What does it take?

I have time on my hands. Well, I would've spent the time doing other things, but considering that I am currently waiting to hear back about a repair I need, I figure I will fill that time. So I figure I will discuss something that's been eating at me for quite a while.

As a crisis worker, I hear a LOT of difficult and traumatic stories. I'm trained to do this, and frankly, I've come to see it as a privilege that people I haven't met are trusting me with their stories. That is not easy for them to do. Additionally, as a crisis worker, I try to work for social service and social change. While it's important to treat a problem, it's also important to consider why that problem even exists and what can be done about it.

Recently, I learned that a student at a local high school in a very affluent community was very brutally attacked and left for dead a couple of months ago. The story broke all over the papers, and I really felt awful for the young woman and what she's been through. I've spoken to many people from this community, and they've had a lot of questions for me about how they can talk to their kids and families about what happened. I'm glad there's some sort of a dialogue about this--frankly, I think our silence on these issues allows them to foster and go unreported. It just makes me angry that a very highly publicized and very horrific case is what spurred this community into awareness and action. I cannot and will not discuss specific client cases due to confidentiality, but I do know that this one case is one drop in a pretty enormous bucket of survivors in this particular town. Just because the town is so wealthy and well-off does not make it crime-free.

But that got me thinking...what does it take to move people to action? The realization that yes, this could happen to them, in their community? The realization that no matter how much you do to "reduce your risk," the only thing that will reduce your risk of rape is to never be around a rapist in the first place?? (Yes, I'm playing Alex the Advocate here. Can't turn that off!) Why is it that a particularly horrific and publicized event gets people talking and mobilized, yet the cases that happen daily warrant no attention?

I don't know the answers to these questions. Not now, with too much caffeine in my system and too little sleep. I guess I will close with a quote from the divine Cherie Moraga. Read it and think about it in the context of this entry. This is from her poem, "What Does It Take?" from her amazing book Loving in the War Years:
If they took you,
I would take to the streets
scream, BLOODY MURDER.

What does it take to move me?
your death
that I have ignored
in the deaths of other women?

Isn't the possibility
of your dying
enough?

I love that poem, but I think it's applicable for here. Why does this one story get everyone fired up, but not the thousands of others? And like Ms. Moraga mentioned, isn't the possibility that it could happen bad enough? I guess now that they are fired up, I hope this momentum lasts.

Silent all these years

Well, that previous post is such a downer. I do wonder, though, if Mia had somehow survived the attack, would she have talked about it? Would she have written a song about it, like Tori Amos had done with "Me and a Gun," and put it on the next Gits album? And what of all the Mias I brought up (like the women of Juarez)? Would they have talked? Or would they be silent all these years?

As both a woman and a feminist, things like that just make me so mad. It's like we can't win no matter what we do. It's hard to talk about things that might make the public uneasy, yet without talking about them, nothing gets done to change them. And what are we supposed to do anyway, go along with it? I think not. In Newark, a fifteen-year-old named Sakia Gunn was stabbed in the chest for telling a man to stop harassing her. No one likes being harassed, so what was she supposed to do? Put up with it? Or risk being killed? And why do we have to change our actions for someone else? Shouldn't it be the offender who should be told not to stab one of us or hurt us?

I just wonder about all of these things. I know I can really be the master of the depressing. I was telling my partner about the New Jersey Four earlier today, and I work at a rape crisis center. And I brought up the Sakia story, which is pretty nasty. Guess I'm what my concentration in my major is--muck raking. (My concentration is 20th century American literature, that includes the really politically charged folks like Upton Sinclair and Ida B. Wells.) One of my feminists says I was born to rake the muck. Well, I guess blogging is just a start. Had Ida B. or Upton been around today, I could totally see them blogging. Then they could make the leap to writing books.

Forty years

As I stood out on the quad today, freezing my butt off to sell baked goods for the V-Day bake sale (proceeds go to the Vagina Monologues! woo for us!), I watched a very exciting and very powerful demonstration on the anniversary plaza of the Quad. The demonstration consisted of a march, speeches, and open mic to commemorate the 40th anniversary of African American Cultural Programming. The speakers were really good and talked about how it is everyone's responsibility to incorporate commitment to fairness into one's daily life. They talked about the cultural centers and the university's programs--and how far we've come since those early days.

One of the speakers brought up a story I had heard at a party and at my cluster, but it came back to me after hearing it. Apparantly, during the early 20th century, most of the dorms were all white. No minority student could live in them. This was a big surprise to me. I mean, I know racism exists and has a long and hideous history. But it was surprising to hear that many of the incoming students did not get a place to live when they came to the university. So where did they live? Many chose to stay with community members who let them board with them during the school year. So in areas like the downtown Urbana and Champaign neighborhoods, the students lived with the respective families who took them in. Some of the other students (who didn't like the rule but really couldn't do much to change it) would come over or bring food or something like that. After all, they probably would have still wanted to see their friends, even if they couldn't live in the same building.

While I would never ever want to return to an age like that, I often wonder about all the untold stories that happened in those neighborhoods. I don't really care so much about the white dorms (because that's pretty shameful) but it's the stories about the students living with the community members that sound cool. I know that if I were living during that time and had friends boarding with families, I'd probably go over and visit them or we could study/hang out together. And I would probably invite them over to see me. But I don't think I could stand a white dorm. I know that all three schools I've attended were predominantly white. However, I do hail from an area that has a large black and Latino population (whites make up about 30-40% of the population there, if that), so it's not like that is an issue for me.

Makes me glad this isn't forty years ago. I wonder if there are any written accounts of the students or their host families. I would love to read about them.