More on Anger, and why Catharsis Doesn't Work

I've been thinking about this topic on and off all week, and how to respond to this argument of support for the hydraulic theory of anger (though the comment supports the theory as description, not prescription, and that's an important difference)

Ultimately, there can be many different reasons to explain the mechanism of the same pattern - in this case, the anger-release-calm, anger-release-calm pattern.

The cycle starts off when something in the world doesn't go our way. The world intrudes into the boundary of the self. Maybe we feel physically threatened. Or we feel a loss of control. Or we just feel really small all of a sudden. We then respond to the world by attempting to shore up and strengthen the boundaries of the self. These responses can have positive, neutral or negative outcomes for ourselves and for other people.

Driving in Atlanta traffic presents numerous opportunities to understand anger. Let's say I'm on my way to work, and I've managed to achieve an emotional equilibrium within my immediate environment. I'm listening to some rocking music. I haven't hit too many red lights. I'm on time. I'm in a rhythm. Things are going right with the world. Then someone cuts me off and comes dangerously close to hitting my car.

My first, split-second reaction is visceral. I doubt a cat or a dog or a monkey would react differently. There must be a short release of adrenaline, my heart rate goes up, my brain goes into overdrive, and the fight-or-flight response kicks in.

However, since I've been socialized extensively on how to react in these situations, as are most drivers, this reaction doesn't last long. I don't drive off the road or try to kill the person who cut me off. I assess the situation realistically. My heart rate goes back to normal only a couple seconds later. I realize my muscles are tense, so I relax them; I'm holding my breath, so I let it out, perhaps saying a few four-letter words at the same time.

Within a few seconds, I start having a second reaction. This is a much more emotional reaction than visceral. My boundaries of self come into play. I'm not just a bundle of nerves anymore, I'm a human being, and I've been insulted by whatever other human being was driving that other car. They've invaded my space. The world is suddenly out of equilibrium. I imagine their thoughtlessness, their lack of care; I imagine them imagining me, or not imagining me. I imagine that the world has a sense of justice, and now I've experienced the world's injustice. They don't care about me, and I care about the fact that they don't care about me. It's not right for a person to act that way. I wish I could reach out and make them know that. Make them. My control was taken away. I want to reassert control. At this stage, a whole chain of thoughts and imaginings are running around in my head. I'm angry.

Then a few more seconds and I'm over the second stage. I'm on my way to recovering equilibrium. That chain of thoughts runs out, it's not attached to anything... it slips out of my head. I'm not angry anymore.

I don't have a road rage problem, so if you were driving with me in the passenger side, you wouldn't know any of this was going on. The only outward signs would be a short cursing spell and a slight tightening of hands on the wheel. At absolute worst, I'd bang my fist lightly on the steering wheel. I don't know exactly why I curse and steering-wheel bang, but if I had to guess, it's because I've been socialized into that reaction by hearing and seeing so many other people do the same thing.

I called visceral reactions the first stage, and emotional reactions the second stage, but in most other situations, it's not that clear-cut. The second can come first. Or they can feed into each other and go back and forth. That's how we start to see these anger cycles.

Here's an example of the second stage going first. The next morning after the 2004 election was a rough one for me. I'd worked on the Kerry campaign. I was terrified of what George W. Bush would do to this country. The morning we lost, I definitely felt like the world was not only invading my boundaries of self, but burning them down with a blowtorch and then laughing at them. I was powerless, pathetic, depressed, fearful and hopeless. I went out for a smoke break (I quit that year, actually). Another coworker on his smoke break said "Looks like Bush won. I didn't even like him that much, so I'm not happy about it. But I've always voted Republican and I always will, that's just what we do in my family."

I was suddenly very angry. My sense of being under attack by the world was based on social, political and emotional factors, but all those complicated factors had just crystallized into the presence of a human being standing next to me. I had a friendly relationship with this guy, I already knew his stupid political views, and we always had nice conversations, because we never discussed politics. But all this social context was unimaginable in that split second. I was having a visceral reaction: ENEMY ATTACK FIGHT HURT.

My reaction was to turn my face, grit my teeth, walk a few steps away and sigh. The feeling passed. My heart rate returned to normal. I got over it.

I don't want to get pinned down to any one psychological or philosophical theory about the boundaries of self. They're very flexible. You often feel like your self is interwoven with your family and loved ones, your community, even the world itself. In general, I find that it's a useful way to think about issues involving control and anger.

As a teenager I engaged in several violent situations -- basically, short fistfights -- where I became trapped in one of the stages, and it turned into aggression. It's easier to talk about the two extremely mild examples above, because to dissect my emotions at their most violent would be too depressing and embarrassing. I will say that I can look back to those teenage years and pinpoint an interesting variety of reasons why I released that aggression.

1) I had no choice. It was a true fight-or-flight situation, and I couldn't run. Oddly enough, I didn't feel particularly angry when I hit.
2) I had an opportunity to run, or to turn away, but a combination of external factors made me feel so powerless that hitting back was the only way I could regain any sort of emotional control. I felt like I would die if I didn't.
3) I was drunk and it felt good.

With all that in mind I want to touch on the situation that marythemom raised in her comment: the cycle of domestic violence. It's extremely disturbing to try and put myself in the mind of an abuser but I'm going to give it a try. Looking at my own reactions, I can get halfway there, and then I have to squeamishly imagine the rest of it.

Abusers beat their victims (usually a man beating a woman or children, but I'll use the word generically) for two reasons: to gain a sense of control (emotional), and because it feels good (visceral). It must be a complicated mixture, and some tend more to one extreme than another. I can imagine that some abusers are totally conscienceless and do it out of sheer enjoyment. For them, it's like having a really fun boxing match, except that they're not in danger of getting hit back. They get that rush of adrenaline, the raised heartrate, the heightened sensitivity, and they don't think beyond that.

However, I think it's more common that abusers don't get that much physical enjoyment out of the abuse. It's more of an emotional issue. They feel like they're out of control. Their job is getting to them. They're not achieving all the goals that their society tells them they should have achieved. Something is holding them back.

It's accepted in our society, and shown in every type of media, that men can express their anger physically. These expressions of anger don't make you any less of a man. In fact, they make you more of a man. The abuser already has a link between control and aggression nested in their mind. One day, the abuser experiments by hitting someone close. The world becomes crystallized into that person next to them, and a visceral reaction sets in... if they hit that person, they'll reinforce their boundaries of self. They assert themselves as someone with power, someone in control. They hit. It feels good. Then, when the adrenaline fades away, it feels really, really bad.

They apologize and make desperate promises. But the problem is that they've already established a pattern. Feel bad > hit > feel good > feel bad > apologize/justify > feel good > feel bad > hit. Instead of breaking the pattern, they refine it in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. In other words, they don't want to think of themselves as bad people, so they build up elaborate justifications. She was asking for it. He didn't want to do this, but he had to do it. He had no choice. He didn't like it, but it had to be done. She drove him to it.  The abuser has built up a fantasy world that justifies their abuse. They don't want to move outside that world, because then they'd have to face the moral consequences of their actions.

It's a pattern, but it's not a pattern where a unitary force (anger) builds up and then has to be released. It's a complicated interplay between control, the boundaries of the self, imagination and pleasure. There have been studies done that prove the catharsis/hydraulic theory does not work to reduce anger. A lot of modern approaches I've seen explicitly reject the hydraulic buildup-release model as being too convenient... especially convenient when it comes to the rationalization stage. Instead, to simplify the process, they use other models, such as addiction.

I've found that reading about Buddhism is also a great way to approach anger - anger as craving. Many Buddhists work to move beyond this craving. In Buddhism, you can't just say "I am going to control my anger!" You have to ask, who is this "I" in the first place? And why does this "I" feel the need to control, much less the need to control anger?

I'm certainly not cut out to be a nun, and my particular branch of Buddhism doesn't focus so much on perfecting the emotions. But it's definitely helped me get a greater sense of awareness. Those are the two key terms for me: awareness, and letting-go. I'm not in control all the time, and I'm aware of that. I'm going to feel things that I don't like to feel, and feel things I don't want to feel, but these feelings will pass. I don't need to hold on to them. I don't need to police the boundaries of my self in order to feel whole.

Finally, getting to anger in children: children feel intensely, and lack the adult capacity for self-awareness. Their boundary between the self and the world is constantly shifting. The world constantly intrudes on them. They have their control granted and then taken away for seemingly mysterious reasons. They imitate adult patterns of aggression without understanding the roots of the pattern. They want to explain all these powerful things they feel and imagine but can't find the right words. Habit reassures them and anchors them, even when the habit brings emotional pain.

You could actually say all of these things about some adults, now that I think of it! Anyway, anger issues in children are just ridiculously complicated, and listing it out like this is so frustrating, it almost makes me want to start banging my head against the keyboard... RRRARRR!!

Sigh... it'll pass...

The Dangerous Desire to Adopt Haitian Babies

I'm a foster care adoptive parent. I can't speak for all of us, since we're a diverse bunch. Some of us have also adopted internationally and support international adoption strongly. Others despise the institution, and are angry about what the perceived hypocrisy of parents who walk past the foster kids in their own cities and states so that they can adopt from a far-away country. I'm somewhere in the middle, but definitely leaning more towards the anti side, especially after this week.

This week, I've been deeply disturbed at the swelling public desire to adopt Haitians. Haitian orphan babies. The very name is problematic. In our imagination, an orphan has no family, but the vast majority of "orphans" all over the world have living parents, and almost every single one has living extended relatives. And the children that need family care are, overwhelmingly, older children.

Quite a few other parents I know are really pissed off about it. If you want to adopt, why not consider adopting from foster care? Why Haitian babies? I can guess at some of the answers. Most of them will not be very flattering.

There's a certain group of white adoptive international parents that dominate much of the discourse around adoption in this country. The most organized of these are evangelical Christians, but many of them are secular in their beliefs on adoption. They're across the political spectrum, ultraconservative to ultraliberal, though if I had to hazard a guess, most of them are center-right in politics. I believe these people are, basically, a force for evil. If I put it in any nicer words, that would be a lie. Examining their belief system, and their potential political influence on the recovery efforts in Haiti, is a pretty terrifying process.

I was first made aware of the Rumor Queen website several years ago. I was doing some research on Chinese adoption for a blog post. They're a large community of parents adopting from China, and the site is known for posting a lot of useful data about wait times. A few years ago controversy happened in the forum when some Chinese-American parents were accused by white parents of "jumping the line". There is, in fact, an expedited program for some Chinese-Americans; it's quite restrictive and any Chinese-American greater than second-generation does not qualify. The fact that some of these Chinese-Americans were possibly be more worthy of Chinese babies because of factors like "language" and "culture" and "race" apparently enraged some of the white parents. I read about it second hand from a couple of really angry, hurt Chinese-American families. This episode should give you a taste of the quality of discourse at this and similar websites. There are dissident voices, but the environments are most often dominated by white parents who refuse to consider any of the complex ethical issues surrounding transracial, transcultural, international adoption. They're saving children. How can you argue with that, right?

These online communities are often very hostile places for adoptive parents of color. They're even more hostile, of course, to adoptees and birth/first parents who want to discuss more complicated perspectives of adoption.

I stumbled on Rumor Queen again recently and was shocked to see what was going on. The whole site has gone gaga over adopting Haitian babies. It began with concerns about Haitian children, and is evolving into a coordinated plan of action to put pressure on political representatives for a Haitian babylift.

Also, I’m hearing about plans to bring more children (as in, thousands) into the U.S. all at once on airplanes. There are some precedents for this, there was Operation Peter Pan / Pedro Pan in Cuba in the 60’s, and then there was Operation Babylift in Vietnam in the 70’s. IIRC they did something similar in Korea in the 50’s, but I’m not sure it was given a name. At any rate, there is precedent for allowing a whole bunch of orphans into the U.S. who do not already have parents waiting for them. The U.S. government has not yet given the green light on this, and I’m unclear at this point who exactly gets the final word on it. If anyone out there has more information about it, please share. If it can be done in a way that ensures they are only bringing true orphans over then I’m all for it and would get behind it in a letter writing campaign. However, I would want someone overseeing the effort who can make sure things are done ethically. Someone with the ability and the clout to insist upon it.

The concern that "things are done ethically"... that's a nice thought. The comments dispense with that window dressing. They're full of demands that we have to get the kids out now, now, now, before they die, die, die. The practical reality is that after a horrific disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti quake, it's completely impossible to determine whether any abandoned child is a "true orphan". It's a process that is going to take months and even years.

This post from a more informed international adoptive parent blogger is a more reality-based examination of the issue. Adoptee bloggers who also study adoption academically -- among them Harlow's Monkey and A Birth Project -- are deeply concerned about the parallels to massive child extraction events like Operation Babylift. These were not shining humanitarian moments. Many of the adopted children found out later that they had parents and siblings left behind who wanted them, or even relatives in the United States who were searching for them.

In countries like Haiti that suffer so severely from poverty, citizens have to take the risks of globalization, but reap few of the rewards. Families are split apart as young people go to the cities to work, or to other countries, leaving their children in the care of relatives. Family ties are weakened by poverty, by the constant presence of disease, death and loss, but also paradoxically strengthened as families come up with new ways to endure hardship and stay together. A white middle-class Midwestern mother doesn't understand why a Haitian mother would leave her children at an orphanage, hoping to take them back later. The white mother could understand if she really thought about it on a rational basis. But the lure of the white savior narrative is powerful, and sweeps her up in a rush of emotion: fear, longing, desire. It's because the Haitian mother is a bad mother who doesn't deserve her kids anymore. The innocent baby is not yet contaminated by this evil culture. They deserve something better, cleaner, richer, more tender, whiter.

Here's another comment from that thread.

RumorQueen Says:
January 21st, 2010 at 2:07 pm
And how many children will die while they are building a new infrastructure?

Sometimes you do what you can, not what the ideal would seem to be.

It’s like the guy rescuing starfish on the beach, there are a hundred thousand starfish and a guy is throwing some of them back in the water. Someone tells him there are too many, he can’t possibly make a difference all by himself. And he says, as he throws one in the water “I made a difference to that one”.

There are going to be all kinds of issues these kids will deal with. I’ve gone out of my way so my kids know I did not “rescue” them... but that isn’t going to be able to be said for these kids. Sure, it’s not an ideal situation. But would it be better to let them die?

Analogies simplify complex issues, sometimes in an accurate way, but this analogy is just smoke and mirrors. International adoptive parents are really fond of this starfish metaphor and this is not the first time I've seen it in play. It always boggles my mind. Why is adopting a third-world "orphan" like throwing a starfish back in the ocean? Maybe the poor starfishes needed to be on the beach as part of their mating cycle and the guy is messing with them because he's sadistic. Maybe he has a weird sexual fetish about echinoderm-hurling. Or maybe he's just a dumb-ass. The analogy effectively obscures the issue of motivation, as well as the implication of "saving".

Let me try another analogy. Let's say you live with your child in a house that burns down. You're dazed, confused, and burned. Your neighbor says, "I think I should take care of your child". You say, "Thanks for your offer. But my child really needs me now, and I think they wouldn't sleep well in a strange house. If you could just give us a tent and some food and some bandages so we can camp out while I get better and look into rebuilding, we'll be OK." Your neighbor says, "that's too logistically complicated and I'm concerned about the security situation. I just want your child." You say, "Thanks again for your concern and I'm grateful for any help you can give me. If you're so worried about my child, maybe you could let both of us stay in your guestroom for a while? That way my child could be safe and would sleep well too." Your neighbor says, "No, we have an interdiction-at-sea policy and visa restrictions will not be relaxed. Just give me your child. Actually, nevermind. I don't even need your permission anymore. I'll just take them."

Here's the worst comment on the thread. It was let through without a rejoinder. Mine was blocked.

49. Proud2Adopt Says:
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:03 am EthioChinaadopt – the issue is that if someone is paying $30,000 to adopt a child, they want a baby! Its as simple as that! I’m really tired of hearing about how so many of these kids are just split from their parents. Lets get the 380,000 kids that were ALREADY orphans OUT of the country & into waiting homes, that way the focus of orphanages can be on those children who are NEW orphans or split from parents & families. The reality to me is, I would LOVE to adopt one of these children. No, this isn’t a NEW passion spurred from seeing photos on TV. But hopefully with the dire situation they will waive much of the 25K+ fees for families like mine to adopt one of these children here! Amen!

I admit I wasn't nearly as diplomatic as I could have been. But that's not my strong point. I was way too irritated with these people. In case you're wondering why the maniac above me was referring to $30,000 for a fresh baby, I really don't know. I'm not up-to-date on the latest prices in the international baby market.

The next babylift thread was racist beyond belief. Rumor Queen ran footage of a riot at a food distribution point.

Desperate target Haiti’s orphanages

In a country where it is survival of the fittest, what chance do babies and children in an orphanage have?

The Vietnamese Operation Babylift was driven both by racism and fear of communism. But this framing, on the other hand, is pure 100% unadulterated racism, invoking the most damaging stereotype of black people invented by white imperialists. "Survival of the fittest" implies that Haitians are nothing more than animals. Their children need to be removed immediately or they won't even grow up to be human beings.

I haven't watched a lot of news in the past week -- probably less than 10 minutes of footage a day from sources like CNN -- but in those brief times, I've seen plenty of examples of orderly food distribution. I've seen Haitians rescuing each other. I've read accounts by independent media, small media and even the mainstream media -- "Despite isolated incidents of looting, violence and other criminal activity, the overall security situation remains calm" -- that security fears have been massively overblown.

Rumor Queen attacked me for my blocked comment later on in that thread. I then left a harsher comment (I refrained from profanity but did use the word "strip-mining") and my comment was, of course, also blocked.

Luckily, policy makers aren't listening to these people with full attention anymore. There are competing voices. UNICEF, Save the Children, SOS Children's Villages, pretty much every single large secular children's aid organization, plus some of the religious ones, are advocating a total stop to new international adoptions until quake recovery gets underway and far-flung families begin to come together again. Adoption should be the last resort. I agree with that. I'm somewhat moderate in that I don't see a huge problem with removing children who have already been through most of the process and have already met their adoptive parents. If a bond is already there, there's no point adding another loss. And a lot of the adoption process is true red tape that doesn't serve anyone's interests. But airlifting children who just "appear to be orphans" (as several Catholic leaders in Miami have been demanding) and almost certainly cutting them off from their roots... this is wrong. It's wrong for the children, it's wrong for their relatives, and it's wrong for the country of Haiti.

There was an adoption story I heard on NPR yesterday that really touched me. It's not the typical adoption narrative we've been hearing:

Margalita Belhumer, a Haitian-American who lives in New York City, was visiting Haiti when the quake struck nine days ago. She shaded her eyes from the tropical sun as her 8-year-old daughter, Melissa, squatted at her feet.

"I'm seeking to leave with my daughter. People are dead, place crumbled. She has nowhere to live, so I can't leave without her," Belhumer said.

She said she raised Melissa since the girl was a newborn infant, wrapped in a sheet and left on the sidewalk in front of St. Joseph's Catholic Church. Child abandonment by destitute mothers is not uncommon in Haiti. While Belhumer worked at her job as a security guard in New York, she paid a family to take care of Melissa. Belhumer said she had begun the adoption paperwork before the quake struck.

"I started the adoption process, but I started last month. But I've had her since the first day she was born," she said.

If any adoption is expedited, it should be these ones. But these are also the people who are least likely to have the ears of politicians. Everyone wants Haitian babies. Haitian adults, and Haitian families, are another matter. There has been no announcement that more visas will be granted to reunite Haitian-American families.

This report by a US adoptee-rights blogger, based on notes from a USCIS teleconference, has a chilling quote.

Hundreds of adoptive parents, paps, orphanage directors with dozens of children, and even, apparently, loose children gather outside the US Embassy. Many come unannounced demanding entry. Officials have set up and are refining procedures for entry into the compound, interviews, and decision making. (Procedures were discussed in detail, but I"ll hold that for another entry.) They emphasize that the Embassy needs advance notice of petitioners so someone can go outside, locate them, and escort them through the gates. Only adoption cases are being handled. (Haitians with other Embassy business, including those with pending pre-quake visa and immigration applications are being turned away for now.)

Talk of adopting orphaned Haitian babies seems to be swirling all over. And though I'm concentrating my ire on a certain class of white adoptive parents, I'll have to note, not everyone full of this dangerous desire is white.

"I wanna just go down there and get some of those babies," Latifah said on the Today Show Thursday. "If you got a hook up, please get me a couple of Haitian kids. It's time. I'm ready."

As someone who has adopted before, here's some questions I'd ask of anybody in the U.S., of any race, who is really serious about this.

- Do you know what a homestudy is? Are you ready to pass one?
- Do you realize it will be almost impossible to adopt a baby, hard to adopt a toddler, and that the vast majority of children who really need to be adopted are older children?
- Do you know what attachment disorder is? Children with inconsistent caregiving in early years often develop this to some degree. They may experience the expression of love as a terrifying loss of self. They may do anything in their power to make you stop loving them, including physically attacking you, your pets or your other children. There is no known 100% effective therapy for this.
- Do you understand the effects of various prenatal exposures? Do you understand and accept that your child may grow up with irreparable brain damage?
- Are you ready to establish routine visits to one, two, three, all of these and more: therapist, psychiatrist, physical therapist, neurologist?
- Are you prepared that your child may resent you or hate you for taking them away from everything and everyone they've known and loved? And that even if you've explained to them that they're never going back, they may still try to push you away, because in the back of their minds, if they're bad enough, you'll send them away, and they'll go back to everything and everyone they've known and loved?
- Are you prepared to have a child so terrified from trauma that they act as if they were half their developmental age? That they wake you up screaming every night at 3 in the morning? That they rage uncontrollably if you don't stay by their side every waking minute?
- Are you prepared for your friends and family to perhaps shrink away from you because they don't understand why your child acts the way they act -- maybe it's because you don't love them enough, or you don't spank them enough -- you're doing it all wrong and it's all your fault.

If you can answer "yes" to all of these, congratulations. You might be ready to adopt from foster care. To adopt from Haiti, answer all the above questions, add the effects of malnutrition, add a language barrier, and multiply the child's trauma by a factor of ten. And subtract a lot of money. Unlike foster care adoptions, which are basically free, you're going to have to pay legal fees. Maybe even $30,000. And children from foster care will have permanent Medicaid, no matter your income level, but if you adopt internationally, it's up to you to find a way to pay for all those psychiatrist visits you'll almost certainly be needing later on.

Here are some additional questions:

- Are you aware of transracial adoption issues? If you're a black American, are you aware that transcultural issues can be just as intense as transracial ones?
- Do you have a connection to a Haitian-American community? Do you speak Kreyol or French?
- Your child will likely be Catholic and think of themselves as Catholic. Are you? If not, how will you handle the difference?
- The ethical thing to do is to try to establish contact with your child's relatives in Haiti. Are you prepared for the fact that you, as a rich American (no matter what your income level) will then be regarded as a financial benefactor/patron? If you've grown up in the US and absorbed our surface-egalitarian values, you will be unaccustomed to this kind of role, and extremely bad at it. If you refuse to make contact because of this issue, or because of fear that your child will love you better if you cut them off from their roots, then... well... you suck. I'll leave it at that.

You'd better be sure you can handle it. If you can't, your child will pay the highest cost. If the adoption falls through, your child may end up in foster care, possibly so scarred that they'll never get another chance at a family.

I've said a lot of harsh things in this post. But I also want to note that this desire can also be understood in a positive way. Children inspire love. I believe in certain universal values, and across every culture and all of history, people love children and want to take care of them. An equally universal trait, unfortunately, is the desire to exploit children. Children don't speak fully for themselves, so we speak for them. It's necessary, but it's also dangerous. Exploiting a child can be as blatant as child sexual abuse, or sweatshop labor... and it can be as subtle as wanting our children to validate us as parents. Wanting them to love us, and being angry when they don't show us love.

We're getting into grounds of philosophy and religion here, but I don't think a completely pure love is truly possible on this earth, because love needs knowledge, and pure knowledge is impossible. We try, but we don't know fully what's best for the other person, so we make guesses, and our guesses are based on imperfect knowledge. And so exploitation creeps in.

My religion talks a lot about the impossibility of individual purity and makes the acknowledgment of imperfection absolutely necessary. I think many other belief systems address the same issue in different ways. For example, in Christianity, Jesus Christ represents a pure kind of love, and other kinds of love exist in relation to that standard. The answer is not to stop loving, or to stop trying to understand, but to realize that our love is always endangered by selfishness. If we ever think our love is pure, we need to stop thinking along that track, take a step back and think again. Don't stop loving, just stop thinking that your love is infallible and all-knowing.

I'll close with a few reality-based ways to help Haitian children in Haitian families:

- Donate to SOS Children's Villages, Save the Children or UNICEF.
- Sign this AIUSA petition to request an end to interdiction-at-sea policy
- Contact your representative. Ask them to support an increase in refugee visas for Haitians and expedited family reunification visas for Haitian-Americans. Ask them to support the airlift of Haitian children unaccompanied by family ONLY for the purposes of temporary medical hosting and NOT for the purposes of adoption.
- If you live close to a Haitian-American community, contact their organizations and ask if there is anything you can do to support community efforts.

I may add more later as I become aware.

Sex and Scoliosis

What does scoliosis have to do with sex?

There are a lot of connections. I guess I'll need to start by explaining scoliosis. It's a common disorder, but one that is often very misunderstood by the general public, as well as many non-orthopedic doctors. Most people vaguely remember a scoliosis check from their school days. Sometimes the kids are lined up in a row, and told to take off their shirts and bend over while a medical professional inspects them from the back. The experience is obviously rather humiliating and tends to cause a lot of nervous laughter.

Scoliosis -- a sideways, left-right asymmetry of the spine -- is the most common form of spinal deformity. It can also be accompanied by other forms of spinal deformity, like kyphosis (AKA hunchback) and extreme lordosis (AKA swayback). It sometimes comes as a package deal along with disorders of connective tissue, or with cerebral palsy and spinal bifida. In those cases, scoliosis is often diagnosed at a very early age.

The other kind of scoliosis, the much more common kind, seems to come out of nowhere. It's known as adolescent idiopathic scoliosis or AIS. "Idiopathic" is from the same Greek root as "idiot" and basically means "we have no idea what causes it." Though recent research has shown that it's actually genetic, and they've even tracked down the genetic location (but only if you're white, which is bizarre, because there isn't any significant racial/ethnic difference in prevalence rate). Someone with this kind of scoliosis (usually a girl, as the incidence of more serious curves among women is 7-10 times that of men) is born with a normal-looking spine. Before puberty, the spine begins to bend and curve. Maybe it stays there... maybe it gets worse through puberty. Then maybe it stays there, or maybe it gets a lot worse close to menopause. Without major surgery, it's essentially a one way road. In scoliosis vocabulary, when curves get worse, it's called "progression". "Progression" is bad. Arresting progression is good.

According to this NIH resource, "Of every 1,000 children, 3 to 5 develop spinal curves that are considered large enough to need treatment." If you adjust for sex, the rate climbs up to almost 1% of all girls. I don't know of any source that says actually how many girls receive treatment of which types. Treatment means to watch, take lots of x-rays, determine progression, and if it looks like progression is, well, progressing, to brace. Or in very serious cases, go directly to spinal fusion.

That's the "Milwaukee" variant of brace. It's the kind I had. It's made from hard plastic and steel. It's expensive, ugly, frightening, and extremely uncomfortable. The family nickname for my brace was "The Iron Maiden". You can climb into it and strap it on and off, and adjustments of the screws will accommodate changing body shape during puberty. I think you're supposed to wear it until a few years past puberty, when your spine growth finally halts. The brace is an old form of treatment and it's shown to be moderately effective at arresting progression.



Many girls experience horror and anger when they find out what bracing is going to mean for their lives, and that it won't even fix them, it will just probably keep them from getting any worse.

It was easier for me to accept my fate. First of all, my mother also has idiopathic scoliosis, and her curve was fairly serious. Hers is comparable to the woman pictured above. She had not been treated as a girl, and her scoliosis had slowly progressed as she went into middle age. She eventually had a spinal fusion -- two long steel rods screwed into her spine -- and was in the hospital for two weeks. So I had a strong motivation to make sure my curve didn't progress as far as my mother's. She was also a positive role model for me. I saw her as an active, glamorous woman who refused to be limited by scoliosis. I tried to adopt the same stoic attitude toward my own scoliosis. Second of all, my orthopedist said it was OK to only wear my brace 12 hours a day, which meant I slept in it, but I didn't have to wear it to school. I think he may have subscribed to the philosophy that although the brace should really be worn 23 hours a day, there's so much social stigma attached to it that many girls rebel, and won't wear it at all, whereas a private bracing regimen has more likelihood of consistent follow-through.

I don't know if it would have made school any worse. I've written before about the extensive racist abuse, and sexualized racist abuse, I got in late elementary and middle school.

I was harassed so much in the locker room my first year of middle school that I refused to change my clothes at all. P.E. was a living nightmare full of verbal attacks and physical threats from larger girls. I spent much of my time desperately thinking of ways I could get a medical excuse. Unfortunately, aside from my scoliosis, I was healthy as a horse. I refused to participate in activities anyway, and sat with the asthma-sidelined section. I'm still bitter about this experience because it taught me to associate healthy athleticism with emotional trauma and racist bullying. Maybe if I'd had my brace on, I could have gotten my coveted medical excuse.

It was something I never, ever thought of at the time, though. The orthopedist's word was the word of law. And the brace was something to be hidden. I think this is a common tendency among brace-wearers. Girls that age don't want to be seen in a brace. For photos, they'll take off the brace. If they're told to wear it to school, they're mocked and stared at. At the time, I considered myself very lucky that I was able to hide my brace from other kids my age.

I don't know much about disability theory and disablism, but I've been reading through blogs about it, and it's very interesting in relation to scoliosis. I don't identify as a disabled person/person with disabilities, and I don't think many other people with idiopathic scoliosis do. But many of us have also gone through an intensely emotional adolescent period where we're viewed as disabled.

One of the hallmarks of disablism is that it strips away sexuality. The prejudice against disabled people includes thinking they are not supposed to exist sexually, have sexual desire or be desired.

Being braced means going through puberty strapped and screwed in to a weird exoskeleton that incarnates the negation and emprisonment of your sexuality. Your breasts and hips are starting to grow. They might start to bump painfully against the brace. So you have to visit the doctor -- often an older man -- who adjusts your screws to accomodate your new growth.

The brace seems anti-sexual, but it also has positive sexual connotations. The light at the end of the dark tunnel is that the brace will "keep you normal". You'll get through puberty and enter into sexually desirable womanhood without too much spinal deformity... the brace will preserve you. The brace probably becomes the most significant physical object in your life, for good and for evil.

I certainly didn't receive any counseling about my scoliosis. I don't know if it's common today to have counseling as part of the bracing process. If it's not, it should be. Girls who have gone through bracing feel like it's them, alone, against the world. Although it's quite a common experience, by medical and social tradition, the disorder is isolated and hidden.

This study showed that bracing doesn't affect self-image much. However, it also takes places in Sweden, where school environment I'm sure is quite different than in the U.S. This other U.S. study tells a somewhat different story: "Scoliosis was an independent risk factor for suicidal thought, worry and concern over body development, and peer interactions after adjustment. CONCLUSION: Scoliosis is a significant risk factor for psychosocial issues and health-compromising behavior. Gender differences exist in male and female adolescents with scoliosis."

After bracing, scoliosis, and deformities of the spine in general, become almost invisible. It's extremely rare to have a spinal deformity so pronounced that anyone can tell by looking at you when you have clothes on. People with idiopathic scoliosis "pass". People have known me for years, even decades, without knowing I had scoliosis. Then one day they'll see me in a bathing suit -- and not even the first time they saw me in a bathing suit, but maybe the first time they really focused on my back -- and they'll burst out with something like, "OH MY GOD DID YOU KNOW SOMETHING IS REALLY WRONG WITH YOUR SPINE!!"

Once it stops being invisible, it's all of a sudden very, very visible. I guess it's sort of like shaking hands with someone and suddenly realizing they have six fingers.

If I'm not experiencing any back pain, I rarely think about my scoliosis, although I sometimes worry about my future. Pregnancy is not a risk factor for progression, but menopause is. Right now, my thoracic curve is 36 degrees. If it gets past 40, I might need spinal fusion surgery. This is a mostly safe procedure, but it's still really scary, and involves weeks in the hospital. Click on the following link if you've seen enough David Cronenberg movies that you think you can handle it (link to nightmarish spinal fusion surgery image). Spinal fusion partially reverses the curve, arrests or slows down further progression and relieves chronic pain. You're still reasonably flexible afterwards, but there are potential complications, and I'm not considering surgery at this stage. If I refused surgery, and my curve happened to progress further, I would start to have more pain and diminished lung capacity. Past 60 degrees, I might start to experience severe and constant pain in my back and/or ribs, and my internal organs would get squeezed together and I might start to have breathing problems. Past 80 degrees I might have lung AND heart problems.

But I don't stay up night worrying about the risks of progression. Many people have more uncertainty about their medical future than I do. For example, if I had diabetes, I might worry about having a foot amputation.

Since I grew up with scoliosis, it's taken me a while to understand how it looks from the outside. Aesthetically speaking: not good. We're conditioned to associate left-right symmetry with health and general wellbeing. People with moderate scoliosis, like me, often look symmetrical from the front, but assymetrical from the back, and I suppose that seems eery and perhaps even deceptive and sneaky. There's a lot of really negative associations in popular culture (e.g. Hunchback of Notre Dame). When mean-spirited people do "retard" imitations they'll often hunch up one shoulder and stagger in order to simulate a deformed spine.

I don't talk about scoliosis casually because a) I don't have any major health problems because of it, so there's not that much to talk about b) I'm afraid of it being used against me. I'll put it on medical history forms when I know I can be assured of privacy. It was used against me recently when I applied for private disability insurance. I thought it would be a good idea to have a separate private policy in case I lost my job for any reason. I did a ton of research, spent a lot of time talking with the salesman, and ended up with a quote that specifically excluded anything going wrong with my reproductive system AND my back. I changed my mind and decided it wasn't worth buying since so much of my body was apparently uninsurable. They excluded my ENTIRE BACK. Hypothetically speaking, if I got in a minor car accident, and as a result developed the exact same kind of back problems that anyone without scoliosis would develop, nothing would be covered. What a terrible deal. No thanks!

The health implications of my scoliosis are not that extreme, and I don't need any accommodations to perform any major life activities, which is why I don't consider myself disabled.

- I have foot pain in my arch if I don't wear comfortable shoes. I can wear platforms, but I can't wear high heels.
- I have to be a bit careful doing things like yoga and pilates.
- I have to stay reasonably active in order to be 100% pain-free. When I get too sedentary, I start having back pain and rib pain. If I ever had an illness that forced me to rest all the time, I'd be in big trouble. Exercise and stretching are highly effective for scoliosis back pain. Other options I would consider to control pain if it ever got worse include drugs, physical therapy and adult braces. There are a gazillion alternative health "cures" for scoliosis back pain suffering, but they strike me as being of very dubious efficacy.
- I have to watch my posture
- I have to watch my weight. Excess weight leads to back pain. Being underweight might be even worse, because being underweight is connected to bone density loss, and people with scoliosis have lower than average bone density anyway.

None of these problems are really unique to scoliosis. Plenty of able-bodied and disabled people have back pain or foot pain.

This link from Eurospine.org sums it up: "Progression of scoliosis can involve an aesthetic problem and lead to functional problems. Respiratory disorders may develop in large curves greater than 80º. Nonetheless, the mortality rates and vital prognosis in individuals with scoliosis are comparable to those of the general population."

It's the "aesthetic problem" of scoliosis that's unique. Like I mentioned before, left-right symmetry is wound up with definitions of health and beauty across many different cultures. People like me are aware of this on a subconscious or barely conscious level. 99.99% of the time I forget that I don't fit that symmetrical standard. Every so often I'm reminded, and it feels a bit painful. There are subtle psychological effects. Vague feelings of being a secret curved impostor in a straight-backed world. Times when I feel like my spine is an enemy working against me... times when it hurts to breathe and the pain makes me feel angry at my spreading rib bones, and I wish I could reach inside of myself and squeeze them back into place. Sometimes I'm bitter about the inches of height I lost to scoliosis.

Back to sex. Even without bracing, there's still a sexual paradox when it comes to scoliosis. Have you ever seen a picture of a woman with scoliosis and/or kyphosis that was not anonymous, depersonalized, clinical, grim and depressing? Like the photos I included above? Scoliosis is profoundly unsexy.

On the other hand, when women pose provocatively, they often throw one hip to the side and put one shoulder forward.Why is that pose sexy? Maybe it makes us look femininely defenseless and vulnerable, as opposed to a masculine, stick straight pose. That's going along with a typical sexist definition of "femininity". There's another less sexist possibility... the pose is also highlighting the flexibility of the spine. So in that sense, the woman is showing off her body's capacity by bending in a certain way.

There's a comic book artist, Rob Liefeld, who was (in)famous starting in the 1980s for drawing unrealistic women. The conventions of drawing women are in comics are easy to criticize, but Liefeld's stuff is... well...I guess you'd have to see the spinal curvature to believe it.

That's supposed to be sexy. For the audience of predominantly young men who made Liefeld very popular, it must have been sexy. This is a funny analysis of the above drawing by a group of women comic book artists:

Take note of Avengelyne’s waist and how it is thinner than her head. Minus the hair. Note how it hangs beneath her ribcage like a suspension bridge, rather than actually supporting the top of her body. (Her torso must be kept afloat by those helium breasts.) Note the scoliosis gone grossly untreated. Note the little leather bags which wouldn’t fit around a normal person’s wrist. Especially note that the artist put her in the most obvious POSE to exaggerate the spine: a profile shot with negative space between her back and arm. That’s correct - our intrepid heroine’s spine would appear yanked. Avengelyne is a SWAYback™.

The humor is partly at my expense. But I can't help laughing. It's a highly sexualized image, but not one that I identify with in any way.

But here's a poster image I ran across that uses stupid sexist humor to make fun of a real woman, and I don't find it funny at all.

It really illuminates the double standard that women are subjected to. You're supposed to be sexy so that you please men. But if it looks like you're trying TOO hard, men (and other women) will make fun of you. If you don't wear makeup, you're a [insert homophobic slur]. Wear too much makeup, you're a [insert transgender-phobic slur]. Curve your back, look sexy. Curve it too much, it looks like you're deformed. Argh!

Thanks to my brief readings of disability theory, I realize that making fun of people with spinal deformities isn't something I should just accept as the natural order of things, especially because this humor is connected to moral judgments of disability. That is, the idea that physical body difference reflects some kind of moral failing. When it comes to scoliosis, I think the general public halfway believes that scoliosis is the fault of the person's family. There's a myth that giving young kids backpacks that are too heavy will make their spines curve (totally not true). When people are adults, "she should have had that corrected" is sometimes an assumption. A lot of people don't realize that the only sure way to even partly reverse a curve is spinal fusion, which also leaves a giant seam-scar running up your back. Another judgment is that a person with scoliosis must be poor. It's true that I'm very lucky I had access to bracing; if I wasn't born into a middle-class family in a rich country, my curve would be a lot worse by now. So there are major class differences in scoliosis, but ultimately, we're all in different positions on the same boat because there is no way to permanently and completely reverse adult scoliosis.

Thanks to flickr, I did actually find some images of scoliosis that I think are beautiful and help affirm positive self-image and sexuality. I wish I'd found a greater variety of body types, but these images are great to start off with. Some are post spinal fusion.

First, here's the typical clinical picture. It shows everything that's wrong with the body.

Now here are the flickr pictures. They show the open possibility and vitality of a body with scoliosis.

It's heartening to see a bunch of pictures like that. There are more at this link.

When I walk, my right hip swivels a bit higher and wider than my left hip. I've had people tell me it looks sexy. I've had people ask if I've hurt my foot. Neither reaction bothers me anymore. The way I walk is just the way I walk. It gets me where I need to go.

Acknowledgements for this post: thanks to Thorn for commenting about this issue, and mentioning how it negatively affected your adoption homestudy due to ignorance on the part of the social worker. Also thanks to Deesha Philyaw on Twitter for mentioning the Judy Blume book about a girl who goes through bracing: Deenie. I wish I'd gotten a chance to read that book when I was a girl, and it sounds really interesting.

Some Thoughts on Racial/Ethnic Hatred Sparked by Expatriates in Japan

Why do some American expatriates in Japan hate the Japanese so much?

If you're not familiar with this hate... it's some of the most virulent hatred I've ever seen in my life. I've witnessed some of it personally, as a bystander, and indirectly heard of much more.

This isn't all expatriates, of course. For example, my mother was an expatriate for a period of time, and she certainly wasn't like that. She has a lot of critical things to say about Japanese culture, but in a balanced way, in much the same proportion as she would criticize any other culture, including her own.

The most vocal expatriates are young white men on stints teaching English, and it's this group that also has the most evil reputation. But other expatriates types also exhibit this hatred sometimes.

Honestly, people like this are one reason I've never seriously considered going to Japan for any length of time longer than a couple weeks. A long time ago, when I was having a rocky time in college, my parents pressured me psychologically into applying for the JET program. I sabotaged my own application so that I could tell them honestly that I was denied. As someone who is not fluent in Japanese, and doesn't really belong to any community in Japan, I knew I would have to be in close contact with this type of expatriate, and I could not stomach the thought of that.

This hatred seems especially disturbing to me because I understand where it comes from. I've been treated badly by Japanese. The first time I was aware of race, and being racially different, was in Japanese kindergarten. In general, Japanese are not particularly friendly to me. To Japanese, I don't look Japanese, I don't dress Japanese, I don't even walk like a Japanese, and in Tokyo, I'm treated with distant politeness or ignored as if I don't exist. My own father sometimes casually insults my identity and accuses me of not being Japanese enough.

As a result, I often don't like Japanese. I enjoy having casual conversations with Japanese tourists in other countries about stuff like food, but I don't purposefully seek them out or go looking for deeper friendships with them. There are some exceptions, like my roommate in Mexico that I felt very close to. He was considering immigrating permanently to Mexico, and had different ideas about identity than the vast majority of Japanese.

But I don't hate Japanese. Based on my personal history I have some hang-ups and neuroticisms about Japanese that I wish I didn't have, but I do, so I compensate in practical ways. Otherwise, I just think of Japanese as human beings... flawed, complicated human beings, like all other groups of human beings.

I'm not going to provide lists and examples of bad expat behavior. You're either familiar with it or you're not, and if you're not, then you're lucky. But here's the basic arc:

Stage 1: I love Japan. Japan is so cool. It's so different over here. I can't wait to meet some samurai and geisha. I'm fulfilling my lifelong dream. This is going to be awesome.
Stage 2: Japan isn't what I thought, but it's still really cool. All these Japanese girls are having sex with me just because I'm an American. Sometimes I get the feeling people are looking down on me. Oh well, if I just smile a lot and speak Japanese better, I'm sure they'll accept me.
Stage 3: Culture shock, aching loneliness and deep depression
Stage 4: Retreating and retrenching in a safe womb-like environment with other expats
Stage 5: F%#@ these racist, xenophobic Japanese. Japanese women are manipulative stuck-up $%!@s. I wish we'd bombed ALL of Japan. I'm rude to them all the time now so I can get back at them for treating me like they do. And I can't wait to get home.
Stage 6: Now that I'm home, the bad memories of Japan are fading a bit, thank goodness. I have returned a much wiser person. I know all the weak spots of the Japanese now. In fact, I'm an expert on Asian culture. I explained this to an Asian-American once but they violently disagreed with me. Oh well, they're not a real Asian anyway.
(Alternate Stage: Stay in Japan, let hatred die down to a bilious rumbling with occasional explosions.  Post regularly on f*ckedgaijin.com).

Sexuality and misogyny and the legacy of imperialism are big parts of all of this. Imagine the expat arc as a dysfunctional romance, with Japan as the woman, and you could encapsulate most of those stages in the immortal words of Marion Barry: "Bitch set me up!"

The sex/imperialism is also an angle that's been covered by theorists quite extensively. I'd like to approach the issue from another angle, a more comparative and personal one, based on my experiences with born citizens and immigrants as well as expatriates.

Have I ever encountered the same level of hatred toward Americans? No, but I came close, once in Mexico, and once in the U.S.

When I was in Mexico, I met a lot of people who criticized the U.S. I largely agreed with the criticisms, and they were stated in a fair way. In fact, Mexican leftists who had problems with U.S. politics were always MORE charitable than U.S. leftists. They would often talk about aspects of the U.S. that they admired, such as our history of relatively fair elections. I never saw this criticism spill over into hate, though.

I also met a lot of Mexicans who were treated very badly in the U.S. and still didn't develop hatred. For example, I met a taxi driver in Guadalajara who told me that he risked his life to cross the desert to find work in Dallas, but the people there were so racist and unfriendly, it took him only three weeks to decide to go right back to Guadalajara. Maybe they're nicer in other parts of the U.S., he noted optimistically, though he had no further plans to ever leave Mexico again. Another Mexican I met spent six years in prison in Florida for a crime he claimed he didn't commit, and he still had a lot of good things to say about the U.S.

And I don't think that people leashed any hatred simply because they didn't want to offend me, an American tourist. If I was white, I might think that. But Mexicans often find it hard to believe I'm an American, even after I state it quite clearly. I don't "look American". It's a reaction I encounter frequently anywhere outside the U.S., and I've developed a pretty thick skin about it.

Anyway, one night while I was traveling in Mexico by myself, I ended up in a crowded taxicab going to a nightclub. Since we had to go a long way on a dirt road, and most of my fellow taxi goers had already had a few drinks, the conversation was heated and lively. There were a couple Mexicans and an Austrian tourist. The Austrian tourist, on hearing I was American, launched into a diatribe against American cultural imperialism. We made crappy movies, and crappy music, and crappy food, our American crap was drowning out everyone else's culture, all our entertainment was vulgar, and so on.

I got angry. I was prepared to hear this sort of thing from a Mexican, but not from an Austrian. Most Europeans have enough money and power to consume their own crap if they want; they happen to CHOOSE to consume ours. I tried to argue back, but he kept interrupting me. So I dropped the bomb. "Well what's your native way of having fun on the weekend in Austria? Burning Jews?" The Mexicans all gasped. The Austrian visibly wilted, and said in a small voice, "that was a long time ago". The conversation shifted. We'd put on a good show for the Mexicans, though: they looked like they were really enjoying the argument from the sidelines.

To this day I feel a little bad for cutting down the Austrian like that. But only a little.

Although I said I was prepared to hear this kind of diatribe from a Mexican, I never did. My overall impression was that Mexicans were rather light on the criticism when it came to the U.S. For every thing they hated, they knew something that they loved. Sadness, disappointment, anxiety, yes; hatred, no.

When I lived in Miami, I worked in a series of restaurants and bars. There was an informal but very powerful racial/ethnic hierarchy pretty much everywhere I worked in the service industry. White Anglos, upper-class Cuban-Americans and diverse upper-class immigrants/expatriates (usually European) were at the top. They were the owners and managers. The middle was composed of more Cuban-Americans and Anglos. Halfway between the middle and bottom were native African-Americans and whiter-looking Latinos. On the very bottom, recently arrived Carribean black people (Haitian, Jamaican) and other Latinos (such as Central Americans). Your place in the hierarchy was determined by 1) money 2) degree of whiteness 3) degree of blackness 4) kind of English spoken 5) kind of Spanish spoken 6) citizenship and documentation status. Since Miami is such a diverse and chaotic environment, new arrivals often weren't quite sure where they fit in the hierarchy. I know I was never sure, myself.

One day, I was outside my restaurant having a smoke break with the Jamaican janitor/busser. We struck up a conversation that quickly took a disturbing turn. She started on a rant about how the American black people were all thieves, liars, drug abusers, could not be trusted, made her people look bad, and so on. I just told her I didn't think that was a fair thing to say, but I didn't want to get in an argument with her. I felt sorry for her because she was facing a horrendous level of racism from the manager, a white Frenchman who was racist against everyone who worked there, but picked on her the most.

I wondered later, why did she hate African-Americans so much? Why not hate white people or white Europeans? After all, the manager truly was an evil worm of a person (full story of his evilness here).

One reason is that it's not very common to hate upwards. It's more common to fear the people who have power over you. If you can't separate from those people (people with separatist ideologies can hate in any direction), you have to learn how to get along with them.  And you don't have the energy to spare for hate.

When I was dealing with racist abuse in school in the U.S., I felt the same way. I didn't have time to hate the people who abused me. All my emotional energy was wrapped up in trying to answer two questions: "Why are they doing this to me?" and "How can I make them stop?" In order to try and stop the abuse I had to think like my abusers, I had to put myself in their shoes, I had to imagine how they saw me, I had to imagine how they would react if I did certain things as opposed to doing other things.

I could not afford to hate them.

I think it's much more common to hate downwards. And a subset of hating downwards is hating sideways. My Jamaican coworker was financially on a lower level of the hierarchy than African-Americans, but she also realized she was on a higher level when it came to stereotypes of morality and culture. That is, she observed that there were more negative sentiments against African-Americans than there were against Jamaicans. So hating African-Americans was a way to claim a higher position in the hierarchy, a way to claim that no, she was not on the same level or lower, she was really on a higher level.

Whenever someone is insecure about their position in a hierarchy, a way to stabilize your position is 1) find someone who is on the same level or slightly lower 2) hate them.

I think this works in the area of class, as well. Often, the people who say they hate the poor the most are the people who have escaped poverty, or who are lower-middle-class and almost in poverty. Really rich people rarely hate the poor. They can ignore them and/or exploit them without going through the bother of hating them.

An expatriate in Japan, once they hit the culture shock stage, becomes incredibly confused about their place in the hierarchy. This confusion is compounded by the fact that they don't even understand, on a visceral level, that the hierarchy even exists. The ideal of egalitarianism is very strong in the U.S. When that egalitarianism actually works, I love it. It's what makes my country great. But it's an ideal, not a reality. If you believe it's already a reality, you become blind to the existence of totally real hierarchies lying underneath the mask of egalitarianism.

People from countries with more formalized race, caste and/or class systems have more experience, more cynicism and more ability to notice parallel structures in foreign countries. They'll have a more practical attitude. "OK, I've landed. Where am I? Near the bottom... darn. Can I work my way up? Oh, it looks like this system is really rigid. Only a few rungs? What about my kids? Well, I'll adjust my expectations and see if it's worth the trade-off."

The Japan-hating expatriate has huge privilege from being some combination of white, American and male. Japanese give them a lot of room. When they act badly, Japanese will simply ignore it. The expatriate senses weakness. "They let me get away with bad behavior - that means I am better and stronger than them - I hate them because I am better than them - I am better than them because I hate them." But the expatriate also starts to understand that the Japanese don't really need them. Japan is pretty much the richest non-white country in the world when it comes to economic power and median living standards. The expatriate may start penning angry rants about Japan, but there is nothing they can really do to get any kind of meaningful revenge in a collective sense. Though they can be very cruel to individual Japanese, and then later, to Asian-Americans.

They realize the sheer uselessness of their hate, and it makes them hate even more.

I wish I had a better note on which to end this piece! 

Close to Home

It's on the national news. Eleven-year-old Jaheem Herrera killed himself because of severe emotional abuse. This story hits close to home because I happen to know a boy who was in the same school and grade and class as Jaheem Herrera. I'm never going to look at him the same way.

I know from my own experience how isolated Jaheem must have felt. If just one single kid in the class had stood up for him, he probably would have been saved.

I never wanted to kill myself, but I was pretty desperate. For years, I used to lie awake at night hoping that aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse I went through was primarily racial, but it had other elements as well... I wasn't good at gender-conforming, and got called a lesbian a fair number of times.

It sounds like what Jaheem went through was primarily about gender-conforming but had racial/ethnic elements as well. I know the school in question is not diverse (almost entirely African-American), and although I don't know how Jaheem's family identified, it's obvious he didn't fit in.

From My bullied son's last day on Earth
Bermudez says bullies at school pushed Jaheem over the edge. He complained about being called gay, ugly and "the virgin" because he was from the Virgin Islands, she said.

"He used to say Mom they keep telling me this ... this gay word, this gay, gay, gay. I'm tired of hearing it, they're telling me the same thing over and over," she told CNN, as she wiped away tears from her face.

But while she says her son complained about the bullying, she had no idea how bad it had gotten.

"He told me, but he just got to the point where he didn't want me to get involved anymore because nothing was done," she said.

Bermudez said she complained to the school about bullying seven or eight times, but it wasn't enough to save him.

"It [apparently] just got worse and worse and worse until Thursday," she said. "Just to walk up to that room and see your baby hanging there. My daughter saw this, my baby saw this, my kids are traumatized."

She said Jaheem was a shy boy just trying to get a good education and make friends.

"He was a nice little boy," Bermudez said through her tears. "He loved to dance. He loved to have fun. He loved to make friends. And all he made [at school] were enemies."

Bermudez said she thinks her son felt like nobody wanted to help him, that nobody stood up and stopped the bullies.

"Maybe he said 'You know what -- I'm tired of telling my mom, she's been trying so hard, but nobody wants to help me,' " says Bermudez.

I feel so sorry for him. But at least he was happy once upon a time, before he came here and started the period of misery that ended his life.

I don't know what to do, but I have a few ideas. I'm going to continue writing about my own experiences with abuse in school and giving advice on the topic where I can. I'm not calling it bullying anymore, because "bully" is too light of a word. I can't be an advocate in any more public sense, however. I can be very articulate in person but not on this subject. I can write about it, but it's almost impossible for me to talk about it.

I'm going to talk to Sunny about Jaheem Herrera, and show him his photo, and explain that it happened because other kids called him "gay" and were mean to him. I'll try to find some way of telling him that I don't want Sunny to ever abuse anyone in that way, and more importantly, to stand up for kids who are being abused, because if you don't, you could end up being guilty for the rest of your life. And finally, that if he was ever a victim, I'd pull him out of school and do whatever it takes to protect him.

This story is running together in my head with another story I heard second-hand from my mother, about a discussion she had with a man who had been one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan. Our family has connections to refugee families, including some Sudanese, though I don't want to go into any more identifying detail on the connections.

Anyway, the man said he was willing to share his story because he considered himself an advocate. His story involved some very simple math. His group tried to go Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians expelled them back into Sudan. So on their next attempt, they walked 500 miles from Khartoum into Kenya. There were 800 of them when they started walking. There were 300 when they arrived. Wild animals, starvation, disease and soldiers had killed the rest. He was seven years old.

I couldn't even imagine. The same age as my son...

I actually tried reading "What is the What", the story of former "Lost Boy" Valentino Achak Deng, but I gave up less than 100 pages in because it was making me so unbearably sad. It's hard to say what was worse, going through all the nightmare of the civil war, or being so poorly treated in America, just when he thought he was safe.

And then many of the children of the refugees end up in poorly managed public schools where they suffer tremendous abuse for not "fitting in".

In this country that's supposed to be so rich and civilized, we can't even keep children safe in schools.

Analysis of a Local Public Disturbance

What makes a viral video?

Here are some qualities I've noticed.

1) They show a human or animal engaged in some unique or extreme activity
2) They exhibit noteworthy artistic skill or cleverness
3) They greatly reinforce prior beliefs
4) They greatly challenge prior beliefs
5) Newsworthy: they show something that connects with our sense of the local and the current, the here and now. We can relate the narrative of our lives to what happens in the video.

These videos also generate mountains of racially-based commentaries wherever they're posted. Actually, it's often more a spittle-flecked monologue than it is a dialogue.

I'll talk about two other viral videos before I show the Soulja Girl one.

I remember a video from last year that showed a high school fight. Two young men take off their shirts and square off. It's a white kid and a smaller, shorter Asian kid. The crowd is yelling their support of the white kid; they're on his side. It begins. Whoever uploaded it has added a soundtrack: Rick Ross' "Everday I'm Hustlin" booms over the fight. The Asian kid moves like greased lightning and after a few punches, the white kid is down. He gets up and walks off. The Asian kid drops him again; this time he can barely stagger away, blood and bits of teeth spraying from his mouth. The video ends.

This video was popular among Asian-Americans, for obvious reasons. A narrative built up around it. The white kid was the bully. The Asian kid was the hero. The narrative had dubious authenticity, but it felt right, it fit with the video and it fit with many of our experiences. I've certainly had the experience, multiple times at school, of being surrounded by a circle of hostile white kids screaming at me. I watched the video several times. It created a strong surge of mixed emotion. I couldn't think straight while watching it. I loved it and hated it at the same time for making me romanticize the violence.

Another example is a popular video I saw last year that's much less violent but seemed to arouse equally strong emotions. A young, pretty, blond white girl sits in front of the camera and talks about her infatuation with Arab men. Nothing is pornographic or poetic; her tone is quite flat and even bland. Arab men are handsome. They're sexy. They're romantic. They know how to treat women well. They're fun to hang out with. She only goes out with Arab men now. Her current boyfriend is Arab. She's learning Arabic. She's converting to Islam. That's it, really.

You can imagine how the typical anti-Arab commenter reacts to this. Her positive stereotyping sends them into a frenzy. What she believes is the exact opposite of what any white, presumably Christian woman is supposed to believe about Arab men. It's a huge challenge to their own beliefs, and they have to deal with it by turning her into a non-representative freak, someone who's not deserving of the title of woman, even.

If it was a more common fetish – for example, a white man giving similarly bland reasons for liking Asian women --- there is no way the video would have gotten the same attention and reaction.

I first saw the Soulja Girl video at the Creative Loafing blog. It's a local Atlanta blog. There are other local sources for the video. It's viral because it's current, it involves something that almost all Atlantans are familiar with (the MARTA train), it shows an extreme of human behavior and it reinforces some prior beliefs for a lot of people. I have to warn viewers, the video is quite depressing and is going to arouse a lot of negative emotions. I'm going to talk much more about those reactions than about the video itself.



Here are some comments from the initial Creative Loafing post. There's a good dialogue in that the stupid comments do not go unchallenged.

Reason #3,129 guns should be kept off MARTA

# Jill Chambers Says:
May 7th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
It's just one more reason why MARTA needs to have their police actually riding on the trains. How sad that someone would so rudely disrespect the elderly woman and that all those other riders did not even try to come to her defense.

# Cricket Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 6:46 am
This is a perfect reason that people with concealed carry permits SHOULD be allowed on MARTA. If I had seen this, and it had escalated to actual physical violence, I would have no problem giving that ghetto wh*re two in the hat.

# Ken Edelstein Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Cricket, you make the point of gun control advocates everywhere.

# DaleC Says:
May 8th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Cricket it DID escalate to physical violence when the guy finally stood up and stopped the aggressor. No weapons needed.
That poor old woman. I can't believe it took that long for SOMEBODY to stand up to her being assaulted.
Notice how rapidly Soulja Girl's attitude changed when she was confronted by someone who showed force in an appropriate manner.
Bullies fold when someone calls them on their crap. It's a shame it took someone that long to stand up to her.
As an aside, don't you just LOVE the beautiful world of Hard Core Hip Hop culture.

# Roxie Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Dude, Dale, did you just call "superman" Hard Core HipHop?
Please, appropriately hang your head in shame.
The woman in the video was not a life threatening individual. Although, she is severely testing sanity and patience, being horrendously disrespectful, aggressive, and antagonizing..It was NOT dealt with appropriately by the young man, as you can see, it only escalated the situation. There are better ways to deal with something like this that do not involve HITTING.
Of course, armchair quarterbacking is so easy. It took so long for ppl to respond b/c they couldn't believe what was happening and certainly didn't expect it to last as long as it did.

Hilarious.
# nast Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Seeing as how this incident was defused by a simple act of wig pulling, perhaps Gov. Perdue should sign a bill that protects individual rights to pull others' wigs in restaurants, parks, churches and other public places.
"A wig-pulling society is a polite society."

In the next update to the story, the spittle-flecked monologue begins.

MARTA statement regarding videotaped lunacy


# troy c Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Is she an Obama superdelegate?

# LMM66 Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Not one of those losers tried to help an elderly woman. Everyone there was dumb*** you-know-what. As people have mentioned here already, THIS is how stereotypes are formed. And whether folks like it or not, THIS is the norm for "them".

# Weary One Says:
May 10th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
M.A.R.T.A.
Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta

# Roxie Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Wow. I didn't know so many racists liked CL.

MARTA actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (although everyone knows the other five words). It's a contentious intersection of race and politics in Atlanta.

Compared to better-known train systems, such as New York City, the trains are very limited in the ground they cover. The crime rate is low and the trains and stations are extraordinarily clean. Everyday users of the MARTA trains are predominantly working-class/middle-class African-Americans. All other Atlantans take the trains periodically, usually to go the airport or to attend special events held downtown.

Central Atlanta is a diverse mix, with the largest bloc being native (Atlanta-born) African-American. White people who live inside Atlanta are comparatively progressive in their politics, especially because of the huge GLBT community. They're not a choir of enlightened angels, by any means, but one thing is sure: if they were scared of seeing and talking to black people every day, they wouldn't be living where they do.

The suburbs to the east are where many richer, non-Atlanta-born African-Americans have settled. And to the far north, the suburbs trace the arc of white flight. The iron claws of the northern suburbs have had a pretty bad effect on the development of public transportation in Atlanta. Their politics, plus the road-construction lobby's dirty money, ensures that Atlanta's traffic congestion and air quality get worse and worse every year. MARTA's system is funded only by the two counties of metropolitan Atlanta, although people from the surrounding counties frequently use it for park-and-ride. The counties of the northern suburbs refuse to link their own systems to it, for fear of getting too many undesirable people in their neighborhoods. A well known fact: "MARTA is unique in that it is the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding."

The comments to the video illustrate an intense fear and loathing of public transportation. This fear and loathing feeds from racism, then back into racism, in a vicious feedback loop. "If only I could never leave my car," they pray. But parking is limited at their sporting events and their centers of bureaucracy. Every once in a while, they have to bravely step onto a MARTA train. And they're not even allowed to carry their guns on board! They resent that.

Anyone who is passionate about Atlanta and knowledgeable about Atlanta and lives inside it, no matter what their race, knows about this dynamic. We're all hostages to it.

Getting back to a more personal level, what do viewers feel about the woman?

I didn't think that drugs were involved. It definitely wasn't crack. People on crack aren't that fluid and expressive and coordinated in their movements. I think a lot of people on the train had the same visceral reaction I did… the fear and awe of the mad. If you don't look at them, maybe they won't notice you.

In fact, that's what happened. I read it first at local videojournalist A.Man.I's blog: Soulja Girl Turns Herself In. The fuller story was reported here and on local radio stations.

MARTA's 'Soulja Girl' Getting the Help She Needs

She's only 25 years old, but the dark bags under Nafiza Z.'s eyes tell the story of a young life blighted by psychosis, delusions, hallucinations and mania that are the hallmarks of her mental disorder.

Yesterday afternoon, Nafiza, was in the DeKalb County jail receiving the psychiatric treatment she desperately needed. But on April 7th, Nafiza was spiraling out of control on a MARTA train traveling through Atlanta's east side.

The scenes captured on another passenger's cell phone of Nafiza aka "Soulja Girl" terrorizing an elderly passenger - caused a sensation on the Internet and embarrassed MARTA officials who quickly issued a warrant for her arrest.

People with bipolar disorder aren't usually that violent or aggressive even in their manic phase. They are usually more of a danger to themselves than they are to others.

Nafiza's boyfriend Dee, with whom she has a baby son, said it more eloquently when he called into the Ryan Cameron Show on Friday, "If she wasn't bipolar she would be the good a person on earth," said Dee.


"That girl got a good heart. The city don't help her, man! They just kick her back out on the streets. The city don't help [black mentally ill] folks like that. Once you get in that [manic] stage you can't help yourself. It mess with your mind, man. Once your mind gone it's a wrap!"

I don't know exactly what it's like to be in the grip of clinical mania, adrenaline coursing through your body, other strange chemicals surging through your brain. But I know what it feels like to be a witness to something like that. Perhaps the awe and fear of the bystander is partly because of our empathy with mania... as if we're seeing the dial turned up to 10 on an experience we've felt at level 3 or 4.

It reminds me of a bizarre experience I had when I was in college in Miami. I was at a donut shop late at night, studying with some friends. An older white man walked in and set down at the booth next to us. He started talking very loudly to the air in a sharp, agonized tone. It was a monologue about being a Vietnam vet and how he was betrayed and how it was all the fault of the gooks. That sentiment, those words, over and over again.

My friends were shrinking into their seats. They were all foreign students and terrified of getting into trouble and getting deported, especially the one from Iraq. I had the opposite reaction. My skin was on fire, there was a buzzing noise in my ears, my body started shivering and trembling as if someone had plugged me into an electric current, and everytime he said the word "gook" the current spiked. After a couple minutes of this, I couldn't take it anymore. I got up and faced him and started yelling back.

There was chaos after that point. Another older white man came over, said he was also a Vietnam vet and then took my side of the loud, disjointed argument. The staff of the donut shop got involved. There were numerous threats of ass-kicking. The police came. They tried to talk him down but eventually arrested him after he got into his car, because he was obviously in no condition to drive.

My friends, who hadn't moved during the whole time, told me I was crazy. Yes, my actions were pretty irrational, but I didn't feel like I had a choice. I'd waded up to my knees in something that the mentally ill man was drowning in. I suppose I won, but my victory was pretty hollow.

This was the first narrative that I connected to the video I watched today. But after that man went out into the parking lot, I have no idea how his story began or ended.

After I read a bit more of Nafiza Z.'s story, I feel almost guilty for writing this analysis. I still empathize with the bystanders and the poor elderly lady, but I also empathize with her terrible struggle. I hope these words will go to show how the hatred expressed toward her has more to do with a complicated web of politics, race and resentment than it does with her actual actions. I hope she can transcend the person shown in that video and become the person she wants to be.