Yup, I'll Say It Again...

...in case you missed it the last four years... I still hate Black History Month. You can follow the link to read a post I wrote four years ago, if you care to.

A lot has changed since I wrote that post, both in America and in my life. America did elect her first brownskinned President in 232 years, and he is now up for re-election. I found out even more about my own personal American history. And instead of living in a mostly-"white" community, I now live in a browner community, which has only reinforced my dislike of "Black" History Month.

What hasn't changed is racism. I can't say that it's gotten worse than it ever was. When you look at the last 236 years of American History, brown, tan, or reddish-toned folk have universally been targeted for a disproportionate amount of ill-treatment and genocide ever since European settlers made their homes on this continent. Right after the Civil War, and then again one hundred years later after the Civil Rights movement,  brown people made great advances in the way we were perceived. But invariably, those strides forward brought on a backlash that sent our rights two steps in the opposite direction: the strides we made after during Reconstruction beget the KKK and Jim Crow Laws, for example. After Obama's election, racism has certainly become less hidden though I have to say the backlash, while expected, makes my head spin. Having a brown President has brought out every snide, nasty comment we ever had about "race", and allowed it to be aired in the guise of bipartisan politics. And everyone is guilty.

I still think--no, I'm even more convinced that singling out an ethnic history does an enormous disservice to this country and everyone in it. It perpetuates the myth of race. It doesn't take into account the real reasons that "race" came into existence in the first place. And, it hides the real truth, which is that brown peoples all over the western hemisphere have been systematically and purposely divided, dominated and destroyed in order for a Euro-centric empire to flourish. And, it sets up the greatest myth of all, that America is "white and black".

As an American who is brown-skinned, I will not identify as "Black". I am not black in color. I do not, nor do any of ancestors or family members come from a country named "Black". To talk of a "Black Experience" conjures up images of a people as seen through European eyes.For me, quite literally, drawn and colored black or photographed in shades of black white and grey.

I will not, cannot identify as "African American". I am not African, any more or less than I am European. Neither my father, nor mother, nor any of my grand or great-grands or even most of my great-great grands were born in Africa. I know this, because I took the time over several years to find out exactly who my people were. I have found two Africans in my tree; one from Madagascar and one from some heretofore unidentified African country. Neither of them, interestingly enough, were brought over as slaves. And with the exception of Nicolas Marin from Alsace-Lorraine and Narcisso Garcia from Puerto Rico, the remainder of my known ancestry were born and bred in America. On my mother's side of the tree, a surprising number of my ancestors were born outside of slavery, or weren't slaves for long.

I don't think my family's history is all that unique for brownskinned people from the East Coast of America, although I notice that the further south and more inland you go, the mixture between European, Native and African may be more weighted one way or the other. But there are a great many of us who claim varying amounts Native Blood.

People will argue for the cause of the "Black Experience", or the "African American" experience. It largely brings to mind slaves and the horrors of slavery, of emancipation, of segregation and Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ways in which a people have triumphed over obstacles. In no way am I negating any of that history. But my soul hurts for the stories that are NOT told, or forgotten and then completely obliterated and left out from the accepted narrative.

And I still get really angry by the suggestion that because I insist on claiming ALL of my ancestors, I'm really trying to avoid being "Black" or "African American". I can assure you that this is not the reason. Nor do I think there's some "money for Indian Scholarships" and I don't feel a need to research my history so that I can "enroll" in a tribe. While I am inordinately proud of my African heritage and the triumphs of my African ancestors, I resent being made to feel as if I must identify one way or the other.

This year already, more than years past I have seen homage paid to Carter G. Woodson as the "father" of African American History, and to W.E.B. DuBois as being a leading great educated "Black" man. I most certainly am not devaluing their work; without Woodson's insistence our African history may have been erased completely, because Euro colonists didn't really want for their slaves to know where they came from. They didn't teach their slaves to read and write for a multitude of reason, history being one of them.  But I personally have inherited some feelings about DuBois in particular, who was a little bit of an elitist... at least to hear my grandfather tell it.

DuBois was a frequent guest at my great-grandparents home in Atlanta and his snobbery apparently pissed off my great-grandmother who was more than a little Native (most likely Nottoway). I think it amused and sort of rubbed my great-grandfather the wrong way, he being at least an 8th or more of Seminole via his mother. While there was a huge catch-all called "mulatto" on the censuses of that time, amongst that group itself,  there was a distinction between "mulatto" (African and European) and "half-breed" (Native and African).The mulattoes held disdain for "half-breeds"....  DuBois and Woodson were, according to research, "mulatto". My great-great grandmother Annie Cox was "half-breed".

But the kicker is that while mulattoes or "creoles" might have been relegated to being the courtesans of Europeans, they were left alone to hold property and houses. "Halfbreeds", if they identified as "Native" (which would be likely if the mother was Native and the father black) could still be hustled off their property and sent to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. So I suspect that a great many of my "halfbreed" ancestors who had land and were free long before slavery ended, allowed themselves  to be thought of as "mulatto" which eventually and arbitrarily became "light skinned black". Think about... if you owned property, and could lose it by claiming your full heritage, what would you do??

In reality, all it has ever been about, this "race" thing, is money. And business. BIG business. Multinational corporations worth billions of dollars.

In the 1300s, European countries could trade, import and profit from silk, spices and opiates from Asia because of deals they had made with Mongolia and China. But when the Roman Empire fell, and the Turks blocked the trade routes, Europeans sought other routes. Some Europeans, particularly the Dutch and Portuguese explored eastwards, convinced they could get around Africa to Asia. Some explored West, convinced they could cross the ocean and get to Asia from the other side. Columbus, Italian by birth and Spanish by way of his young mistress/second wife, got financing from Spain and took the latter route. He happened on the Caribbean and the Americas, and the rest is established as history. Initially, the upper class of the Europeans exported and abused their own to work in new colonies--the poor, the broke, the criminal-- and to develop these new lands. But it wasn't enough of a labor pool and business wasn't making enough of a profit. The companies weren't able to top the profits of the spices, opiates and silk they had made with Asian trade.

Africans and the Moors were already known to Europeans, but my own personal theory is that war, particularly with the Moors (around the time Columbus sailed for the West) helped to promote the feeling of "us versus them" that allowed Europeans to justify African slavery. Besides, the Moors were not Christian.

In America, the first people abused and enslaved to work for the colonies were the Indigenous people here, but that proved difficult. Yes, many Native Americans died because of European diseases they were not used to, and they died because the Europeans laid waste to the the land and food sources the Native population relied on. But many many many more of the Native peoples retreated further into America, refusing to serve Europeans, forming alliances with each other and disappearing from view. America was their home, after all, her forests and swamps and mountains easy for them to retreat to.

To "break" them, the Europeans captured and exported whole nations of indigenous people to the Caribbean, and replaced them with people from Africa. As far as conquering a people goes, it was a brilliant strategy; it disoriented the people exported, it reduced the numbers of the people left, and it completely subjugated the people imported. How can you fight a battle when you don't know where you are, or how you'll get back home?

But there was something the Europeans didn't quite count on when they first got to this part of the world: unity between the newly imported Africans and the Natives. When the Africans ran away they were often taken in and adopted by Native Americans. The Seminole Nation in the swamps of Georgia and Florida were most famous for defending their African friends. And amongst the colonies in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, so many Africans intermarried with Native peoples that at one point, "free blacks" out numbered the white colonists.

Slave revolts in the West Indies frightened the American colonists, and they resolved to not let that happen here. And while history traditionally told you that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were "wiped out", new, more accurate knowledge has proven this a lie. The infamous Maroons of Jamaica, who terrorized English colonists, were a mixture of the Native Arawaks of Jamaica and runaway African slaves. Recently, DNA testing begun in 1999 found that up to 62% of present day Puerto Ricans are of Amerindian descent.

In America, they began to enact laws that prohibited mixed unions, and reclaimed many African/Natives as "free blacks". In time, they even legalize the capture and re-enslavement of "free blacks". To further widen the divide between Native peoples and African slaves, Europeans introduced and actively encouraged the concept of slavery to Native Nations, particularly the Five Civilized Tribes. Some Nations, particularly the Cherokee, took to slavery in a more Euro-centric way, especially among those Cherokee who themselves were  partially European. Initially, the major difference between Euro slavery and Native slavery was racism; "White" Euros dehumanized brown skinned people in order to justify perpetual servitude. But for many nations, a "slave" was the equivalent of a less-fortunate relative whose care and feeding were repaid with service.. and often slaves were absorbed into the family either by marriage or age. This rarely--if ever-happened among Europeans in this country.

Its important to realize how much money was generated by slavery; how many companies were built on its practice, how many industries and products were made and were exported cheaply due to slavery, how many banks were formed to deal with the money. Wall Street came into existence because of slavery and racism. And then perhaps you will understand why it was so important to keep slavery going. Really, slavery still is going. Currently everyone is talking about Apple and its use of Chinese slave labor... but think about the billions of dollars made on Apple products because it can pay its workers peanuts and force them to work long shifts, housing them in dormitories where they can easily be called into service. These days its electronics; in early America it was cotton, clothing, and tobacco. In the West Indies it was sugar. But slavery has existed since mankind started fighting wars. What was new to the institution was racism; declaring that a person might be a slave in perpetuity, because of the color of his skin. That because she was darker, she was less intelligent, less human. God-ordained to be dominated.

Even when slavery ended, racism had become so ingrained in the country that many people stayed right where they were, continuing to work in the same conditions they toiled under during slavery. And for the great many who migrated north, the companies that survived and profited from their exploitation still needed cheap labor to survive , and did so by racially exploiting these people, relegating them to second-class citizenship, segregation, and poverty.

For all of us, being told that we should identify as "Black" or "African American" severely limits the very rich and diverse history of this country. It limits our scope to think we are "only" one thing, share "one" experience, and contribute to "our race" and not this entire country. Furthermore, it is a Euro-centric way of thinking that we have been encouraged to accept.

Every year, "great African-Americans" are held up study and praise, ostensibly to create pride in ourselves. But it is inaccurate history; since many of these icons are just as Native American as they are African American. And to ONLY claim the "African" negates the importance of  these people in the larger context of the world. It limits their contribution. I often wonder what greater contributions to humankind my own grandfather (who knew of his African, Native and European history but never spoke of it) would have been capable of had he felt comfortable declaring all of his ancestry. How long would slavery and oppression REALLY last, if Native Americans and ex-African slaves truly united to fight the same oppressor? America might be a very different-looking place.

For instance, Crispus Attucks, known as the first person killed in the name of American freedom, was African and Native Canadian. To only identify him as "Black" limits the story of who he really was, where he came from, why he felt compelled to stand for America as a man. Arthur A. Schomburg, a "Black" librarian, was in fact from Puerto Rico of German and African/St. Croix parents. To only identify him as "Black" limits why his quest to research and collect books about Africa. To talk of the "Black Experience" severely limits the true horror of people forced to choose or hide their cultural identity in order to survive.


Only looking at "Black History" limits the true story of America. It allows everyone else to teach "American" (read "White") history 337 (338 in a leap year) days of the year. And for 28 ( or 29 in a leap year) they can pretend they are honoring "Black" people by reciting every known fact about Black Greatness. And sometimes some little known facts. But our country's history is FAR more complicated and nuanced than just "history" and "Black History".

If I only identified as "African American" I may be ashamed of my "white" ancestors, assuming their unions with my "black" ancestors were born of rape and torture.I would assume that the slaveholder I did find in my history was "White". I may completely overlook the possibility that Peter Morgan, slave holder and probable father of Peter G. Morgan was an Indian slaveholder. And I wouldn't have bothered to delve into the history of Nicolas Marin, who left his European wife and children to live with his mulatto (Euro and African) mistress, raising eight children with her.

And just today, looking up historical facts, I found out something fascinating. It turns out my father's ancestor Marin, born in Barcelona but German-speaking, and who emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine to America in the very early 1870's, was likely to be a Sephardic Jew, or at least of Jewish descent. A fact that amuses me, since my father converted himself and us to Judaism "because it made sense." I might never have learned that if I only looked at history through the eyes of a "Black" woman, rather than an American one...

Which is what I am. An American woman.

Sources:
Arthur A. Schomburg
Wiki on Arawaks
Wiki on the fall of Constantinople
Wiki on The Moors

Petersburg and the Atlantic World
Sephardim
William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians
The Melungeons
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann

The Threat of Race, David Theo Goldberg
SOMO-Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations
History of the Jewish Community in Alsace Lorraine

Animal Farm

...had a profound effect on me as a high school freshman.

My parents purposely took me out of the country in '67, after Malcolm X was shot. The intent was to go to Africa, but after spending time in France to learn French we ended up in Jamaica the winter of 68-69. There were many reasons to go to Jamaica rather than Africa, but a major reason we went to a tropical location was because I developed severe asthma. Where other people outgrow their asthma, I never outgrew mine.

I went to school there until I was 7, where I learned how to read, do basic math and some Jamaican history. After awhile, my father figured that the headmaster of the English-styled school was stressing me and it contributed to my attacks.

Without medication, an asthma attack can last a few days, and mine often did. It takes all your energy to breathe when you have asthma, and you can't really eat and breathe at the same time. Your body freaks out at the thought of yet another thing obstructing your airways and shuts down your appetite. I was a really skinny kid as a result.

After awhile,  my dad just took me out of school altogether, and he and my mom began a loose attempt at educating my sister and me. We learned American and European history. We learned to speak "RP", Received Pronunciation, how to read and write phonetic symbols, and how to write a short story.

We read a lot. We had no TV after awhile, and at the time there were only two radio stations in Jamaica... RJR and JBC, so when we weren't digging up nannybugs, making mudpies, playing the "Eric and Johnny Game" or taking care of the cats, we read. We looked forward to Poppy's trips to town... he'd stop by the library and bring us books to read, or he'd buy us some. My favorites were Enid Blyton's "Malory Towers" series, about English girls at boarding school. I tried to make a game out of it, but the idea of being without your family in a boarding school was a really foreign concept to me, so we stuck to "Eric and Johnny"... were the Professor was married to "Eric" and I to "Johnny", and we had children and nursed babies and ran a household and ran an organization that saved widows and orphans and helped peasants. Except for the saving of widows and orphans and the helping of peasants, the "Eric and Johnny Game" was fueled by real life. However, the widows and orphans and peasants aspect was fueled by our weekly readings of the Old Testament during Sabbath Service, and the communist books my Poppy often brought home.

When I had asthma I read a lot, because that was about all I could do. I couldn't sleep... it was uncomfortable laying down and the sound of wheezing in my head made me dream of screaming ladies. I couldn't play with my sister or the cats. Laughing made me cough which sent my lungs into spasm, and talking was too much work. I couldn't eat. So when I wasn't sitting quietly somewhere waiting for breathing to come easier, I read because it took my mind off my thoughts...and my mind raced during asthma because without reading there was nothing else to do.

Aside from Malory Towers, which was just mindcandy, two books I remember best are Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, and Yenan Seeds and Other Stories, "a collection of short stories... (that reflects... ) the Chinese people's new life of struggle since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from several angles."

Just for a moment, imagine being twelve years old, trapped in your own mind and reading things like:

The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society. 

 And...

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

Stuff like that has a profound effect on a twelve year old.

So then, because we were strangers in a strange land and we owed money to the landlord and he called immigration, we got deported from Jamaica, and I no longer had the luxury of endless reading, playing with cats and digging up nannybugs. I decided I wanted to go to school. Poppy was willing to keep us home and hidden, but I insisted.

I did well in 7th and 8th grade. Academically, I mean. Socially not so much... I was skinny and didn't wear flare legs or colored overalls and Pro-Keds,  my unpressed hair didn't stay in curls for more than an hour and I knew too much. Teachers loved me, kids teased me. Especially light-skinned wavy-haired Kay, who I realized later had a host of problems that had nothing to do with me. She lived in the rundown tenement across the street from I.S. 201 with her mother and several brothers and sisters. Her mother was a large, surprisingly dark woman. One day I got a glimpse of her dad... a white man who wore black rimmed glasses and came to visit sometime but didn't live there. She picked on me to deflect attention from her poverty and her bi-racialness. Back then, "white in Harlem" was DECIDEDLY uncool.

In 8th grade I had band, and started to play the saxophone. The breathing exercises I practiced to calm my asthma made my lungs pretty strong when they weren't spasming, and I was pretty good at sax. But then I discovered, by accident, that I could sing, and with that talent and very good grades (way better than most... I was the 8th grade Salutatory) I got into Music and Art for voice.

And that freshman year, we read George Orwell's Animal Farm.

It messed me up... because this was, apparently, the dark side of communism. At least that's how the teacher presented it. And it was the first time I was really forced to question things I had learned.

In January when I got evicted, in attempt to secure a "one-shot" deal, I applied for public assistance. I got PA briefly, but then I started to work, and after my first paycheck, welfare cut me off. I sent in the paperwork required to extend my Medicaid... I even made a note of the date: July 5th. The cut-off date was the 11th. And I'm guessing Medicaid didn't get my paperwork in time, so they cut me off on August 1.

It's a simple thing, going down there with my proof (I'm well under the income limit, living under my roommate's lease and on payroll for $250 gross a week) but God knows the thought of dealing with them just sends me into knots. And I'm afraid to do it online, because I know it won't get processed. I need to get over my dread and just do it, because I've now been without asthma medication since September. And for the first time in YEARS, I had a real attack last night. Asthma sucks. It forces me to double-think everything I'd like to do... like go get my hair done (cuz I made some extra money working with BigMan selling pictures the other night), or going down to an Occupy Wall Street meeting.

I've been paying attention to OWS. There are still things that disturb me about it... mostly to do with the lack of brown faces I see associated with it. And based on my own life and in talking to other brown faces, the lack of brown faces has mostly to do with a lack of time. Most brown faces feel that their daily struggle--which existed long before the struggle began lapping at toes of lighter-hued folk--takes up a lot of time. In particular, brown mothers of sons would rather spend their time administering to football leagues and school involvement, cooking, laundry and work than go down to OWS because the former collection of efforts is a tangible way to keep theirs sons from the hazards of poverty and racial profiling by the police. Whereas, OWS is more longterm and sort of not in the realm of immediate results. But mothers that I've talked to are interested and hopeful, but wish to hear more solid, tangible things they can do from home. Like close bank accounts. Or boycott Black Friday.

On a day like today, when I'm sitting here writing, waiting to see if my lungs will clear up so I can selfishly go get my hair done, I contemplate OWS and how it relates to brown faces, and my fear is that these brown faces will be late to the party.  And the party has everything to do with them. Without them, without actively acknowledging how this country came to to be, how brown faces and red faces were systematically brutalized and marginalized in the name of capitalism, I worry that this party is going to be just another "Animal Farm".

Yup, I know that's a leap... but my mind races when I have asthma.

It's Not The Truth Till The White Man Says It's So*...

...and other incoherent musings on what pisses me off about Occupy Wall Street...

*I'm paraphrasing my grandfather here, who's actual quote was "The Black Man won't believe it till the white man says it's so".

I've been wrestling with what to say for about a year now, long before this Occupation. And, for the most part, I'm happy that the REAL issues facing the everyday Joe and Jane are finally coming to light. My basic problem with it though, is that Lashonda, Raekwon, Javier and Milagros have been saying this same shit for a good couple of years now:

• we were laid off/fired
• unemployment ran out
• Medicaid doesn't cover us/won't cover what we need
• the rent is too damn high
• how come I can't afford shit even though I work HARD, and #NameThatBillionaire is actually MAKING money????

It was always expected in this country that there would be a lower class. It was always expected that this lower class consisted mostly of brown-skinned people, some the descendants of slaves but more recently random brownskinned folk from a multitude of third world countries. When shit FIRST started getting tight, it was very easy to blame it on the influx of immigrants "taking our jobs". The brownskinned people already living here were mostly dismissed, since {begin sarcasm} they are mostly to blame for their own poverty.  They don't have an interest in education, pop out babies so they can live high off the welfare hog, don't like to work, and are born criminals.{/endSarcasm} Let's call those people, for the purpose of this post, "the riffraff".

Putting aside all the factors that LED to the creation of the riffraff, the riffraff themselves have always known that the only hope out of this cycle was education, or sports. Oh, and maybe rap music. And most of them, despite popular stereotypes, work hard--harder than you can imagine--to get out. But when the economy first started to turn, they were the ones to get cut out first... the maintenance people, the blue collar worker, the union worker. And whatever little gains their families had made to escape the riffraff pool were lost. But their complaints were met with deaf ears. And what's worse... other brownskinned people slightly above the riffraff pool had all kinds of comments like:

• "You just need to get over yourself and get any piece of job. So what you have to work for minimum wage! Work in McDonalds! Clean floors!"
• "You're just lazy! You don't want to read, don't want to learn. You LIKE standing on street corners! Work harder!"

The problem with the former statement is that it's not really as simple as taking any old piece of job. It comes down to math, so let me illustrate in numbers:

On paper, you're a single mother of two living in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Off-paper, you do have a partner/most likely the father of both your kids but probably the father of one of your kids. He probably has a kid someplace else for which he's paying child support. Your rent is about $1200 but only because you've been living there a few years.

For the year, your...
Combined income before taxes is $78,000
After Taxes/deductions/child support it's more like $62,000.

Monthly, that's $5,166

These things are essential to daily living:
Rent:  -$14,400
You don't drive, need monthly metrocards to get to work ($104 per month per person): -  $2496
Con Ed (about $160 a month for light/gas, more in the summer if you have a few air conditioners)   -$1560
Cable/Internet/House phone (he watches sports/it  keeps the kids quiet. Note: Cablevision is significantly cheaper than TimeWarner in Manhattan) -$2160
Laundry (assuming you do it yourself in laundromat) - $600
Food (not eating out/cooking most meals/snacks for the kids) - $6,000
Your once-yearly clothes shopping for kids (even if they wear uniforms, they still need regular clothes. I'm estimating an average of $100 per month per family member... that's a lot but I'm being generous and bear in mind that kids shoes are expensive)   - $4,800
Your pet, 1 cat... litter, food, etc.  -$430
Household items (dish /laundry detergent, soap, shampoo, toothpaste - you spend an average of $160 a month at Target or Walmart) - $1,800
Medical co-pays/prescriptions (you live in the Bronx. They say your kids have asthma) -$600

That brings you to $34, 846 going out, and on paper, you're left with $27,154 for the year. And that looks good on paper, but in reality this is about $522 a week which is easily hemorrhaged by buying lunch, a few take out dinners, a trip to the beach or God forbid, a Yankee game. You take a vacation as a family once, go to the movies a few times, throw two birthday parties year, probably save a good amount for the kid's college tuition which is automatically deducted from your net income. It's also not taking into account ANY student loans you or your partner probably have, credit card debt (even if at this point it's manageable), the cellphone plan. And, you're a good parent so your kids have lessons of some sort... karate, basketball camp, football, music lessons. If your kids are under a certain age you pay a baby sitter. If you ARE lucky and do have a piece of a car, add insurance, gas, maintenance, car payments. If you live like this, you are by no means rich and probably wonder just where your money goes, but at least you have jobs.

Then one of you loses their job. Or maybe one of you was only part time to begin with because of the kids. Or you both lose your jobs. The absolute worst case is if one or both of you are a Creative/Artist.

The maximum amount of Unemployment you can get in NYC is $405 a week. If you're smart, you take taxes out of that unemployment unless you're sure at the end of  the year it won't cost you on your tax return. This would leave you with about $365 per check. If both of you collect unemployment, that's WAY less than what you're used to working with, but you can manage for a while. On paper it's $3240 a month. But remember... you no longer have health insurance. And you're not sure how long you will be unemployed. You go for foodstamps.

The maximum GROSS income a family of four can receive a month in order to qualify for foodstamps in New York City is $2238 (less than half of what you were bringing in when you both worked), so no foodstamps for you. You can probably get Medicaid, once your COBRA plan expires.

You cut all the extra stuff, maybe even pare down your cable bill. It's hard to renegotiate phone contracts despite what they tell you. You may get some relief from your student loans. Maybe ONE month from the credit card companies.

But your unemployment is prolonged, and the hundreds of applications you've applied for are met with silence. Not even a "I'm sorry but you don't qualify". You start to consider those minimum wage jobs, but get this... $7 an hour for 35 hours equals $245.... HALF of what you'll make on unemployment. So you ride it out. Because if you start to work at $7 an hour, and say you can't hack it or get fed up or something else happens and you leave that job, you can't re-instate your unemployment if you've been at the job less than a few weeks or made less than a certain amount of money. I know this, because I made that mistake...

More likely you'll find something part time at about $13 an hour. This could bring in about  $206 a week, after taxes. It's still less than unemployment, but if unemployment has run out you're damn grateful for $206. But certain expenses will remain the same... carfare for one. The cost of food. Rent. Cell phones... if you work and have kids in the city that need to travel by themselves you get to rely on having a cell.

Either unemployment runs out or you take a job paying less than what you're worth OR, you just have no income. You fall behind in the rent. Screw the credit card, eventually you just stop paying. Hey, now you can apply for Welfare. But the MINUTE you apply you get sucked into the Back-to-work program, better known as F.E.G.S. Welfare now requires you work 35 hours a week doing SOMETHING in order to get benefits. But you can't make over a certain amount of money... which is less than the Food Stamp guidelines. If you only work part time, say 20 hours a week, the other 30 hours you MUST spend at F.E.G.S unless you can document a reason you can't. F.E.G.S says there are jobs out there, they will find one for you... and sometimes they do. But again, the minute that job pays over a certain amount... byebye welfare. If F.E.G.S is unable to find you employment in your field... (and really... if YOU couldn't find a job in your field, how in the hell is F.E.G.S going to??) they put you to work in the welfare job center itself.  And if you happen to be a creative/artist/writer/musician and you think you can make money freelancing while looking for a job, guess what? F.E.G.S won't let you: in order to release you they need documented proof you're working, usually in the form of a paystub. But if you're freelance, you don't get paystubs. Think you can supply proof of payment? Sure! but you don't' get paid till you do the work, right? Right. And F.E.G.S won't release you to be home working without a paystub. Fuck it, you fume. I'll just stay home and work and supply the proof later. But if you don't come in with documented proof (in the form of a paystub) by the Friday of the week you were out, F.E.G.S tells welfare you are "FTC'd. "Failure To Comply". You get bumped off welfare INSTANTLY. Think you can just explain and be reinstated? Guess again. You have to apply for welfare ALL OVER AGAIN.

So fuck welfare. You'll do without it.

If you fall far enough behind in your rent, the landlord starts sending you notices. If you fall far enough behind in your credit card, they may sue you. Force you into a payment plan by threatening you with a judgement and ruining your credit. I have been sued both by Capitol One and by Chase... in the neighborhood of $5,000 combined. No, really.

Back to the landlord. He progresses from 30-day notices to 7-day notices to eviction notices. You try to get a "one-shot" deal from Human Resources (same office, by the way, as Food Stamps and Welfare, officially called TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). If your rent arrears are too high... they won't pay. If they feel your rent is too high (stick a pin in that thought), they won't pay. If they think you don't have the income to pay back the "one shot" (turns out this is a LOAN, not a GRANT), they won't pay. And, even if they offer you some money for you rent arrears, the landlord can always say "no--I want it all". Mine did.

That rent thing... remember Welfare has an idea of what rent SHOULD be, and how much they will pay. And that amount is $900 for a family of two (not sure what it is for the imaginary family of four, but it's not much more than $900). So if you find an apartment, the lease needs to say $900. If it says more, then you have to explain to them how you intend to pay the rest of it. And this is where that partner thing gets dangerous... if you list that you  have a partner, then HIS income needs to be included. And if his income combined with yours is more than the guidelines, byebye welfare, byebye one-shot. Instant case closed. Average rent in Harlem these days--still the cheapest average rent in Manhattan--is $1460. For a studio. That forces you to look in really scary neighborhoods for a rent you can afford/welfare will pay for.

And by the way... between the lapsed student loans, the defaulted credit card debt, the eviction or utility shut off, your credit is WRECKED.

Bye-bye job opportunities.

Many employers now run a credit check as part of their decision to hire you. If you worked in payroll or accounting you are FUCKED. And if you're in your thirties or forties, employers bet you can't really work for peanuts because you have kids and a household to maintain... so they give that job to the younger person who presumably has no ties. Yes, that's illegal. But look around you... who amongst you is mostly employed, and who isn't?

OK, so back to the Occupy Wall Street. I did say this was incoherent, right? While Ray, Shawnie, Millie and Javi have been pressed through the spin cycle the last few years, Joe and Jane have suddenly realized they are in the same spin as the riffraff. They are scared for their future. They decide to sit in Zuccotti park, which by the way, is a public space but is privately owned. They are mostly white, mostly young. The police are used to doing what they do... getting these people off this public but privately owned land because the person who owns that land called the police and asked for these people to be removed. But the Occupiers are young and white, and that dumb-ass Bologna got caught pepperspraying white girls, and it makes the news.

I have friends who are police officers. One or two of them I love as people, and I understand that they are used to seeing the worst of human beings on a daily basis, and this makes them jaded. I also understand that people are assholes and like to fuck with cops. Actually let me correct myself: white people like to fuck with cops because any brown-skinned person knows that fucking with the cops is like playing Russian Roulette. It could end badly.

My high regard for the individual officer aside, as a whole, I am no fan of the police force in general. I have seen them jack up fare jumpers on the subway. They arrest black men for bullshit like walking between subway cars. And I'm sorry the Occupiers have a taste of what it's like to be black, but I am now extremely annoyed that four white girls getting pepper-sprayed causes a major stir but the police who arrested "Skyyvokka" for handing money to a crackhead who was panhandling outside a club one night, after chasing down the cab he jumped into, hauling the kid out, arresting him, taking him downtown, cavity-searching him and then releasing him because no drugs were found and he is neither a drug abuser or a dealer... THOSE cops will never be corrected. That shit never makes the news.

The second thing that annoys me is the focus of the protest. "Wall Street" isn't the problem. Yes, companies like Chase and Capitol One and the infamous Goldman Sachs are running roughshod and barebacked over us. (To sue unemployed me in Bronx Supreme Court for a total of $5K... really???? And yet you got bailed out?) But they are only partially to blame. There will always be a small percentage of the world having most of the money. It's the object of the game to be part of that 1%. And they are so far up the food chain, that 1%, it really doesn't affect us. But it's the fukkers just below that who have fukked us over. In my opinion, the corporations choking the life out of  Ray and Shawnie, Millie and Javi and now Jane and John are non-publicly traded, privately owned corporations like these,

--or the giant real estate conglomerates that have jacked up rent in New York so badly that you normal people really cannot afford to live here.

--or the giant drug companies that have so fucked up the health care system that our sickest people go without medicine. I have a theory that there is a deal going on between Medicaid and the asthma medication makers. Whole tracts of the Bronx are asthma zones. Medicaid will pay for a $300 a month prescription for Advair. But it won't approve or pay for a monthly prescription of Nasonex ($130) which controls the allergies that trigger some asthma.

--or the hedge fund industry who bet against the American economy (that's how it was explained to me when I worked at one, anyhow). Reading the linked article, please note that many of these companies are supposedly "Headquartered" in Europe. But their owners actually live in Connecticut. Or Long Island. Those companies exist legally outside the U.S. for the benefit of the SEC, but trust me... those bastards live and work here.

--or those small, unnoticed companies that masquerade as arms of the government, like F.E.G.S. which has somehow have hooked up the NYC Human Resources Administration but is intermittently listed as "not for profit" or "privately owned."

So I get that people are frustrated and want to shake the system up. Maybe sitting in the park or blocking off the Brooklyn Bridge might do that, but I seriously doubt it. And the various unions signing on doesn't impress me. Because unions only protect their own as long as their own are employed and paying dues. The signing of songs and dancing of dances and sharing of food doesn't impress me... nobody is singing and dancing on the Food Stamp application line up in the Bronx... you can't even eat in those offices while you wait all damn day, let alone share some food. And no, the people standing in line won't risk losing their benefits to come down and sit in the park with you. That line to apply/ask a question/get a damn application is so long that it takes you all day--the line is literally halfway down the block, and snaked through various corridors once you get inside the building just to check in to "reception"--and if that day you took to stand on line has already cost you a day of work and you're doing this on your day off... naaah...they're not coming down.

Screaming that Wall Street needs to be regulated probably won't get the government to regulate Wall Street. First of all, the government is owned by the drug companies and the oil companies, and is being influenced by the hedge fund people. Scream enough and they may throw you a bone, like a Black president for example, but we all know how that worked out...

America needs a "movement". We need something to inspire us, since our Black President, the poor bastard, let us down (the one thing I will take away from watching them beat down Obama is that it doesn't pay to be ethical in America. To play "nice" is to be "weak". Ironic, isn't it?).

And just as a last irony... as I finally finish this random and incoherent vent, I learn that Steve Jobs has died. Certainly a brilliant man. Changed computing forever. A man with a vision...

... who almost single-handedly destroyed the music industry with iTunes which in turn decimated the graphic designer's dream job of designing memorable CD covers...
...who created a system of computers that are mostly incompatible with anything but Apple/putting a serious dent in the creation of other technology...
...who has addicted an ENTIRE generation of people to instant gratification in the palms of their hands...

...so it's kind of ironic to see these kids protesting corporate giants while Tweeting and Facebooking and uploading videos of every minute of this demonstration on their iPhones...

Again... Required reading
The Manhattan Rental Market Report, Sept. 2011
The Largest Private Companies - Forbes 2006 
Hedge Funds' Bets Pay Off - WSJ

Remember September...

I'd said I wasn't going to do this, and here I am adding to the rehash.

But I realized, looking over this blog, I don't think I ever really wrote about 9/11. Not in depth. And I also realized that as many pictures as I have taken in my life... easily in the 50,000 range, I took no pictures that day. Not one. And I could see the smoke across the bay from City Island... I even went down to Ground Zero that October, and I never took a picture.

Part of it, I think, is because I used to work there. I had only left my job at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (as it was known then) about a year before because a former co-worker and friend called me to work for him at one of the last "dot.coms." He said the new gig was "family friendly." My Sun was just about a year old, and my relationship with his dad was--and always had been--tumultuous so there was a lot I was doing on my own.  I joined my friend's company because commuting to midtown would be easier and because I could work 10a-6p, which made it easier to pack my young baby up, get him to my mom's and still get to work on time. Turns out, not only was the company NOT family-friendly, it was about to take a nosedive and they canned me in less than a year, my friend shortly thereafter. After 9/11 he called me to say how horrible he had felt about convincing me to leave a great job at a great company, but I told him, he probably saved my life. It's highly likely I wouldn't have left Morgan Stanley otherwise.

I ended up at a company that did the back-office work for independent hedge fund investors, making a shitload of cash for someone with no college degree. But I couldn't hack that place... I got myself into all kinds of shit and walked out on the job on August 8, 2001.

I got a good severance package. They wanted to keep me quiet. I had been having an affair with my married boss and when I ended it, trying to work shit out--yet again--with the Sun's dad, my boss made my life a living hell. I really had no intention of suing him or the job for sexual harassment, though I surely could have. It was textbook harassment. But at the time I was really scared of the Sun's dad. I was more afraid of what he would do to me than I was mad about the job situation--and plus I'd brought it on myself. When I fuck up, I fuck up good, but I own my fuck-ups. I think my boss didn't want me to make a stink cuz it turned out he'd had some trouble someplace else, and gave me full pay for the next few months, plus my health care plan for 6 months. It was a sweet deal. And for the first time, at age 39 I decided that I was finally going to follow the family business, my inescapable destiny... and my heart's calling, to be a creative. I applied to Pratt Institute and to SVA for graphic design, but in order to support my application I enrolled myself in a drawing class at SVA.

By this time, my beautiful little boy was two and a half. We had just weaned. The day I quit the hedge fund I'd gone to my mom's to pick him up. I wore a long, yellow poloshirt dress. I normally only nursed him at night now, but because I was in a state that day and he was surprised to see me, he insisted on "boobie, please." I hiked up my dress up and nursed him, talking to my mom about why I'd quit. It turned out that was the last time I nursed him. I was still on my "mom's list"... an email list of about 100-150 women who had supported me through nursing, pumping milk at work, weaning and various other issues.

The morning of September 11, I had planned to go downtown with Bigbear and my Sun to Pearl Paint and buy stuff for the drawing class. But I woke up a little later than I had intended. I looked out my kitchen window. Ten years later I can still remember the legendary crisp blue sky. Nary a cloud. I began to have second thoughts about going downtown, because it was too nice a day. Sipping on my giant mug of Bustelo, I picked up the phone to call Bigbear and tell her I'd changed my mind. I flipped on the "Today" show to see what the weather would be like for the next few days so I could make a plan, and saw the World Trade Center on the screen.

One of the towers was on fire.

When I first started at MSDW, my department was located on the 70th floor. The company occupied twenty-three floors in 2WTC, starting on 59 through 74. I'm pretty sure the cafeteria was on 44, one flight below the 45th floor "sky lobby". There was one floor that wasn't really a floor. One of our engineers explained to me how it was really a large air vent system, designed to bring fresh air up into the higher floors. Each floor was constructed as a square within a square... all the elevators and staircases were in the center square, and usually whatever secretaries or assistants there were tended to have their cubes around the outside of the square. The offices were along the outside square, so that pretty much every office had a window. Every floor had it's own server room.

Every morning I would ride the huge elevators up to the 45th floor skylobby, and then take another elevator up to 70. I was single, I wasn't really dating yet after a bad break up, and I had nothing to do but work. I would get there about 8:30, make my rounds to the floors I serviced to switch out back up tapes and about 9:30, right before the cafeteria closed, my co-worker and I (the only two girls in the department) would sneak down and have breakfast. We'd do more rounds, then go to lunch. Sometimes we'd go hide out and chat in the server rooms, or take turns running down to the concourse level and go shopping.

I often worked late. In the winter when it got dark early, I would sometimes stand in the floor-to-ceiling windows, press myself against the glass and look straight down. It would feel like floating. I met my Sun's dad and got pregnant, and my Sun was born in March of '99. I took Family Medical Leave so I could be with my baby for three months, but when I came back that June, my department welcomed me back. My boss would let me bring my little boy with me to work on Fridays that summer, and SD would wait for us on West Street and drive us home.

Every three months we had fire drills. When I first got there, my co-worker was the female searcher. It was her job to search all the women's bathrooms in case of a fire. When she got married and left, I gladly took her place. We took those fire drills seriously at MSDW, and we all knew Rick Rescorla because he usually led the drills himself, and there was usually a fireman with him.

One day during a drill, we had a new-ish employee. Rick was explaining how fire and smoke travel upward, so if a fire broke out on our floor, 70, or above, we should immediately get to our designated staircase and travel downward. If the fire was below us, we should try to travel down, but if that were not possible, go up two floors. "If we're on a really high floor, would we be able to get to the roof" the new guy asked? I remember Rick saying that the roof was usually locked, so it was better to travel downward since the smoke and fire would still try to go upwards. "But what if we can't get past the fire?" the new guy insisted.

The fireman with Rick said "Don't worry, we'll get you out".

That morning, watching the burning tower on TV, I wondered if Rick and the fireman would be able to get those people out. It looked really high up. I called my mom. I told her that given the fire, we DEFINITELY shouldn't go downtown. It was too nice a day anyhow, and I still wasn't dressed. I hung up, still watching the Today show, Katy and Matt discussing the terrible accident of a plane and a building.

The woman they were talking to screamed that the other building exploded and the cameras panned away from the top of the first building to the second one, where a fireball was mushrooming. And I think everyone in NY realized at that moment that this was no accident. That we were at war.

At 9:20, I posted to my mom's group:

OH MY GOD
The Word Trade Center.... A year and a half ago, I was in one of
those buildings.... on the 59th floor. 2 years ago I was on the 70th
Floor.

They got both of them. I was watching TV and SAW the second one
explode.

I still know people there!

Oh, I pray for them....

Our usual mommy chatter about new pregnancies, night-weaning and Sesame Street software dwindled and was replaced with the various reports coming in, checking on each other and husbands who may have worked in the city.

At 9:57a I posted:

We're in some deep shit. 'Scuse the french. Somebody also just
bombed the pentagon.

Oh my God.

After that, the day became a blur. The towers fell. Son's Dad, who worked at Verizon came over to check on us. He was crying. And I realized that day that our relationship was pretty much doomed, because his tears didn't move me. I spent the day trying to shield my boy from the images on the TV, checking reports, trying to fathom what my world was becoming. I worried about my ex-coworkers. I wondered if all those drills had done us good... and it turns out they had. I tried to tune out the recurring mental image of seeing a plane come through those windows, skidding through the center core and exploding out the other side.

The world outside became eerily quiet, as the airplane traffic I normally heard coming in to land at nearby LaGuardia was grounded. And then the crazy roar of fighter jets. In the afternoon, I walked down to the beach with a friend, my crazy-haired baby walking beside us, still bright, still happy. I looked down at him, wondering what his world would be like, if war would touch him. There were two Mexican day-laborers sitting on the tiny pier; they had been there all morning. In Spanish, they told my friend they had seen the towers collapse, had felt the ground rumble all the way across the water.

My sister drove down to get her children; the Diva from High School in Times Square, MoodMagic Barbie from her elementary in East Harlem. Poppy was working at the college in Westchester. And all the bridges back into the city were closed, all the trains stopped. So SD and I drove up to get him. No one was on the road. Everyone's car was parked, everyone was home. No one but us was on the road...

The smoke billowed for weeks, every day just as grey and puffy as the day before. It became clear that there were no injured, no bodies. People just didn't come home; my mom's neighbor Chantal Vincelli, another friend of a friend. I combed the lists of the missing to see if any of my former co-workers were on it, but I didn't see any. I heard they all got out. Except for Rick.

A few weeks later, I started my class at SVA. I hadn't been downtown since the towers fell, and I took the F train to 23rd street. When I came out of the subway, there were fliers papering the station: MISSING. HAVE YOU SEEN HER? LAST SEEN.... when I came out of the station, there were more fliers, littering the streets, riding the gutters, papering the walls. Hundreds of them.

In October, I took the train to Chambers, my old stop. As soon as the doors opened I smelled that smell... of death and fire and sadness. I walked my old route, the empty sky overpowering me. Everything was blocked off, so I cut down a side street and from afar I could see the jagged remains, like some huge skeleton, and mountains of rubble.

So that's my 9/11 story. Every year, even though I don't normally write much about it, I think of my old co workers and wonder if they ever recovered. I think of my friend's friend Joyce, of Meggie's brother, of Chantal. I try not to succumb to the media hype and the replays, I try not to search out the pictures anymore. One day, maybe I'll post the pictures I took of my cube and my view out the 70th floor windows, and the lobby.

And the image above...  I may "retire" it after this year, but I'm not sure. I've never trashed a file before. There aren't many physical copies around. I created this image a few years after 9/11, when I was a student at Pratt Institute. The first print I matted and framed, and took it to the 49th precinct in the Bronx and gave it to them. The officer at the desk looked at me a little blankly. I often wonder what happened to that print, if they still have it, if they know that it meant something to me to give it to them.
I sold another print to a good friend and fabulous supporter, and one year I made magnets out of the image and sold them at a craft fair, donating half the proceeds to AmeriCares.

I thought to revamp the image this year, but it didn't work out. I guess it wasn't meant to.

I still have four that I printed and signed last year, but I think that's it. I think I won't print them anymore.

It's not that I think we shouldn't commemorate 9/11... I think we should always pause to remember. But I think that for those of us who didn't suffer a direct loss, we should step back and allow those that did to live... to grieve, to recover.

And I think that for the rest of us, we should use this day to remind ourselves that America is SUPPOSED to be tolerant of other religions and beliefs. We say we are, but we're not. In the years that followed that terrible day, the persecution and profiling of our Muslim Americans disgust me. Our treatment of immigrants, legal or no, has gotten worse. If we give in to the hate that was visited on us that day, we are no better than those that wish our annihilation.

Except for Bin Laden. For the record... Obama gets big props from me, for getting Bin Laden. He got his just desserts.

I Miss Writing

...lately I miss it a lot. I poke around blogworld and it's interesting to see who writes, still. Most people, including me, like the interaction of FB or the shortness of Twitter. I haven't gotten into Twitter..... I think the people worth following are witty and I'm not that witty. I can be funny, but I'm not witty. I do have a "Tumblr". It took me a long while to get to Tumblr. But what I like about it is it's much easier to upload photos t it. And that's what I've been doing a lot of lately... cellphone snaps that I post to Tumblr.

But I miss organizing my thoughts and writing them out. It's just that by the time I get around to writing now, I'm exhausted.  And the mornings have not settled "in" yet, now that school is back in session. But I need to get back.

Have I got stories...

Dangit...

...I wanted to start writing every day again, but that has proved unwieldy. We're still settling. Worse, my roommate still isn't in the place, a fact that was really upsetting me until I decided to look at it like this: I'm being paid $2250 a month to help someone sort through 15 years of boxes, and relocate to a smaller place. When I look at it like that, I don't feel so bad, cuz really, sorting through 15 years of somebody else's boxes is no easy feat. It involves TONS of patience, some therapy, a lot of dust and some heavy lifting. Oh, and logistics coordinating. Plus, I make sure she eats properly.

I LOVE where I am now. The apartment is cosmetically beautiful, though what lies beneath can be some very old yuckiness... bad bad wiring, silverfish, giant roaches in the basement. But our place is clean and bright and filled with varnished wood. And the location... wow. I couldn't have landed in a better place... a few blocks from my family, 10 blocks away from my old High School, a few minutes from work. What used to take me an hour and a half on a good day, takes me maybe 15 minutes. ANYWHERE. My Sun goes to school by himself. We can walk to more than one friends house.

And while the Rock was beautiful and peaceful and the entire length of it could be walked in a half hour and I do miss the sea... it was a mile-and-a-half of pretty much the same neighborhood, the same people. Where as, walk a mile and a half in any direction from my new Zero... and the landscape and architecture changes drastically.

So... I still have no money. I have a part time job, though. Framing rich people's artwork and odd collections and the occasional family photo. But mostly rich people's artwork. Yesterday a signed Ralph Steadman came through to be reattatched. WOW. Serious coolness. And last week we had a Shepard Fairey. And some kick-ass Pearl Jam posters, limited silkscreens. But I have no money. By the time I pay for my storage unit, various small bills, the phone, maybe a cheap shirt, I'm dumb broke again. I have been battling with public assistance and they won. Though at one point they did throw my some money which I bought a TV with. And between working for roommate and my framing job, there is little to no time for my own shit. I'm starting to feel it. Taking cellphone snaps helps a little... but I look at some of the art and photos that come through to be framed and think shit... I'm at LEAST as talented as this... and MORE talented than THAT and shit if I had the time I could be as talented as THAT.

But....

All things in due time, I guess. I can't complain. I spent so long fighting so hard to hold on to the Rock and my place there, that I am continually amazed that letting go turned out to be infinitely better.

Well... gotta dig up $5 from who knows where to put on the laundry card so I can dry my clothes...

The Bitch

is back in town.

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Red Hook, BK

...is way too trendy for my taste but it sure looks cool...

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Upper West Side

...is about as strange and "small town" as the Rock I am leaving...

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I Will Miss This

...when I go...

...the Rock has been good living the last 15 years, but it's time to go. It was a great place for a small boy but it's not such a great place for older boys. Boredom and isolation tends to breed random acts of stupidity, and I hope that the Sun will have better access to things by being closer to them.

I will miss small town living, sea breezes and beaches within walking distance...

I'm a little verklempt.

But I can't wait to be gone.

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Seeing

...ordinary things in a different way.

...the ceiling of the subway station at 96th street...

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Male/Female

...sitting on a subway train. Notice how much room the man takes up...

An every day thing, and a most annoying fact of subway life.

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