Representative Ayanna Pressley: Naked Courage

Ayanna Pressley has just released a video through The Root about losing her hair over the last 6 months as a result of alopecia areata.  This is a screenshot from that video:

Representative Ayanna Pressley goes bald in public for the first time.

I’ve written about Black hair before, but seriously, this is a doozy of a topic. It’s hard for white people to understand just how political Black women’s hair can be, even though we’re often the ones doing the politicizing (e.g. her hair isn’t professional, is she trying to be militant? etc.).

So right now, I’ll just say this.

The first Black woman I ever seriously dated had sickle cell trait-related alopecia. She wore a wig constantly – nice looking one, too – but was apparently freaked that I might “discover” she had very little, very short, and very patchy hair on her head. In the dark she took off her wig while I was in the bathroom. I came back and found her sitting straight up, rigidly, instead of relaxing on the bed. I could tell there was something different about her silhouette, too, though it took my eyes a little bit to refocus. By the time I sat down on the bed next to her, she was almost shaking.

For the Black women who have this, this is a huge deal with a lot of shame attached. [I am, of course, not saying that’s how it should be, just saying that that is how it actually is right now.] It took a fuckload of courage for that girlfriend to expose her natural hair to me, one on one and in the dark after I had already clearly expressed my affection for her and attraction to her.

It’s remembering that woman quivering with fear on my bed in the dark that makes me qualified to say, Pressly, you’re a straight-up BadAss.

Go watch the video. It’s under ten minutes, and you won’t regret it.

Thirty-Eight

Well, today the Virginia legislature ratified the ERA, making it the 38th state to have done so. This does not mean that the ERA will be immediately effective. There are two major problems confronting ERA proponents (including me, natch).

First, 5 states that ratified the ERA have since passed acts that purport to rescind their ratification. While this is a barrier, I don’t judge this a particularly high hurdle to clear. There simply is no mechanism in the constitution that discusses, much less actually permits, a state that has ratified an amendment to take that ratification back. The constitutional process simply demands that a state ratifies it. Once a state has done so, it has done so. Anything after that is likely (but not certainly) constitutionally irrelevant.

Of course, a right-leaning judiciary might still attempt to hang up ratification on that point, but since it’s pretty flimsy and in pretty flagrant conflict with the actual constitutional text, so-called originalists would prefer to have another hook on which to hang their argument that the ERA cannot be put into effect. As it so happens, they do. That’s the second barrier: the ERA as written is simple and includes no deadline, but passage of the ERA was accompanied by text that gave the states only a limited amount of time to ratify, after which the amendment would be presumed not ratifiable. This deadline was extended once, but not again, and according to the accompanying text (as amended) time to ratify passed in 1982.

Now, the constitution also does not specify that Congress may limit the time period during which states may consider ratification, but this argument has decidedly more sympathy than the any argument that states might be able to “take back” ratification. After all, if they can take back ratification, there is no obvious reason that they can’t take back ratification of an amendment already in effect. This could potentially reducing the amendment to support levels below the threshold needed to bring the amendment into force. At that point, what would happen? Repeal of an in-force amendment? What if a single state repeals their ratification of the 9th amendment? Since there were only 13 states at the time, and only 10 required to put the amendment into effect, rescinded ratification by one state could result in a need to ratify by 26-29 states to restore the amendment’s force. All these reasons make it unlikely that even die-hard conservatives hell bent on defeating the ERA would rely much on the rescinded ratification argument when they have any other argument to make.

So it seems likely that whether or not the ERA becomes effective on Jan 15, 2022 will be dependent on whether courts agree or disagree with the argument that Congress has the power to include accompanying text limiting the ratification window.

Of course, what seems more likely to me is that ratification by a 38th state will put new pressure on Congress to pass a new amendment textually identical to the ERA so that states can then ratify the new version, and that that new pressure will be successful within fewer than 10 years. At that point, we will have 33 relatively easy ratifications. To gain the other 5 might be easier than people think, but won’t necessarily be easy in any absolute sense. It’s arguably true that at least some of the reason why the 12 states never to ratify have not more recently changed their minds is because the question of the ERA was considered irrelevant by most. With a new window for passage and an enthusiastic base of women pushing for passage, it will likely be much harder for a state’s conservatives to effectively oppose ratification in the 10 years after a new ERA passes than in the 10 years leading up to today.

Nothing is guaranteed, and neither sex nor gender equality is yet enshrined in the US constitution, but Jan 15, 2020 should still be remembered as a day to celebrate. Reaching 38 is a very important victory.

Do Not Try To Understand Me

Empathy is at the core of justice. Without an ability to place oneself in another’s situation, it would be hard for us to criminalize many activities that we now do. Pyramid schemes, for example. The create the appearance of opportunity and the appearance of voluntary participation in the enterprise in pursuit of opportunity. But the opportunity is not, in fact, present. A justice without empathy would lead us to tolerate pyramid schemes (far more than we do). It is this exact sort of justice without empathy, without the ability of the men responsible for enforcing law and creating justice to imagine themselves in the situation of the victim, that is responsible for millennia of rape going unpunished and often unrecognized. Indeed it is only as women have taken a greater and greater role in enforcing law and creating justice that these rapes become cognizable by a system of justice, punishable by a system of laws.

Empathy is both necessary and good.

Understanding, however, is not necessary and it is too often not even good.

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Gender Neutrality is Wrong … Sometimes

Okay, so this is a quick note for those folks who aren’t completely turned off by pedantry and appreciate thinking more deeply about gender. If you ain’t both, this probably isn’t for you.

When “gender neutral” was first used in the context of trans* advocacy, access to bathrooms was probably a driving motivator of the language. In this sense, “gender neutral” is reasonable: the bathrooms themselves might easily have little to nothing to do with gender, including (importantly) things that humans tend to project gender on to even when they are not in any way associated with any particular human. So “Gender neutral” began largely communicating the idea of having no gendered connotations whatsoever – the sense we’ll use for the rest of this brief note. Bathrooms in the home are generally gender neutral in this sense, though we could certainly make a bathroom communicate femininity or masculinity by decorating it in particular ways. Still, when one tenant moved out, presumably those gender signifiers would also go: so, at least intellectually, we can separate the gender neutral bathroom from the gendered decor.

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More Geek Than

MORE GEEK THAN

Fortran!

Foot on the dancepad
Gunnin’ down BigBad
Playin arcade ports with a spacebar and trackpad
My hobbies aren’t hobbies
Galaxy of blue milk
Cosplay and comics and fanfics and filk
Translocation
To the orbiting station
That’s no moon it’s a holodeck vacation

Itchy trigger finger
But i’m trusting the force
kill the targeting computer
I’m aiming for the ports
I’m past the future
It’s no two thousand and one
Mini robot with an app gonna get me done
While you’re at the bottom of the gravity well
Geeky Girls fly Alcubierre
superluminal.

MORE GEEK THAN

Another game
addicted brain
this level’s driving me insane
Another bot
Another mod
A photoshop of General Zod

This update is shaky
The programmers are nuts
Cuz they’re drinking free caffeine with no healthcare until they bust

never-ending overtime
you code around the clock
you won’t make it seven years
til YOU run amok

Devs are burning through programmers like we’re running out of style
CEOs are getting paid
So it’s worth THEIR while

The fans are throwing fits on all official fora
Cuz the game just calls it quits or says Talas is from Andorra
The Rabid Puppies riot, say the Hugo’s in the tank
But NK Jemisin is laughin to the bank

MoreGeekThan

More. Geek. Than Fortran.
More. Geek. Than Fortran.

Ain’t seen the stars since we went to warp
Been so long, now Tasha Yar is Worf!

Programmed my own enhancements
in C + +
but a bug is overflowin’
the data bus
like untested nested code
I’m very unstable
I repeat things line by line until I’m unable
I repeat things line by line until I’m unable
If report then else next line until I drop tables

Step off Borg
Get out of my way
Got my Raspberry Pi from NewEgg today!
Waking up
Before I get to sleep
‘Cause Imma soldering circuits eight days a week!

MoreGeekThan

More. Geek. Then Fortran!
More. Geek. Then Fortran!
More. Geek. Then Fortran!
More. Geek. Then Fortran!

More. Geek. Than Fortnite.
More. Geek. Than Tetris.
More. Geek. Than Zelda.
More. Geek. Than Unix.

More. Geek. Then Fortran!

 

The Media Are Useless Teaser: Steve Adler

i want to write about some quotes that Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and the Guardian US (GUS) collected from US journalism movers and shakers. The quotes are supposed to be about what the media did wrong in their 2016 election (especially presidential election) coverage. In practice, most of them aren’t about that. It’s sad, really, that communication professionals can’t even stick to the topic. Yet other aspects of what they said was far worse than merely undisciplined topic-wandering.

As I was writing about the larger series of quotes, I found myself writing a huge amount about just one. It’s far too much for a piece that analyzes trends throughout the quotes – it would bias the feel of the piece, making it feel less a piece about trends and more a piece about that one guy and some peripheral junk. So I’m dropping this preview of the other piece where I’m just shoving everything I wrote about that one guy: Steve Adler, the Editor In Chief of Reuters. Allow this to whet your appetite for the later piece.


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