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Add this to the post-racial society pile! There was a time when racist bullsh*t like this went on in private conversation, but Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden apparently goes balls to the wall with this bit of miscegenation analysis of the background of the President of the United States. The mind-blowing snippet from Media Matters.

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy ‘60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to “hope” for “change.” It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

It’s obvious that the 2012 run up to the elections will be a total race meltdown for these people.

Welcome back to post-racial America friends, where some people believe that electing a black man as POTUS erases all vestiges of racism from American culture.

Sometimes there is justice in the world, and in some ways it takes a sad form in the context of the big picture. If The Valley Club had members and leadership who thought about the cruelty they showed to the minority children from The Creative Steps Day Camp, the facility wouldn’t be in this position.

Yesterday, Valley president John Duesler announced that the club’s board of directors had voted 5-1 to file this week for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

For months, it had been rumored that Valley would not survive the costs associated with legal proceedings and lawsuits filed on behalf of young campers from Creative Steps Day Camp, a city summer camp whose members are minorities.

Campers’ families alleged that their children’s pool privileges had been revoked because the club’s overwhelmingly white members didn’t want children of color at the small, suburban club.

Ronnie Polaneczky of the Philadelphia Daily News has the entire e-mail from Valley Club president John Duesler to club members, sent out this week. A snippet that still shows a startling lack of insight about the initial problem that led the club to this place:

“[W]e have also emailed you, last year’s members, and have understandably received a collective shrug of the shoulders...we are all tired and beaten down and just sickened by how our club has been improperly portrayed.  After speaking to many members, my sense is that mostly everyone wants to move on.”

...Please know that this Board has done everything in its power to find a reasonable solution to, not just the declining memberships, but the legal remedies too.  Yet, as with so many things that we face in life today, much of our challenges ame down to a matter of money!  Money!  Money!  While our club has great heart and character, money is a resource of which we have been perpetually short. 

“We do wish all of you the best, and we look forward to seeing you again within our community of families and friends.

This incident is another healthy reminder that self-segregation, in case illegal self-segregation, exists in many places outside of the South. (IMHO, the most color-aroused place I’ve ever lived is NYC, there were social norms and political history that fostered clear habitation boundaries that are just now breaking down because of the general unaffordability of housing.)

Remember the Freudian slip to the media by John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club when the initial excuses began?

“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”

Below the fold, the details in the Human Relations Commission report that left no doubt that this club had quite a retro mentality about race relations and pool purity.

In the report findings, there is example after example of parties the size or larger than The Creative Steps Day Camp’s welcomed in with few restrictions, certainly none of them turned away. The Valley Club had 155 paid membership in 2009 and 179 in 2008, none held by an African-American. A few screenshots to peruse of the reactions of some Valley Clubbers:

And this:

Valley Club tried in 2009 to expand its membership by recruiting in areas outside its township - Lower Moreland, which has a 0.8 percent black population - mailouts were ”mainly directed at areas with overwhelmingly Caucasian populations” including Rhawnhurst, Fox Chase and Churchville.

The more-diverse townships of Cheltenham and Abington, like other nearby areas with “significant African-American populations,” the report says, were passed over.

I wonder what happened to that teacher, Michelle Flynn, who so clearly revealed her personal biases above?

Related:
* Black kids booted from Philly club’s ‘whites-only’ pool
* ‘Complexion’ of black camp kids not a problem at new pool
* Too little, too late for the Valley Club
* PA state investigation finds Valley Club did discriminate against minority kids at its pool
* I guess I’ll just sink to the bottom of the pool

Hat tip, Adam B.

Regular readers will have noticed that in recent months, Feministing has brought in a number of new contributors: Ariel, Jos, Lori, Rose and myself. No doubt you're getting to know them by reading their posts and engaging with their ideas in the comments section, but I also suspect that you might want to know a little more about these wonderful women (I know I do!). Over the last few weeks, I've been interviewing my fellow new contributors so that you and I can get to know them a little better. This week I interviewed Lori Adelman.

Lori grew up in New Jersey and went to Harvard, where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in Social Studies. In college, she was active in student government and in the Association of Black College Women's political branch. She got her start in feminist work in the Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and at the Abortion Access Project. Now, she works at the International Women's Health Coalition in the communications department, where she blogs for IWHC's blog Akimbo. Lori lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog, Wordsworth, who she describes as a dog of the "presidential variety": an adorable, brilliant, accomplished mutt.

Chloe Angyal: How did you come to be involved in feminist activism and writing, and with Feministing specifically?

Lori Adelman: I feel a lot of pressure here to have an answer that's very relatable to people, because I'm always looking for ways to have my personal experience and my own story be informed by and be contributing to "the movement" in some way, but I'm just offering a disclaimer that I'm going to resist the urge to do that here. My story is my story; people will take from it what they can.

So basically, I got involved with feminist activism as a means of survival. I think that for me to survive as the person I am, to remain whole and in tact and uncompromising, it was a natural progression for me to advocate for equality and to advocate for women to be taken seriously and respected on a regular basis, which is basically, for me, what the feminist movement is about.

So it started out on this very personal level. I grew up watching the casino lights across the bay that separated my town and Atlantic City, and even worked in casinos for a time in high school as a lifeguard/spa attendant, and then as a hostess in an upscale restaurant that was once featured on Sex and the City. That feels like so long ago. So basically I grew up being surrounded by this casino industry's great promise of glitz and glimmer, and, at the same time, by the black community living in the same city, in abject poverty, populating the waitstaff of the casinos and just being totally shut out from that promise of wealth. And I took that observation and those experiences with me, when I left New Jerz for college. And so initially I was all about the Black community in college, and feminism came second, if at all. It was part of my politics, but it wasn't a priority. And then, when I was in my junior year of college, I started interning at the Abortion Access Project, and that was something that I didn't think I would necessarily be caught up in: I wasn't involved or even really particularly interested in the abortion debate when I started working there. I mostly did it because it was really close to campus and I was really interested in women's health, but after I started working there, I was fascinated by the workteam and I started learning about how comprehensive the attacks on women's autonomy were. And it scared me, and it opened my eyes to the amount of opposition that women are facing on this issue.

Then I got an internship in the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch, and my eyes were opened even more to how thethe reallytruly comprehensive and linked nature of these attacks. , and I saw what was happening not just in America but all over the world. And I saw that it wasn't just about abortion, or motherhood, or even women, but it was about freedom and autonomy and justice, which were the same things that I was fighting for in my work with the Black community, and that tied it all together for me. So I was just hooked after that.
And so then after college, I moved to New York and kind of struggled for awhile, to find a feminist job that would pay me a living wage and speak to my interests and skillset, and so I was just dead broke for awhile while I figured that out. And I can't lie, because that was a rough time, and it really made me reevaluate myself, my feminism, and my values. But it was totally worth it, because during that time I found out about this amazing organization called the International Women's Health Coalition, which is where I'm working now, and I couldn't possibly love my job more.

And regarding Feministing, I was totally a reader before I started contributing. I was obsessed with the site, and it really helped me form some of the feminist values that I hold to this day.

CA: Who are your favorite fictional heroines?

LA: I have to go with an amalgamation of several different characters. One of them would be JD Salinger's Franny, because her spiritual dilemma resonates with me. Another would have to be my favorite childhood figure, Anastasia Krupnik. I totally love her. And from film, the Oracle, in The Matrix. Was she bad ass or what? I don't know about you, but I am really hoping those internet rumors about a black woman having written The Matrix are true.

CA: Who are your heroines in real life?

LA: I have so, so many heroines in real life. I'd say that most of the women I've met in my life have been heroines to me, or to someone they know, in some way or another. But I would say primarily the people I work with - my colleagues at the International Women's Health Coalition. They are amazing. The writers at Feministing are truly heroines, and I won't go into detail on that because I think that everyone reading the site can speak to that. My friends that I grew up with in high school, my roommates from college, obviously my mother and grandmother. They've been really brave and strong, and they taught me how to be who I am, and to be proud of it. Also, I find honest female authors to be really heroic: women like Rebecca Walker and Mary Gaitskill, and even nonfiction writers like Naomi Klein and Michelle Goldberg, are women who put their truth out there for the world, persuasively and unabashedly, and that really speaks to me, and inspires me to be more emotionally honest in my own life and in my own feminism.

CA: What recent news story made you want to scream?

LA: Do I have to pick just one? Part of my job is to do media coverage, so every day there's a moment of banging my head against the desk while I compile the day's news about women's health from around the world. The obvious one is the Stupak Amendment to the healthcare bill. It was infuriating, and it was a slap in the face to American women.

A less obvious one, perhaps, is the sort of condescending nature of a lot of the coverage of the movie Precious, and in general surrounding a lot of Black art and news stories. From the death of Michel Jackson to the Skip Gates incident to the feminization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, in general, a lot of the coverage misses the mark for me, and reflects a bigger problem with the way the world views people of color, and women of color in particular.

CA: What, in your opinion, is the biggest challenge facing feminism today?

LA: In my opinion, the biggest general challenge facing feminism today is that elitism, in the broadest sense of the word, is institutionalized. It's institutionalized in the movement, and it's institutionalized in greater society. And when I say that, I mean that privileged cultural groups, like old boys' groups, are the main means of organizational activity right now. My experiences at Harvard really opened my eyes to this fact. Nepotism and cultural snobbery and institutionalized -ism's- racism, classicism, sexism - they are alive and well, I promise you. Just by attending Harvard, this bastion of elitism, I've benefited in countless ways. I grew up modestly, but now I can speak this language I couldn't speak before, and I fit in places I wouldn't have before, and that's part of my own privilege that I'm still trying to work out how best to use or lose. So But anyway, this elitism is a great challenge for feminism because I think when the most powerful forces are being formed in this kind of secretive and elitist and non-transparent way, that translates into a less inclusive movement, not to mention a crisis in leadership and a crisis in collective identity regarding who makes up this movement and what its true goals are. So I think we could really use less elite and more grassroots leaders for our movement, and I think that will come from people - tomorrow's feminist leaders, specifically - seeing their problems and seeing their individual experiences and struggles - women, men, everyone - as social and structural and as related to the movement. And I think that's our biggest challenge.

CA: You're going to a desert island, and you get to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you pick?

LA: Dark chocolate, with some kind of yummy thing in it, like almonds or cherries. Or both! My drink would be red wine. And my feminist, hands down, my partner Rafiq wins that contest. So basically, I'm going to be chilling on a desert island that looks and feels a lot like my living room on any given weekday.

Miss Indian TG Arizona 2007-2009, Ricki Quintero, White Mountain Apache

Who thought a pageant could actually serve the better good? The 2009 Miss Indian Transgender Arizona Pageant is being held in Phoenix on December 13th this year. The pageant is a collaboration of a LGBT individuals, groups and programs within the Native community working to raise awareness around trans people in their community and the issues they're challenged with.

Love. Check out an interview with Pageant Director Trudie Jackson, and more info about this year's pageant here.

Via RaceWire.

Regular readers will have noticed that in recent months, Feministing has brought in a number of new contributors: Ariel, Jos, Lori, Rose and myself. No doubt you're getting to know them by reading their posts and engaging with their ideas in the comments section, but I also suspect that you might want to know a little more about these wonderful women (I know I do!). Over the next few weeks, I'll be interviewing my fellow new contributors so that you and I can get to know them a little better. This week I interviewed Jos Truitt.

Jos joined Feministing as a contributor this July, and in the past few months has been blogging up a storm (those of you who love Mad Men Mondays, you can thank Jos for that!). Jos grew up in Boston and graduated from Hampshire College, where she studied philosophy of race, feminist organizing and sequential art, which, she informed me, is the academic term for comics.

Jos now lives in DC, where she is pursuing her passion for reproductive justice. She recently started working part-time at the National Abortion Federation hotline and she serves as a clinic escort with the Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force. She has also worked and blogged for Choice USA. In her spare time, she likes to bake and spend time in the printmaking studio, and when I asked her which feminist she'd take with her to a desert island, she gave by far the sweetest answer I've heard yet.

And now, without further ado, The Feministing Five, with Jos Truitt.

Chloe Angyal: How did you become involved with feminist activism and writing, and with Feministing specifically?

Jos Truitt: I really wasn't exposed to feminist thought in any sort of overt way for most of my life, and certainly not through high school. I read one essay by an early twentieth century feminist that was about a page long at the end of senior year of high school. And I don't even remember what essay it was or who it was by. I just remember reading it and thinking that the ideas made sense to me. And it clicked. But I think that because I was raised in a very Christian fundamentalist family and in a Christian fundamentalist community, feminism was just really, really far off my radar. But at the same time, the way I understood the world and the things I cared about would have fit within feminism.

In college I came to feminism through critical race theory, through folks like Kimberle Crenshaw, and I was really intrigued by that kind of intersectionality. I was in this really amazing class on critical race theory with Falguni Sheth and Margaret Cerullo, and Falguni Sheth was going to be teaching a class on feminist legal theory the next semester, and I thought, "Oh sure, I'll check that out." I didn't really identify as a feminist, and I didn't really know that much about it, but the more feminist thought I looked at and the more I hung out with feminist organizers and the people doing this work, the more I realized how much these were the beliefs that were important to me and the issues that were important to me, and how much this was what I wanted to be doing.

As for Feministing, I was connected to Miriam in a few different ways. At Hampshire I worked for the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program, and Miriam was part of the organization's New Leadership Networking Initiative, so I'd seen her speak at a conference and I'd read her work a little bit. And then last November I was an intern at Choice USA and Miriam was working out of their offices while she was working for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. So we met there, and started to get to know each other a little bit, and that's also when I started blogging for Choice USA's blog Choice Words. When I moved back to DC, Miriam had already seen some of my writing and had encouraged me a few times to join the Feministing community. When there was a big explosion of trans issues within the community, I decided to start writing, and I got to know the community a little more. That was about the time the editors were looking to bring in some new writers and they wanted to bring in another voice on gender identity and expression from a trans perspective. So Miriam came to me about joining the blog. It's such an exciting opportunity; I get to keep writing about the issues I care about, and I have the potential to reach a broader audience.

CA: Who is your favorite fictional heroine?

JT: Buffy. I didn't in any overt way have a feminist analysis in high school, but I just have a really nostalgic memory of Buffy because that show helped me survive being a closeted, queer, trans kid in a very Christian household. Because of its representation of difference and exclusion, and of not fitting in and finding strength in that. So even though the show had some problematic elements and definitely failed on race a lot, and lacked a gender analysis outside of the binary, Buffy was the first feminist role model I was exposed to, before even realizing that she was a feminist or that I was a feminist. The fact that she could be femme - which I didn't completely understand I wanted to be but had some relationship to - yet strong, and powerful, and stand up for herself while also being a complicated person with weaknesses and struggle to fit into a world that she didn't really fit into, it spoke to me. And I think it really primed my brain for feminism.

CA: Who are your heroines in real life?

JT: The Black feminist thinkers who brought me to feminism in the first place, like Kim Crenshaw and Angela Davis. Their intersectional analysis is what showed me that feminism could be a politics and a worldview that made sense for me, because something that always stood out for me as I started to engage with issues of oppression and social justice were the intersections and complications of identity. And then Kate Bornstein gave me language and words and ways of expressing feelings and concepts that I had inside of me and never, ever knew how to articulate when it comes to trans identity and gender. So she's been a major influence.

And then, some of the really amazing role models I've had the privilege of working with and learning feminism from. I first read feminist thinkers in classes with Falguni Sheth and Margaret Cerullo, who both have incredible analysis and taught me how to think. And Marlene Fried, who runs the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program and who really gave me the opportunity to learn how to do reproductive justice organizing.

CA: What recent news story made you want to scream?

JT: It's been really hard to watch movement on some of the issues that have been touted as the current queer agenda or current LGBT agenda or current gay agenda, and have people saying they speak for my community when I really disagree with them. For example, hearing a trans organization talk about the Matthew Shepard hate crimes bill as a victory, when I see it as a really big step back because of its support of the prison-industrial complex and because of the extra policing it's going to create in our communities. It's always really hard in these moments: it's the first real legal recognition of trans people at the federal level should be a gift, and instead, I see it as supporting these systems that I struggle against. So I wanted to feel really proud, but at the same time, the fact that it happened by increasing policing and sentencing and potentially putting trans folks at greater risk, is a real struggle for me. And I feel similarly about Don't Ask Don't Tell and gay marriage, the other two major pushes. The focus on the military-industrial complex and the focus on marriage, instead of trying to get civil rights and basic human rights for all queer people, is just not an agenda I can support.

CA: What, in your opinion, is the biggest challenge facing feminism today?

JT: I think it's the struggle to incorporate a gender analysis into feminism. I think a lot of feminist work, unfortunately but understandably, starts by accepting the world we live in in terms of gender as just fact, that the world that we live in is divided by gender in a binary way, and that within that reality we have to fight for women's rights, women's equality, women's liberation. I understand the gender binary, or the forcing of all people into boxes of "male" and "female," as a crucial tool of patriarchy. That binary itself is used to oppress everyone who doesn't fit into one box or the other. It's a way to keep the people who fit into the most limited and the most racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist and otherwise privileged definition of men in power at the expense of everyone else. And the work is happening, but it needs to be understood as a vital part of feminism that we have to critique and understand and dismantle the compulsion to force everyone into the gender binary. Until we do that, feminism's always going to hit up against that wall and only get so far. And as long as we accept that gender binary, it's going to keep us from reaching liberation because it's just going to hold us back that little bit more.

CA: You're going to a desert island, and you get to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you pick?

JT: I have to keep a feminist from the world? I would feel so bad about that! Well, I guess if I had to deprive the world of a feminist, it would probably have to be Kate Bornstein. Her ideas apply to my own personal life experience in such a powerful, intense way. They've just been so meaningful to understanding myself. My drink will be a dirty vodka martini with blue cheese olives, and for food I'm going to have to take pear pie with a gruyère crust.

"Status is Everything": These are the words repeated in the new HIV testing campaign to be launched by the Newark, NJ African American Office of Gay Concerns (AAOGC).

The website is not functional yet, as the campaign will be revealed on December 1, 2009, and officially launched in January 2010, but their preview photo shoot for the advertising campaign was released on flickr this week.

Photos feature young gay African American men with the caption "Status is Everything," and the ad campaign will refer viewers to a hotline and website where they can schedule free HIV testing at local clinics.

Not found in this campaign, however, is the need for a cogent campaign that's inclusive of young women of color. In 2007, blacks accounted for 44% of the 455,636 people living with AIDS in the 50 states and District of Columbia. And as Advocates for Youth reports,

Black women and Latinas account for 79 percent of all reported HIV infections among 13- to 19-year-old women and 75 percent of HIV infections among 20- to 24-year-old women in the United States although, together, they represent only about 26 percent of U.S. women these ages.

One idea that has circulated this year accuses black men on the "down low," that is, closeted black men who have sexual exposure to other men while dating women, of contributing to the HIV epidemic and women's infection rates in the US. Yet, the director of the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, Kevin Fenton, concluded that the cause of increased infection rates among black women was instead the incidence of black men with multiple heterosexual partners. He cites data that shows a lack of bisexual self-identification among the community of HIV-positive black men. (Is it possible that the accusation that "down low" men spread HIV is an extension of the race-fueled trend of the feminization of black men?)

This advertising campaign, while potentially powerful in the gay male community, won't help the black women who comprise 61 percent of all new HIV cases among women.

One thing is certain: Newark's new campaign, while not targeted toward the women affected most by HIV, is a nice change from other disturbing HIV advertising we've seen.

Nearly every staff member they have named so far is white -- and male. The co-op's board is white, all but one male. I would venture there are vast swaths of the city they don't know and rarely traverse....

If these reporters and editors check with the U.S. Census, they will discover that Chicago's racial and ethnic base is majority-minority. There are far more people of color than whites. Latinos are Illinois' fastest-growing minority group. A good half of the Chicago region is female.

Some might call it arrogance, hubris or just plain racism. I don't know about that, but to me it's just plain folly.

Jim O'Shea, the former Chicago Tribune managing editor who last week announced the Chicago News Cooperative...says he intends to have a diverse staff and board of directors....O'Shea envisioned eventually having 20 to 25 staffers. "I am interviewing a candidate as we speak who will bring to us some diversity," he said.

The New York Times Magazine that made Precious actress Gabourey Sidibe a cover girl was almost a too-good-to-be-true moment. All at once, the world was a more inclusive place for people of dark complexions, ample body sizes and for people living in the shadows of the less visible differences her Precious character embodies. It's crazy how powerful representation can be. I am a dark-complected, Harlem girl who has survived violence. And while it's on the self indulgent side, I must admit: seeing that chocolate girl on that measly little cover with her pride held high made all the difference to me.

A few days remain until Precious debuts across the country on Nov. 6th. The story, originally told by Sapphire through the novel Push, is an ode to negotiating inclusion and exclusion in the media. It's about much more than the New York Times' account: a "Harlem girl raped and impregnated by her abusive father." (That's practically all the ink dedicated to Precious the character despite an accompanying a column that extends for 5 pages.) It's about inclusion and what it says about who is valuable in our society. That's best captured in Push, when Precious explores this:

I am comp'tant. I was comp'tant enough for her [Precious' mother] husband to fuck. She ain' come in here and say, Carl Kenwood Jones--thas wrong! Git off Precious like that! Can't you see Precious is a beautiful chile like white chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers. Precious is a blue-eye skinny chile whose hair is long braids, long long braids. Git off Precious fool! It time for Precious to go to the gym like Janet Jackson. It time for Precious hair to braided.(64)

But what I love about the book is that Precious is not a defenseless subject. She is a survivor who resists against her exclusion by striving for her own inclusion. She does this by learning how to read. She then uses her literacy to read about the lives of Black women through writers such as Alice Walker, Ann Petry, Ann McGovern and others. The story ends with her literally penning her own story fully epitomizing the agency she had all along despite sexual trauma and despair.

Given how pivotal negotiating representation is to Push's rendering of Precious' story, I was a little underwhelmed to notice one glaring discrepancy between a character in the book and a character in the movie. In the book, the description of Blue Rain, the half-messiah, half-educator that delivers Precious from the bondage of illiteracy and abuse is as follows: "She dark, got nice face, big eyes, and...long dreadlocky hair." (39-40) This character in the movie is played by Paula Patton, a light-skinned African American woman with straightened hair. By no means do I doubt the talent of Patton, but it means something that the directors chose to cast one of the most central characters of the film against Sapphire's original description.

While I have not seen the film yet, I am also interested to see how Blue Rain's sexuality is framed. The book also reveals:

Ms Rain tell me I don't like homosexuals she guess I don't like her 'cause she one...Ms Rain say homos not who rape me, not homos who let me sit up not learn for sixteen years, not homos who sell crack fuck Harlem. It's true. Ms Rain the one who put the chalk in my hand, make me queen of the ABCs.(83)

I have read several responses to the film and not once has anyone made mention of Blue Rain's queer sexuality. I certainly hope Lee Daniels, director of Precious -- a man who wore locs for years and self-identifies as gay -- did not write Blue Rain's sexuality out of the film the way he wrote out her color. If so, it will be a shame that America didn't get to see these precious little identity details, these markers that allow us to decimate the tropes of the white savior story. The lightening and possible desexualizing of Blue rain simply adheres to this worn tattered script and is not in keeping with Sapphire's call for inclusion through the vessel of Precious.