A mischievous, but civic minded co-worker organized several boxes of marshmallow peeps to model good Census practices. The picture is a little blurry and doesn’t fully capture the explosion of peeps all over the coffee maker and shelves, but the sign reads:
April 1st is Census Day! Return your form and be counted.
__ number of peeps in the household
Ethnicity: bird and rabbit
Race: Pink, Yellow, Green

Hey, I’m easily amused…

Since The Monkey does arrive on April 1st, I had no qualms about declaring an “unmarried partner” as “Person 2″ on my Census response. That said, it’s wick-wack that being counted as a queer person is intrinsically tied to my “marriage/partnership.”. Hi, being Queer is about recognizing a broader non-heteronormative community. Really.

Which all reminded me that 10 years ago, I contemplated (and honestly, I don’t remember what I decided to do…), registering Tamu as my non-married partner to mitigate the under-counting of queers.

Thanks to Grace and Joy, parol lantern making has become a new holiday tradition. These two sisters are the artistic, bamboo kit assembling, scrap cloth, decoupage and stay up all night force behind the Gabriela Network’s entry into the 2009 Parol Lantern Festival. The last several years, the filipino senior center with their chain link, floral cut recycled aluminum can parols have impressed, but this year Gabnet is going for gold. Step aside, seniors!

Parol making with this crew means learning about Filipino women’s movements and leaders. It’s also time to catch up with old friends and get my creative on with a refreshing glass of Grace’s kalimansi mimosa…great way to support solidarity efforts!

This year the parade theme, Light the Way and Be Counted, aims to raise awareness of the Census. So Gabnet lanterns will feature images from under-counted groups: immigrants, migrant workers, undocumented residents, complex households, homeless individuals, people of color and LGBT people.

I’m not a crafty holiday elf–or any sort of small craft creature unless it involves making model cars from Tamiya kits. But I can use google. So I spent the evening searching for images of these under-counted communities to paste on the parols.

Click the image for pictures from the 2007 production process and presentation. The Big Gay Star was the piece de resistance!

Parol lantern festival and parade: who,what, when, where
PAROL LANTERN FESTIVAL and PARADE
Saturday, December 12, 2009, 3PM to 8PM

3PM to 6PM: Parol Festival games and demonstrations in Jessie Square
6PM to 8PM: Parol Lantern Parade and Performances (Yerba Buena Lane to Jessie Square)

The game was made even better by the American Indian Movement schooling Cleveland on the wackness of having an Indian mascot. They had a two-sided, single-spaced flyer that patiently walked the reader through the finer points of why this is Not So Nice. That’s very kind of AIM. My version of the flyer would be much shorter. It would read: Mascots are team pets. People are not pets. Conversation over.

The following are bits from the Western Center on Law and Poverty (WCLP) and the California Budget Project (CBP). Both will most likely have updates on the final version soon. Click on quotes to get to the full link.

This is the first time that CalWorks grants for children are being cut. As the WCLP says:

Grants will be reduced by 25% from a maximum of $566 a month for two children down to $420 a month if the parent can not comply with federal work requirements.

Only good news is that these changes will not go into effect until 2011.

Here’s more on CalWorks from the California Budget Project. the full report also outline cuts to In-Home Supportive Services, Healthy Families, Medi-Cal and SSI/SSP.

California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) Program
The budget agreement makes several significant policy changes to the CalWORKs Program that are
scheduled to take effect in 2011. Specifically, the budget agreement:
• Limits adults to 48 cumulative months of cash assistance in any 60-month period. Adults may
return to aid one year after reaching the initial 48-month limit. This change does not appear to
affect the children’s portion of the grant during the period in which the adult loses aid.
• Requires counties to conduct a “self-sufficiency review” every six months with CalWORKs adults
who do not participate in welfare-to-work activities for sufficient hours. Adults who fail to attend
this meeting without good cause would have their cash assistance payment cut by 50 percent.
• Cuts, by up to 50 percent, grants for children in households in which:
–An adult has been sanctioned, with the size of the cut dependent on how long the adult does
not comply with CalWORKs rules.
• Reduces, by 10 percent, rates for substance abuse treatment services for individuals who are
Cal for savings of $8.8 million in 2009-10.
• Increases, by 10 percent, the application and annual fees paid by community care centers, for
revenues of $2.1 million to offset General Fund spending.
• Requires certain families for whom the state collects at least $500 in child support to pay a $25
October 1, 2010. Only families that have never received CalWORKs cash assistance would be
fee, which is mandated by the federal government and is currently being paid by the state.

After a lawyerly recitation of the facts and a irony laden funny about the prospect of being shot while trying to jimmy the lock to his (white) house, Obama states, “Cambridge police acted stupidly…in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”

I appreciate that he points to studies that establish racial profiling happens and his support for anti-racial profiling legislation. Something about learning that the POTUS would be on the same side of this debate if this were to unfold in let’s say in criminal procedure class in law school or in an online comment thread to a youtube video (yes, often those two forums are of similar intellectual caliber) is dare I use that terrible word…empowering. Ha ha! The President is on My Team! I win!

I’m left to resort to trite terms and not so fresh observations because it kind of feels like the first time I’ve felt this way about the White House/President.

Something about succumbing to trite terms calls for more laziness so to use another uncreative and too loosely defined word–leaderhsip. Having someone in power setting the tone for a debate (facts, legislation, funnies and personal experience) and being clear where he stands on a controversial topic makes it easier for the rest of us. Or something like that.

It’s all deep, moving, inspirational, empowering, leadership-y. Really.

I thought the whole idea that America was post-racial and post-black was laughable from the beginning. There is no more important event in the history of black people in America than the election of Barack Obama. I cried when he was elected, and I cried at his inauguration, but that does not change the percentage of black men in prison, the percentage of black men harassed by racial profiling. It does not change the number of black children living near the poverty line. Which is almost a similar percentage as were under poverty when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Sonia Sotomayor confirmation circus and now this. In an interview over at The Root, Prof. Gates talks about being arrested on his front porch by the Cambridge Police. The incident generated the predictable reactions of “Oh, stop over-reacting and crying racism! Really, this is no Rodney King. It’s not like the cop called him a N-#$#. And he was asking for it when he antagonized the police officer when he asked for his name and badge number. I mean, professor-man wasn’t even tazered or anything.” Reading the comments section on most sites raises my blood pressure by 50 and drops my my IQ by the same.

The productive inquiry is not “was Prof. Gates or another person of color subject to explicit and outrageous racist name calling or the victim of an ‘officer involved shooting’?” Rather, we should ponder how and why race is deemed a non-issue for similarly credentialed and privileged white men because this silent assumption of white neutrality precludes all meaningful dialogue about how race functions in our public and private institutions, professional and most personal interactions. Just how many white tenured Harvard faculty have been subject to arrest on their front porch?

The fascinating thing about this interview is how Prof. Gates comes across (intentional or not) as exceptionally privileged, yet singularly black vis-a-vis interactions with law enforcement. Gates has a “regular” car service/driverfrom Newark, NJ to Cambridge. That’s at least a 5 hr drive and this is no regular car service, but one where the drivers wears blazers and slacks. The professor was returning from a PBS shoot in Beijing where he and his daughter spent a “glorious” time being tourists. It’s a stretch to envision an a similarly privileged white man and a white police officer escalating to the point where the suspected perpetrator demands the officer’s badge number.

Gates also sounds genuinely taken aback by the fingerprinting, mug shots, search of personal possessions–the daily indignities inflicted upon anyone arrested in the U.S. (the disproportionate number are of course, African American men.).

The system attempts to humiliate you. They took my belt; they took my wallet, they took my keys, some change; they counted my money. And I knew that because they said, ‘We’re going to release you upon your own recognizance, and the fine is $40, and we know you can pay it because we went through your wallet.’

It’s meant to be terrifying and humiliating. And I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me. And I said I can’t wait to get out, I am eager to talk to my lawyer, and they said they had to book me first. Then I was told that Charles Ogletree was in the building, and that he was there with three other Harvard professors—my friends Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Larry Bobo and Marcelina Lee Morgan.

If only all wrongly arrested individuals could have Charles Ogletree as counsel! Although, I have to say without a doubt my jailhouse phone call would be to Al-b. Anyhow, Gates then likens sitting in his cell with the company of his Harvard law professors to a “a Senate filibuster; we had to tell stories in the prison cell.” Really? My point of reference would be more mundane, but I’m not a globe-trotting, Martha’s Vineyard vacationing, eminent Harvard professor.

Would a white man occupying the same station in life be arrested for the same behavior? Methinks not. As Prof. Gates said,

There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And as Elie Mystal writes:

I’m thrilled to live in an America where we can have a black president. I just hope he never gets locked out of the White House.

I downloaded the Prop 8 decision and skipped to Carlos Moreno’s lonely and eloquent dissenting opinion. It carefully lays out his legal argument for why a proposition that requires discriminating against a group based on a suspect classification is indeed a revision of the state constitution. But for this blog entry, I’ll spare you a re-cap of the analysis surrounding the distinction between a revision and amendment and share with you a selection of the grand statements that will ground me as I wade through the majority opinion. If you want to read the actual legal arguments—of which there are 185 pages worth, go here.

Justice Moreno’s name was briefly floated as a possibility for the Supreme Court and I wonder how this opinion would have played out in confirmation hearings. Guess we’ll never know.

Justice Carlos Moreno:

“The rule the majority crafts today not only allows same-sex couples to be stripped of the right to marry that this court recognized in the Marriage Cases, it places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens the status of our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority. I therefore dissent…

Describing the effect of Proposition 8 as narrow and limited fails to acknowledge the significance of the discrimination it requires. But even a narrow and limited exception to the promise of full equality strikes at the core of, and thus fundamentally alters, the guarantee of equal treatment that has pervaded the California Constitution since 1849. Promising equal treatment to some is fundamentally different from promising equal treatment to all. Promising treatment that is almost equal is fundamentally different from ensuring truly equal treatment. Granting a disfavored minority only some of the rights enjoyed by the majority is fundamentally different from recognizing, as a constitutional imperative, that they must be granted all of those rights. Granting same-sex couples all of the rights enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, except the right to call their “ ‘officially recognized, and protected family relationship’ ” (maj. opn., ante, at p. 7) a marriage, still denies them equal treatment…

I realize, of course, that the right of gays and lesbians to marry in this state has only lately been recognized. But that belated recognition does not make the protection of those rights less important. Rather, that the right has only recently been acknowledged reflects an age old prejudice (Marriage Cases, supra, 43 Cal.4th at pp. 821-822, 846, 853) that makes the safeguarding of that right by the judiciary all the more critical…

Proposition 8 represents an unprecedented instance of a majority of voters altering the meaning of the equal protection clause by modifying the California Constitution to require deprivation of a fundamental right on the basis of a suspect classification. The majority’s holding is not just a defeat for same-sex couples, but for any minority group that seeks the protection of the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.”