Sometimes it's ok to throw rocks at girls

As a South African literature specialist, discussions of the diamond industry often make their way into my classes. DeBeers, the diamond company founded by Cecil Rhodes in South Africa in 1888 is known for an advertising campaign that it started in 1938: “It dreamed up the notion that a diamond ring should be an essential display of love and status, its gift a rite of passage. In the ensuing decades De Beers and its marketers penned slogans—memorably, ‘a diamond is forever’—and invented social rules, urging men to spend two months’ pay on a gift for their affianced. That benchmark not only permitted high margins, but suppressed the second-hand market—to the benefit of both the firm and its customers, who could be reassured their investment would hold its value.”[1]  Basically, DeBeers created a market for diamonds that hadn’t existed prior, and the company did so by inflating demand for a limited commodity.  By the end of the 20^th century, 80 percent of all brides received a diamond ring as a symbol of engagement.

Of course, these diamonds were mined by black South Africans who were effectively enslaved by the colonial policies of people like Rhodes and then under the auspices of apartheid.  And so-called conflict diamonds, the products of the labor by enslaved adults and children, continue to make their way into the U.S. Even when the diamonds are certified “conflict free,” the gemstone industry remains steeped in its legacy of colonial exploitation of indigenous labor and its simultaneous commodification of women as consumer goods to be purchased with expensive rocks. And that’s what allows the consistent and increasingly sexist billboard propaganda of Spicer Greene Jewelers in Asheville to perpetuate the marketing myth and women must have diamonds, that men are required to buy them for us, that, most recently, “sometimes it’s ok to throw rocks at girls.”

Her it is.

In various parts of the world, women are still stoned to death for marital infractions, most often on presumption that they have committed adultery. The fear that women might transgress the mandate that is offered by the “diamonds are forever” slogan (even if that transgression occurs because the woman is raped) incurs a sentence where men throw rocks at women and girls until they are dead.[2] 

Not in the US, you say. We don’t stone women to death, here. Well, men kill women all the time, but not generally with actual stones. In a 2016 report by the Associated Press, FBI and state cime data showed that 6,875 people were fatally shot by romantic partners during the period from 2006 to 2014, and of those, 80 percent were women: “On average, that works out to 554 annual fatal shootings of an American woman by a current or former romantic partner during the nine years examined, or one every 16 hours. Of the female victims in the AP’s study period, 3,100 — or roughly 56 percent of the total women killed — were shot by husbands, ex-husbands, or common-law husbands. Another 1,953 women were killed by their boyfriends.”[3] A google news search for “man kills wife” on March 23, 2017 pulls up numerous stories with headlines such as these: “Pennsylvania man Kills Pregnant wife with Sword,” “Man Kills wife with Hatchet” (Florida), “Man shoots, kills wife, injures sister-in-law in Pasadena Restaurant.” The list goes on and on. And on.

In other words, many of these women were sporting a “rock” that had been “thrown” at them by a suitor. 

Spicer Greene’s billboard on I240, of course, is meant to be funny.  But it isn’t, not in a country where women are still conditioned to be objects purchased with gemstones that carry with them a history of the enslavement of millions of people, not in a society where men feel entitled to murder women whose bodies and minds to which, in one way or another, they feel that have an unquestionable right, and not in a society that has just seen the most explicitly misogynist election in our nation’s history, one where it was seemingly ok for people like Trump adviser Al Baldasaroto to say things like “Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot.”

Gemstones are pretty.  They sparkle.  But the history of how they made their way from the mine to the hand of the blushing bride, how they are implicated in a racist and sexist legacy that’s all about commodification and property is worth knowing. And I hope that Spicer Greene’s billboard and the marketing strategy behind it is more reprehensible to you for knowing it.

---

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/international/21717369-production-worlds-most-valuable-gem-may-be-about-peak-report-de-beerss

[2] The most recent coverage of such an instance was last week: http://dunyanews.tv/en/World/378408-Afghan-woman-stoned-to-death-by-Taliban-for-adulte

[3] https://www.thetrace.org/2016/02/woman-shot-killed-frequency-domestic-violence/

The Moral Monday Politics of Meat

Every Monday since April 29, groups of protesters, led by the Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, have descended upon the North Carolina legislature in Raleigh to protest any number of Republican legislative initiatives.  Led by Barber's charge of "forward together, not one step back," thousands of people have taken up residence on Halifax Mall outside the Legislative Building to challenge a raft of legislation that will (among other things) decimate public education, limit women's access to reproductive healthcare, restrict voting rights, and devastate the environment.  Hundreds of people have been arrested in a carefully staged performance of civil disobedience -- the rules for which you can read about here.

Barber and two protesters

North Carolina's decline from what the editorial board of the New York Times refers to as "a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness" to something unrecognizable to those of us who live here -- particularly those of us, like myself, whose families have been here for generations -- has been swift and putative.  I attended last week's protest, spurred, finally, by the House's swift and sneaky passage of HB 695, a bill that contains provisions that will (again, among other things) effectively shut down all but one abortion clinic in the entire state.  The presentation of this bill, which is ostensibly about protecting North Carolina citizens from Sharia law, was so underhanded that even our Republican governor Pat McCrory decried the covert nature of its passage.

From Asheville, where I live, Raleigh is about a four hour drive.  Along with about 100 other people, including three other faculty members at Western Carolina University, I rode to the rally on one of two buses chartered by Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell.  Some of my fellow travelers had done this before; some, like the 79-year-old man who shared his story, had been arrested and were wearing their "I was arrested with Rev. Barber" pins in solidarity.  Many told their stories of entering the Legislative Building, of their meetings with various members of NC's general assembly, including Tim Moffitt, who represents Buncombe County, and of their expectations for this particular rally.  

Seriously.

We brought our own lunches and ate at a rest area about two hours out, and we arrived in Raleigh at about 3.30 with enough time to wander the halls of the legislature prior to gathering on the mall.  One of my colleagues tracked down Moffitt and spent about an hour in his office.  Later, when we outside, my colleague told me several things about this meeting.  Two seem important to me.  First, Moffitt said that he was "troubled" that state employees would be in attendance at these events.  The implication, as far as I can tell, is that as a state employee, one is not in a position to challenge the state.  And I think that there is some real fear on the part of state employees that they could get in trouble for attending such a protest.  Indeed, Art Pope's Civitas Institute maintains a database of information about Moral Monday protesters, including, when the institute can get it -- which it can in the case of state employees -- information about protesters' jobs and their salaries (so when you click the link for "protester salaries," you see lots of college professors.  I'm not up there, by the way; the database only seems to contain folks who got arrested, which I didn't).  

The second thing that Moffitt said to my colleague was this: "you are not those people," meaning the people protesting on the mall.  OK, so let me back up for a second.  To address the issue of what it means to be protesting as a state employee, none of my colleagues were there to protest as representatives of the state institution for which we work; we were there as individual citizens with individual interests.  In terms of not being "those people," my guess is that the reason Moffitt said this to my colleague is that my colleague, like Moffitt, is a young, affluent, white man (Moffitt also asked my colleague how much money he made, and my colleague told him, even as he said that he wasn't attending this rally to protest his pay).  "Those people" are, effectively, the NAACP (therefore, black people), women, the poor, and the elderly.  At least this is Moffitt's estimation of who "those people" are.

A little protester photographed by another of my colleagues

What's scary -- and very telling -- to me about Moffitt's claim is the very clear indication that Moffitt is dividing his constituents into two categories: people who are "like him," and "those people" who aren't.    Such a reality points to a lack of any sort of empathetic imagination that might allow for someone like Moffitt, or for that matter any number of his colleagues in the general assembly, I would venture, to imagine their existences as linked to the existences of the people that they supposedly represent.  It's terrifying to know that the North Carolina legislature is a space wherein my district's elected representative can proclaim such blatant racism, sexism, and classism even as the state's citizenry stand outside his window and try to shine a light on that very reality.

When my colleague told me about his exchange with Moffitt, I bristled, and I offered (as I always do as an ecofeminist) that oppressions are linked, intersectional, and co-dependently reinforcing.   To see oppressions as discrete entities and to view oppression of one group as somehow independent of the oppression of others is to misunderstand the mechanism of oppression; to claim that those who are being oppressed are not the same people as those who are elected to represent them is to misunderstand the concept of democracy.

Yeah.

I imagine (and even know after conversations with many folks on the mall) that the people protesting get it, know that what affects one of us affects us all.  That's why they were out there holding posters, pumping fists, chanting, and clapping.  

On the way back to Asheville, we stopped to get something to eat.  It was 9 p.m., and everyone was starved.  We pulled into Burlington and stopped in a shopping center where the options were Wendy's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Subway.  We were told to get off the bus, grab some food to bring with us, so that we could get back to Asheville.  When everyone piled back on, they brought with them burgers and pepperoni pizza, turkey subs and chicken filet sandwiches.

The recognition of the interconnectedness of oppressions often breaks down when it comes to animals, even among people who see and recognize such intersectionality as profoundly significant and even as immoral (hence the notion of "Moral" Mondays) when to comes to legislation that affects their fellow human beings.  The question that I'm always left with in such instances, when empathy and moral consideration don't extend beyond our non-human framework, is whether or not any liberation movement will ever amount to much when the most liberated and liberal among us fail to recognize as foundational the linkages between animal and human oppressions.  

Human beings have justified the oppression of other human beings by rhetorically constructing them as animals.  Racism and sexism are predicated on a foundational lack of recognition of "others" as human; consider, as I've noted before, that the Nazis killed the Jews with rat poison, that women are treated "like pieces of meat," that African slaves were sold at auction as chattle.   

Oh, and here's an Obama sock monkey.

Don't get me wrong, here: I am behind the Moral Monday movement.  I am glad to see the swell of this tide of discontent, the coming together of disparate groups, and the disenfranchasing of the notion that, in issues that pertain to our moral health, there are no "those people" and "these people."  But if this movement is about unity and the uniting of what might otherwise be disparate elements of society, then I want for the protesters to consider one more moral issue, and let's have a Meatless Moral Monday.  I know you're laughing, but it couldn't hurt, after all.  And it might make even more manifest the false dualisms that underscore someone like Moffitt's ability to turn away from all of those voices on the mall.  "Forward together."  All of us this time.

Plant. Is. Food.

Jason Sellers, that guy that I've been living with for well over a decade, opened Plant today, so most of this entry will be me bragging about him.  Jason is one of those people who just seems good at everything that he does.  He's one of those people I often envy for what appears to be an uncanny ability to do anything well.  Here's a case in point: we were hanging out at the Bywater with friends a few weeks ago.  The Bywater is this really cool concept bar/recreation area on the French Broad River.  I call it a kind of summer camp with booze: in addition to the bar, there's about an acre of land with picnic tables, horseshoe and cornhole games, grills, and fire pits.  You can bring your own food and grill out, sit by the river, play the games.  You can bring your dog.  You can tube down from the Wedge, climb out of the water, and head into the Bywater -- at least that's what a whole cadre of folks had done the day we were there.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

As an aside, I worry a bit about the fact that the grounds are laid out as follows: bar, railroad track, river.  Sound like a recipe for disaster to anyone other than me?

No river, here, but you get my point, right?

There's a bimini ring toss game as well, the goal of which is to swing a ring tied to the end of a string in such a way that it lands on a hook attached to a wall.  This is not an easy task.  I stood there and threw the freaking ring over and over and never got it on the hook.  Jason took one practice swing, then a second, then got the ring on the hook.  And then did it over and over.  In exasperated and highly competitive frustration, I gave up and got another beer.

So it's this sort of thing that seems unnerving to me, Jason's ability to do things with such seemingly little effort.  But the truth is something altogether different -- and the ring toss example works to explain it.  I just kept throwing the ring, thinking that if I just threw it enough times, it would land on the hook.  Which it didn't.  If it had, I would have then gone back and then tried to replicate the process by which I succeeded. And that's my method with most things: produce a lot of scholarship, for example, hope that some of it is good, then go back and replicate the model on which the "good" is based, then get bored and move on to something else.  I hang pictures on the walls by trial and error, thereby leaving lots of holes, rather than measuring anything out.  I have a tendency to believe that many things that I do are good enough to suffice and don't necessarily need to be better, to be perfect.

I actually find it odd to write these things; I've always considered myself a perfectionist -- and perhaps in some ways I am...in the ways that have to do with appearances, with wanting to appear competent and capable of everything that I do.  But in many essential ways, I'm not.  I'm happy to let things slip; I'm happy, for example, to paint the bathroom walls without taping the trim, even if it means that I get some paint in the wrong places.  It saves time, even if it's not perfect.  And perhaps this is about being a bit of a risk taker, or being impulsive, or being just this side of dangerous.  Or perhaps it's just about being sloppy.

Not Jason.  Jason's the antithesis of sloppy.  Jason measures everything that he does, and he weighs all the options before acting.  He got that ring on the hook on the third try not only because he considered the problem of the ring and the hook -- the weight of the metal in his hand, the length of the thread, and his position relative to the wall -- before he let it go, but also because he paid careful attention to what he did wrong the first and second times; he doesn't come at things backwards, doesn't allow himself to continue to make errors.  He gets it right because he takes getting it right very seriously -- perhaps moreso than anyone else I know.  And once he gets it right, he keeps working to get it more right.  He got the ring on the hook, but maybe he could get the ring on the hook with his eyes closed.  Maybe he could get the ring on the hook using his non-dominant hand.

So back to Plant: Plant is vegan.  Plant is a restaurant based on an ethical principle to which Jason adheres absolutely and to which his business partners, Leslie Armstrong and Alan Berger, adhere as well.  And that ethic is, in fact, the driving impulse behind the place.  Jason had been a long time vegetarian when I met him in 1997; we became vegan after we moved to Massachusetts in 1999.  And Jason has always been a chef at heart, has always been interested in food and in the politics behind how and what we eat.  He went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet in Manhattan in 2004, and he worked in the city at Candle 79 before moving with me -- very much against his heart's desire to stay in New York -- to Asheville, where he became head chef and kitchen manager at the Laughing Seed.

Leslie, Jason, and Alan.

Jason has been working to get it right for a long time, and he's succeeded in ways that seem inconceivable to me.  And I should know: I've been present for the entirety of his culinary journey.  The food that he's making now is the food he's always wanted to make.  It's delicious, savory, entirely plant based, and incredibly refined in both presentation and flavor combinations.  One of my friends declared, after eating lunch there today, that the space in which Jason works should be declared a holy pilgrimage site.

For Jason, getting it right is still something that can be improved upon; getting it right is just another place from which to start.  And I can't wait to see what happens now.

Oh, and Anthony Bourdain is coming to town, or so the rumor goes.  If he shows up, I'm sending him an invitation to Plant.  Bring it.