning motor of the nebulizer. I didn’t see any of the episodes, mind you, because my eyes were fixed on my son’s upper lip, where I trained the hose spewing vaporized Albuterol.

So, I haven’t been writing.

I have been Facebooking, however. Ah, Facebook! The refuge of the exhausted, isolated mother, trapped with a sick child, yet able to participate in a quasi-social life stolen in five-minute snatches.

A few of my friends began the year pledging themselves to the #365FeministSelfie project, the brainstorm of Veronica Arreola. Arreola began the project as a rebuttal to a Jezebel piece describing selfies as a “cry for help.”  “Selfies aren’t empowering,” the writer scoffed, “they’re a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”

“But what about positive selfies?” Arreola countered. “Yesterday I saw a mom and her maybe-5yo-daughter taking a selfie.They were making silly faces and snapping pics. Those were memories being made, moments of love that both will likely remember forever.” She went on to describe other ways selfies could be feminist: “WOC [Women Of Color] rarely see themselves reflected in media, people over a size 4 are told to hide themselves, transgender persons want to be seen...”
 
I wanted to take part. Because periodically, someone has to write a clickbaiting column declaring feminism dead, again (too many links to embed, I’m afraid). The #365FeministSelfie project seemed like a way for women (and other-gendered people!) to simply and effectively preempt a 2014 Feminism Is Dead article while bringing up feminist issues in a new way. I wanted to be a visible mixed-race woman of color in the 365FeministSelfie roll call. But-

“A selfie every day?” I thought. “Ha ha ha ha.”

In February, my friend Jaclyn Friedman interviewed Arreola for her podcast. Together they were so convincing, I made for myself the more modest goal of a selfie a week.

Now it’s mid-March. I miss writing. I am having that kind of tired, sad, well-worn Cult of Domesticity feminist mom crisis that we all know. (Members of a parenting group I belong to—again, on Facebook—have titled our version Household Drudge, PhD... or MA, in my case.)

Since sustained writing, research, or even thought is quite beyond me these days, my goal now is to turn out a series of weekly quickie posts, based on my own #365FeministSelfie series. Tomorrow’s post will cover feminine performance, social capital, and body hair.

* Yes, I am sorry to rub it in your face, everyone suffering from the Polar Vortex. The downside, of course, is that we are going to run out of water this summer. Oh, and the earthquake this morning.

Are you participating in the #365FeministSelfie Project? What made you decide to join? Share in the comments below! And please subscribe to be sure to catch every post in the series. 

Keystone, Climate Change, and My Children's Future

Image by Jmcdaid via Wikimedia Commons

I haven't written anything in about two months because my kids have been sick, I have been sick, my husband has been sick, the holidays happened, and now my grandmother is in the hospital.

But we are in the 30-day window for the public to weigh in on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Every day that we go without rain in California makes me nervous and edgy. This photograph makes it abundantly clear that a severe water shortage is coming, worse than any in living memory. I can feel, in my bones, that everything we have experienced — hurricanes, the Polar Vortex, record-breaking droughts — is only the beginning of the effects of global climate change. I honestly worry that my children will inherit a planet less able to support life than any time in human history. I had to speak up.

I decided to post this because I am hoping that others will also be moved to write. Please make your voices heard. Comments close on March 7, so please write today.

I stand against the Keystone XL Pipeline. The U.S. State Department has determined that the extraction, refinement, and transportation of the tar sands will not increase the effects of climate change, but ONLY because the Department claims that the tar sands oil will find its way to market one way or another. In other words, the State Department is advocating in favor of the Keystone XL Pipeline because it is protecting U.S. interests without accurately accounting for a rapidly warming planet and its effects on future generations.

Yet the Keystone XL Pipeline, in fact, threatens U.S. interests precisely because it will have climate effects. The U.S. is a global leader, and the action we take on Keystone will signal to the rest of the world whether we intend to take material action on the changing climate, which will affect every person on this planet, or whether we will ride cheap oil to oblivion.

If we wish to remain a global leader, must take a stand on climate change and our dependence on oil, for the sake of our homeland and for the home of our entire species. I have heard arguments that Keystone XL will make the U.S. energy-independent. Yet we cannot deny that oil will not and cannot be the fuel of the future. Our continued dependence on oil is a testament to the industry's powerful influence on national policy rather than an argument in favor of the status quo. Rather, if we continue to rely on oil, we will no doubt fall behind in the development of alternative fuel and solar technologies. Our country uses oil as a crutch, and it is holding us back.

During my childhood, during the administration of President Carter, the U.S. made first steps towards solar technology. The Reagan administration turned our economy back towards oil, bringing all that innovation to a halt. Imagine where we might be if we had, instead, aggressively pursued solar all those decades ago. Only now are houses and cars beginning to be heated by our most abundant energy source, and we are in competition with other nations to retain a slim edge. Are we going to turn the clock back again?

Our planet is already in turmoil due to human-created drastic climate change. Most of the country is suffering from frigid temperatures and massive snowfall due to the Polar Vortex. Here in California, we are laboring under the worst drought in our recorded history with no relief in sight. Our agricultural economy is threatened by a dire water shortage. Food prices are already rising. Across our entire nation, we are only beginning to feel the climate crisis that is building, threatening our economy, our food security, our infrastructure, and the very lives of our citizens.

The Keystone XL Pipeline marks a watershed moment. Our decision to exploit the tar sands oil will not be a final carbon "push" that will send us into irrevocable disaster; alternatively, our decision not to exploit it will not halt climate change. Nevertheless, the world awaits our decision as a signal. The symbolism of the Keystone XL can be as influential as the movement of the markets that signal confidence or lack thereof in a stock or a country's economy.

For this reason, I urge you to in the strongest possible terms to reject the Keystone XL Pipeline. We must send a clear signal that we will forge a new energy future rather than drain oil down to its poor, dirty dregs in the tar sands. Not only our nation's citizens, but our entire species is suffering from what are only the first effects of climate change. We must do everything in our power to halt our current path.

Oil is the handbasket. It's time to get out.

For a deeper analysis of the calculations regarding the carbon effects of Keystone XL, see this. For a more eloquent argument on behalf of the planet, please read this. Ultimately, I decided the numbers were less important than the symbolism of the pipeline, since the calculations are elastic and the effects likely won't be entirely known unless/until we go through with it. To my mind, the potential risks far, far outweigh the potential benefit.

Finally, if you still aren't feeling alarmed enough, there's always this: "How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt."

Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

Rest in (People) Power, Nelson Mandela

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Madiba went home today.

The lesson of Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid movement is not about endings. I remember how elated and triumphant I felt in 1994, when South Africans of all colors went to the polls. But the path to liberation does not end with democracy. Democracy is but one step. We are still treading the path. 

That path started before Nelson Mandela, and it continues after him. No one person is a movement. Great shifts in history come from masses of people working together: drops of water that make a flood. 

After a liberator dies, power rewrites the story. So it’s up to the people to remember the truth. Human lives are never simple, nothing is just black-and-white. (Not even South Africa—the Anti-Apartheid movement included every constituency of the Rainbow Nation, including people of Southeast Asian and South Asian origins.) The South African constitution enshrined GLBT rights because people in the movement did not hide for the sake of the struggle, they instead made connections between racism and homophobia visible and visceral. The Anti-Apartheid movement aimed for nothing less than liberation for all, but only because people within the movement demanded it. 

Power sees liberation movements as the enemy. Power wants nothing more than Stasis, to continue itself into perpetuity. People want Change, because we are alive, because we grow and die, because we have children, because Life begins and ends and keeps going on, but never the same. 

Mandela gave us a gift. He gave us tools. We don’t need to mourn what we’ve lost. Let’s instead revel in the gifts we have received, in the knowledge we have gained. Power wants us to forget. We will not forget. For Madiba’s sake, and for all those ordinary, mundane freedom fighters whose names are forgotten to history, but not to their friends and families, we must remember. We have to take up the tools, well-worn. We repair and use them again. And we pass them on. 

******** 

Since the day of Mandela’s passing, I have heard from friends who are teachers that many of their students—elementary to high school—do not know who Mandela was nor what he accomplished. 

Zoë Wicomb wrote in The New Yorker, “Every schoolchild knows of his contribution to democracy in South Africa, of the sacrifices he made, of his status as an icon of reconciliation.” 

Apparently not. And they won’t unless we tell them.  


Readings on Mandela the man, not Mandela the myth:

"The Meaning of Mandela," The Nation 
"Don't Sanitize Mandela,"  The Daily Beast
"Three Myths About Mandela Worth Busting," Africa Is A Country
"That Time Reagan Vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act," Colorlines.

Multicultural Kid Blogs has a tribute page to Mandela, including a link to an elementary school lesson plan about Mandela.

Beyond Girls and Boys

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

This week, I’m very proud to announce that you can find me on Black Girl Dangerous:

“Beyond Girls and Boys: Teaching Gender to My Kids”

 

10 Reasons Why Maria Kang Is Wrong Wrong Wrong

I don't work out. I lift my kids.
So I have biceps, but not a taut tummy.
Also, I don't know how to Photoshop out my nipples.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

... and one bonus one!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.)

1) “What’s Your Excuse?” My job isn’t fitness, and my body is not an ad for my business.

2) Some of us have priorities other than appearing fuckable to 20-year-old guys.
 
3) Not all of us have a stay-at-home-husband. Or a partner at all. Or relatives who can take the kids anytime for free. Or money for sitters. Or access to licensed, good quality day care. Gee, you know what might help with that? Universal child care.
 
4) Why don’t all moms work out while their kids are playing at the park? Maybe because they are enjoying a moment to themselves. Maybe because they are trying to have a little adult social life as a break from being around children all day. Maybe they have kids who demand a lot of attention. And maybe women who make different choices than you have completely legitimate reasons for doing so.
 
5) Being skinny isn’t the same as being fit.
 
6) Over-exercising is a thing.
 
7) Fat-shaming is bad for everybody. Including the children. Maybe especially for the children.
 
8) Different bodies are different. It makes my heart ache to think that Kang has struggled with an eating disorder in a quest to attain the societal ideal of a “perfect” body. Maybe if we didn’t define “beauty” in such a narrow band along the spectrum of our body shapes and sizes, no girl would push herself to such extremes to look a certain way.
 
9) You know another Asian-American woman who has struggled with an eating disorder? Margaret Cho. Cho has coped with this through being a bad-ass feminist and GLBT advocate. Instead of internalizing norms of feminine beauty, she has dedicated herself to challenging and dismantling them. I know which solution I’d rather choose.
 
10) My tummy is no longer taut because my abdominal wall stretched out when I grew two human beings inside of me. Maybe we, as a culture, should try to honor these bodies that have created life. Doesn’t that have its own beauty?
 
And the bonus reason Maria Kang is wrong wrong wrong:

11) Now I have to explain that not all hapa-Pinays from SacTown are like this. 

Not enough reasons? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.

Special thanks to HapaMama Grace Hwang Lynch and Cynthia Liu of K-12NN for the thought-provoking Facebook dialogues that led to this post.

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty

  

Changing Schools

First day of kindergarten.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Today, I took my daughter out of our local public school and enrolled her in a charter school.

I didn’t think I would announce it, but then I realized, hey, I write about parenting and politics, and I have just committed a huge political act.

We live in an excellent school district, and our home school is one of the most desirable in our district. We were looking forward to our daughter receiving a solid education while also enjoying a truly diverse peer group.

My daughter, I should say, adored her preschool. She came home covered in paint and mud every day. The love between Silver and her teachers was plainly mutual. At school, she would pet animals, make rivers in the yard, create stories with her friends, pick and eat vegetables from the garden, and pretend to be a kitty, or a mama, or an astronaut, or an excavator. On the way, she learned to write and gained the fundamentals of reading, math, and science.

In the first few days of kindergarten, my family experienced the shock of transitioning from preschool to the regular school system. My daughter seemed oddly unenthusiastic, and one day as she settled into her car seat, she asked, “What does it look like inside your body when you cry?” My husband and I tried to take statements like these with a grain of salt, unsure of how much weight to give them during this time of flux.

The afternoon before Back to School night, I asked her what problems she had that she wanted me to talk about. In order of importance, she listed:

• Sometimes my teacher yells really loud and it hurts my ears. 
• Leila gets lunch at the cafeteria and sits with all of those kids, but I want her to sit next to me, but she never can. 
• Sometimes we have to sit on the rug, and it’s boring. 

So I sat through the Back to School night rally in the auditorium, then we parents filed away to our children’s classrooms for another presentation by their teachers. I sat down on a tiny chair and filled out several forms. The teacher talked about curriculum goals—writing aptitude, sight words, scissor skills—and also described the kinds of homework he would assign. He held up a composition notebook showing lines of upper- and lowercase L’s on one side and cut-out photos of a lion, a llama, and a child licking an ice cream cone on the other.

Silver expresses her displeasure with me.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I had my reservations about my child having to sit and write letters in long rows, when all the writing she has done so far has been on her own initiative: grocery lists, birthday messages, angry letters to me when she is mad. Nevertheless, I could see that her teacher, trained in studio art, was trying to work creatively within the limits he was given. Their first homework assignment would be to draw a picture of something fun from the summer, label all the parts, and write a sentence or two about it. (A rather long assignment for kindergarten, admittedly.)

With only 10 minutes until 8 p.m., the scheduled end of the evening and my children’s bedtime, he asked for questions. On my turn, I asked, “Can you talk about your philosophy and some of your methods of discipline?” The teacher walked over to a small rectangular table with three chairs ranged around it: green, yellow, and red.
 
The red chair was the last straw. My daughter had, in preschool, participated in a democratic classroom. As she has told me many times after I apologize for yelling at her, “The teachers at school don’t yell.” It’s true: they don’t. Of course, at preschool there are five teachers for 25 kids. In kindergarten, there are two. But my daughter is accustomed to being part of the classroom process where limits are agreed upon collectively and enforced gently, and I’m not ready for her to grapple with an authoritarian system yet.

The charter school I am moving her to practices project-based education, which to my mind, is what every school in the U.S. should practice. Diversity and social justice explicitly make up part of their mission. They emphasize experiential learning tailored to each child’s particular style. Collaboration forms the foundation of their structure.

I am, in theory, committed to public education. And yet, as every parent realizes when her or his child begins school, I want my daughter to have an excellent education right now. Public education in this country is a large, unwieldy vehicle, constructed rigidly, and difficult to turn in a different direction.

If our education system is supposed to prepare our children for life as adults, what are we teaching them? To respect authority. To tolerate repetitive, boring tasks. To understand that the system is unresponsive to their desires, needs, and emotions. And, above all, that the pleasures of education—personal attention from a teacher, play- and project-based methodologies, richness of materials, opportunities to go outside in a beautiful environment or take exciting field trips—are limited by economics. That we live in a two-tiered society, between those who find school a trial and those who find school rewarding, becomes obvious to our children from an early age.

People always scoff that we can’t buy our way to a better education system. (But maybe we can.) And yet, what would it be like if we abolished private schools and channeled all those funds to public education? What if we did only this: reduced class sizes, paid teachers wages respectable for trained professionals, and improved facilities so that schools could be open, airy, green, and pleasant places to be? What if we could make arts available to every child, every single day? You can’t convince me that education wouldn’t improve.

And what if we went further and made the goal of education to instill a love of learning in every child?

I know, it sounds like I am asking for the moon. And yet, like every parent, I want my child to be happy and smart; I want her to have ambitious goals and feel capable of reaching them. I want her to delight in learning rather than approach school with dread. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.

Self-Regulation

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

To play or not to play with toy guns? Christine Gross-Loh asked this question in her recent article in the Atlantic, “Keeping Kids From Toy Guns: How One Mother Changed Her Mind.” She explains how she initially opposed gun play in her family, but after spending time in Japan where gun play is tolerated by parents and encouraged by teachers, she decided it could benefit kids and their imaginations. 

Her argument rests on the premise that a permissive attitude towards gun play results in better self-regulation in children. She notes that weapon play was far more common in the U.S. in the 1950s and cites a study that asserts that American children had better self-regulation 60 years ago. She adds, “But societal panic intensified in the wake of a spate of tragic school shootings in the 1990s, and a shift towards zero tolerance policies and regulating how children should play has been steadily increasing ever since.” 

At which point she lost me. 

This sentence tangles together two concepts: play policy and gun policy. Do American parents and educators discourage weapon play due to a misguided cultural belief that “gun play desensitizes kids to violence”? Perhaps. Yet I would argue that a greater contributing factor is that, in the U.S., it’s far too easy for fantasy and reality collide. 

Gross-Loh acknowledges, “Today in Japan, almost no one owns firearms and there are hardly any deaths by gun” and “there is no easy answer when my Japanese friends wonder at the paradox of our banning gun play when we do not ban the guns that kill thousands of children and teens in the U.S. each year”, but she fails to connect playground policies discouraging gun play with the reality of gun violence in America. 

Let’s reflect on the fact that after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, citizens and politicians have been unable to enact meaningful legislation to make owning a gun at least as difficult as obtaining a driver’s license, in defiance of all evidence that demonstrates a high rate of gun ownership correlates with a high incidence of homicide. 

Let’s consider the children who have gained access to real guns and accidentally shot themselves or others, like this one, this one, this one, and this one, just in the past month. 

Let’s remember as well the children who have been shot by police because they possessed toy guns that resembled real ones. Let’s also contemplate the gun lobby that not only blocks legislation to curb gun ownership and prevents any scientific research into gun violence in the U.S., but also stands against regulations on toy gun designs that would make it easier for police to distinguish a toy from a genuine weapon. 

So I take issue with Gross-Loh’s dismissal of American attitudes towards “gun play” as cultural difference. Bans on toy guns and gun play are rooted in real fears, not phantom overreactions, based on hundreds of tragedies where minors have acquired guns and used them to very deadly effect. Since we who oppose gun violence can’t seem to move by reason or emotion key politicians to enact a less permissive weapons policy, we try to enact those policies at home. We can’t control the guns, but maybe we can control our children. A false sense of security, to be sure. 

I find the second question—does allowing gun play lead to better self-regulation in children?—more difficult to address. Gross-Loh writes, “I have come to believe that one of the secrets of Asian boys’ self-regulation is the way that aggressive play is seen as a normal stage of childhood, rather than demonized and hidden out of sight,” but provides no citation for this assertion. As with many discipline-specific terms, “self-regulation” can be hard to define, particularly across cultures. 

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Nevertheless, I hardly think that whether American children engage in gun play is the single key to their “self-regulation.” First of all, even with “gun play bans” in place, can we say that gun play has effectively declined? An imaginative child (i.e., all of them) will create a gun out of anything at hand: sticks, pieces of paper, a thumb and a forefinger. Secondly, can we really assert anything about all American children, across all ages, given the vast differences of class, cultures, and backgrounds? The study she cites examined children in Oregon and Michigan, who “were demographically mostly white.” (The Asian children studied were in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.)

I heartily agree with Gross-Loh, however, that American children are not given enough opportunities and time for unregulated imaginative play. My daughter is about to enter kindergarten where, at five years old, she will be assigned homework. (I first received homework at age nine.) Our education system has come to focus on academics at the cost of unstructured play time like recess and imaginative outlets like visual and performing arts classes. Since both parents usually work and require childcare beyond the end of the school day, children can further lose unstructured time to extracurricular language classes, tutoring, sports classes, etc. Additionally, the proliferation of screens—and parents’ needs to get things done while their children are stationary with videos and iPad games—can also reduce time for imaginative play. (I call these “the opiate of my children” and deploy them willingly as needed.) 

I frequently cite an anecdote from another of Gross-Loh’s articles, “Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?”, where she highlights the Finnish model of education. She recounts that an American Fulbright grant recipient queried a Finnish teacher, “How can you teach when the children are going outside every 45 minutes?” to which the astonished Finnish teacher replied, “I could not teach unless the children went outside every 45 minutes!” 

I am fully in favor of educational policies that allow children more time to engage in imaginative play. I am also willing to consider that gun play could be a healthy part of children’s imaginative worlds—as long as it remains in the realm of play. 

I am not, however, willing to continue a national policy on guns that relies on “self-regulation.” In our armed society, children die at epidemic levels, and that is a fact, not fantasy. 

Read my series on gun violence, Guns and Anger, including my response to the mass shooting that occurred less than two blocks from my children's school.