The Politics of Morning Sickness

I’m almost to the second trimester of what will hopefully be my first viable pregnancy, and I was unprepared for the nausea when it hit at 6 weeks. To date I haven’t vomited, but that first week, I struggled through each work day and could only temporarily keep the nausea at bay with small, frequent meals. Since then I’ve managed the nausea better by taking over-the-counter vitamin B6 supplements and Unisom (doxylamine succinate), a combination that’s shown to be safe in pregnancy, and continuing to eat frequent meals and snacks. But I’ve also used my saved vacation time to work 6-hour days for most of the last few weeks, having told my boss about my morning sickness. I’ve teleworked as much as my company policy allows – up to 4 times monthly, though my boss would likely accommodate me if I needed to do it more often – and held meetings virtually whenever possible. The nausea might be improving, but it’s more slow than sure, and my vacation time runs out soon.

A few times I’ve broken down and taken Zofran, which I already have on hand as a security banket for my borderline-phobia of vomiting. I’ve mostly taken it at night, when the nausea is worse and I can no longer eat my way out of it. One bad night, I tried toughing it out, and I spent the next day at work miserable and sleep-deprived. By bedtime I finally gave in and took Zofran again.

An estimated 80% to 90% of pregnant people experience nausea, at least in the first trimester, and at least 50% of pregnant people vomit. As many women reading this will know, my morning sickness – or, more accurately, nausea and vomiting of pregnancy (NVP) – is relatively mild. The Pregnancy-Unique Quantification of Emesis (“PUQE”) scale rates severity of NVP from 3 to 15, with “mild” being 3 to 6, “moderate” being 7 to 12, and “severe” being 13 or higher. Before I started taking B6 and Unisom, my nausea was on the higher end of mild, maybe 6. (BTW, Gideon Koren, who developed the PUQE scale, should be smacked for that acronym. Unless it was coined by a female grad student who scored high on it herself during a pregnancy.) My nausea still feels close to 6 on some days, particularly if I’m more sleep-deprived than usual.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Modified-Pregnancy-Unique-Quantification-of-Emesis-and-Nausea-PUQE-scoring-system-NVP_fig1_322522359 

In pop culture, morning sickness is often portrayed as funny or cute, a rite of passage to fondly swap stories about. In movies and TV shows, a pregnant woman will throw up once, twice, maybe a few times, but then she’ll be fine and partying with her friends again. (Think Knocked Up or How I Met Your Mother.) Behind these sunny pop culture images is a glaring silence about how much NVP impairs a pregnant person’s functioning at work and at home. And on occasions when the silence is broken, what you hear is terrifying. A professional woman writes on LinkedIn about "vomiting in between Zoom calls" - though another woman believes it's a vast improvement over vomiting between office meetings. A healthcare worker on a pregnancy forum in the What to Expect app spoke of throwing up between patients. A hairdresser told me how the nausea had lasted for her entire pregnancy with her daughter, forcing her to leave her clients in her chair to throw up multiple times a day. It’s mind-boggling that women are expected to power through this, and even more so how many women actually do. But should we have to?

Until recently, I didn’t fully appreciate how the women’s liberation movement and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 revolutionized the role of pregnancy in the workplace. According to the ACLU:

“Since 1978, when Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination under federal law, pregnancy has become routine in the U.S. workplace. Women now comprise half the workforce, and roughly 85 percent of working women will be pregnant at least once.”

It’s no longer routine or legally acceptable to fire women for getting pregnant or systematically avoid hiring women for fear they will get pregnant and quit (though, as the ACLU notes, discrimination is still rampant both within and outside the law, with many employers failing to provide reasonable accommodations). However, in our push to normalize pregnancy at work, and to prove to those hostile to women’s career advancement that we could tough it out, maybe we’ve lost sight of how physically difficult it really is to work while pregnant. When those of us who struggle with NVP power through or stay silent about our struggles, we perpetuate a climate where other pregnant people feel guilty or frightened about asking for accommodations.

This minimization comes through, in varying degrees, in the litany of online guides for dealing with NVP. The many lists of home remedies like crackers by the bedside, ginger tea, and avoiding strong smells, don’t capture what a constant waking disaster NVP is for many pregnant people. When they do mention prescription meds, their recommendations are often reserved for women with “severe” NVP or Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG). One article counsels women to build extra time into their morning commute to throw up, and to have a change of clothes at work in case of disaster. In fairness, though, some of these sources tacitly acknowledge how limiting NVP is by advising women to take sick time or otherwise lighten their schedules if they can. It's an obvious travesty that many pregnant people have no paid sick time, and little room for workplace accommodation. This is especially true for women of color, who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs with limited benefits.

(A note on the Fortune article: if you get a paywall on your desktop, try clearing your browser history or reading it on your mobile device.)

The medical establishment, for its part, isn’t as helpful as it could be. Because NVP is so common among pregnant people, and temporary for most, doctors and midwives sometimes minimize it. They may also force women with “moderate” or even “severe” NVP to jump through multiple hoops, vomit multiple times daily, or lose significant weight before accepting that home remedies and over-the-counter meds don’t work for them. As noted above, the PUQE scale threshold for “severe” nausea is 13 or higher. To achieve this score, you likely need at least 6 hours of nausea and over 7 instances of vomiting or retching per day. A lot of misery and lost work productivity can happen below a score of 13.

If I were writing advice for people with NVP, it would read something like this:

• Yes, it really is as bad as you think it is. Don’t let a partner, doctor, employer, relative, or friend tell you otherwise. (For the record, my own husband has been nothing but sweet and supportive.) And if you are being a wuss – so what? We all have our own capabilities and limitations.

• If you have PTO or work flexibility, don’t feel guilty about using it. Don’t think of it as being lazy and trying to work less – think of it as managing your energy so you can do your best work when you are on the clock.

• Make it clear to your healthcare provider if slow-pedal remedies aren’t going to work. If you can’t try snacking on saltines and sipping ginger tea because you spend half your day recovering from vomiting, tell them that. If you have little or no PTO and a job with no time for trial and error, tell them you need prescription meds ASAP to be functional. You know your nausea better than they do.

•  If you’re really struggling, strongly consider asking for Zofran (ondansetron) and taking it if it’s prescribed. ProPublica has detailed the suspected links between Zofran and cleft palate or, worse, heart defects in your baby. But, as my midwife explained, the studies demonstrating these risks have been criticized for having inadequate control groups. Women with more severe nausea may be more prone to having babies with these defects whether or not they take Zofran. The design flaws in these studies don’t rule out that Zofran poses a real risk, which could be 1 in 333 for ventricular septal defects (VSD). Different women will have differing levels of aversion to that suspected risk, but many in the NVP trenches find that Zofran helps them hold down jobs, keep their houses sanitary, and take care of the kids they already have. (Weird thing – my midwife told me that insurance companies often want women to rule out other NVP remedies, including meds like Zofran, before approving Diclegis, a prescription B6 + doxylamine combination that has a better safety profile. Of course insurance companies can’t do anything logically.)

• Don’t rule out blackmail if your care provider won’t prescribe the good stuff in a timely manner. Threaten to use cannabis or even to terminate the pregnancy if you can’t get relief from the nausea. /IJS …

My other proposed solutions don’t fit neatly into a bulleted list. They’re political and a much heavier lift. For starters, the proposed Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would strengthen protections for pregnant people, particularly in regard to workplace accommodations, picking up where the Pregnancy Discrimination Act left off. And we obviously need universal paid sick time as well as universal paid maternity leave. (Side note: I don’t have paid maternity leave, but I’m fortunate to have 7 weeks of paid sick time as of today. Hopefully I won’t need it for anything else.) But even in countries with the most progressive workplace policies and welfare states imaginable, women with NVP struggle both at work and at home. A study of Norwegian women found that even those with “mild” NVP sometimes struggle with work productivity, housework, and caring for older children, which may result in conflict with their partners.

My own experience with even “mild” NVP has reinforced my views on abortion. I’ve already had less energy to distinguish myself at work or apply for other jobs, at a time when the grant funds for my position are in jeopardy. And it’s not like I have a golden parachute – having come of age in the Great Recession, I know how quickly you can fall out of professional employment if you can’t find an employer who considers you a “good fit.” So it’s clear how financially devastating a hard pregnancy can be for a woman whose job has lower pay, fewer benefits, and a more unforgiving schedule. The words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg are clearer to me than ever:

“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. … When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

As it happens, I have some issues with RBG, as articulated by authors here and here. (Of note, she had one Black clerk in all her SCOTUS tenure, despite Howard University, an HBCU, being located in Washington, DC.) But she nailed it when she expressed how much forced reproduction limits women, even in progressive countries like Norway. Women and their families need to deal with the world we have, not the world we ought to have, and access to abortion is a necessary coping mechanism.

At the same time, we shouldn’t stop fighting for that better world. I agree with those who criticize mainstream feminists and Democrats for focusing so heavily on abortion at the expense of a broader reproductive and economic justice agenda – even, or especially, in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. Women shouldn’t have to get abortions to hold down their jobs. And while I’m a fan of Zofran, I don’t think women should have to take it in order to be good little workers who keep on going. We need to acknowledge that pregnancy and capitalism are ill-suited bedfellows, and at least the first trimester of pregnancy is a substantial limitation for many people with uteruses.

The risk of acknowledging this, of course, is that we’ll go back to era when employers will systematically avoid hiring women, for as long as they can get away with it before facing a class-action lawsuit. That’s why we also need to fundamentally re-imagine how we relate to work and caregiving. When someone can’t sustain employment during or after a difficult pregnancy, both a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and a Federal Job Guarantee (FJG) could buffer their household budgets and help them get back into the workforce when they’re ready. In the ferment of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Italian feminists envisioned paying women for caregiving and household labor, while Angela Davis proposed a more radical approach of socializing housework, moving it from the private sphere into the professional workforce.  

Fundamentally, we also need a greater cultural appreciation for women as full participants in society. As Avra Siegel, a former Care.com employee, puts it:

“Let’s be real: it’s not like women got pregnant on their own – there was another person 50% responsible for that pregnancy. But men just happen to not be the biological sex that bears the child, and so all the consequences of the pregnancy fall on women because of our physical role in childbearing and rearing. When our laws and workplace policies do not account for the reality of pregnancy and childbirth, it is the height of gender inequality, not because pregnancy is a disability, but because it is actually a condition that should be honored, revered and celebrated. We are perpetuating the human race after all.”

(And if you’re one of those population hawks whose answer is “We shouldn’t perpetuate the human race,” I’d kindly invite you to go fuck yourself. Sexual species reproduce – that’s what we do, and realistically that’s not going to change. Even in rich countries, not all childbearing people are profligate greenhouse gas contributors in terms of frequent air travel or other luxuries. They’re constrained by political and corporate decisions about whether transit is available, how efficient cars are, how food and electricity are produced, and so on. Moreover, if we don’t have enough people in future generations to run the economy, they’ll be ill-equipped to adapt to climate change.)

Women have an individual right to pursue their talents and dreams in the paid workforce, and society is the better for our contributions and perspectives. Even with progressive transformations like a UBI and FJG, a household where both parents are attached to the workforce are likely to be more secure, with more political clout and power to shape the means of production.

Finally, while the physical struggles of pregnancy are unique to people with uteruses, this isn’t all about us – it’s at least as much a race and class issue as it is a gender issue. While we push for greater accommodation of NVP and other pregnancy complications, we can also push for better accommodation for people of all genders who face illness, disability, and other obstacles. When struggling with NVP, we deserve better than to vomit between clients, bring spare clothes to work, and struggle through our day with our gag reflex and our sanity hanging by a thread. And the political economy needs to make room for all workers dealing with the struggles of the human condition.

Thoughts on Sebold, Part 2

 

Photo Credit: https://trauma-recovery.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/shutterstock_61860736.jpg 

From what I’ve read of the Broadwater exoneration, including Bray’s piece, my feeling toward Sebold was initially rather jaundiced – that she had the wherewithal in later years, as a successful author who was able and willing to reflect on her traumatic experience, to realize that her accusation against Broadwater might be a mistake, and to do something about it. I admit I’ve reserved judgment a bit more since reading Laura Miller’s piece in Slate – it’s one thing to read and acknowledge in the abstract that Sebold’s rape was “brutal,” quite another to read the cruel details and see the depth of her trauma. But I still think Bray is closer to the truth than Miller.

Bray’s discussion of how internalized racism affected Sebold’s judgment also made me think about the question of racial disparities in campus sexual assault accusations and adjudications. This question arises against a backdrop where universities have ignored or bungled complaints for even the most egregious assaults – not just nebulous “he said, she said” scenarios. And it’s used by the Right as a cudgel to claim that the real campus epidemic is in false accusations, not sexual assaults.

Specifically, I remembered an Atlantic article from 2017 by Emily Yoffe. I have some reservations about her – for instance, I don’t share her hand-wringing about cancel culture or Al Franken’s ouster, and I’m not as worried about #MeToo beyond specific racial dynamics. While her 2013 Slate piece, “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” was more nuanced and informative than the clickbait title suggests, I thought there was a subtle but powerful blind spot in its framing. (If you can contemplate changing binge drinking culture on campus, you could simultaneously contemplate how to instill more respect for women in male college students, while changing the culture of negligence in university administrations.)  So I don’t know for sure when she’s being intellectually honest, or when she’s leaving some key details or context outside her frame of analysis. Still, she presents enough compelling information in the Atlantic piece for me to take the issue seriously as one that needs further study:

“Since there are no national statistics on how many young men of any given race are the subject of campus-sexual-assault complaints, we are left with anecdotes about men of color being accused and punished. There are many such anecdotes. In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who ‘routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases’ said that ‘most of the complaints they see are against minorities.’”

“Colgate University was recently investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for potential race discrimination, a Title VI violation, in its sexual-assault adjudication process. The university was cleared in April, on the grounds that the numbers did not allow OCR to conclude that race was a statistically significant factor in Colgate’s adjudications—in any given year the number of men of any race referred for formal hearings was in the single digits. … But the report did bring those statistics to light, a rarity. In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate’s students were black. According to the university’s records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated.”

 

Yoffe emphasizes the difficulty of drawing conclusions without systematic data, but highlights possible causes suggested by university faculty and staff she interviewed:

“Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School and a self-described feminist … writes that ‘morning-after remorse can make sex that seemed like a good idea at the time look really alarming in retrospect; and the general social disadvantage that black men continue to carry in our culture can make it easier for everyone in the adjudicative process to put the blame on them. … Case after Harvard case that has come to my attention, including several in which I have played some advocacy or adjudication role, has involved black male respondents.’”

“Students are pushing their boundaries and that many hook up with a partner of a different ethnicity for the first time. But then, ‘if there is any kind of perceived injury—emotional or physical—when you cross racial lines, there’s likely to be more animus.’”

“As the definition of sexual assault used by colleges has become broader and blurrier, it certainly seems possible that unconscious biases might tip some women toward viewing a regretted encounter with a man of a different race as an assault. And as the standards for proving assault have been lowered, it seems likely that those same biases, coupled with the lack of resources common among minority students on campus, might systematically disadvantage men of color in adjudication, whether or not the encounter was interracial.”

“[Melissa Kagle, former Colgate professor] told me that university administrators, in their zeal to address an issue that was a top priority of federal regulators, had gone after rumors and third-party reports of assaults, pressuring some female students to pursue complaints. I spoke with two women who made harassment complaints against a Rwandan student who was later expelled. One said she hadn’t wanted to make a complaint, but was told that it would help another woman feel safer; neither believed expulsion was the right outcome.”

 

Another possibility, of course, is that sexual assault victims on campus are more likely to report men of color as opposed to white men. It would also take more data to understand what percentage of campus sexual assault complaints are ambiguous “he said, she said” cases – the kind the public imagination fixates on disproportionately – rather than obvious assaults. Another variable is how well the complainant knew the accused in various cases (the better she knew him, presumably the less likely she would be to misidentify him). Still, Melissa Kagle’s perspective, at least as reported by Yoffe, is thought-provoking:

“Kagle viscerally understands the horror of rape because as a young woman she experienced it herself. But she told me that over the past several years, she’d become deeply concerned that in some cases fear of assault on campus was clouding people’s judgment and creating a reflex to presume guilt. In several cases that she’d come to know closely, at first by happenstance and then because minority men began to seek her out for assistance, ‘people believed something terrible happened when it hadn’t.’

Kagle believes that men of color—and especially foreign men of color, students from Africa and Asia—were uniquely defenseless when charged with sexual assault, typically lacking financial resources, a network of support, and an understanding of their rights.”

 

Yoffe and the university personnel are suggesting that a non-trivial share of accusations against male students of color might be, if not willfully false, then based on a racialized misinterpretation of the encounter. Of course, extensive research has shown that false rape accusations are rare. But, as Blay explains, “False rape accusations are rare, yes, but one must reconcile that with the fact that 52 percent of people falsely accused of rape are Black men, and Black men convicted of sexual assault are 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than white men.”

Maybe the racial disparities alleged by Yoffe and like-minded faculty are really a nothing-burger based on a few scattered anecdotes. For one thing, most assaults are unreported, and those that are often don’t make it to formal adjudication. (Also side note – Halley has similar allegiances to Yoffe.) But the sordid history of rape allegations against Black men in the US suggests it’s a legitimate concern on college campuses, and a major objective of campus reforms is to make assaults easier to report and adjudicate.

And yet, in a system where young women are already doubted, shamed, and too often subjected to the trope of “morning-after regret,” what would it mean if college campuses became more circumspect in handling cases with a Black or other racialized defendant, especially if the complainant was white*? The prospect of examining complaints against racialized male students for bias is a minefield, since it could involve cross-examining the complainant and picking apart her story – precisely the type of practice that is under scrutiny for disparaging and re-traumatizing victims.

Moreover, many of these defendants may in fact be guilty, and would assault other women if the university cleared them of wrongdoing using a higher bar for evidence. These victims continue to see their perpetrators on campus or even share classes with them, while universities too often do nothing. As a result, many victims drop out of school, losing scholarships, tuition dollars, and years of fulfillment and good income that could come from earning a degree and pursuing a career in their field. Instead, they spend years coping with their trauma, while also struggling to make a living and grappling with trust issues in future relationships.

So while wrongful expulsion from college isn’t a trivial outcome, it must be balanced against the widespread incidence of young women wrongfully being driven from college themselves by trauma and negligence. And while young women, especially white women, would ideally be aware of their own biases in reflecting on sexual encounters with Black men, it shouldn’t come at the cost of them self-gaslighting and hesitating to report assault. Also, importantly, racial bias toward Black male sexual assault defendants isn’t the only dynamic at play. Black women who report being raped by Black men are sometimes attacked by fellow community members, not least among them other Black women.

If it’s not apparent by now, I’ve never been raped, assaulted, stalked, or subjected to intimate partner violence. No doubt this impacts my reaction to the Sebold case and the question of race in campus sexual assault cases. I’m sure trauma narrows or overrides a victim’s intellect in ways that I can’t understand, even decades after the event. But I’d say my opinion is still relevant because my own experiences give me an appreciation of what’s at stake. I know what it feels like to fear for my safety.

Also, perhaps it’s relevant not in spite of the fact that I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but because of it, specifically with Black men in sexually charged situations. My experiences are among the many mundane reminders of what should be obvious – that most Black men aren’t rapists. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), based on self-reporting by victims, 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. Over half of rapes and sexual assaults are intraracial while fewer than 40% are interracial. (I haven’t figured out how to use the raw data to disaggregate victim and perpetrator data by race, so I don’t know what victim/perpetrator race combinations are most paramount among interracial rapes.) Black perpetrators are overrepresented in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics for nonfatal violent crime overall, but the disproportionality is lower for rape than for other nonfatal violent crimes (22% of rape offenders compared to 13% of the U.S. population). The white share of rapists is statistically comparable to the white share of the population.

 

In short, I think Bray’s implicit (yet gentle) attempt to examine how Sebold’s racial biases drove her inaction as a successful author, and even her actions as a traumatized teenager, is reasonable. I clashed with several Facebook commenters on the Jezebel article about whether Sebold should be subject to any questioning or accountability for how she handled Broadwater’s conviction over the past 4 decades. (This isn’t a scientific assessment, but the women who bristled at these questions seemed predominantly white, while those receptive to the questions included many Black women.) To those who opposed scrutinizing Sebold’s (in)actions and insisted we shouldn’t let the law enforcement personnel who handled her case off the hook, I wanted to say, “No shit, Sherlock.” No reasonable person is denying law enforcement’s culpability in this case, and accountability for them and Sebold isn’t all or nothing. But these commenters do bring up an important point. As Miller says in the Slate piece:

“It’s not the responsibility of a traumatized rape victim to fairly investigate and prosecute the person who assaulted her. That is the duty of the police and prosecutors, who failed both Sebold and Broadwater at every stage, from the moment she first reported the crime to the moment he was convicted.”

 

Similarly, in an article for The Cut cited by Bray, Amia Srinivasan explains:

“Very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of rape. This is a thing almost universally misunderstood about false rape accusations. When we think of a false rape accusation we picture a scorned or greedy woman, lying to the authorities. But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. … Fewer than half of these [exonerated] men were deliberately framed by their alleged victims. Meanwhile, over half of their cases involved ‘official misconduct’: a category that applies when the police coach false victim or witness identifications, charge a suspect despite the victim’s failure to identify him as her attacker, suppress evidence or induce false confessions.”

 

This echoes the point in Yoffe’s article, quoted above, that university administrators sometimes pressure women into filing sexual assault complaints.

 

Notably, though, even Miller 1) doesn’t say it’s off-limits to question whether Sebold should have realized her mistake years later, and 2) doesn’t answer “no”:

“Should Sebold, at some later point, have had second thoughts about Broadwater’s conviction? Possibly. I don’t know. … That [“Lucky” movie] producer’s inquiry ultimately led to the overturning of the conviction. But Sebold herself researched the case while writing Lucky. Did she, too, notice the smaller lies that [Assistant DA] Uebelhoer told her and wonder if the big one, about how Broadwater had gamed the lineup with a friend, was also untrue? In an afterword added to the book in 2017, Sebold describes Broadwater as coming from ‘a family with an entrenched criminal record,’ which suggests she’d looked into the facts and realized that the prosecutor’s stories about his own past offenses weren’t true. To my mind, that’s the most incriminating line in the book, but it still doesn’t prove that Sebold knew or even sensed that the wrong man had been convicted of raping her.”

 

In a way, the question of sexual assault and harassment on college campuses – or workplaces, or any other institution with an internal, non-criminal discipline process – is even more vexing. The stakes are lower, but so is the burden of proof. Again, it’s hard to say without better data how often wrongful accusations (sincere or otherwise) happen, let alone lead to expulsion or termination. California's Yes Means Yes law, which I support overall, has been in place for a few years and might provide some data soon. 

Wrongful college expulsions are clearly an exaggerated strawman for the Right, and likely for Yoffe and Halley as well. But even if rare among Black and other racialized defendants, I still think they’re relevant. For one thing, part of what might make these cases rare is the fact that Black men are underrepresented among postsecondary students to begin with, and Black American men probably more so. If that were to change, maybe racial disparities in sexual assault accusations would become more apparent. EDIT: It could simultaneously be true that a large majority of Black and other racialized defendants are in fact guilty, and that men in these demographic groups experience disproportionate and intolerably high rates of wrongful accusations.

I have no clue how to balance these conflicting goals, and I wonder if they’re really as conflicting as Yoffe suggests. Hopefully writers like Yoffe are merely making a strawman of the Left’s supposed indifference to questions of fairness and racial disparities, just as Ijeoma Oluo was asked to do for USA Today. And yet, I’ll say outright the impression that I suppressed when I first read Oluo’s article – that her coup de grace,

“I was asked to write that if a few men are harmed to protect women, it’s worth it. As if that’s a real threat. As if that’s a valid fear. As if, in this world, a power shift of that magnitude is even within the realm of possibility …”

is a bit glib, since there are other power dynamics at play. (I know anecdotally of at least one case where a kind, capable young Black man was fired from a social service agency because he was accused, not that credibly, of sexual impropriety by an intellectually disabled client.) As a Black woman, Oluo is in more of a position to know than I am. But there are other thinkers and writers of color who’d disagree with her, and I’m trying to make sense of all reasonable perspectives and all that’s at stake.

Jeannie Suk Gersen, who strikes me as more honest than Yoffe or Halley, opposed Harvard’s adoption of “a lowered standard of proof [of guilt for sexual misconduct cases]: from ‘reasonable belief’ to a ‘preponderance of the evidence.’” I’m not a legal scholar, and I don’t know that I’d agree with her on the specifics even if I understood them better. But I agree the questions are worth asking. Maybe it’s quixotic, but I wonder if a sensitive and trauma-informed questioning style would make at least as much impact as the evidentiary standard in assuring justice for both accusers and defendants?

 

The ultimate prize, of course, isn’t a fairer and more effective system for adjudicating rape cases – it’s a world where white supremacy, misogyny, and violence are simultaneously dismantled, and rape is rare to begin with. But for white women, we can’t just say that it’s the job of these institutions to figure it out, or it’s the job of men to get their act together (though they really should). As voters and members of civil society, we’re part of these institutions, we have clout with them, and we can use them in positive or harmful ways. I don’t think we should be afraid of the conversations that Broadwater’s exoneration and Sebold’s wrongful accusation have raised. It’s not like these discussions (and others on race and gender that I haven’t even touched on) are verboten in mainstream discourse – clearly many journalists, scholars, and activists are tackling them. But they’re not as widely discussed among white liberals, women or men, as they should be.

Bray had a bleak assessment of the current situation:

“What is justice, after all, in an inherently unjust, deeply racist and sexist society? Who gets justice, and what does justice look like for people who experience harm at the hands of others and particularly at the hands of the state? In America, justice is constantly shapeshifting, and one person’s idea of what is just can just as easily be another person’s idea of gross inequality and corruption. It’s the nebulous nature of the concept that makes it so easy to corrupt.”

 

If, God forbid, a daughter of mine were raped, I’m sure I’d advise her to report it to police or other authorities regardless of the perpetrator’s race – unless there was something specific about the case or her wishes that swayed me otherwise. After all, she’d not only have a right to justice, but also an obligation to prevent more women from being victimized if at all possible. But, hopefully, we’d be cognizant of our own biases and try to prevent someone she couldn't confidently ID from being punished. Overall, the purpose of these questions isn’t to set rigid, ideological standards for how to react in specific circumstances. It is, at least, to try to imagine what justice does look like, and to remember how multifaceted the fight for it is.

*I'm not envisioning a scenario where colleges and universities use different evidentiary standards for perpetrators of different races. Rather, investigators would keep racial dynamics and the possibility of implicit bias in mind in evaluating accusations.

Thoughts on Sebold, Part 1

 

Photo Credit: Leonardo Cendamo for Getty / L: NBC News, as featured in Jezebel

Since Anthony Broadwater (age 61) was exonerated for the brutal rape of Alice Sebold, then 18, in 1981, I’ve been thinking about a few unsettling experiences in my life. I’m wondering how well my moral compass would’ve held up if they went differently. (Full disclosure, I haven’t read “Lucky.”) This post is geared mainly toward other white people, especially other white women. I describe these experiences in detail for family and friends whom I’ve never told before, and they touch a number of sensitive race, gender, and class nerves. For that reason, when I shared the link to this post on Facebook, I adjusted the privacy settings to hide them from friends who might be needlessly triggered. I’m airing these stories out, in part, because our prejudices lurk and build in the things we don’t say. I’m publishing this post in two parts, with my personal anecdote in the first part. For those who want to skip past the anecdotes, my take-home message is in the second part.

 

Part 1

It’s hard for me to say enough good about Zeba Blay’s sensitive and insightful piece for Jezebel, “What Does Alice Sebold Owe Anthony Broadwater?” In light of my own experiences, this passage strikes me in particular:

“We forget that there is a subtlety and banality to racism that allows it to endure. It is too easy to cast the then 18-year-old traumatized rape victim as some kind of mustache-twirling villain. … This isn’t to say, of course, that Sebold’s actions were not egregiously anti-Black, and that as a young white woman in a racist society, she colluded with a criminal justice system that is more concerned with punishing Black men — any Black man — than it is with due dilligence and intentionality in handling such a delicate and complex crime. In her memoir, Lucky, it’s clear that Sebold’s own biases and prejudices collided with the reality of her assault: She writes about being afraid of ‘certain’ Black men after her rape.”

 

Blay seems to believe, and I’m inclined to believe, that Sebold sincerely thought Broadwater was the perpetrator when she accused him. But Blay is still opening up a conversation about how Sebold’s internalized racism preprogrammed her response to the trauma.

 

Also, after much digging, I rediscovered a passage I’d found in a past Google binge, by Susan Brownmiller (yes, that Susan Brownmiller) from “Against Our Will”:

“The Till case became a lesson of instruction to an entire generation of appalled Americans. I know how I reacted. At age twenty and for a period of fifteen years after the murder of Emmett Till whenever a black teen-ager whistled at me on a New York City street or uttered in passing one of several variations on an invitation to congress, I smiled my nicest smile of comradely equality – no supersensitive flower of white womanhood, I – a largess I extended with equal sincerity to white construction workers, truck drivers, street-corner cowboys … Did not white women in particular have to bear the white man’s burden of making amends for Southern racism? It took fifteen years for me to resolve these questions in my own mind, and to understand the insult implicit in Emmett Till’s whistle, the depersonalized challenge of ‘I can have you’ with or without the racial aspect. Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.”

 

Go figure, this passage comes right after the one that Angela Davis excoriated for portraying Till “as a guilty sexist, almost as guilty as his white racist murderers.”

 

Two of my bizarre and unsettling experiences were situations I got myself into. I’ve told so few people about them because I’m mortified by my recklessness. 

The first experience was in Manhattan, KS in 2005, when I was 21. I was out of college, working my first full-time professional job, and living in a tiny apartment, almost a studio, in a converted old house that I’d been too naïve to realize was something of a slum when I rented it. (The landlord treated me, a young professional woman, fairly well, but the other tenants not so much.) On Halloween night, a Black neighbor down the hall – I’ll call him Carl – was having a party, and later that evening approached me to borrow some money. I’d had one or two brief, friendly conversations with him since I lived there. He said he had an outstanding warrant in a neighboring county, and he needed to pay the court about $90 or he’d be in some violation and lose visitation rights with his son. He said something to the effect that he’d made mistakes but didn’t want to lose touch with his son. I had no idea, then or now, if he was telling the truth, and the way he told the story seemed a bit theatrical. But I sympathized in the chance that it was true, and I figured I wouldn’t starve on account of $90 even if he was lying, so I went to an ATM and got it for him. As collateral, he and a friend brought a giant TV into my living room (this was before flat-screens were widespread).

Later, a friend of Carl’s – I believe the same one who’d helped him carry in the TV – knocked on my door and asked if he could hang out for a while. I haven’t chosen a pseudonym for him because I don’t remember his actual name. He said he was trying to get away from an annoying and persistent woman at Carl’s party. Wanting to be polite and not wanting to be racist – wondering if I’d have the same hesitancy if he were white – I let him come in. We sat on the couch and chatted for awhile, and it was a charming and interesting conversation. He said at one point he was pro-union and a Democrat. Afterward I wondered if he said it because he knew it would strike a chord with me. Maybe both are true.

It was getting late, but he asked if he could spend the night on the couch, to stay away from the unpleasant woman at the party. Again, interrogating my own reaction for racism and classism, I said yes. But I also knew it was a stupid and reckless thing to do. So as I got ready for bed, I quietly pulled a couple of my cheap steak knives from the kitchen and placed them on the windowsills by my bed. A little while later, he came to the bed, crouched down, and asked if he could sleep in the bed with me. I can’t even remember now what I was about to say – I think I was finally going to say no – when he reached over and cut his hand on one of the knives. I can’t even remember why he was reaching – maybe for better balance – and I don’t remember if I felt threatened by the reach. He pulled back in surprise and said “What the – you have a knife?! You’re scared of me?! I’m scared of you!” And he hastened to get out of the apartment with the crazy knife girl.

The next day after work, I came home to a torn envelope halfway under my door. There was a note from Carl, saying he’d repaid the $90 in full and wanted the TV back. But ostensibly someone had ripped the envelope and stolen the money. I went in and started preparing dinner, and after a few minutes I noticed that my laptop and all but one CD were missing. The door didn’t have a deadbolt, only a knob lock, and the jamb was scratched as if it had been jimmied. I called the police and filed a report for the stolen items, and I told them about the previous night. I didn’t tell them I suspected anyone in particular, because I didn’t – though I suspected that Carl or his friend had scoped out the place for valuables for someone’s benefit when they brought in the TV. The conversation I remember was unremarkable, but one officer said I shouldn’t worry that excluding someone would be racist – “this is your castle, and you’re the queen here.”

I don’t know if anything happened to Carl or his friend as a direct result of my police call – I just wanted my stuff back. And I was relieved when Carl retrieved the TV shortly afterward – it took up a ton of space and I’d had no interest in selling it anyway. Months later, another tenant told me that Carl was nervous about an impending landlord visit because had had some stuff that was “hot” or “not legit.”

Carl’s friend stopped by several times after that. Once he stood on the fire escape and called several times for me to come to the window. Once he came to the door, and I had the handy excuse that I was cleaning for my aunt’s visit the next day. The final time he came to the door, I was fed up and didn’t have any excuse handy, so I just shut the door.

Obviously I thank my lucky stars that something much worse didn’t happen in the situation I opened up with Carl’s friend. I don’t think he planned to rape me, considering how taken aback he was by the knives. But for all I knew at the time, he could’ve been a rapist. I do wonder how he treats lower-income Black women, who can be mistreated with fewer social repercussions than there would be for middle-class white women. I’ll impress upon a daughter that she should always deny a strange man an entry to her space, or a date if she’s not interested. Politely if she wants, but still – set boundaries. If he happens to be Black and he thinks she’s being racist, it’s his problem if he doesn’t understand why a woman by herself would take precautions with any man she doesn’t know.

 

You’d think I would’ve learned from this experience, but I had another experience with some similarities in late 2011 or early 2012 in Iowa City, when I was in grad school. The young man in question was a Ghanaian ex-pharmacy student; I’ll call him Abeiku. I can’t remember where or how I met him, maybe at a café, but likely he struck up an interesting conversation, we exchanged numbers, and maybe he called to meet up sometime later. He’d studied at Howard University but I believe he’d dropped out. As I recall, his father was a pharmacist and was somewhat frustrated that he’d fallen off track. Once I gave Abeiku a ride home, but he was vague about where “home” was and said “Just let me off here.” It was near the homeless shelter. My relationship with another man at the time wasn’t exclusive, but I wasn’t interested in Abeiku that way.

One evening he called, or maybe we ran into each other at a café. He asked if I wanted to watch TV with him and I said sure. But he didn’t want to watch it with his roommates around, so he suggested we go to a hotel. Seemed weird, but I decided to take him at his word – I could understand wanting to get away from his roommates. And, again, I asked myself if I’d be as hesitant if he was white. In my memory, we took a cab there for some reason – maybe we’d met downtown and my car was back at the house. We might’ve started watching TV, but at some point he made sexual overtures. Maybe he tried to kiss, and maybe I kissed back to be a good sport – I honestly can’t remember. Somewhere in there he exposed himself, and he asked “Have you ever been with a Black boy before?” (His words – it’s possible he asked this at a previous time we’d met, rather than at the hotel.) I recall being put off but not exceptionally offended or threatened by the exposure – it seemed to make sense in context. But nothing happened beyond that and he dozed off. I tiptoed around the hotel room, gathering up my things so I could sneak out, but I dropped some coins and woke him up. I can’t remember the exchange then – I think the gist was that he realized now that I wasn’t interested but was dismayed that I was conveying it by sneaking out.

Some months later, I got a call from Abeiku in jail. He’d been picked up for fighting in the library and now he was being held on an immigration charge. Maybe I was the only person he knew whom he thought would have that kind of money. But I sure as hell didn’t have $6,000 for bail. Sometime later he’d been transferred to another facility, and he sent me a pen he’d made with a fabric cover and my name stitched on it. He may have included a note that said that he was going to be deported to Ghana, or he may have called or texted once he was back in Ghana.

I honestly don’t know why my memory of the evening in the hotel is so spotty, since really nothing happened. It’s only now that I have an inkling of why this experience was less unsettling than the one in Manhattan. It’s not just classism and the buffering influence that educated immigrant status has on anti-Black racism in America – Abeiku was respectful overall, not intrusive. He wasn’t a stranger asking to enter an apartment where I was alone. Even if my memory is wrong and we left from my house, I had roommates. And maybe he honestly thought that a hotel self-evidently implied sex. Still, though, I didn’t know him that well, and I couldn’t have known what his intentions were. That’s why I still find it unsettling – because of what *I* did despite my own discomfort.

 

The third incident that sticks in my mind was in Tampa, probably in 2013. On the bus home from work, I happened to make eye contact with a Black man who may have been in his 40s and I smiled. I noticed him looking at me and smiling a couple more times after that. I got off at my stop and was heading toward the intersection when I saw him step off the bus rather abruptly. It seemed like he’d decided at the last minute to get off at that stop. It was late afternoon and the area immediately around us was deserted. I think we were in front of a motel. He hit on me in a deliberately charming, velvety way. If I recall correctly, I told him I had a boyfriend – “Where is he?” – I told the truth that he was in Iowa City finishing his bachelor’s, since I’m not good at lying. He wasn’t deterred, but eventually I deflected his advances and politely made my departure.

Most of the time, when I’ve blown a guy off who was hitting on me, I haven’t feared for my physical safety, at least not consciously. But, due partly to my own nature and partly to how women are socialized, I don’t like to break guy’s hearts or be the unreasonable person who won’t even give him a chance. Asking myself afterward why I was so unnerved in this encounter, I certainly can’t rule out racism, but our isolation and the fact that he seemed to choose that stop specifically to follow me were also factors.

 

My main interest with this two-part post is sexual assault, not come-ons or catcalls, so I won’t spend too much time on the latter. As it happens, I’ve personally experienced them mainly from Black and Latino men. Maybe similar advances from white men haven’t stuck in my memory or I didn’t pick up on them as readily, which probably reflects my internalized racism. I know I’ve had advances from white men that were more subtle but in some cases unsettling. Probably the biggest factor, as Roxane Gay has pointed out, is simply that one person’s experience is highly variable and can’t represent the whole.

But … Meh, I’m not that interested in intellectualizing it anymore. Such exercises are often a well-intentioned, convoluted, desperate effort to prevent one’s experiences from reinforcing one’s prejudices. The fact that there are cultural differences between men of different races isn’t that complicated. Whether or not it’s objectively true that white men catcall less, that kracken of a trope just isn’t so strong in my head anymore, that street harassment and come-ons say anything deep or insidious about the character of masculinity in any one demographic group. Likewise, I could be wrong, but I don’t believe I saw Carl’s friend in every poor or working-class Black man I encountered in later years.

But the way white women experience and make sense of these street encounters, influences how we react to cases like Sebold’s. Sebold herself first became convinced that Broadwater was her rapist when he greeted her on the street with a casual flirtation.

 

Finally, a PSA to dudes everywhere – if you want sex, just come out and say so. Don’t play these mind games with coded terms and cajolement. Don’t try to trick us into having sex. Or, if you don’t want to ask and be rejected outright, resign yourself to an evening that’s just Netflix and no chill, since she probably won’t change her mind. Ask the waitress to split the check if you prefer, but sex isn’t an unspoken quid pro quo for dinner and drinks. If that’s what you want, find an independent sex worker who’ll tell you up front what services she offers at what price. Truth in advertising.

Poem: "Grand Canyon"

                                               Photo credit: https://bit.ly/3BJ3spd 
 

A lost deer's parched nose

Strikes a rust suspension plumed in a trickle of deceptive teal,

Its pitted brain now numb to upstream or down.

Before its clouded eyes and behind,

Red rock whittled layer by layer, stratum by stratum.

The beauty serves its purpose;

Just visible from the outlook are the steps and mazes where spires were leveled,

The rocks peeled back aeon by aeon, contour by contour,

Wound with a ribbon road coursed by lumbering trucks

Meandering toward a blurred horizon.

 

Red to the north, red to the south,

Red above, red to the west from sunset and smoke.

And a leading edge always reporting,

A sfumato of melanin from the west

And a chapped and dirty exodus, grapes long trampled

Tracing in reverse the trails of a partition,

               This time fleeing fire and parched pittances,

                              universal but every year dwindling,

                              and hearts hardening like anvils

               In the ribs of those who glare in the sun.

 

So they come, fording the fault,

               Summiting the plateau,

Chiseling the rocks away layer by layer, aeon by aeon,

The meals of the waxing moon claiming the pay of the waning.

On both sides of the Basin, suits and pantsuits

Sign the statutes, write the code,

Pour coin into a river of silicon.

 

Caked rubber soles stamp the dirt

               Trip the occasional skull in the slag;

The remnants of a spontaneous hill of bones

                              at the base of a chasm once sheer

                              now carved to a ghost.

Only splinters remain of the field of hulks at the precipice

               engines cooling, keys dangling

               towed away to be melted, recast

And strike the rock in eternal torment.

 

Any papers blown away,

The occasional note still in the cloud.

Eclipse Thoughts

I can't remember if I had the glasses on or off when it started. I think I had them on, and I knew it had started because I could no longer see anything through them. A few cheers went up from the crowd in the grassy setback between Highway 50 and the strip mall parking lot. I'd been reclining on the blanket, but I got to my feet, as if that would give me a closer look. I think many others in the crowd instinctively stood to honor the celestial display. It was smaller than I expected from the photos and artistic renderings, but it was perfect, like a stamp or embossment on a dark sky. The corona was thin and white, with short etched flares, except for a red spot toward the bottom right, which I learned later was the chromosphere. The black disc of the moon was not a solid, matte black - some light from the corona bled in and made a subtle gradient of dark, smoky gray. The eerie blue light that had fallen in the minutes leading up to totality was softer now, with more purple. The sky around the corona was twilight blue, darker or lighter depending on my memory. The cicadas and tree frogs that had become increasingly loud as the light dimmed before totality were now deafening. I could hear Caleb behind me asking my mother if it was safe to look at the corona without glasses, and I harped at him - yes, it's safe, are you looking?!

A scattering of thin clouds surrounded the corona, and they were illuminated as if by moonlight. I was mesmerized by their perfect elegance, and by some God's amazing, flawless design in clearing the heavy clouds to the south and leaving just these few for adornment. Based on something Caleb was saying to someone else in our party, I was afraid he'd turned away again, and I nagged him again, "Caleb, are you looking?!" He assured me that yes, he was looking. I reached back for his hand. Then a blinding flash from the diamond ring emerged, and we knew it was over and put the glasses back on. Some folks in the crowd clapped.

It was shocking how quickly it was over. I was disappointed. Certainly not in the event, but in myself. I hadn't centered myself to take the full measure of its beauty and power. I'd profaned it by nagging Caleb when I thought he wasn't looking at it. I felt there was something wrong with me for not being able to tell people, breathlessly, that it was amazing. It certainly was, but the words didn't spill from my mouth like in that Bible passage. I felt I'd squandered this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that many Americans didn't have, and I hoped desperately that I'd have another shot at it in 2024.

The parking lot lights came on as the sunlight decreased

In the last couple minutes before totality, sunset colors popped out just above the western horizon. If atmospheric conditions had been different, we might've seen sunset in all directions. 

Driving back through Missouri, tall thunderheads were stacked across the horizon over cornfields and cattle pastures, but I thought that no other beauty of nature could come close to totality. It was remarkable how quickly everything had returned to normal, with bright yellow sun flooding the fields as if totality had never been. I thought perhaps the Sun is like a proud woman with a great obligation. A romantic encounter that she only has on occasion shakes her to her core each time, but the nature of her duties is such that she doesn't let on how it's affected her. The Moon, in his travels around the world, finds time for a liaison with her whenever the opportunity arises. I reflected on how I had lamented "God hates us!" in a Facebook post about the heavy clouds forecasted in the Midwest. But God or Gods had heard my prayers and cleared the clouds in just the right spot. I'd had time, money, and health to travel to the totality path when many others weren't so lucky. And I was grateful, even if my puny mind and heart had failed to comprehend the moment.

Pinhole projections of the receding eclipse through my hat

Crescents projected through tree canopies

We spent much of the drive back in heavy traffic, particularly at junctions and on-ramps. It wasn't bothersome, because we weren't in a huge hurry, and it was a happy reminder that we had all come to Missouri with a shared purpose, and we were all going away with a unifying experience. Like me, many passengers in other cars were looking at the receding eclipse through their sun roofs with their glasses. Google Maps said things I'd never heard before, like "Traffic is getting worse. You are still on the fastest route." Periodically we would see some eclipse viewers staked out on a gravel shoulder or in a farm field, with their lawn chairs, cameras, and telescopes. As we got further into northeastern Missouri, about three out of every four cars had Iowa plates. Crossing the Des Moines River into Iowa, and seeing sunset colors bleed into the clouds to the west, my heart ached for the weird blue light leading up to totality. But I was seduced enough by these lesser natural beauties to suggest to Caleb that we take a quick detour to cross the Mississippi. Which he vetoed, since he had to start work early the next morning. 

The next evening, I took a walk on the greenbelt near my apartment, as part of my resolution in recent weeks to be less sedentary. Sunset was illuminating the tree trunks and the creek's surface, and again I missed the blue light of the eclipsed sun straight overhead. But I thought, perhaps this yellow light is all the Sun has to pay homage to her departed lover with. 

I won't say the eclipse put things in perspective. On a daily basis there is no perspective - we need food, safety, dignity, and economic security. The fact that the sun will explode billions of years from now and we'll be long gone doesn't make us love our children any less. But it is something to look forward to - if anything, it might embolden me to take risks. Seven years from now, I don't know if I'll be married or single, a mother or childless, professionally employed and doing well or underemployed and scraping by, healthy or sick. But the possibility will be there. And if I don't get a chance to see it next time, maybe someone who missed it this time around will be so blessed.

Hard-to-see crescent projections from my hat

P.S. Much of the fun of a total eclipse is in the hours leading up to it. My mother and her boyfriend, my aunt, Caleb and I played it by ear in the morning, pushing eastward from Kansas into western Missouri through driving rain to try and get out from under the heavy cloud cover. First our target destination was Warrensburg, then Sedalia, then Columbia. Somewhere on the way, in the middle of nowhere, we stopped at a gas station with some local produce and baked goods. There was a small cardboard box labeled "Eclipse Snacks," and it had Star Crunch, moon pies, Starburst, Eclipse gum, Sun Chips, and Milky Ways. And Oreos, which look remarkably like an eclipsed crescent sun in the rendering on the package.

This song "Animals," from Vancouver techno outfit BT's album Emotional Technology, captures the feeling of the eclipse much better than that song "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Corporeal: Reflection on a Melanoma

It's remarkable how some things remind us, very suddenly and powerfully, that we have a body.  Especially in the professional world, people spend a lot of time distancing themselves from their bodies, maintaining a manicured facade that doesn't cause anyone embarrassment.  This is a bit of an overstatement - for example, you're allowed to mention to coworkers that you're having a colonoscopy the following day*, but can you imagine a high-powered businessman in an Armani suit telling his coworkers he's having a colonoscopy?

[the next 2 paragraphs are not for the squeamish]

The dermatologist drew a circle around the mole with a marker, and then an almond shape around the circle.  It looked like an eye with the mole as the iris.  Then she swabbed iodine on it, and the eye stared upward through the swirls of sepia.  I made the mistake of looking down at one point; the almond shape where the skin had been removed was raw and red, and I could see bulbous swells of subcutaneous fat just below the surface.  Then she mentioned that she was stretching out the skin to get the stitches in, and I began to feel nauseated and drifted into a dream state for a few seconds.  The dermatologist said even she, as a doctor, does not look when something similar is being done to her own body.  Your mind may know you're not in danger, but your body thinks something terrible is happening to it.  Your blood pressure drops, any blood sugar is rapidly consumed, and you become limp and "play dead," like an opossum.  As cerebral as we try to be, we are still instinctual beings, and our reactions to visceral threats and extreme circumstances sometimes surprise us.

When they removed an additional chunk of tissue, I did not look or even think about it.  But my boyfriend was in the room and he saw it, and as soon as the procedure was over I asked him for all the gory details.  He said the piece they removed was just under an inch thick--now I know exactly how much fat I have on the front of my thighs!  I can picture it--a layer of skin no thicker than the skin of a peach, already bruised and furrowed and filled with stitches, covering a healthy slab of globular yellow fat.  Of course this imagining is too neat--there would have been blood everywhere.  Blood seeping from the excised flesh, seeping from the edges where they had cut, soaking into the papers on either side.  I saw some of my own blood on the tray by the bench afterward--bright red blood soaked into handfuls of gauze, and a small steel dish with a shallow pool of deep red blood at the bottom.  I was proud of my blood--it had a deep healthy color and a smooth texture, thick but not too viscous.

A piece of me has been removed, and I have to take it easy for a couple weeks while the skin and fat fuse back together.  The full recovery time might be up to a month, but I should be able to walk normally within two weeks.  It amazes me that the body can heal itself so quickly after having such a sizeable chunk carved out of it.

I'll go to the synagogue soon, to give thanks for my good outcome, I suppose.  Isn't that what people used to do--go to a place of worship and give thanks for their safe passage through a trial?  I was never afraid, but I am in awe.  It would be too cliche to say that my life is forever changed and I'm going to live each day as if it was my last, and it's not true anyway.  I'll still go to bed without brushing my teeth, take evening naps that keep me up half the night, and let dishes pile up in the sink.  I'll still worry about money, career, and connecting with people in strange new places.

But I relish the ordinary things ahead of me just a little bit more.  I look forward to being able to walk at a normal speed again, go for a hike, swim in the Gulf, buy sun hats and loose flowy trousers and maxi skirts, have a glass of wine, visit family, go to New Mexico with Caleb one day.  I'll have a fairly long scar and I don't expect I'll be self-conscious about it--my body is something to be proud of and I'll wear cutoff shorts if I damn well please.  Knowing that my body has the potential to create more skin cancer reminds me how much I enjoy the things of ordinary life.  It spurs me to plan and take time in a way that I might not otherwise--I'm the laziest person on earth and not at all a morning person, but I at least need to make time in the mornings to apply sunscreen.  And of course, it makes me grateful to otherwise be in excellent health.  Having to walk slowly on my stiff leg has given me a small taste of what it would be like to have my mobility limited by arthritis or some other condition.

I think it's true what many people say, that Americans move too fast and are to stressed out to step back and take stock of things, starting with their own bodies.  We lose opportunities to enjoy life in ways that we're able, which might be constrained by illness or infirmity.  The older I get, the more I understand why people do yoga and pray and embrace other coping and centering mechanisms.  I also know that when you're in too deep in the daily grind, something like yoga isn't going to be enough to pull you back into balance.  If you're wondering when you're going to get a job and where you're going to stay at night, the stress can grind you down, and the health problems that result can leave you prostrated.  Often it's the grind itself that leaves people with arthritis, back pain, or cancer.  At work I've taken calls from people who were about to undergo cancer treatment and were on the verge of homelessness.  Another thing to contemplate more seriously post-melanoma is what is within my talents to do so that no cancer patient will ever be homeless.

Looking forward to a long, sunscreen-filled life.

*I've never had a colonoscopy.  For all my talk of people being more aware of their bodily selves, I don't want anyone imagining me having a colonoscopy.  I do not have a rectum.

**Also, I should mention that the melanoma was only Stage 1A, and the prognosis is extremely positive with the excision of extra tissue around where the mole was.  The biopsy results came back from the edges of that bigger chunk they removed, and there were no cancer cells.

"Enough of blood and tears . . . Enough!"

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[No, this has nothing to do with fashion.]

I'm relieved that Israel and Gaza have agreed to a ceasefire, and that it wasn't as bitter and destructive as Operation Cast Lead three years ago.  But it freshly broke open the festering wounds in each side's narrative--the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the new state of Israel in 1948, and the collective memories of pogroms and Holocaust that the Jewish immigrants had carried with them to the Holy Land.  Each side's tactics continue to have the opposite of their intended effects on their opponents, bringing to mind Einstein's definition of insanity.  And the rest of the world struggles to get a constructive conversation about the issue through the murk of identity politics.

The rabbi at the synagogue in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, where I attended religious school, seemed like a pretty enlightened guy.  But when he explained how Israel initially received statehood from the UN partitioning process, he glossed over the controversy and bloodshed surrounding its creation.  And when he told us about Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, he didn't provide the political context.  Or maybe he did, and I was too young to understand it.

Some years later, when I was in college, I heard of a poll that showed that a strong majority of Palestinians--about 70%--believed suicide bombings against Israeli civilians were justified.  Discussing it with my mother, I said there must be some mistake--the sample wasn't randomized, or the survey questions were leading.  But my mother said she could easily believe it.  When people are ground down for so long by poverty and violence, she said, it distorts their moral sense.  Rabbi Harold Kushner notes a similar process among Israelis: "I think sixty years of living under siege, worried that any briefcase could be a bomb and any pedestrian could be a terrorist, has contributed to the coarsening of Israeli society, affecting the way they drive, the way they argue, and inevitably affecting how they see their Arab neighbors."  Although it's only natural to have less immediate sympathy for people who harbor such hatred, I decided that a people's right to freedom and security cannot depend on them having perfectly sanitized sensibilities.  After all, the children don't choose what prejudices they're raised with.

And four years ago, during Operation Cast Lead, a fellow congregant at the synagogue in Manhattan, KS, was sharing her thoughts on the conflict.  She is a Bulgarian who met her husband in Israel.  She said that the deaths of civilians and destruction of civilian structures in Gaza was tragic, but couldn't be helped--it was the only way to stop the torrent of rockets in southern Israel.  My instinct was that Israel's tactics couldn't possibly be justified, but I wondered if this woman had a point.  After the gathering at the synagogue, I went to a café to do some work.  Another member of the congregation was there, a right-wing fellow, and he came up to me and said, "Did you know that Hamas was attacking from the UN school [which Israeli air strikes had damaged] and using human shields!?"  I muttered, "No, I hadn't heard," and hustled off to find a table.  I was furious with him for disturbing me in a place where I had come for relaxation, and for assuming that I'd agree with his hawkish politics on Israel just because I'm Jewish. 

 

Now it occurs to me that the UN school incident is a microcosm for the whole situation and the way the global community discusses it.  Israel using highly destructive tactics.  Hamas utterly flouting rules of engagement by putting its own people at risk.  A global outcry against Israel that was understandable, but betrayed an assumption that Israel would do such a thing without extenuating circumstances--in other words, an utter unwillingness to give Israel the benefit of the doubt.  Israel blaming Hamas's ruthless tactics for the extent of the damage, rather than asking whether it should have used different tactics with an enemy known to hold its own people hostage.  And above all, Israel failing to step back and see how ridiculous it is for a first-world democracy to be in the business of exerting military control over a stateless people.  You'd think they'd want to divest themselves of the responsibility already.

But I failed to recognize how endemic the colonialist sentiment in Israel is, since it's so outside the Jewish upbringing I received.  Even in the very limited and sanitized education I received about Israel, I learned to be grateful that we have a sovereign state at all, rather than to be greedy for more land.  I understood Zionism as a desperate yearning for an ancestral homeland, and a political effort to create it in modern times, but I was not instilled with a sense of entitlement to take it by force.  Based on these unconscious assumptions, I misunderstood Israel's main interest in controlling the Palestinian territories to be one of security--whereas colonialists seek land, water, minerals, trade routes, etc.  While the Israelis’ tactics might be woefully misguided, I thought their motives were understandable.  I thought the true colonialists were an extreme faction, consisting mainly of Jewish settlers in Palestinian territories and their hardline backers in the Knesset.  A faction with undue influence, to be sure, but a manageable minority. 

But now I think (admittedly under heavy influence of my mother) that the extremist sentiment has bled into otherwise reasonable Israeli citizens and politicians, if it wasn't a mainstream fixture all along.  Perhaps the reason the conflict has dragged on for so many decades, and the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration has so spectacularly drug its feet, is that the extremism is deeply ingrained in Israel's policy toward Palestine, rather than being a removable fly in the ointment.  Perhaps that's why, even when it takes good-faith baby steps--dismantling settlements here, easing blockades there--Israel is unwilling to take some of the major steps that would address the Palestinians' deep-rooted and largely legitimate grievances, such as retreating to its pre-1967 borders.

During the latest conflict, I've bristled at the characterization of Israel's air strikes as willful, black-and-white atrocities.  Firstly, the IDF did a much better job than in Operation Cast Lead of tailoring their attacks to militant targets.  (Although I wonder why they weren't as well tailored in the last conflict.  Has the technology or the intel improved since 2009, or do they just have more conscience or sensitivity to international opinion?)  Also, the IDF tries to warn civilians to evacuate its targets, whereas Hamas deliberately targets civilians.  Moreover, as a legal analysis on the BBC World News website highlights, the principle of proportionality allows for the idea that a state will want to protect itself using tactics that are "required in order to achieve the legitimate purpose of the conflict, namely the complete or partial submission of the enemy at the earliest possible moment and with the minimum expenditure of life and resources."  The principle prohibits the state from using *more* than the required force, but allows that the tactics may result in higher casualties on the enemy side.  And maybe if any reasonable analyst thought that the air strikes would actually succeed in disabling Hamas and furthering the peace process, the moral calculus would be different.  But the deaths, injuries, and property damage on the Palestinian side deepen an already dismal psychological and economic environment, and only galvanize the people around Hamas.

For much of the Israeli populace, I think support for Operation Pillar of Defense was an honest self-defense instinct, and I think many of Israel’s critics could have been more sympathetic to that instinct, if not to its policy manifestation.  After all, it’s difficult to expect any national government to take the high road if it means incurring more civilian and military casualties in the short run.  The same goes for ongoing policies such as the Gaza blockade—it’s motivated at least in part by Israel’s legitimate concerns about suicide bombers and weapons trading.  And I think there’s some truth to the widespread complaint among Jews—hawks and doves alike—that the international community focuses disproportionate attention on Israel’s misdeeds. 

But if Israelis had a visceral reaction of lashing out against rocket fire, you can’t blame onlookers for reacting viscerally as if they’d seen a high school quarterback beating up a scrawny preteen.  And I think part of the reason the world scrutinizes Israel so heavily is that has higher expectations of Israel.  Jews should be flattered that critics worldwide think Israel would be more receptive to persuasion by humanistic principles than, say, North Korea.  I only wish the international community would back up its criticism by helping Israel and Palestine split the difference regarding the blockades—help prevent illicit weapons and militants from slipping across the borders and threatening Israel, while enabling Palestine to trade goods and grow its economy.  And, of course, I wish the U.S. would use its massive financial leverage to get Israel’s ass to the negotiating table.

 However, I think Israel has within itself the ingredients for empathy with its neighbors, willingness to compromise, and perseverance to build a lasting peace, even if it’s a two-steps-forward, one-step-back process.  In a Yom Kippur sermon a couple years ago by Rabbi Kushner, the same one from which I took the earlier quote, he describes a speech he gave to a Unitarian conference, where he emphasized the ways in which Israel upholds the UU’s liberal principles, including equal treatment of women and gays.  While I don’t agree with all the statements and implications of Kushner’s sermon, one segment sticks with me: “I believe a democracy should be entitled to make mistakes without having its right to exist called into question.  And I believe that the more confident Israel is that we have their backs, that it has the undivided support of the American Jewish community, the readier it will be to take risks for peace.”

 Kushner's sermon: scroll down to "The Case for Israel"

Kushner’s sermon is a deeply emotional defense of Israel.  It doesn’t address the question of whether Israel should have been created if the dispossession and bloodshed of Palestinians was inevitable—if it could not have been done democratically, no matter how many times we turned back the clock and tried again.  (For my part, I think Israel’s “vested” right to exist is good enough.)  And at multiple points in the sermon, you might think that his emotion is preventing him from being rational, that he cannot be an objective judge.  But I think his argument shows that sometimes an emotional approach is the right one.  After all, it is the impulse to stand in solidarity and give the benefit of the doubt that keeps families, friends, and communities together in times of crisis.  For my part, I insist just as hard that Israel be protected in the long term as that she help the Palestinians to secure a free and sovereign state.  I just ask the rest of the world to not dismiss Israel as a lost soul, but to have faith in its ability to eventually be a peacemaker.