A Small Social Justice Study

 

This summer, I think that a lot of us felt the need to start getting a lot more informed about social justice issues. The kids clearly felt this need, too, and we had a lot of great conversations... which led to a lot of great questions...

...which I did not feel equipped to answer. 

I did what I generally do, then, when asked a question I do not know the answer to--I suggested that we look it up!

Rather, I suggested that we rewrite two of the Girl Scout badges at the kids' levels--the Cadette Finding Common Ground badge and the Senior Social Innovator badge--to encompass a short study on social justice, during which we could research the answers to our most pressing questions and find out more about the issues that we felt most called to.

There are so many--too many!--social justice issues to be able to give them all our careful attention during one short study, so we decided that we'd focus on just Black Lives Matter and the LGBTIA+ pride movement for the moment. 

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has a LOT of helpful information for thinking and talking about racial identity, bias, our country's history of racism, and how to be activity anti-racist. The kids and I went through a couple of their topics together, and then we each explored the rest of the topics separately and came together for conversation about them.

We spent another interesting afternoon working on a giant puzzle and listening to interviews of people who represent important moments in LGBTQIA+ history. Or rather, the kids got to work on our puzzle, while I stayed at the laptop and ready-referenced the questions that they continually peppered me with. AIDS activism in the early 1980s and the Stonewall Riots are the only historical events that I feel confident lecturing off-the-cuff about to the kids, so thank goodness for Wikipedia!

If you're interested in the history of the AIDS epidemic (it has a lot of modern parallels!), I highly recommend this book:

It's intense, and so, so, so sad, but it's also a vivid example of the extreme amount of social activism that's required to achieve even a starting point of social justice. AIDS activists sacrificed their careers, their reputations, and sometimes their lives just to get to a point where our government could begin to consider that perhaps we should not deliberately let entire swathes of people succumb to a pandemic.

On another afternoon, we popped popcorn and watched this documentary on the Stonewall riots:

It's a good example of how yes, you DO sometimes have to commit civil disobedience to right a social wrong that's been legislated into existence.

Here's another good example:

There IS a Book Three, but we're still on hold for it at the library!

John Lewis' story is epic. I'm ashamed to admit that I knew nothing about the Freedom Riders until I read his story. I'm sure my school system failed me in not teaching this, and then I failed myself by still not learning it after I was grown up and supposed to teach myself everything I'd missed out on learning as a kid. 

As another project on another day, the kids looked up book lists featuring POC and LGBTQIA+ people. There are several book lists referenced in this article about things white people can do to advance racial justice. There are a ton more great books in this list of children's and middle-grade LGBTQIA+ literature. The kids requested all the ones that looked interesting to them from our public library, and if there were any that the library didn't already own, they were to fill out a Suggest a Purchase form for it. Our library is awesome, and I think that Will only managed to find one book on all of these lists that the library didn't own! We got a bunch of new stuff to read for ourselves, though--I was especially excited to see that Jazz, whose picture book I always recommend to people as THE way to explain what it means to be transgender to anyone young or old, has a memoir now!

The Cadette Finding Common Ground badge wanted Syd to explore civil debate. Watching protest march footage certainly covers that, but at that point in the summer I didn't want to actually take the kids to anything in-person, but I did want to find something that showed how anyone can agitate for social justice, so we also spent another afternoon working on our paint-by-numbers and listening to protest poetry and protest songs. Here's an extensive list of protest poetry--shout-out to Paul Laurence Dunbar, who we previously met while learning about flying machines!

The kids sat with all of the research that we'd done for a few days, then came together to create a list entitled "How to be an Ally." Here's part of it:

They did pretty well, although their list shows that I didn't do enough to help them feel empowered and able to take direct action, perhaps, as much of the list is more about amplifying the message or showing support for the message, etc. Or maybe that's a product of this pandemic, when I don't feel comfortable encouraging the kids to attend protests or physically volunteer their time, so then they don't think of those options. But ultimately, their list is do-able and kid-friendly, and they each chose an item from it to do right then:

Syd intends to make digital copies of her hand-drawn pinback buttons (in the top photo), so that anyone with a 1" pinback button maker can download them and make them, too, but then high school started, and her algebra and biology teachers are definitely making up for the lack of work that her French and art teachers are giving her. So pinback button designs might have to wait until she learns everything there is to learn about algebra and biology first...

In other news, Will's teen police club, run by our local law enforcement officers, had a meeting (in the brief window when our community was starting to get back to doing stuff like that, before they stopped again) specifically to discuss Black Lives Matter and the instances of police brutality that have been so much in the news. Will came prepared (because I'd given her a list of these instances and required her to research them, summarize them, and then write her opinions), and although overall the discussion wasn't the absolute greatest, it wasn't terribly awful, either. I don't think that the officers who volunteer their time to work with the community's children are bad-hearted, but I don't think that they're exactly the wokest, either. And at one point, when an officer was discussing our farmer's market controversy and told the children that there was no proof that the Schooner Creek farm was run by Nazis, Will spoke right up and told everyone there that our family knows them and they're definitely Nazis.

Technically, I think they're actually "white identitarians" who refuse to admit that they're racist and instead insist that they just want to evict all POC from this entire country that was originally stolen from its indigenous people, but whatever. Everyone knew what she meant.

And I guess if I was looking for direct action towards social justice, then stepping up to contradict a police officer and tell a group of your peers a bit about your own experience with racism is pretty direct!

May Favorites: Piers Anthony, Magical Women, and Depressing Facets of Humanity

These are some of the books we returned the second that our library re-opened its returns. So excited to have some counter space again!

Sooo... how's everybody doing? Anybody else waiting for, like, the *next* sign of the Apocalypse? At this point, I'm not gonna rule out zombies...

My one comfort is that maybe all this shit is shit that, because it happened, will result in positive change. Our medical system is broken. Our system of social services is broken. Our society, and its collective sense of justice to everyone of all races, most particularly those who are Black, is broken. I don't even understand what-all is broken to have put Satan's stupidest hellbeast in the office of president of the United States for the past three and a half years, but clearly some kind of gears are flying off and knocking into other gears and sending them flying in order for that ridiculous mess to have happened.

So, yay for outrage, I guess. Yay for protests. Yay that we somehow, in the midst of all this shit, have built enough collective compassion that we will say George Floyd's name and admit that Black lives matter.

On the topic of understanding a little more about the ways in which hundreds of years of active racism have led our society to this point, this book was one of my favorite reads of May:



It's about the actual lived experience of Black Americans who fled the South for the North and the West in the time between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. The author conducted extensive interviews with some of the precious few individuals who are still alive from those days, and it's made a huge impact on how I understand racial disparity in our society.

It's a whopper of a book, but it's a must-read.

It feels weird to move from such a heavy, important book to YA sci-fi/fantasy, but that's what I read this month. I snagged these two books from Will's library shelf--



--and I LOVED them! They follow an orphaned teenager who manages a company of wizards in a land that's semi-magical but also quite prosaic and is run by a despotic king. Our local public library just re-opened its holds queue, so I put the third book on hold and I'm super hoping that they call me this week and tell me I can set up my fifteen-minute slot for a no-contact pick-up.

This book was also great--



--and it's my greatest coup that I encouraged Will to read it, as well, she told me it didn't sound interesting, I told her just to try it, and she did, and she liked it! It's not one of her personal favorites, but the perilous adventures of a telekinetic woman mixed up with a crew of undercover operatives is just my speed.

Here's another SUPER depressing book about yet more ways that we are actively killing our environment:



You guys, I hate to tell you this, but it turns out that sustainably-sourced seafood is just about a lie. Wild-caught tuna is not caught by Ernest Hemingway's old dude with a rod and a reel--it's caught in a big-ass net with a ton of other sealife and oceanic infrastructure that just gets trashed. Like, thousands of sharks are killed and just get trashed. Turtles are killed and just get trashed.

I do NOT want sharks or sea turtles to die because of me.

And "dolphin-safe" just means that dolphins mostly aren't part of the by-catch, although now that often has to be done by putting divers into the water to herd the dolphins out of the nets as they close. Not only does that scare the ever-loving stuffing out of the dolphins--multiple times a year!--but it can also separate mothers and babies. It SUCKS.

And there are nets that just drag across the ocean floor, tearing away all the supporting infrastructure and killing everything down there, just for scallops.

Because I know you needed one more thing to be depressed about, you guys. Sorry.

Hey, want to hear about something else depressing? It's THIS guy!



William Smith basically invented geology by making the first geological map. He did this by essentially walking the literal roads in three countries, hammering away at the ground, comparing fossils, exploring mines, and low-key manipulating canal-builders into building canals where he'd sure like a nice big cut in the earth opened up for examination.

He showed it off to members of the new Geological Society, because he thought they'd think it was cool and he wanted to be a member. But at the time, the Geological Society was made up almost entirely of rich snooty-snoots who were, like, hobby rock collectors and looked down on somebody who actually made his living with geology (Smith's side-hustle was contracting himself to farms and figuring out systems of dikes and canals to turn their fields from marshland to viable cropland), and not only did they make fun of him to his face and NOT make him a member of their snooty-snoot society, but some of their members deliberately plagiarized his map.

Like, deliberately and systematically. It took them years to spy out all of the relevant info it had taken Smith decades to discover, but when they finally achieved it, they redrew his map, published it, and undercut his selling price on account of they were rich.

William Smith was sent to the literal poorhouse because of them.

Man, the zombies really ARE coming after us next, aren't they?

Okay, now that I've realized why I've been in such a bad mood all month, let's turn to Will's list. She's our champion of escapist literature!

Alas, even poor Will has been struggling lately, as she has been bored, bored, BORED with the dearth of reading material since the library closed. Hopefully that will be remedied with our next library pick-up!

Will's partly been coping by re-reading some old favorites. I don't know how many times by now she's read this beautiful, positive children's novel:


She's also let me suggest a few books for her. She doesn't always love what I suggest, but I was stoked to see that she loved this particular old favorite of mine:



I may have even been about her age when I fell in love with Piers Anthony!

Here are Will's other favorite books from May:



Okay, that seems to have been quite a Ben Aaronovitch rabbit hole! And I will be quite sad if there's ever a month that Tamora Pierce doesn't appear on Will's favorites list.

And here's the rest of what she read!



It cracks me up that she always includes her AP textbooks, but she DID read them...

I've mentioned that I love narrative podcasts the most, so even though I'm still blowing through You're Wrong About, the kids and I have gotten super interested in this awesome horror podcast:



It's narrative, but not so much so that you can't space out for a bit or have to make everyone pause it while you run to grab a popsicle. It's for sure slowed down our progress in our family audiobook, Dracula, but it is the absolute perfect thing to listen to while hanging out on the back deck or working a puzzle in the family room--scary, mysterious, and engrossing!

And here's my latest YouTube obsession!



I really like long-form crafting videos--not even tutorials, but just watching someone make something incredibly detailed and sophisticated. Most of my other follows are dressmakers and costumers, so I was stoked to find this crafter who does all the other things, too! And I'm hella jealous that she has a Glowforge, which I have hopelessly desired for YEARS.

It's too bad I forgot the part about making any money from blogging, lol!

So far in June, all I've really done is wander around, sometimes eat nachos, and incessantly worry myself sick while reading Twitter updates about ever more acts of police brutality against peaceful protestors and ever more words of cruelty and inanity from our evil and incompetent president. I'm trying to read a history of women in computing, but I can't make myself relax and focus, and the earliest pick-up I could arrange for all of the fluffy, escapist fiction that I requested from the library is next Tuesday, alas.

So if all I have to show for myself come July 1 is a half-read history of women in computing and a thousand bags of tortilla chips eaten with cheddar cheese, black-eyed, peas, and too much onion, so be it. I'm sure the zombies will be showing up any minute now, anyway...

That Time that I was Accidentally Friends with a White Supremacist

So you guys, here's a thing that's happened this summer:

I'm part of this super low-key homeschool group in my town--for those of you playing the home game, it's the nice one, not the one with the mean moms who bullied me for several years. This nice homeschool group trends more hippy than not, with the kind of people who drink homemade kefir out of jars and pass around grain-free snack bars and form nature co-ops. We used to have an afternoon playgroup every week. We've gone on camping trips together. I chip in on the natural foods group buy sometimes. I love them.

One of the moms in this group was among the hippiest of them all. She once lovingly explained to me why tampons are bad. She sometimes brought homemade jello--like HOMEMADE jello, made with, like, organic gelatin and applesauce and coconut oil, and she ate it out of a Mason jar. On a hike, she gamely pretended to consult with me about tree identification via bark, politely ignoring the obvious fact that I obviously cannot identify any tree beyond if it's a maple or an oak or a sycamore, and for sure not by its bark. We were Facebook friends, and I was really into all the photos that she posted of her sheep and the stuff that she wove on her honest-to-god loom. On one camping trip, she taught my kid how to use a drop spindle. I really liked her, you guys. I really, really liked her.

She and her husband are farmers, because, you know, of course they are, and they sell at some of our local farmer's markets. That's not important right this second, but hold onto it.

Okay, so a couple of months ago I was scrolling Facebook, as you do, and my friend had vaguebooked some weird post about people who were spreading lies about her. I had no idea what she was talking about, which is generally the point of vaguebooking, but in the comments to her post, someone commiserated with her and said it was awful, all those awful things people were saying about her in our town's local Facebook group.

Does your town have one of those? A sort of indie little Facebook group where people ask for recommendations of good carpenters and bitch about the road construction and sometimes gossip? Our town has two--an official one and a sort of anti-official one for the snarky people who can't say anything nice. I swear that I've heard more breaking news on these groups that later ends up in the newspaper! I also know all the good carpenters, and where to get a watch fixed, and that the McDonald's by the highway always tells people that they're out of soft-serve when really they just don't want to get the machine fixed.

So OBVIOUSLY I immediately clicked onto that Facebook group and scrolled down to see who was talking trash about this friend, and indeed, people were talking trash about her!

Okay, here's another tangent: last year, in the county over from mine, a guy committed a hate crime by vandalizing a synagogue. He'd originally planned to burn it down, and still had bomb-making supplies in his car when he was arrested. His trial recently happened, and as part of it the transcript of the FBI interview was released, and on page 70ish of this interview transcript he gives the first names of two people who were members of a white nationalist hate group, Identity Evropa. He claims that these people had dinner with him in a local diner, and within a couple of days of that he'd used a money order to pay dues and join this group. He's pretty disjointed, about what you'd expect, but there's a pretty strong implication that these people who met with him are the ones who recruited him into this hate group, not long before he became radicalized enough to commit an actual hate crime.

And now we're back to the story: in his interview, he gave the first names of these people he met with, the members of Identity Evropa, and their first names matched the first names of my friend and her husband. People were claiming that they WERE these people, and were trashing them and telling people not to buy produce from them and that they should be banned from the farmer's market, etc.

I've had mean lies spread about me before, and it sucks, so I was loaded for bear at this point, and I immediately went into research mode. It shouldn't be that hard to prove that my friend wasn't the person named in the FBI transcript, and shame on the FBI for making it so easy for someone to be falsely accused like that.

Step 1: I found the FBI transcript for myself, and read it for myself. And yes, the names did match, and the location that he gave for their meetup was feasible. BUT in the interview, he also gave the woman's handle that she used when she posted on the Discord message board associated with Identity Evropa. So...

Step 2: I Googled that handle and Discord, and the first hit was Unicorn Riot, a non-profit that specifically worked to obtain and post the messages from neo-Nazi Discord chat boards. You can search this by Discord handle, and doing so gives you all the leaked posts from that specific handle. There's no context to tell you what the user is replying to, so all you really have to go by are what that user says.

I read through all of the posts that this specific user posted, looking for clues to help me prove that this person was not my friend. Except that all of the identifying information that she gave did line up--not enough to definitively identify her, but enough that, frustratingly, I couldn't definitively say it wasn't her, either. She posted pictures of her sheep. My friend has sheep. She posted a picture of a weaving that she'd done. My friend weaves. She posted the sexes and ages of her children. My friend has children of those ages and sexes. She posted a picture of her newborn. My friend's baby was born then. She posted about homeschooling. My friend homeschools.

At some point, although I was still looking for identification details that would prove that this Discord user wasn't my friend, I went back and also started taking screenshots of the upsetting, racist things that the Discord user was posting. She posted about taking the gentle children's world history curriculum, Story of the World, and supplementing it for her children with another book that purports to be a history just of white people, and is used as a call to arms by a LOT of white supremacists. She derided a particular self-help book as "anti-white." She claimed that there was no such thing as a Native American genocide, and that Native Americans could be prospering but "do not today for other reasons." She wrote these words: "Any Whites who have spent time living in a neighborhood or attending a school with a non-white majority know the strife that Whites endure."

You see where this is going, right?

But still, it wasn't definitive that this racist Discord user spewing upsetting, racist things was my friend, I mean, it wasn't definitive to me at the time. Until--and I don't remember if I found this link on the Discord leaks, or if it was another comment on the Facebook group that gave it to me--but either way, I learned that this person had a short-lived YouTube series. In it, she goes by her Discord handle, and tells us about plantain and yarrow and the benefits of bone broth.

Step 3: I clicked on the YouTube channel and played the first video, the one on yarrow. Twenty-two seconds in, my friend's voice says, "Greetings from the homestead. I'm Volkmom." Two minutes and 45 seconds in, she informs me that "race is sacred."

And that's it. She basically handed me the clearest way to identify her--I'd know her voice anywhere.

The Facebook gossip was absolutely correct. This Discord user really wasn't my friend, but only because I can't be friends with someone whose worldview is not just wrong, but abhorrently wrong. I feel sick to my stomach, wondering why she hid this about herself, why I could be so fond of someone who had such a rotten heart. She was one of my aspirational Facebook friends, you know those ones who you read their Facebook posts and you're all, "Gee, I wish I wanted to install a hoop garden and keep sheep! Aww, look at how pastoral they all are, sitting in the sun and eating blackberries!" My kids know her. My kids like her! I've now given my children memories of hanging out at the lake with a white supremacist.

I thought she was so great, you guys.

Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those things where everyone in the know could simply be all, "Hey did you know so-and-so is basically a neo-Nazi? We're not going to hang out with them again, okay? Okay!" That's because remember when I told you to hang onto the knowledge that this woman and her husband sell at the farmer's market?

They sell at the farmer's market. And this fact is blowing up my town.

My town apparently can't legally evict them, although another farmer's market, run not by the city but as a non-profit, did. The mayor says that sure, he super hates white supremacy, but the town also arrested a peaceful protester who was simply standing next to their booth holding a sign saying she'd been harassed by them. The town makes all of the anti-racism protesters stand outside the farmer's market, but the creepy dudes with the visible knives, who literally told a reporter that they were Three Percenters--you know, the actual right-wing militia that was active at the Charlottesville rally? Yeah, they get to hang out in front of their booth. On Saturday, less than half an hour after the peaceful protester was arrested, my kids and I walked past their booth and past a whole group of those guys laughing and chatting in front of it. I'd have had to push past them if I wanted to approach the booth. Most people were pretending like they didn't exist, but plenty of people were squeezing past to deliberately buy from them, as well.

It has been weeks and weeks of this mess, there's been a conflict there for the past two Saturdays, at least. And then on Monday, driving the big kid to horseback riding, I heard on the radio the breaking news that the city is SUSPENDING THE ENTIRE FARMER'S MARKET. They say that they're suspending it for two weeks, but who knows?

Are a bunch of farmers and producers going to lose a lot of money? For sure. The farmer's market here is bustling, even when white supremacists and their pet right-wing militias scare away a bunch of potential customers.

Are they saving us from an incident in which people are going to get seriously hurt? It's starting to seem like it. I mean, I guess? If arresting peaceful protesters but letting avowed Three Percenters stand armed in the exact same spot is honestly the best that the city can do to keep its people safe at a farmer's market, of all places, then sure, I guess, just shut the damn thing down and we'll all be racist or not quietly inside our own homes.

You guys, I am not built for the soul-searching and internal conflict and Feelings that this has made me feel. The weird guilt that I was accidentally friends with a white supremacist. The upset that I really liked her, and the worry that maybe I should talk to her and tell her--I don't even know, that racism isn't okay?--and I'm doing the wrong thing by avoiding her, instead. Or should I join the protesters? I want to hate her and demonize her, but man, I can't get the picture out of my head of hanging out around a campfire with her, listening to her and the other hippy moms talking about orgone boxes (WHICH ARE ACTUALLY A THING AND NOW I HAVE TO GO RESEARCH THEM AGAIN TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT RACIST, BECAUSE MY LIFE HAS BECOME ME QUESTIONING ALL OF MY MEMORIES), and how she was really nice and I liked her.

And who else do I know who's secretly racist? That's the thing. I don't trust my pleasant memories of pleasant times anymore. I don't trust all of my friends anymore. I don't trust myself to know who's a great person and who's a really, really, really terrible person.

ANYWAY... Apologies for the last few paragraphs basically being a bonkers, incoherent rant. I don't really have any summing up thing to say, or, like, some kind of profound insight or whatever. Mostly, I just wanted to tell you about this crappy thing that's been happening and how I'm feeling super crappy about it.

If you, too, were ever accidentally friends with a white supremacist for a while, let me know and we can start a club!