Think before you Pink

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Photo from wikipedia.

It is a feeling of hopelessness that brings us to this place. Desperate to save those who suffer. Determined to prevent those we hope never will. We are clawing and grasping to find any morsel of earth to hold onto when we feel like we’re spiraling out of control.

It is hopelessness. I know that now.

I used to think it was ignorance. Or lack of caring. I used to get angry. Every October when the grocery aisles started to display a sea of pink. “Pinkwashing” we call it now. Pink ribbons. Pink products. Pink everywhere. A tradition so old it has a name. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and it used to make me so angry to watch the way we commercialize it.

Then my father has a brush with the C word. The word we don’t even want to spell because it feels too forewarning and…

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Pathologizing Black Folks is America’s Religion, Or: A Few Thoughts on Roxane Gay’s ‘Bad Feminist’

Aware of Awareness

I spend nearly everyday writing and reading about global and local configurations of white supremacy and anti-blackness, with a special emphasis on the U.S. and France. This subject is the topic of Resurrecting Slavery, one of two books I am completing this year while on leave with a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

I made a decision to use this year to begin a conscious process of decolonizing my scholarship. This is a process that I began a few years ago, inadvertently, as I increasingly embarked upon a journey of mindfulness and well-being. As I prioritized my own self-awareness, I also found it necessary to liberate myself from harmful things in my personal and professional life, including and especially unexamined dynamics of white supremacy, anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy and other forms of insanity that pervade the power structures within which we are all conditioned.

For me, decolonizing myself from…

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Dear Doctor

Voiceless No More

Red Thread Broken

Update: I’m happy to report that the administer and I have been able to resolve our differences and move forward in a respectful manner. Nevertheless, adoptees’ voices are still largely ignored, and I still feel the heart of this piece remains true.

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Absolutely nothing is known about the first years of my life. My personal history begins when I was two years old, allegedly abandoned on a busy street in Nanjing, China. From there I was taken to the local police station, and then to the Nanjing Social Welfare Institute. In these ways, the beginning of my life can be characterized by a complete lack of control. The decision to leave my first family was not mine.  This was made by the national government in 1979, when China first introduced the One Child Policy. And this was again made by the local government, as Jiangsu Province implemented one of the strictest family…

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Of Coffee, Ice Cream and Soccer Shoes

Grab a Seat

Baudelaire and procrastination: the flâneur, the dandy, and the poet

Procrastination: Cultural Explorations

The following is a guest blog by Tamara Spitzer-Hobeika, one of our speakers in this autumn’s Procrastination Seminar. Come and hear Tamara discuss ‘Baudelaire’s dandy: the anti-procrastinator’ on Wednesday 29 October at 5.30pm in the Old Library, All Souls College, Oxford.

Baudelaire, by the famous photographer and balloonist Nadar (aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), 1855-8

Il n’y a de long ouvrage que celui qu’on n’ose pas commencer. Il devient cauchemar.

The only difficult work is that which we dare not begin. It becomes a nightmare.*

—Charles Baudelaire

These words by the accursed poet, the writer of beautiful spleen and terrifying idéal himself, are a perfect mantra for anyone experiencing the entrancing throes of procrastination.

The sentence that follows them in his Journaux Intimes (1887)—“By putting off what one has to do, one runs the danger of never being able to do it”—confirms that Baudelaire was no stranger to procrastination. Since…

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Canada, In the Shadow of a Gunman

The 14th Floor

The Attack

I sat down on Wednesday morning in my office shortly after 9 pm to plot out, ironically, how I was going to leave Canada. Academics can be a cruel game when it comes to deciding where one is going to live, and as a young intellectual in search of a job, I was staring out at words like Lingnan University, Gettysburg College, Fordham University…all places outside my home country.

And then it started. A flash across my twitter feed, headlines across the CBC…a solider gunned down at the War Memorial, shots fired in the Center Block of Parliament… immediately, images of military forces fanning out across Ottawa flooded my computer screen. There were reports that one gunman had been killed in Center Block, but that others were still on the loose. Maybe they were on the roof of a building? Maybe in the dense woodland area off the…

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How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

okepi

*Note: Please read all italicized technical words as if they were in a foreign language.

The fall semester of my senior year, I was having some serious self-confidence issues. I had slowly come to realize that I did not, in fact, want to become a researcher. Statistics pained me, and the seemingly endless and fruitless nature of research bored me. I was someone who was driven by results – tangible products with deadlines that, upon completion, had a binary state: success, or failure. Going into my senior year, this revelation was followed by another. All of my skills thus far had been cultivated for research. If I wasn’t going into research, I had… nothing.

At a liberal arts college, being a computer science major does not mean you are a “hacker”. It can mean something as simple as, you were shopping around different departments, saw a command line for the…

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For Whom The Uber Tolls

I Drive S.F.

It’s Saturday night… not even late. A few minutes after nine. I’m at Mission and 7th. Get a request for an address on Market, a block and a half away. I take a right on 7th and pull into the far left lane. As I turn onto Market, a girl in cut-off jeans and a tank top waves me down. She’s practically in the middle of the street. Grabs my door handle before I can even stop. Climbs in the backseat. I ask if she’s Andrea, the name of the person I’m supposed to pick up. She mumbles something and rolls down the window. The rider destination has already been added in the app so I start the ride.

“We’re going to the Richmond then?” I ask.

She says nothing. I look over my shoulder. She’s curled up against the door, passed out. I start driving. Turn off Market onto Hayes and then…

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