screening of the documentary “Race: The Power of an Illusion” @ Wylie Hall, Room 005 (IU Campus). 7p. free.

Who: The IU Progressive Librarian’s Guild hosts a
What: Free screening of the documentary “Race: The Power of an Illusion” —
What is this thing we call ‘race’? Where’d the idea come from? What are
the patterns of human variation? And if race isn’t biological, what is
it? How do our social institutions ‘make’ race?
When: Thursday, February 22nd, 7PM
Where: Wylie Hall, Room 005

We will be showing two parts of this documentary series:

“The Story We Tell” — uncovers the roots of the race concept in North
America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came
to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an
eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify,
American social inequalities as “natural.”

“The House We Live In” — asks, If race is not biology, what is it?
This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics,
economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions “make”
race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and
wealth to white people.

See http://www.pbs.org/race for more information about these films!

“By far the best documentary series on race of the last decade.” —
Troy Duster, former president, American Sociological Association

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

Bikari Kitwana Lecture @ IU Auditorium. 7p.

Hip Hop Congress teams up with Union Board for this Black History Month
Speech from famed author and former Editor of the Source. Kitwana has
written several books about race and hip hop, was involved with the
“Bible of Hip Hop” during it’s Golden years, and is currently involved
in his own lecture series.

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

Scratch screening @ Whittenberger Auditorium, Indiana Memorial Union. 7p.

We are going to be screening the most famous DJ-focused hip hop
documentary and also holding a Q+A/meet-and-greet with one of the
executive directors of the film, John Carluccio. Carluccio is also most
famous for inventing TTM, a way of representing DJ produced scratches
on sheet music. Also, there will be some Congress DJs in full effect to
answer any questions or give demonstrations before and after the event.

Published
Categorized as Lets Go

(Relatively) recent show video

I’ve been slacking on uploading video I’ve taken of recent shows.
John Anderson playing a show with Disaster on 2007.01.07


Hannah , Darren, and Nick’s new band playing a show at House Gone Wylie some time in January. I thought they were terrific. I’m really excited about all the new bands starting in Bloomington, and they’re one of my favorites.


The Grade Grubbers, from Buffalo, also played that show.


Bitter Homes and Gardens is another new Bloomington band. We played with them at Punk Night at Uncle Festers.


We played with Delay, Taigaa! and Ghost Mice in Columbus recently.


Here is a song fron Taigaa!’s set.

Prisons Often Shackle Pregnant Inmates in Labor

I originally posted this over at the midwest pages to prisoners blog.

I came across this article today that describes the surprisingly prevalent practice of shackling incarcerated women while they are in labor. Apparently, only Illinois and California have laws expressly prohibiting this practice. Other states have formal policies banning the practice, and some others claim to have informal policies. The article states that “Many states justify restraints because the prisoners remain escape risks, though there have apparently been no instances of escape attempts by women in labor.”

The article also provides some statistics about the number of pregnant women who are incarcerated:

About 5 percent of female prisoners arrive pregnant, according to a 1999 report by the Justice Department. The Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group, estimates that 40,000 women are admitted to the nation’s prisons each year, suggesting that 2,000 babies are born to American prisoners annually.

Finally, a quote by one nurse gives a distressing picture of incarcerated childbirth:

“Here this young woman was in active labor,” Ms. Simpson wrote, “handcuffed to the armed guard, wearing shackles, in her orange outfit that was dripping wet with amniotic fluid. Her age: 15!”

Link

Update:

I asked my friend Tess, who is studying social work at Indiana University and is doing her practicum at the Indiana Womens Prison (IWP) up in Indianapolis about incarcerated mothers in Indiana, and this is what she had to say:

i am not too in-tune with a lot of specifics at IWP, but i have done a lot of research on the subject. every pregnant woman that is sentenced to prison in indiana stays at IWP. we have a great family preservation program, including an RN, casemanager and a social worker. the RN, Ms. Jura Finn, has a pre-natal group that meets once or twice a week. in that group, they eat healthy food and talk about parenting issues. the family preservation staff also help the women set up placement for the child until she is released from prison. when they go into labor, pregnant offenders give birth at wishard hospital in indianapolis, without shackles or handcuffs. guards are in the hospital, as well. the father or the child or the offender’s mother is allowed to be present in the room, too. i am unsure how long they get to stay with the baby…

overall, i was under the impression that amnesty international’s expose in the late 90s about women being forced to give birth in shackles had kinda ended the practice. it’s unfortunate that it still happens. also, if arkansas only has about 50 incarcerated women giving birth a year, it doesn’t surprise me; they don’t have enough experience with pregnant women. i was glad to read that certain nurses are putting their feet down with guards. it would never happen in indiana, b/c indiana does not think that women can committ offenses that warrant maximum security precautions (under revamped legislation from mitch daniels). i am really interested in prison nurseries and residential programs for incarcerated women and their infants. there are only three prison nurseries in existence right now: 2 in new york (one being the bedford hills correctional facility which has been around since 1901!) and another in nebraska. short-term studies have found that these programs really are effective in reducing recidivism, but not enough research has been done. a lot of programs that exist to keep the new mother and new child together put a lot of emphasis on breaking cycles of incarceration and forming healthy bonds of attachment. programs called MINT (mothers and infants nursing together) in california, MILK (mothers inside loving kids) in virginia, WIAR (women and infants at risk) in michigan. if yr mother gave birth to you in prison, you have a greater chance of doing time later in life (that’s true of any child with an incarecerated parent). also, the bonds of attachment that form right after a child is born are so important to typical development. if you do not have a care-giver to attach to, it could cause emotional and behavior challenges throughout yr entire life. wow.

“I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.”

I stumbled across this quote on the Internet.  It’s from Karl Rove, allegedly uttered at a Republican Women’s convention when talking about the benefits of Bush’s immigration policy.  I came across the quote in the context of an editorial on the conservative National Review website.

The editorial’s commentary is pretty interesting:

It is precisely Rove’s son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they’re young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It’s not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don’t want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

…

This is why the president’s “willing worker/willing employer” immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it’s not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.

The use of the phrase “educated elite” gives me the fear, and the editorial’s ultimate conclusion seems  to call for a more closed-bordered approach to immigration.  Also, the idea that we don’t already have a master-servant society and attributing this toward mass immigration (um, slavery, colonialism anybody?) seems to make this argument rather rethorical.  Still, it shows that immigration is a complicated issue, even within Republican ranks.  Rove’s comment is disgusting and describes, for me; the desire to preserve resources and privilege for those who have it, at all costs, that I find so frightening.  However, I’m also really uncomfortable with the editorial’s idea that you could equate labor that a young, wealthy person could do voluntarily and temporarily, with the labor reality of many undocumented workers.  I’m not denying that in the history of many families with wealth, there is a working class history, and individuals who made some significant sacrifices for their families.  However, the rags to riches mythology that many conservatives (and punk kids for that matter) use to justify the preservation of resources and privilege is an incomplete narrative.  There are a lot of reasons why some people have been able to accumulate and preserve wealth while others have not, beyond just personal industriousness.  If we’re going to value hard work as a culture, we owe it to ourselves to do that in the open context of those other, often unfair and ugly, factors.

Link