Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts

What I Stand For

An online community I participate in regularly offered up a probing question of the day recently: "What do I stand for?". 

Such a powerful question! I have a feeling this isn't a complete list, but here it is so far:

I stand for kindness: To myself, to others, to the earth and everything that lives on it.

I stand for justice: The recognition that we have had generations of injustice and deep, compounding harms that mean some people start out in a hole dug by official policies and actions and face a steeper climb than others. (Here's a graphic from the LA Metro Design Studio that illustrates equality, equity, and justice much better than the one you may have seen with kids shut out of a ballfield. I don't use the kids-on-boxes graphic, which still leaves the kids outside the fence.)

I stand for accountability: For recognition of my own privilege that I didn't understand until I started unlearning and relearning, and for what I do with that privilege to make a difference. (A couple of my blog posts on privilege and bicycling: Riding Thoughts: Privilege is a Tailwind and Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding)

I stand for mother love: For my daughters. my stepchildren, and former stepchildren I'm still connected to, and for encouraging them to grow into themselves, not some version tied to what I think they should or shouldn't be or become.

I stand for love: My love for my husband, and every human being's right to love who and how they love.

I stand for friendship: For being someone who is there for hard times, not just fun times, and someone who nurtures friendships with time and attention.

I stand for engagement and connection: In my neighborhood and community, in policy and politics, in philanthropy and volunteering, in the everyday connections I can foster by connecting people to other people, resources, and ideas.

I stand for freedom: For the right to control our own bodies, for the right to be who we are in the world without fear.

I stand for environmental action, both personal and systemic: That is, I make individual choices to live more lightly on the earth but I know that even if everyone did the same we can't offset the actions of corporations and governments that engage in widespread damage and policy decisions that make things worse, rather than better. I'm fortunate that my professional life enables me to truly make a difference and gives me a wider platform, I vote for people who will move us forward toward survival as a species, and I shop locally, including food, to support local living economies.

Fundamentally I stand for making the world a healthier and more equitable place for all: Both close to home and far away, I support with words, actions, and cash the people and organizations making a difference.

Years ago I wrote a post about the 4-H pledge that somewhat relates to this question.

I expect to keep pondering the question and may come back.

What do you stand for?

Related reading:

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We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: Poems for Activists and Advocates

This collection includes harsh and violent imagery. You might think it needs a content warning. Yes, because the world we live in needs a content warning. Any day, every day, any of us might encounter harm, violence, the ending of our lives bit by polluting bit or all at once in the impact of a vehicle or the firing of a gun. Some of us move through the world with identities that increase the odds that we'll experience these as part of our everyday reality, one of the many injustices that activists and advocates speak out against.

This collection could keep growing. I compiled it the way I do all of my posts pointing people to poetry, by adding a link as I encountered a piece in my morning poetry reading that fit into this theme. 

At some point as the collection grew I got the book Poetry of Presence II: More Mindfulness Poems. I wanted it because I loved the first Poetry of Presence, not realizing that for this second volume editors Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson had also felt the calling to collect poetry that speaks to the urgency of our times. As they wrote in the introduction to describe their wonderful selections,

"Many poems in this volume therefore delve into varieties of suffering: woundedness, illness, loss, and death; prejudice, bigotry, injustice; violence and war . . . a host of tough stuff that, frankly, most of us would rather not deal with.

"But mindfulness poetry has the potential to crack open that tough stuff—one stanza, one line, even one word at a time. Enough light escapes through those cracks that we can edge forward when it gets dark or, if we need to, stay put a while and catch our bearings. By that light, we may begin to see more clearly and intuit more wisely how to be whoever we need to be, to go wherever we need to go, to do whatever we need to do. We're led more directly into the heart of the question that Ada Limón sets forth in the epigraph: 'What is it to go to a We from an I?'"

These words and those of the poets in the book and below remind, inspire, humble, and amaze me because poets can take these horrors and create such startling beauty, roses amidst the wounding thorns. 

A quotation by poet, peace activist and priest Fr. Daniel Berrigan fits here. I don't know which of his poems or writings it might be from; if you have the citation please share in the comments.

"This occurred to me, that faith is prose and love is music and hope is poetry." - Daniel Berrigan

What do you pledge, what actions are you already taking, to undo or prevent harms to each other and to bring justice and beauty to the world? How are you creating hope and going toward a We?

"Protest" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. 

"The World We Want Is Us" by Alice Walker

Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other
no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs
are dropped by
the 1%.

"Of History and Hope" by Miller Williams

But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

"V'ahavta" by Aurora Levins Morales

imagine winning.  This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry,

"Postscript" by Marie Howe

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.

"The Fallen Protestor's Song" by Mohja Kahf

So when you write a word
on a wall for all to see
and it doesn’t have to be in code,
and no one breaks the hand that drew it,
when freedom is no longer treated like a narcotic,
dosed in hidden little baggies only for the few,
but becomes like photosynthesis in plants,
processing light in every leaf,

"Blackbirds" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub

when, every now and then, mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we manage to unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it's meant to be.

"Democracy" by Langston Hughes

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

"I Believe in Living" by Assata Shakur

i have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know anything at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.

"Tired" by Cleo Wade

I was tired
of looking at the world as one big mess
so I decided
to start cleaning it up

"A Brave and Startling Truth" by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

"How Sweet It Is" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I lose faith
that my smallest actions
make a difference,
let me remember myself as one of millions,

"Gate A-4" by Naomi Shihab Nye

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

"Revenge" by Elisa Chavez

We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,

"For Those Who Would Govern" by Joy Harjo

First question: Can you first govern yourself?

Second question: What is the state of your own household?

Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service and compassionate acts?

"The Poems We Do Not Want to Write" by Maya Stein

The poems we do not want to write have the words “surveillance video” in them. Also,
”automatic weapon” and “body camera footage” and “assailant” and “victims.” 

"Breathe" by Lynn Ungar 

Just breathe, the wind insisted.

Easy for you to say, if the weight of
injustice is not wrapped around your throat,
cutting off all air.

Photograph of blue camas flowers in a grassy area. They bear multiple flowers on a stalk, with 6 slender purplish-blue petals radiating from small yellow centers

I chose this image of camas flowers in bloom to close this collection because I grew up in a part of the Pacific Northwest where this plant formed a staple food for the tribes that lived in and moved through the area. As a child I wasn't taught the real history of these mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and cousins and all their relations. I was taught only their history as viewed through the eyes of people like Meriweather Lewis and William Clark, for whom my hometown of Lewiston, Idaho, and the neighboring town across the Snake River, Clarkston, Washington, were named. As an adult I have sought ways to learn the missing and deliberately omitted histories that underpin today's economy, cultures, and the forms of privilege I hold. In my work and the ways I give time and money I seek to utilize that privilege to rebalance the systems we all inherited, to work for justice and a better world for all.

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Hey (We’re Not All) Guys! Why I Don’t Use “You Guys”

Let me put my English degree and years of copy-editing experience to work and start with a handy little grammar lesson: In most instances when you would say, “You guys” you can say “You” and the sentence works just fine.
  • Wait staff to diners: What would you guys like for dinner tonight? Would you guys like to see a dessert menu?
  • Social butterfly to a bunch of friends: Where do you guys want to go tonight?
  • Emcee to an audience: Are you guys ready to give it up for Famous Guest Name Here?
  • Anyone, to any group anywhere: Are you guys [verb]-ing?
This has been grating on me for a while now between hearing it live, on the radio, and from podcast hosts. (Side note to podcasters and announcers: Run a transcript of your last show and highlight every occurrence, then come back. I'll be here.)
I’ve been working to purge my own use, I hope with a fair amount of success. I’ve read a number of articles about the inherent sexism in having a male-gendered term--because oh yes it is--used as a collective. Each one reinforces my feeling that we need to address this default setting.

The capper came just last week. I will let the highly male-dominated conference I was attending remain nameless, along with the male emcee.
I had just finished discussing this very topic with the people at my table--four women, five men, although two of the men were having their own sidebar conversation and probably didn’t hear my little lecture.
We had talked about how someone bothered by this in the workplace brought it up only to be told that they were “too sensitive”. I think we were in general agreement that this created an unwelcoming climate at the same time we’re trying to recruit a lot of people and are actively seeking to diversify the workplace.
I work in an agency whose headquarters and regional offices are essentially big concrete boxes full of engineers--most of them men, many of them approaching retirement age. Some of them participate in STEM outreach and mentoring and we have interns and recent graduates in the workforce.
Do you suppose the young women being mentored want to be referred to as “guys” or think they have an equal chance of advancement if the agency’s default setting is one of guy-ness? I mean, it already is full of guy-ness by virtue of who’s there now so we need to try extra hard to be inclusive and welcoming.
All I know is that when the emcee congratulated two (senior executive) women receiving an award by saying, as they exited the stage, “Congratulations, you guys,” the other women at the table and I all made eye contact and nodded. There it was again.
We’ve worked through similar changes before. We’ve come to recognize that using words that only include some of the people in the room reflects the implication that some people belong there and some don’t.
Many of us are working to overcome that history--to move away from default settings that privilege some people as the norm and mark others as the exception. You wouldn’t look at a room full of people who embody a variety of races, ethnicities and cultures and say, “Hey white people, where should we go for dinner tonight?”
I’m not suggesting it’s easy. Like any habit, changes in your word choice will require effort. This is a lot of historical baggage we’re packing around. (And if you’re a man you have pockets in which to carry this stuff. Women mostly don’t.)
Seriously, folks, if women had been in power throughout the ages would we be addressing groups of all genders by saying, “You gals”? And if we were and you were a man in this system how do you think you’d feel about that?
Let me give you one more reason to purge “guys” as a collective term. Some people are born in a body that means their family and friends refer to them as a guy. They go through difficult work to represent themselves as who they really are, and their true self isn’t a guy at all. How do you suppose it feels to have people still calling you a guy at that point?*
Here’s a list for you. Practice a few times so these become a reflex. Some are better suited to following “you”, some work better after “hey” or “okay” or “so” or some other little throwaway word you use to signal that you’re about to say something. Or you could, y’know, just say what you need to say.

 One more thing to know: It doesn't require that many of us making the change to get society to shift. Just one in four, according to this study at University of Pennsylvania.
Useful Collective Terms***
  • Folks
  • People
  • All
  • Y’all
  • All y’all (for a bigger group)
  • Team
  • Friends
  • Family
  • Colleagues
  • Group
  • Everyone
  • VERB-ers, VERB-iers, VERB-ists:** If you’re engaging in a specific activity this can be useful--partiers, gardeners, balloonists, card players.
  • NOUN lovers/aficionados/VERB-ers or NOUN participants/attendees: Food lovers, birdwatchers, stamp collectors, workshop participants, conference attendees
Age-specific as appropriate (and it often isn’t):
  • Kiddos (only for kids)
  • Young people (only to young people--no need to jokingly referring to old people as young people as if there’s something wrong with being old)
  • Elders
Now, if you’re in a meeting of all guys, or a bunch of people named “Guy”, by all means use “guys”. (At which point you might also want to bear in mind that you’re now in a meeting that doesn’t represent the perspectives of the majority of people in the world. So there’s that.)
We are all learning, every day, how to treat each other with kindness, dignity and respect. Our words matter and can move us toward or away from a more inclusive world.
If acknowledging that you've unintentionally included some and excluded others with your words feels too hard, maybe check your values orientation a little more closely. No, wait--scratch that “maybe”. Just do it.

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Several Footnotes
* Obviously some people making this transition are delighted to be referred to as a guy. Somehow I don’t think when it’s used in this careless collective that it’s meant to include you specifically on the basis of your gender. They aren’t thinking about gender or inclusion at all--that’s the underlying problem.
** You will find me giving the exact opposite advice about VERB-ers if I’m talking about usage in transportation. I tell people not to use the terms “bicyclist” and “pedestrian” to refer to people biking or walking. This is because I strive for people-first language to remind everyone that we’re all people no matter which modes of transportation we use.
If I were starting off on a walking or biking tour I’m most likely to say “OK, group/folks/everyone, let’s get going”. It wouldn’t be the end of the world in that context if I said “OK, walkers/riders, let’s get going”. But if I’m editing a policy document I’m in people-language mode.
*** My extra-cranky final note where I lose a bunch of you because you think I’m being too picky: I don’t include terms for groups of people on the list above that you might expect to see, such as “tribe”. I am not a member of any tribe and don’t think it’s okay for me to appropriate that word, whereas if you are a tribal member referring to others it's completely fine. I don’t use “posse”--they used to hang people, remember? And so on down a list of collective nouns that either don't apply or carry a burden of history I don't want to bring into the room.
Basically I try not to use any collective referring to a specific group defined by its religious beliefs, race, ethnicity, or some other characteristic or practice I don’t share. If I do it’s because I don’t actually know that word’s derivation, at which point I hope you’ll share that historical information with me so I can update my practice. I will be genuinely, sincerely appreciative.
Related Reading
Any Terms to Add or Avoid?
  • What collective words do you use in place of “guys”?
  • Any you avoid because they represent a group definition that doesn’t apply to you or the people you’re addressing?

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Showing Up

"What's your story?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, usually when straight people come to an event like this it's because they have a story. A reason to show up."

I pondered this for a moment, then offered up, "Well, I had a family member who died years ago of AIDS. Half the family doesn't know that's what he had because they didn't know he was gay in the first place. So there's that. But honestly, I don't know that his death directly inspired me; we weren't close or anything. It's more that this is the civil rights movement of our time and straight people need to show up because it's the right thing to do."



It was 1996 and the event was a Human Rights Campaign speaking appearance in Spokane by Candace Gingrich, half-sister to then-Speaker of the House Newt. It would take another 10 years before Washington state recognized domestic partnerships, another 6 years after that before Washington voters upheld the equal right to marry with the passage of Referendum 74.

What did I do to further the cause? Not enough. It's never enough. But I didn't stay home and wait for someone else to do the work.

I donated to the Pride Foundation and the campaign for marriage equality. I had our campus join the Inland Northwest Business Alliance, Spokane's LGBTA Chamber, just the way we belonged to the other Chambers; attended lots of meetings; and made some good friends. I ran for office as a vocal and open supporter of equal rights (and lost, but not because of that -- three-way primaries are tough). I walked and biked in Pride parades. I attended meetings and trainings, changed my usage to ask after people's partners (before they could be labeled spouses), updated language on the website I was responsible for so it would be more inclusive, spoke up in work meetings if we were slipping into assumptions I eventually learned to call "privilege", served as on-campus sponsor of events held in our facilities.

I write all this not to take credit, but to remind myself that I was awake. When we tell stories about ourselves we reinforce our essential nature, and mine is that of someone who wants to change things for the better. When things need work someone has to do something. I'm someone.

You're someone.

Being awake didn't start with Candace's visit to Spokane. My grounding started with my childhood feminism (thanks Mom) and belief that the government has no business telling us what to do with our own bodies, which extends to our sexuality. I had been a vocal opponent of the anti-gay Prop. 1 in Idaho in 1994, and its defeat was a bright spot on the night I lost my Senate re-election bid.

Along the way I also participated in trainings around race and privilege. But somehow, safe inside my higher education bubble where we actively recruited a diverse applicant pool and set up inclusive photo shoots to represent a welcoming campus environment, I thought we were on a reasonably steady trajectory of improvement in racial equity.

I thought everyone understood that America was becoming increasingly diverse, making inclusion an imperative.

I thought most good people could agree that any one of us is better off when all of us are better off.

I thought Lincoln had it right when he closed his first inaugural address by referring to his confidence in "the better angels of our nature." 

Having represented the Idaho legislative district that included the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound and then seeing them bankrupted and the compound turned into a peace park owned by North Idaho College (where I served on the board), I thought America understood the dangers of white supremacy, fascism, and hatred and we were working to outgrow these. 

 When I cried with my daughters the night of Nov. 4, 2008, telling them they would grow up in a different America than the one I grew up in, those were happy tears.

I worked for a university that conducted research into racial profiling, which we understood to be bad policing, so surely police training would address this and things would change. I worked with faculty in the health sciences who focused on health disparities, so surely public health would address this and things would change.

This confidence in ongoing improvement in our national character is quite probably grounded in my whiteness. I don't have to witness racism so it can be invisible to me, making it shocking when it becomes visible. When my friends tell me stories about things that happen to them I hate the realization that this really happens, every day. I wish it weren't so, for all the good wishing does.

Understand that I grew up with Star Trek. Lieutenant Uhura with the dramatic black eyeliner was a strong and sensitive woman. The Star Trek future had women and people of color as admirals, scientists, doctors, explorers, starship captains, engineers. Men worked as nurses and reported to women superiors. People with conditions we label as disabilities lived full and productive lives with important jobs. This was -- and is -- the future I would raise my children to live in.

In all the Star Trek episodes with parallel universes there are inflection points that put them on a brighter path or a darker. In some moment the actions of one person make the difference. And here's the thing -- they don't know exactly which moment is THE moment. So they have to do all they can, all the time.

As do we. The brighter future requires that we wake up, and stay awake. It requires that we show up, and continue to show up.

 Your Turn

 How and where do you show up?
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Related Reading on my Blogs

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How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate

“How did you come to be a bike advocate?”

To answer that question as one of the opening speakers at the first-ever Future Bike when we held an “Inside the Advocate’s Studio” session, I had to back up to how I came to be an advocate of any kind.

I thank my mother for raising me in a way that shaped me into an advocate.

While she wouldn’t have used the word “feminist” to describe herself, she absolutely raised me to be one.

When she married my father she had already been an independent woman with a job and a car (which was hard to come by during World War II). She used stories about her mother and herself to illustrate why I needed to ensure that I could take care of myself as an adult before getting married. (She definitely assumed I would marry.)

She was pro-choice in an era when abortion was illegal, understood that to be a complex position, and answered honestly with good explanations of the various facets of the issue when as a young teen I asked her position.

She raised me to look at others with empathy. If we saw someone who was morbidly obese*, for example, instead of responding with criticism of their size she would say with compassion, “Just think how hard it must be for her to go to the movies or ride a bus when the seats are so small.” [*edited to add 2023 note: I've now learned much more about discrimination against people in larger bodies and wouldn't use the word "obese".]

Mom had never heard of privilege, but she inherently understood the concept. She told me I was a lucky kid: I had two parents who loved each other, a safe home, plenty of food, a good education, and lots of opportunity. Therefore I needed to use that education and opportunity to help people who weren’t as fortunate as I was.

I know calling it “luck” doesn’t unpack the invisible knapsack or dig into multi-generational and structural advantages and disadvantages. But Mom—born in 1921—prepared me well to understand it, and to want to address it. She explained pieces and parts of the world’s problems as being rooted in other people not having the advantages I’d had.

She had watched her own father, whom she described as a proud man, go door to door during the depths of the Depression asking if he could rake leaves or shovel snow to try to earn a little money so he could give his three children a birthday or Christmas present.  She knew what it meant that she had been able to attend a two-year teachers’ college to earn a degree and what a difference access to an education made.

She knew how far my father had come from his humble beginnings, how hard he had worked to rise through the ranks at the lumber company he worked for, and how much it meant to him that every one of his six children earned a college degree.

Mom told me a story that has always stuck with me, perhaps more than almost anything else she ever said.

One summer she and Dad and the four older kids in the family (I and my younger sister not yet having made our appearance) went to Chicago for several weeks. Determined to make the most of this opportunity in the big city, every day she got on the city bus with the kids, a map, and plans for some cultural or educational destination.

On one of these outings as she stood waiting at a corner for the light to change, a funny feeling crept over her. When she looked around to figure out why, she realized she was only the white adult in sight. The only other white people were her four children.

This woman, born and raised in nearly all lily-white Lewiston, Idaho, could have told me about her anxiety, even fear, at these unfamiliar circumstances. What she told me, though, was this: “I realized this must be what it feels like to be in the minority.”

As an adult I understand that in that moment she still carried with her all the advantages American society gives those who are white. She certainly spent the vast majority of her time in a world that didn’t expose her to that feeling, let alone restrict or block her access to what she wanted in life because of her skin color.

But as a child, I heard her tell me that there was something wrong with our world if being of a particular skin color made you feel funny, feel different, feel left out.

She reinforced this with other stories (quite a storyteller, my mom), like the one about a friend whose bitterest regret later in life was that he refused to attend his daughter’s wedding when she married a man from Hawaii who was of Japanese descent. Mom’s friend did this because of his experiences during World War II, but he came to appreciate his son-in-law and thanked him for being such a good husband. She credited him with overcoming his discrimination.

Or the one about a white family in Lewiston whose son married an African woman he met while serving as a missionary, how wonderful Mom thought it was that the mother-in-law welcomed her new daughter-in-law with open arms, and how there were others in town who would not have done so. Her disapproval of those who would criticize or reject a loving couple was clear.

Raised an Episcopalian and later a Lutheran, she didn’t bat an eye when one of my brothers married a Jewish woman from Brazil; rather, she read up on the significance of the bris ceremony her first grandson would have. She chose a formal departure from the Lutheran church because she couldn’t accept that being a good Muslim or follower of Australian aboriginal beliefs or anything else meant you couldn’t go to whatever reward might await after death, modeling religious openness and justice. I know this because she told us so--her values were there for me to learn from.

When the message from your mom is that you’re lucky, you should use what you have to give back, lots of people are unfairly discriminated against for who and what they are and what they believe, and good people don’t do that, you grow up to be an advocate.

And as soon as you bicycle on almost any street in the U.S., you become a bike advocate because you see how critical is that we change our streets so that everyone whether age 8 or 80 can feel comfortable riding. Mom's dementia meant that she never really knew this became my job, but I know she'd approve.

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Everyday Inclusion: Showing up for a Parade Once a Year Isn’t Enough


I’m white. In fact, I’m very white—all the ancestry I’m aware of is from the British Isles and northern Europe (Germany, Holland). My daughters are so white I make jokes about buying clown make-up in order to find a base that’s pale enough to match their lily-white complexions. (They are not amused, particularly Eldest Daughter who harbors a long-time fear of clowns.)

As a result I experience a fair amount of privilege in my life that I may not even notice unless I’m paying attention.

That’s the definition of privilege, more or less: unearned advantages that you don’t request and that arise out of historical and societal forces such that you view your own status as the default setting.

It isn’t just a concept related to skin color; men have male privilege over women and thus may not hear the sexism in a phrase (or recognize it in hiring practices), for example.

It’s not my “fault” that I’m white (blame my parents) and I don’t need to feel guilty for that. But I do need to be aware of the ways in which I benefit and work to balance the system around me so that everyone gets a fair crack at advantages and opportunities that just fall into my lily-white middle-class lap.

I didn’t know this was called privilege as I was growing up but I did learn about the concept thanks to my mom.

Long before it became the subject of diversity training workshops, the notion of privilege was at the heart of what she told me when I was a little girl: “You’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of advantages other people don’t have. You need to use those advantages to help other people, not just yourself.”

She also told me a story about the summer she and Dad took the four older kids to live in Chicago in a corporate exchange of some kind.

Mom determined to take full advantage of the cultural opportunities Chicago offered. Each day she set out, four kids in tow, with a map to explore the city via bus.

One day, she told me, she was standing at a corner waiting for the light to change and realized something felt . . . different. Looking around, she realized she was the only adult white person in sight. The only other white people in sight were her four children.

Let me stop here and say that Mom grew up in Lewiston, Idaho. Just about the only non-whites in sight for the vast majority of her life up to that point would have been members of the Nez Perce tribe, and not too many of those would have crossed her path unless she had a kid in her classroom during her teaching years.

What did she feel in that moment of being the white face in a dark crowd? It makes me so proud to say that she told me, “I realized what it’s like to be in the minority.” She had a moment of realization of what it means to be unconscious of your majority status most of your life, and she shared that realization as a mother.

While I’m sure I don’t recognize and counteract my privilege 100 percent of the time, I work to be mindful and aware so that I don’t take advantage of it directly and so that I use my privilege to speak out for people who don’t have the same access I do.

This has nothing to do with showing up for a Martin Luther King, Jr. parade or making speeches about human rights. It has everything to do with trying to make our world a more just society for everyone, every day.

Your Turn

Have you ever had an “aha” moment in which you recognized your privilege? What reaction do you get from others in that particular class of privilege if you raise the question?

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Representing the Aryans: Political Speech, Violence, and Living Without Fear


Aryan Nations logo.
Later when I served on the
North Idaho College Board of Trustees 1996-2001,
I asked that we cease use of one of the
NIC logo variations that strongly resembled this layout.
The Aryan Nations compound was located in the Idaho state legislative districts I represented from 1990-1994.

Make that “the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations,” their full name.

Needless to say, I didn’t doorbell that particular precinct. I was young and cocky and made a bit of a joke of that when I told people my district boundaries. “I represent the Aryan Nations, but, y’know, I don’t doorbell there.”

The first time I ran, for a state House seat, I was also pregnant. That was another joke: “The baby was planned, the campaign was an accident.”

By which I meant my then-husband and I had decided to start our family, then I attended a women’s political conference and talked about wanting to run for office “someday,” then the week of the filing deadline I got persuaded to file against an incumbent who had no challenger, then—the very next day after I filed—I found out the “starting our family” part of our agenda was under way.

I did a lot of doorbelling. They tell you to walk for exercise when you’re pregnant. Boy, did I! I got asked a lot of questions about my political views and answered honestly while also trying to find common ground with people who might not share my position on a given topic.

Access to abortion was high on the political radar that season; the Idaho legislature had passed a bill restricting access that Gov. Cecil Andrus had subsequently vetoed. My political activities in Idaho actually launched then when I collected signatures on petitions asking Gov. Andrus for that veto.
As you might imagine, I had particularly interesting discussions about that issue the further along I got in my pregnancy. At the Kootenai County Fair I spent time in the North Idaho Pro-Choice Coalition booth, accompanied sometimes by a woman who was nursing her fairly new baby.
The “other booth”—the one espousing views on the other side of this issue—had a display with jars of plastic fetus models showing physical development during pregnancy. We had a pregnant woman (me, at about six months) and a real live burping, pooping, drooling baby. 
While most people might have trouble calling a mom and soon-to-be mom “baby killers” we did get our share of people who went beyond vociferous in telling us how wrong we were to hold our view. People who shared their political/religious beliefs went on to commit murder in the 1990s, with a rash of clinic bombings and assassination of physicians.
Fast forward. I get elected (winning by 313 votes over that incumbent). Six days later baby Katie is born, conveniently waiting until two days after the North Idaho Legislative Tour at which I meet my new colleagues and keep putting my feet up on chairs because they’re so swollen and my back hurts.
Now I’m a new mother. With a baby. One I will kill to protect, with no hesitation. And I’m a liberal/progressive Democrat who says what she believes, representing the district with the Aryans.
At first I didn’t worry about it (hello, hormones!). Oh, once in a while I thought it was probably good that I had retired one of my other jokes—“I don’t want to doorbell the compound while I’m pregnant because I have blonde hair and blue eyes and I’m proven fertile; they might kidnap me for the breeding program.”
But as Katie grew and I took her places with me, I began to think about whether I endangered my family by having her in the public eye. Another woman who entered the legislature at the same time I did and had her daughter a week after Katie was born chose never to include any family photos in her campaign material for that very reason.
I thought about getting a firearm for personal protection. I grew up in a hunting and fishing Idaho family and received gun safety education as a little girl: Assume all guns are loaded, don’t point a weapon at anything you don’t plan to kill, if you wound an animal it’s your responsibility to find it and put it out of its misery. 
I just didn’t get much gun shooting education—that was for my three big brothers.
If I owned a weapon I’d want to know how to use it properly and I just never got around to finding the time and taking that step. We did have a little .22 rifle my husband occasionally took “plinking” (shooting cans off a fence) and I sometimes went with him. 
But in an emergency I wouldn’t have known where it was, much less how to load it quickly (although I have decent hand-eye coordination, an actual advantage women have over men as shooters).
In 1992 I was elected to the Senate seat for a new district alignment, still with the Aryans. I talked with the senator from the northernmost district, which also had its share of people with views that are, shall we say, out of the mainstream (or at least they were then) and who own plenty of firearms.
His take on it: “There are more FBI agents in downtown Coeur d’Alene than in the whole compound. You don’t need to worry.”
I don’t know if he was right about the FBI numbers. And in light of what happened to Victoria Keenan and her son Jason, whose family I knew, in 1998—being chased and shot at by Aryan Nations members in a terrifying incident that subsequently led to the bankruptcy of the Aryan operations—I’m not so sure he was right to tell me I didn’t need to worry.
The Keenan episode took place four years after I lost my re-election bid in 1994. During my years in office alongside my work on issues such as environmental quality and child care licensure I took a number of positions you might say were antithetical to the views of the Aryans:
  • In my first session I debated and voted against an amendment that would have banned flag-burning, which I viewed as an unconstitutional restriction on the First Amendment right to free speech. (My debate included use of a cloth diaper as a stand-in for a white flag of truce, which I used to make the point that it’s possible to communicate without saying a word.)
  • I worked actively in support of sovereign Indian nations’ rights to manage gaming on the reservation. This was the subject of a special session and constitutional amendment in 1992 when the state moved directly to restrict Indian gaming. I and others weren’t successful in our efforts and gaming was restricted in a way that allowed Class I gaming (which let the state run the lottery) and Class II (bingo, pull tabs, etc.) but didn’t allow tribes to run Class III games such as roulette, craps etc. which are the real money makers. (News flash: The house always wins. And for the record I think gambling is stupid and possibly addictive behavior. For me this was about sovereignty rights.) Despite the restrictions the Coeur d’Alene Tribe opened a casino near Worley and has quite a business operation there.
  • I spoke out publicly against the anti-gay Proposition 1 in 1994 as part of the No on One campaign (as did almost every state legislator, Gov. Andrus and Attorney General Larry EchoHawk, I'm pleased to say). In the end Proposition 1 lost by 3,098 votes out of 450,000 votes cast. Little Katie—who is now all grown up—still wears my lavender T-shirt with the slogan “Idaho is too great to hate.”
What I did not do through all of this:
  • Live in fear.
  • Hide my views.
  • Regret running for office.
  • Believe that the Aryan extremism represented the vast majority of my constituents, most of whom just wanted to be left alone and not told what to do regardless of political party affiliation.
Today, with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the hospital and six people dead after yesterday’s attempted assassination in Arizona, I have to wonder if I could speak out, uphold my views and live without fear if I ran for office again.
How many people who might make good elected officials will never consider running out of fear, and what does that say about the kind of America we live in today?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. -Martin Luther King Jr.

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We Stand United

Last Friday I had the great privilege of representing the university for which I work at the Human Rights Rally in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The crowd filled every corner of the Human Rights Education Institute, housed in an old railroad building at the city park.

For me this was a homecoming of sorts. Born in Lewiston, I’m an Idaho native and formerly served in the Idaho state legislature. The crowd held friends and supporters: former State Sen. Mary Lou Reed; Tony Stewart, long-time human rights advocate and former North Idaho College political science prof; human rights stalwart, attorney and former North Idaho College trustee Norm Gissel; Barb Harris of the North Idaho Labor Council; and others I haven’t seen in a long time.

We have stood together before in support of human rights and in opposition to bigotry. We lined Sherman Avenue in downtown Coeur d’Alene and turned our backs in silence when Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and his acolytes jackbooted down the street; human rights supporters made lemonade out of lemons. We worked to defeat the anti-gay Prop. 1 in 1994. We supported the creation of the Gay/Straight Alliance at North Idaho College—a club initially rejected by student government leaders and ultimately approved by the Board of Trustees.

Last week’s rally took place in the face of a visit to Spokane and Coeur d’Alene by the Westboro Baptist Church (which is not a part of any official Baptist organization). About a half-dozen people affiliated with the WBC went to several higher education campuses, three high schools and an evangelical Jewish synagogue to hold up signs with messages of hate for Americans, veterans, people who are gay or Jewish, and others.

The visit was probably triggered by a performance of The Laramie Project at NIC, since the WBC often targets that. You should have heard the crowd go wild when NIC students walked through holding up posters for the play. 

When Norm Gissel and I talked after the event, we had to marvel at how far we have come. We know we have far to go, but it was only 15 years ago that student leaders at NIC were uncomfortable with the idea of openly gay students having a recognized club. The Board of Trustees (on which Norm served at the time) had to stand up for the First Amendment and the rights of the students to organize and there was still discomfort in the community when I won a seat on the board on the following year. Today political candidates list endorsements from GLBTQA organizations in their ads.

I can’t resist live tweeting events for that “you are there” quality, albeit in 140 characters. Here are a few to give you a taste, but you really had to be there to taste the energy, the excitement, the victory.
My parents raised me to believe in the dignity and worth of every human being. Those are Idaho values. Washington values. American values. Human values.
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Standing up for what’s right

The Holocaust. The Rwandan genocide. Abu Ghraib. Lynchings of Americans because they were black. Somalia. Bosnia. Everyday, ordinary people can do horrible things.

They can also be heroes. The Stanford prison experiment revealed how quickly ordinary people entered into their roles as prison guards and prisoners. Now one of the experimenters, Philip Zimbardo, and co-author Zeno Franco examine whether there is a “banality of heroism”—a seed lying within each of us that can be cultivated—as a positive corollary to the “banality of evil”.

They examine individual heroes and call for cultivation of the idea of heroism within each of us, so we can imagine ourselves acting when we must.

How can we foster a heroic imagination in ourselves and in our children to prepare them for the day when we have to stand up for what’s right, regardless of the cost?
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