SHUT UP AND SING: CATCHING UP WITH THE DIXIE CHICKS AND WORRYING ABOUT THE ELECTION

Shut_up_and_sing_2Have you seen  this movie?  I sat in bed watching it early Sunday morning on cable and was just blown away.  It’s one of the saddest, scariest, most moving American documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.  That’s no surprise, since it was directed by  Barbara Kopple, who made Harlan County USA – the landmark documentary about coal mine union battles in Kentucky.

What happened to the Dixie Chicks is infuriating: performing in London just before the start of the Iraq war, lead singer Natalie Maines (married, by the way, to HEROES star Adrian Pasdar,) told the crowd "Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."  The scene is included in this preview.


As I watched the film, seeing the rage and cruelty that emerged in the response to this one sentence,  my first thought was, "Oh my God, what does this mean for Barack Obama?"  The people who went after the Dixie chicks were nowhere near a sense of respect for the First Amendment – and sounded like they would be particularly vulnerable to "elitist" or racist accusations against a candidate.  If you remember the exit polls in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania you’ll recall that many respondents just about acknowledged that they would not vote for Senator Obama simply because of his race.  Am I unfair to wonder if many of those people are the same ones booing and even threatening Maines’ life?  Still "out there" in larger numbers than we wish?  Look at these figures:

In Pennsylvania
exit polls on primary day, 14% of voters
said that race one one of several important factors. Fifty-five percent of those were Clinton
voters and 45% Obama voters. When asked
race was “important” 19% said yes – 59% of them Clinton voters; when asked if
race was a factor in their decision, 12% said yes. In this group, 76% were white Clinton voters.

In West
Virginia
, when asked race was “important” to their decision, 22% said yes –82%
of them Clinton voters; when asked if race was a factor in their decision, 21%
said yes. In this group, 84% were white
Clinton voters.

Finally, Ohio. There, when asked race was “important” to
their decision, 20% said yes–  59% of them Clinton voters; when asked if race
was a factor in their decision, 14% said yes. In this group, 59% were Clinton voters. (the racial breakdown was not available here.)   

Please understand – I don’t know if I’m right.  I’m not alleging racial bias in all those who rose up to burn Dixie Chicks CDs and threaten country stations with boycotts if they "ever played one of their songs again"  – but I do suspect they could be more vulnerable to campaigns run in an uglier vein – just as they responded to this one.  It’s worrying me.

Continue reading SHUT UP AND SING: CATCHING UP WITH THE DIXIE CHICKS AND WORRYING ABOUT THE ELECTION

THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY

Obama_older_ladyToday is my 62nd birthday.  It’s pretty amazing.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future.  AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.

Not only that.  This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead.  And it wasn’t even a big deal.

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable.  That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it.  Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed.  And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow.  And some of that appears to be true.

Dean_rusk_daughter_2
In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine.  Which wrote this:

Resignation  Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was.  In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country.  I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow.  The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program.  As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman.  Apparently I was the only one who did though.  One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom.  And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared.  I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.


I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa?  I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.  Probably it’s just the birthday.  Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before.  OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years!  Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.

CAROLYN GOODMAN, WITH GRATITUDE

 

Ben Chaney stood to the side
watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn
Goodman her eternal blanket.

It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead
themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr.
Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah
Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional
style.

Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at
the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain
pine coffin.

The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn
Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been
for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi.
Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20,
disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their
bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.

The three civil rights workers.

That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from
New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from
Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black
Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted
in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the
hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.

Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr.
Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in
May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.

“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.

Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a
burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons
were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations,
served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth
man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury
in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.

“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and
continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and
neither did Carolyn.”

Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West
Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell
decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew,
the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is
as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.

There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman,
and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave.
Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s
murder.

“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.

On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another,
above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short
while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”

MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns
remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear
out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.

Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman
in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing
of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.

“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”

Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba
Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the
murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too
fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman
Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.

One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment
and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now
asking for forgiveness.

His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my
forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way
lies forgiveness.”

As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.

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