This is an interesting and thought-provoking read about the shortcomings of how the continent of Africa is portrayed in Western media, how it most often comes down to the "warfare-and-chaos beat." 

Most of what the piece says seems true and a fair critique that the Western media, and its consumers, would do well to heed. Of course the more stories, and the more varied stories, that are told about the entire world, Africa and South America and Southeast Asia included, the better. Alas, the diversity of our own country so rarely breaks through in the reporting of our media on ourselves that I'm depressed to think if we'll ever progress so far as to give other continents and countries and little tiny villages with names unprounancable in English their due.

The percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch is the best-available proxy for percentage of students who are low-income in public schools. So this story about the district of Akron, Ohio, offering free lunch to all of its students is especially interesting. 

Akron’s middle and high school students won’t have to pay for school lunches this fall or even fill out paperwork for a government subsidy.

The district already provides free breakfast in all its schools and free lunch in its elementary buildings.

The Akron school board voted this week to extend that policy to all Akron schools under a new option for districts that participate in the national school lunch program.

The change won’t cost local taxpayers any money and the district is expected to save some money because officials won’t have to print, collect and process applications for free and reduced-price lunches.

If this becomes a trend, that's quite the boon for students, but will make the already imperfect art of estimating the percentage of low-income students in a district a bigger pain. You could use eligibility for other federal aid programs, I guess, but I wonder how much of that information districts already collect (or if they should be in the business of collecting any at all). 

Press reports continue to miss the real reason that German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble shouldn't become Euro Group head: no one in America knows how to type an umlaut.

Jargon-filled crit: fun, not particularly useful.

I love me some cultural criticism and theory as much as the next gal, but sometimes I wonder whether anyone is thinking or just producing. For example, we can say "advertisements flatter you so you'll buy crap, yay capitalism," or you can add 100 more words and a gratuitous reference to a philosopher to get:

[Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertisements] uses Althusser as a frame for showing how ads interpellate us as certain kinds of subjects. The ads call out to us in certain ways, and we recognize ourselves as the sort of person they are hailing.  Williamson argues that “advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.”

A few paragraphs later, the writer concedes that "[a]dvertisements have always exploited this principle." Cool, so what value is added by wrapping this observation in theory jargon? Again, I love me some jargon, but if the point is to tell consumers, "hey, watch out, look what's being done to you without your even realizing it," maybe this isn't the most helpful phrasing:

[Williamson again:] Ads create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals: that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume, on the basis of those values, and so on. We are trapped in the illusion of choice… [Ads] invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us.

[New Inquiry]

The duty of a feminist.

Organizing my documents folder, found this; originally written as an email to a friend. It's on the question the duties of a feminist. It still doesn't have a conclusion because I still haven't come up with one.

Ok, to begin at the end, I feel like people cannot be changed. Would it be ironically gendered of me to say that women wrongly believe that they can change other people more than men believe it? Regardless, this actually pervades my entire political consciousness: that is, why bother learning anything / becoming a ‘better’ person if I can’t then successfully use this information to ‘better’ others? I'm so afraid of being dogmatic, too afraid, I think, that I end up in a terrible, nearly nihislist place.

Even if we assume that a non-receptive audience can be nudged just a smidgen — so like, from abhorrence of and violence against trans-persons to merely saying abhorrent, vile-y things that are covered by free speech — is that nudge ‘worth’ it. When I taught speech and debate to h.s. students, my first lesson of the year was always that communication / persuasion isn’t (necessarily) about radical change, but bumping people along a continuum from really disagreeing with you to only mostly disagreeing with you. (Know your audience!) So I feel a little hypocritical here questioning the usefulness of incremental steps. 

[I think we’ve talked about this before in relation to the gay rights movement. How a sizable portion of the movement — affluent, professional gay white men? — believes that instead of pushing for absolute equality in all legal rights, that gay identity should be ‘mainstreamed’ slowly, by just accepting civil unions, etc. and not seeming to be too ‘radical’ about the whole wanting equality business. And I think we both agree this is bullshit, yeah? That this pretty much asks people to suck it up and ‘pass,’ and so 1) ignores the needs of the most vulnerable who can’t ‘pass,’ and 2) unhelpfully divides the community against itself. I think I feel comfortable saying that, with LGBTQ rights, accepting piecemeal victory isn’t good enough, that nudging isn’t good enough. The comparison between gay rights and feminism breaks down, of course, because women are mostly ‘covered’ against discrimination / violence by the law (except for HUGE, IMPORTANT damage being done to access to reproductive health care, but that’s another email), so the fight is quite a bit easier. Maybe women can, and should, accept smaller victories because of relative privilege.]

The high-level questions, human capacity for persuasion and the psychology of beliefs, are fascinating and great. But I think what’s more interesting to me is whether I want to take on this project (of persuasion) in my everyday life, and whether I’d be selfish not to. 

A majority of the people — and this has nothing to do with gender; I know several feminist men and some non-feminist women — that I know don’t care quite as much as I do about feminism. And you know, great, whatever, I don’t care as much as they do about photography or electrical engineering or fancy cheese or micro-brew beers or Megan Fox. Forgetting for the moment that fancy cheese and human rights aren’t on the same level, we can probably excuse people’s ignorance on the specifics, as long as they can generally empathize with other humans. And so now I have a dilemma. Faced with an otherwise-agreeable person — someone who seems capable of great empathy, but who, for reasons of upbringing or geography or whatnot that I can’t assume, makes insensitive remarks that betray little awareness of his/her privilege — do I ditch him/her, or do I try to convince him/her?

The argument for ditching him/her (oh to have a non-silly gender-neutral pronoun!): I have finite time and resources, and people’s capacity for changing their beliefs is probably minimal, so it’s more efficient to find people who already mostly agree with me and to live happily among them. I’m assuming it’s preferable to be among people that agree with you, at least on the big stuff. I’m not a psychologist, so if this is an unfair assumption, let me know. Although, it’s not just a psychological assumption, but a legal one too since the majority can legislate away your ability to function among them.

The argument for convincing him/her: mostly duty, I guess. Fairness, maybe. I’ve had tons of privilege, from the town I grew up in to the schools I got to attend to the people I’ve met and learned from. And it would be hypocritical — and for now I’m confident assuming hypocrisy is bad — to demand that others do an accounting of their privilege and act to minimize the harm to others who weren’t so lucky, then turn around and dismiss a person because they haven’t had the same privilege as I have. E.g. because of where they grew up, maybe they had different beliefs they were reared in and ‘don’t know any better.’ So it would be shirking my duty to know my privilege and minimize harm if I were to say, Anyone who doesn’t at this very moment agree with me is not worth my time. My privilege is the knowledge; my duty to minimize harm is to give others the benefit of being thoughtful, worthwhile people, the same courtesy that feminism wants extended to everyone.

Of course now I have a line-drawing issue: how much time do I spend, how many arguments do I make, before I can quit in good conscience and fairly? What’s the smallest amount of ‘progress’ in another’s behavior and beliefs that I can accept? (Going back to the small victories point from earlier, but now on a personal level instead of societal.)

It was a non-trivial number of times at NU and in law school when I’d ask people to stop saying things like “I hope you rape that test,” or “this thesis is really raping me,” and I don’t think any one of those people realized how legit harmful those sorts of ‘jokes’ are. Maybe choosing rape ‘jokes’ as an example was unwise because even some thoughtful progressive people aren’t convinced to stop making them. But I think it’s precisely a great example for that reason, to show just how untenable it would be if a single perceived infraction were enough to get someone booted from the ranks of those I consider reasonable and worth knowing. Nobody would be left, probably (maybe you!).

I’m still mostly in the theoretical realm: what’s fair, what isn’t hypocritical, what should a rational person do. And I think I’ve argued that the answer is to expend some, but not infinite, time and resources on persuasion. Up to a point. I don’t know how to find the point, but I think that matters less.

But let me be selfish for a moment. I’m easily frustrated in arguments with people that I feel are less stringently logical. And if we’re disagreeing, I’m probably doubting their adroitness with logic anyway, right? Maybe the reason this is a question at all for me is because I’m too lazy to make the effort. It’s easier to write this now, to you, wanting nothing more than some head nods and maybe a short supportive email back, confirming my point of view. Making a feminist argument from first principles is time consuming and energy sapping and, with the rate of returns so low, ego depleting. 

By ego depletion I mean, say I’ve spent the day traveling by public transportation and put up with harassment on the bus and the street, and maybe read a news story about something depressing, deflected a comment by my boss, and gotten a text from a friend about something rude somebody said to her. In each case I’ve had to make the decision to shut up, to move seats, to keep walking, shrug it off, say something comforting, then repeat. At some point, my will-power to ‘deal with it’ runs out. And then it’s the end of the week, the end of the night, and I’m confronted with another person who’s got something clever (read: awful) to say about women, and I’m not mentally equipped to be civil about it, to deconstruct their prejudices and my own, to find common ground and debate assumptions.