Category Archive

Twenty-two years ago today 14 women — 13 students and a staff member — were murdered on the campus of Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. Their killer, Marc Lepine, targeted female students in an engineering class and claimed to be “fighting feminism.”

The fourteen who died were Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Maryse Laganière, Maryse Leclair, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Michèle Richard, Annie St-Arneault, Annie Turcotte, and Barbara Klucznick-Widajewicz.

The 20th anniversary of the killings drew a lot of attention in the Canadian media and blogosphere, and I collected a number of links then:

• A look back at the shootings, their aftermath, and the larger struggle against misogynist violence.
• A survivor of the massacre — then an engineering student, now a government official and a mother of four — comes to terms with her feminism.
• An essay on the impact of the killings on Canadian society.
• Another collection of links from the blog Spare Candy.

“So what is going to be taught to our people in health class in our schools? What is going to be taught to our children about who in our stories, even to little children — what are married couples? What families look like in America? So, you are going to have in our curriculum, spread throughout our curriculum, worldview that is fundamentally different than what is taught in schools today? Is that not a consequence of gay marriage?”—Rick Santorum, chatting with a young Iowa voter yesterday.

Two things, Rick.

First: Yes. That’s what’s going to happen. In fact, it’s happening already, even in states without marriage equality.

And second, if you think that prospect is likely to send shivers down the spine of any American 23-year-old in 2011, you’re deeply misreading the electorate.

Young people today know “what families look like in America.” They know that loving families are raising kids in all sorts of configurations. They see it every day. Denying those families legal recognition won’t keep kids from seeing them as families, and it won’t stop decent, moral, respectful teachers from referring to them in decent, moral, respectful ways. That battle has been lost. It was lost years ago.

Yes, you can harm these families by denying them legal equality. But that harm, even by your own degraded standards, does nobody any good.

Today’s young voters are disgusted by you, as are their younger sisters and brothers. They will not soon forget what you did to their families and their friends.

“We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn’t he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, ‘Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?’ That’s the answer.

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

“And that — that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

–Mario Savio

Cop novelist (and former cop) Joseph Wambaugh has an op-ed in the LA Times this week mocking the students who were pepper-sprayed at Davis. It’s about as stupid and as boring as you’d expect, but there are a couple of passages that are worth giving a moment’s attention to.

First there’s this:

“An assistant professor of English at UC Davis was quoted in The Times as saying that the pepper-spray incident was simply the latest example of “the systematic use of police brutality by UC chancellors” to suppress protests. Well, when I was an LAPD cop, I majored in English at Cal State L.A., and I can affirm that assistant professors of English claim all sorts of weird things after having been driven loopy by too much Elizabethan poetry. The UC Davis campus cops as serial brutes? I thought they just wrote tickets and attached wheel locks to illegally parked cars.”

Willful ignorance is never pretty, but in this case it’s particularly embarassing. UC police have indeed made a regular habit of using excessive force against peaceful protesters in the last couple of years, and even if Wambaugh somehow missed the incident in which a woman needed reconstructive surgery on her thumb after an encounter with a campus cop’s baton, or the time when a UCPD officer pulled a gun on protesters at a regents meeting, or the various other taserings and pepper-sprayings of the last 26 months, you’d think he’d have noticed the roughing up of a tenured professor and a former US poet laureate (and his elderly wife) at Berkeley just three weeks ago.

But as bad as that is, this is much worse:

“The Times also quoted a 23-year-old student … proclaiming that the action of the campus cops was an example of police brutality that is even more “rampant” against “minority groups and women” in the world outside of UC Davis. I think the kid must be experiencing Revolutionary Overload. Allegations of excessive force against minorities have long been an issue with law enforcement critics, but police brutality against women? When did that start? I know quite a bit about police officers, and I can tell you that most of the male cops I’ve met like women. Really like them. A lot.”

No need to worry about police abusing their authority with women, see? Cops like women.

By “women,” of course, he means “women they want to fuck.” And by “like,” of course, he means “want to fuck.”

And what could possibly be wrong with that?

Today is the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused, sparking a movement that would change America.

But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she refused. Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is another.

And there’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. I first discovered it in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.

In November 1952, a black Montgomery high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested and charged with the rape of a married white teenager four months earlier.

It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Reeves himself said that she had gone to the authorities only because she feared she was pregnant with his baby. But the police were able to extract a confession from him by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even forced him to sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

After the confession Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and — despite the police’s promises — sentenced him to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial on the grounds that his confession should not have been admitted into evidence. (He was retried, with the confession excluded, but the result was the same — and the jury’s verdict came even quicker.) In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.