So, one day you look down and see your feet in shoes you don't recognize. Maybe you like them, maybe you don't. This is where life begins. Welcome to WSATA, where the Goddess returns.
If what HBO's True Blood revealed in season previews following last night's premiere of Season 6 is the true story's course, then black vampire Tara Thorton (Rutina Wesley) is in for another run of victimization. The preview indicated that humans will be torturing vampires in order to learn how to kill them efficiently in the vampire war.
All ready there's some double-crossing going on, too. The fictional Louisiana governor on the show, Truman Burrell (Arliss Howard) is pretending to help the vampires while also trying to exterminate them. It seems he will be as treacherous in the True Blood world as Gov. Bobby Jindal is in ours.
Last night, Tara was well on her way to being captured by the governor's troops with her maker/lover Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten). The last we saw of the young black vampire, she was writhing in pain on the floor at the Fangtasia vampire night club after attempting to save Pam, the same Pam who had just told her that their relationship as not a romance and that her loyalties remained with Eric, her maker.
In the past, bloggers such as Tami of What Tami Said and Rene of Womanist Musings have been critical of how True Blood writers have handled race and noted that often Tara's character has been put in the position of victim to face some of the worst brutality on the show. Other writers have discussed specifically problems they see in the shows handling of Tara as a gay woman of color. Last year, Gabrielle at AutoStraddle wrote:
Much like last season's attempt to heal Tara's soul wounds by making her a lesbian, this season so far says that the only way for Tara to be a survivor and rise above all she has been a victim of is to make her a VAMPIRE. To the margins of society with ye, O damaged woman! It seems the writers couldn't conceive of a female character who could survive several seasons worth of enslavement and rape and still be a successful human. So time to try a different form of existence. And time to Other her even further.
Ah, well. I guess if this season plays out as it appears it may, with Tara tortured again, some blogger's keyboard will be on fire again regarding True Blood's handling of black females.
Regarding other events last night, Lafayette didn't have that much to do in the season opener other than get drunk and take care of the wolf child. Sam spent the first ten minutes fleeing, as did Sooki, Eric, Nora, Pam, Tara, Jessica, and Jason. Jason came face to face with Warlow, the powerful vampire chasing Sooki. Andy's fairy babies cried a lot and started growing quickly.
The creepiest thing of the night, Bill Compton's resurrection at the opening and possession at the end. The way he called Jessica, his progeny, and nearly killed her was also pretty intense. I hope the season lives up to its dramatic promises.
Look at this picture, part of several released by the New Orleans Police Department on May 13. Is that a small child running alone from the shooter? So young, so small, and already he's had to learn to escape a bullet.
The man is aiming a gun into a crowd attending a New Orleans Mother's Day Second Line Parade. He and his partner wounded 19 people. Another person was injured when she fell. Suspects have since been arrested for the shooting along with alleged gang members, accomplices after the fact. Somebody shoots; somebody gets arrested. Most people think that's all there is, but I keep thinking about that anonymous child, running and what's ahead for him.
Children who must learn to deal with gun violence as a part of daily life get get lost in our windy debates about everything else that we deem more important. For instance, did you know that First Lady Michelle Obama was speaking passionately about young people who face the threat of gun violence when that heckler hijacked the moment this month?
Someone's always ready to steer the discussion away from the futures of children negotiating gun violence. Oh, you want talk about gun violence in your community? Let's talk about the individual's responsibility and single mothers instead. Oh, you want to talk about gun laws saving lives? Let's discuss the second amendment and my individual right to bear arms instead. Let's discuss everything but real people hurt by gun violence.
I wrote about the Mother's Day shooting last month at BlogHer.com and victims of gun violence who are not necessarily riddled with literal bullets themselves, such as mothers who've lost children in shootings. Somebody said on Twitter that the post shows how we're all six degrees from a bullet. If you read the post, you may sense my frustration.
What bothered me most when I was asked to write about the shooting was my suspicion that few people would care about New Orleans gun violence, despite children being involved. A mass shooting in a community like Newtown always gets more attention than gun violence where frequent shootings have become as unremarkable as wall paint. Also, many Americans, especially many American politicians, appear to feel "not my city, not my neighborhood, not my problem."
But it's not like the Newtown shooting stood alone. In the last 12 months the nation has also witnessed major mass shootings at a movie theater and a temple. Despite these horrors and the carnage of smaller shootings with multiple victims, some pro-gun politicos point to a recent Pew report that says gun violence has declined in the past two decades as though thousands of gun-related deaths each year are acceptable collateral damage for the nation's love affair with guns. "Our weaker laws work," they say. "Free more guns, lock up more people."
Well, I live in Louisiana, a state where we lock up more people than anyplace else and where leaders have not seen a tough crime or loose gun law they don't love. On May 30, for example, our state legislature passed a bill to give gun owners lifetime concealed weapon permits. Meanwhile, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has proposed a bill in Washington to stop some felons from ever receiving food stamps and to prevent poor people from receiving cell phones.
Louisiana has the worst gun murder rate in the nation. According to one report, "Between 2001 and 2010, 4,519 people were killed by guns here, more than a thousand more losses than U.S. combat troops suffered during the Iraq War." These numbers get personal fast. Last year I looked up and discovered I knew three people shot in my city in the same year, and neither I nor members of my family are involved with drugs or gangs. So, something is wrong.
Despite gun-lobby talking points to the contrary, there is a correlation between stricter gun laws and lower rates of gun violence. This fact seems like common sense to me. In the meantime, while the powerful duel coolly with statistics, we watch people die because in our real, passionate world, people don't duel with statistics. They duel with guns. So, those fighting stricter gun control have blood on their hands.
In Louisiana, our leaders implement punitive rather than preventive policies. They uphold tough sentencing laws and are proud to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. Voters continue to elect representatives who take a "let the bullets fly" approach to gun control despite our also having the highest rate of children killed with guns. Still, as prison budgets swell, education and health care budgets shrink.
When I see that picture of a child running from bullets on the streets of New Orleans and consider how my state addresses our gun violence crisis, I think our priorities are upside down. It's possible, too, that we are crazy, doing the same things but expecting different results. And I know that whatever Louisiana has been doing regarding guns, this nation needs to do the opposite.
The Baby Bachelor, the reality TV series spoof from Jimmy Kimmel Live, made me smile, laugh, and say "awww." Here are Episodes 1, 2 & 3. -- Updated June 14, with episode #4.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Kimmel says that his brother Jonathan came up with the show, which features Kimmel's nephew Wesley, age 3, as the Baby Bachelor and little girls ages two & three. For the record, I do not watch the actual shows The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, but I did see episodes of each when the shows first premiered. I can't believe they're still on TV.
Generally, I only care for Bonnie Raitt's version of "I Can't Make You Love Me," and I sort of have a blind spot when it comes to men singing this song. I never believe them when they sing it. But I do believe and love Tank's version.
If you watched So You Think You Can Dance last night, the Vegas auditions, then you heard this song twice. I think dancers get to cheat a bit when they use exceptionally moving music for auditions. It's hard to tell whether it's the music moving the audience or the dancers, but SYTYCD hopefuls didn't chose this song. They pulled it from a hat or something by the producers' command.
On Monday, I wrote about the Terrilynn Monette case and how I felt about it as a New Orleans resident and mother of an adult daughter. I spent some of that post obsessing over my belief that criminal justice professionals assumed too much about the route the young teacher took home the night she disappeared. They consistently ignored that she may have gone straight down Harrison Avenue, the same route I would have chosen had I been her, to get to her apartment on Paris Avenue. (Read my post here.)
A new article at the Times Picayune/NOLA.com website is also calling police assumptions into question. One of the issues is the conclusion they jumped to based on sketchy deductions about red light surveillance photos:
"Because we assumed that (red-light camera) picture was valid, we kind of ruled out Harrison Avenue," [State Rep. Austin] Badon said.
Every local media outlet reported that the police had footage showing Terrilynn's car turning left on Marconi, which would have taken her away from Harrison Avenue. Badon felt compelled to get involved, and I applaud him for his persistence, but his efforts were also influenced by what the police said.
As previously reported, on Saturday, June 8, more than three months after she went missing, Terrilyn's car with her body inside were found in Bayou St. John where Harrison Avenue crosses that body of water. The article at NOLA.com ends with Badon saying, "It's a message for all of us not to assume anything."
I remember asking my daughter back when the news of the surveillance photos broke, "How do they know it was her car and that she was the one driving?" But it never occurred to me back then that the police would ignore Harrison Avenue as a straight shot, that they would not consider all possible routes from Parlay's Bar to Terrilyn's apartment complex. Now I wish I had called or written someone in March and asked, "Why would you rule out her taking the straight route down Harrison?" Instead, I went on with my life, ignoring my hunch because I thought it was logical that others would think the same thing. And they probably did, but like me, they thought the police were doing all that they could.
Also, when I saw that volunteers and officials were dragging the bayou for cars back in March, I thought the search would logically include the bayou at Harrison Avenue because the search, according to reports, included part of the bayou north of Harrison as well as south of it near LSU Dental School. As it turns out, due to some bizarre decisions based on the red light camera report, searchers skipped the Harrsion Avenue bridge at Bayou St. John completely.
As it turns out, the NOPD was never sure that the car they saw turning left in the photo and video was Terrilynn Monette's Honda. Sloppy, sloppy work.
I'm glad Slidell Police Officer Mark Michaud came along and finally found the body so that Terrilyn's mother will not have to wonder where her baby is, but I am dismayed that the NOPD was so careless about the search. If it weren't for Badon, Terrilynn's mother, and Terrilynn's fellow teachers keeping this story in the spotlight, her body may have never been found.
Is it possible that NOPD officers had a cynical attitude about looking for Terrilynn? Is it possible that they did not give her case the attention it deserved because she was, in their eyes, just a black woman drinking too much at a bar and who has time for that kind of missing woman?
Monette's car with her body was found
in Bayou St. John. Mourners have left
flowers in her memory. NOLA.com
Terrilynn Monette's death may have been ruled a drowning with no foul play, but what I remember most about this story is that a man, a supposed acquaintance, claims to have left her in her black Honda that night around 4:00 a.m. He claims he left her "to sleep off" her alcohol, but the bartender who served her at Parlay's Bar on Harrison Avenue in New Orleans said she didn't appear drunk.
For me, this man who left her supposedly drunk in her car lacked moral conscience in that moment. It's not as though New Orleans is the world's safest city. This account of the evening causes me to recall the story of Mitrice Richardson in California, the callous way in which she was handled by strangers.
Mitrice Richardson [was a] 24-year-old black woman from South Los Angeles who was arrested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on Sept. 16 for not paying a $89.21 restaurant bill in upscale Malibu. After her arrest, she was released at 1:25 in the morning without her cell phone or her purse and no transportation because the police had impounded her 1990 Honda Civic in which they say she had less than an ounce of marijuana. Her purse and cell phone were in the car with her identification, according to her family, but the police say she had identification. After that, she vanished. With the exception of a few sightings here and there, the 5 ft 5 young woman just disappeared.
It turned out that Mitrice was experiencing some sort of mental illness episode when this happened. Her body was later found in a Malibu, Ca., ravine. No, Terrilyn Monette was not arrested, but she was left to wander off alone in a less than sober state by people who felt no responsibility to ensure her safety.
Formerly missing Terrilynn Monette
WWL-TV reports that the New Orleans coroner has confirmed through dental records that the body found in St. John Bayou this weekend is that the beloved elementary school teacher. From California, she gladly relocated to New Orleans, and did so well at her job she was nominated for Teacher of the Year.
Although this tragic story unfolded over the last few months in my city, New Orleans, I have not blogged about this case before not because I didn't think it was worth writing about or because it didn't disturb me but because it disturbed me so much. I empathized with her mother, Toni Enclade, and offer my condolences to her and the family now.
I also applaud State Rep. Austin Badon (not always a politician I support) for putting his clout behind the search, sticking it out, and making the search for this young woman a priority. I salute Slidell police officer Mark Michaud as well for deciding Saturday morning to help again. He used his sonar equipment and diving expertise to find the body and did so in about three hours. Since she went missing in March, numerous people of all backgrounds, including a search group from Texas, have been involved in looking for clues to Terrilynn's disappearance and her car or body.
I have an adult daughter who likes to go out with friends, sometimes friends she's only recently met, and learning that the last time a human saw Terrilynn Monette alive was when an acquaintance left her outside a bar on Harrison Avenue at 4:00 in the morning really rattled me. It rattled me enough that I lectured my grown daughter about the importance of knowing the people better with whom she parties. In this era of social media, people quickly claim as friends people they barely know who may care little for others' well-being.
This story has troubled me to the point that I have even found myself driving at times down Marconi Avenue between Harrison and Robert E. Lee Boulevard, a route the teacher was assumed to have taken early in the search. Traveling beside one of City Park's lagoons, I have wondered whether she may have swerved into the water that night and somehow her car remained hidden. I have also wondered whether she was one more abducted woman in this port city.
I live not too far from the part of Harrison Avenue in Lakeview where the teacher was last seen alive, a predominantly white section. The racial make-up of the area is not an indictment of any kind, just a fact, and I have never had a bad experience there. Since I was a baby, my family's home has been minutes away in what historically been called Gentilly, in its predominantly "black section" two blocks from Harrison where it meets Paris Avenue. My mother, now deceased, used to teach at Hynes Elementary School in the Lakeview section. Down Harrison, through City Park, over the bayou--that was the way home.
Today I live in that house with my daughter and son, and we often pick up fish at the Lakeview grocery store. In fact, my son, when he had only recently learned to drive, totaled my daughter's car at the corner of Marconi and Harrison while on his way to that store.
The nearest Starbucks is on Harrison in Lakeview, too. I hit it more than I should, and I stop at Chase bank, pass by Parlay's Bar, and drive down the avenue. For the last few months when I've driven down Harrison, I've seen the flyers with her face, at least one outside Parlay's, and I've continued onward, over the canal and Marconi, through City Park, and across the bridge over Bayou St. John where Terrilynn's car and body were found.
I write these details about the area and how I and my family have experienced the community because it's all so familiar, so close to home. Unlike the criminal justice experts I've heard talk about this case, I would not have turned left on Marconi to get to Robert E. Lee as they have repeatedly assumed Terrilynn did. The NOPD said that a traffic camera caught the teacher in her car turning left on Marconi, but I don't think the public has seen a moving picture of the turn. We've seen a still shot of her car at that intersection.
For a number of reasons, I've been wondering if the police saw the photo of her car and wrongly assumed she turned left. If I had seen the photo, unless it showed the car actually turning, I would have assumed she continued straight in a straight line because that's the way I go. I continue down Harrison all the way to Paris Avenue, driving by habit through the black section of Harrison Avenue. Most likely Terrilyn would not have gone out of her way either to dodge the black section of Harrison Avenue anymore than I would, any more than my mother and father did, any more than I and my daughter would.
The teacher's apartment building is at the corner of Robert E. Lee and Paris. On my way to the classes at UNO, I've seen the yellow ribbons awaiting her return. She lived nearer the lake than I do, so she would have turned left when she came to Paris not right as I would, but the night of her death, if the coroner's cause of death is correct, she never made it that far.
Perhaps noticing that the police may have jumped to conclusions about her route home means nothing, but the NOPD has been accused of mismanaging the case. Regardless of the NOPD's issues. Rep. Badon drew in the state's Wildlife and Fisheries agency and had people searching everywhere, including Bayou St. John. The mystery remains how did professionals miss her car when they searched the bayou before. A scientist may have to answer that question. (If you want to read more details on the Terrilynn Monette case, the best article I've seen so far is by Times Picayune reporter Ramon Antonio Vargas.)
Saturday, June 8, after attending a cousin's funeral, I almost drove down Wisner to Harrison. If I had, I would have seen divers searching for her car, but I decided on a different route. The next day, coming through the park from Starbucks, I crossed the bayou and saw the flowers left on the bridge in Terrilynn's memory.
Her case is another one of those saddening, frightening stories that makes me look askance at my daughter when she's off to meet a group of people she barely knows to go to places that seem foreign to me despite being right here in our city. I remember then how many times my parents watched me head into the night with friends, how they urged me to be careful.
We have to watch our adult children go as we once did, out into the world fearlessly, and we must let them go as Terrilynn's mother had to let her go across the country to New Orleans. Once they are adults, all we can do is beg them, "Be careful, please." And later some of us pray or do what we must do to ward off worry. I have learned to look forward to sighing in relief every time one of my children comes home safely.
I hope that Toni Enclade knows that she did all that she could for her baby. My heart goes out to this mother of a fearless daughter, knowing life for her has not been the same since she learned Terrilynn was missing, and it will never be the same again. But I hope that her heart will heal as best a mother's can after losing her precious child.
Zora Neale Hurston, renowned African-American author, folklorist, and anthropologist, really knew how to put a spin on her life. I suspect her philosophy was never reveal vulnerability.
It's public knowledge that Zora died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave. (The beautiful Alice Walker went in search of her grave in the 70s and put a symbolic marker in the general area of Zora's burial.) It's been said that she was too proud to tell her family that she needed help.
As you can see from the clip below in the April 27, 1950, edition of the Anniston Star, Zora would not admit to prying reporters that she was in financial distress when it was discovered that she was working as a maid. However, I admire the spiritual truth she spun into why she, a black woman with an astonishing resume, was working as a domestic in a white woman's home.
'You can use your mind only so long,' she explained to the U. P. Reporter. 'Then you have to use your hands.'
'I was born with a skillet in my hand. I like to cook and keep house. Why shouldn't I do it for somebody else for a while?'
What Zora really liked to do was write, travel, study people, and network. Her answer to the reporter was a stretch, given that she was not particularly enamored of marriage, which in those days would have given her ample opportunities to cook and clean for someone if she really aspired to keep house. She was, after all, married three times.
In the documentary Jump at the Sun, scholar Valerie Boyd said that Zora "was afraid that marriage would only widen her hips and narrow her life? Her work was her master, and she followed its commands. And you know, she loved these men but they were mere men."
This adventurous woman worked as maid simply because she needed money. But like many writers, she probably rationalized to herself that she was also doing research for her next book while she worked as a maid, something she could never tell a reporter because what would her white employer do after that? The famous anthropologist/writer probably told herself she was observing white people more since she had spent so much of her life previously observing black people and writing about them. Writing about black people, however, no longer paid the bills.
Telling ourselves stories to help us cope with discomfort is what people do to hold on to hope or to manufacture happiness while in undesirable circumstances. They rationalize their choices and find purpose in their troubles. Nonetheless, it is true that it's good sometimes to rest your mind and work with your hands.
Another inaccuracy in the article, unbeknownst to the reporter, is that Zora was born in Eatonville, Fla. She was actually born January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Ala. but fabricated a story about her birth so she could get a scholarship to finish her high school studies, I've read. She told people she was born in Florida in 1901.
Zora died indigent at age 69, January 28, 1960, in Saint Lucie County Welfare Home, Fort Pierce, Fla. I recommend Walker's essay "Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale" to anyone contemplating this aspect of Zora's life from In Search of Our Mother's Gardens.
So, what was Michelle Obama talking about when that GetEqual heckler interrupted her? When I first read about First Lady Michelle Obama's confrontation with Ellen Sturtz of the gay rights group GetEqual, I laughed. The first lady was keeping it real. Sturtz clearly did not know who she was messing with, I thought.
It's no secret that the FLOTUS does not handle as well as her husband the disrespectful ways in which her family's been treated while her husband's been in office. She admitted as much at least three times when she and the POTUS appeared on Oprah last year. Is it possible Sturtz then knew exactly who she was messing with and heckled the first lady hoping to get a rise?
Over at Policymic, feminist activist Laura Rankin has a provocative, well-reasoned post about the first lady's confrontation with Sturtz. Rankin's post is entitled "White Lady Heckles Michelle Obama — What Happens Next is Something Black Women Know All Too Well." And at The Root, Tracy Clayton's collected tweets from some black folks on Twitter about the incident under the headline "Why heckling Michelle Obama doesn't pay." These two writers have pretty much covered all the angles, including how quickly black women, even the FLOTUS, gets slapped with the angry, black woman label, and they've linked to others. So, I won't do a rhetorical analysis here.
Instead, I'll discuss what occurred to me as I listened to the audio of the exchange between the FLOTUS and Sturtz.
To me, it sounded as though Mrs. Obama was talking about the plight of children of color in urban communities. It's a shame Sturtz drowned that out, but I wasn't sure, so I searched the Internet for the speech. None of the articles I found discussed what Mrs. Obama was trying to say when Sturtz chose to interrupt her. They merely said that she was speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser.
When I found the transcript of her at Whitehouse.gov, I discovered Mrs. Obama had been talking about the plight of black youth at Harper High School on Chicago's South Side, where she grew up. Sturtz's decision to interrupt the speech at that point is worthy of contemplation. Why did she think it was okay to heckle the FLOTUS while the FLOTUS talked about black youth in crisis? Why did Sturtz deem that discrimination against gay people deserved more attention than black children under threat daily, living in communities overridden with drugs, gangs, guns, and murder?
Perhaps Sturtz placed her cause above black children and youth in crisis in American cities because she knows that in this nation she's destined to assume a higher place. I won't go so far as to say that she doesn't give a damn about black youth because I don't know her, but I do think that if she cared at all about black children--if she didn't think gay rights in the workplace were more important at that moment than the rights of black children and young people on the streets--then she would not have chosen to heckle the FLOTUS during that particular speech.
I say this as someone who's helped plan political strategy before and as someone living in New Orleans where we face the same kind of crisis Chicago is facing. Just last month I observed how quickly our problems fade from the headlines. We had a mass shooting on Mother's Day. By Monday night, the story had vanished from national news. Such fleeting interest in even a bleeding lead makes me think that not enough powerful, privileged people care what happens to black children and youth in urban communities. But drawing attention to this crisis is personal for me and apparently it is personal for Michelle Obama as well.
I also speak here as someone who thinks there's nothing wrong with citizens protesting and sometimes heckling officials and as someone who disapproves when one minority is pitted against the other in the battle for Civil Rights and social justice. So, then, you may ask why bring up the words Sturtz chose to interrupt if those words force us to look at race? Why don't I just applaud Sturtz's right to heckle and shut up?
Well, I won't because I can't. I must recognize the moment Sturtz chose to heckle the FLOTUS because Sturtz failed to recognize the moment herself. She failed to recognize that the moment did not belong her but to those children, and she took their moment because on some level she must know that white privilege, even shielding the body of a gay rights activist, still trumps blackness in America.
MRS. OBAMA: Now, Harper is located in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city, Englewood. You all know Englewood, right? A community that has been torn apart by poverty and hopelessness; by gangs, drugs, and guns.
And that afternoon, I sat down with these 25 students -- and these kids were the best and the brightest at that school. The valedictorian, the football star, kids in ROTC. But let me tell you something about the kids at Harper. Every day, they face impossible odds -- jobless parents addicted to drugs; friends and loved ones shot before their very eyes.
In fact, when the school counselor asked these young men and women whether they had ever known any who had been shot, every single one of those students raised their hand. So she then asked them, “What do you think when the weather forecast says '85 and sunny?'” Now, you would assume that nice weather like that, a beautiful day like today, would be a good thing. Not for these kids. They replied that a weather report like that puts fear in their hearts, because in their neighborhood, when the weather is nice, that’s when gangs come out and the shootings start.
So, see, for these wonderful kids, instead of reveling in the joys of their youth -- college applications and getting ready for prom and getting that driver’s license -- these young people are consumed with staying alive. And there are so many kids in this country just like them -– kids with so much promise, but so few opportunities; good kids who are doing everything they can to break the cycle and beat the odds. And they are the reason we are here tonight. We cannot forget that. I don’t care what we -- they, those kids, they are the reason we’re here.
And today, we need to be better for them. Not for us -- for them. We need to be better for all of our children, our kids in this country. Because they are counting on us to give them the chances they need for the futures they deserve. (Applause.)
So here’s the thing -- we cannot wait for the next presidential election to get fired up and ready to go. We cannot wait. Right now, today, we have an obligation to stand up for those kids. And I don’t care what you believe in, we don’t --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible.)
MRS. OBAMA: Wait, wait, wait. One of the things --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible.)
MRS. OBAMA: One of the things that I don’t do well is this. (Applause.) Do you understand? (Applause.) One of the things -- now --
(Inaudible audience interruption.)
The FLOTUS finished her speech, calling for more gun safety laws and reminding listeners that voters should be active in every election not just the presidential election.
Sturtz must know that she possesses a level of privilege that escapes Mrs. Obama even as First Lady of the United States. If nothing else, Sturtz's outburst and the way she discusses its aftermath show that white privilege blinds and deafens its beneficiaries. She couldn't see or hear the emotion pouring through Michelle Obama in that moment of her speech. Consequently, Sturtz failed to identify with the very people the gay community repeatedly challenge to identify with them, African-Americans.
African-Americans have been asked to see gay rights through the same lens that blacks have seen their own struggle for Civil Rights. This plea became most strident during the Proposition 8 campaign when African-Americans were erroneously blamed for the gay community's loss.
I don't know whether race played a role in the FLOTUS's reaction to the heckling or not, but I do know that after nearly six years in office, Michelle Obama is still black and must suspect that there are some things people will do to her that they would not have done to other first ladies, especially supposed allies. Wow. I bet she never thought she would get heckled at a Democratic Party fundraiser.
It's possible, too, that the FLOTUS had simply had a difficult day; Sturtz's heckling may have felt like a boulder landing on her last nerve. Nevertheless, whatever the reason she chose to confront Sturtz rather than ignore her, it's become clear through the way the media and the blogosphere have reacted to Mrs. Obama facing off Sturtz that many people in this country still don't understand black women in the context of power dynamics.
I support legislation to stop discrimination based on gender identity and orientation, but I cannot support Sturtz heckling Michelle Obama as the first lady addressed the needs of black youth in crisis. As the FLOTUS said, "Today we need to be better for them. Not for us -- for them." If Sturtz had been listening rather than planning her own moment of protest, then perhaps she wouldn't have been "taken aback" as she said she was when Mrs. Obama walked over and looked her in the eye. If Sturtz had been listening, maybe she would have said instead, "Please, Mrs. Obama, forgive my bad timing."
