Category: Uncategorized

Hey ladies! If you want to win an Academy Award for Best Actress, get cast as a wife, mother, sister, daughter, or girlfriend STAT! Fellas! If you want to win an Academy Award for best Actor, get cast as a husband, father, brother, son, or boyfriend STAT an important historical figure. That’s the lesson from these two fascinating infographics at The Huffington Post.

One demonstrates the roles for which women win Best Actress Academy Awards.

The other infographic reveals the kinds of roles that earn men the Award for Best Actor.

There isn’t much analysis. But here are some things I figured out after looking at the infographics.

The most common Best Actress-winning roles (30.2%) for women are those of wife, mother, sister, daughter or girlfriend. For example, Halle Berry as a mother and girlfriend in Monster’s Ball, Emma Thompson as a wife and sister in Howard’s End, Sally Field as a wife/widow and mother in Places of the Heart.

The most common Best Actor-winning roles for men (25.6%) are for historical roles. For example, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Milk (which he did totally deserve), Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln, Collin Firth as King George VI in The King’s Speech. You may notice a pattern here, too. The male actors play characters who are so central, the films are named after them, literally in the first two cases, and figuratively in the third. The female characters, however, aren’t, apparently, important enough to determine the title of the film.

Now there are historical roles which earn women Oscars, but the category of husband, father, son, brother or boyfriend doesn’t even exist for men.

Women can also win Oscars by playing prostitutes or mistresses (4.7%). Men, however, have not won Oscars for portraying prostitutes or… masters? What the word for the-dude-someone’s-having-an-affair-with? Women are also able to score an award by playing a housekeeper or maid. No butler category for men.

But don’t worry! All’s fair in Academy Awards. Men get their own special categories. For instance, several have one awards for “law or military” roles (10.5%) and others have won playing “career achievement” roles.

What are the take-aways here? The Academy really likes to reward women for playing characters defined by their familial relations to others, and will also give them pats on the head for playing maids, housekeepers, prostitutes, or mistresses–other roles defined by their relations to others. Men, on the other hand, are rewarded for playing important historical figures or whatever the hell they want, and will get encouraging punches in the arm for playing men who have career achievements under their belts–particularly in the male-dominated spheres of law or the military.

So, when it comes to life–I mean, the silver screen–men should pursue high-achieving, leadership roles while women should pursue familial, domestic, sexual roles if they want to succeed. Clearly this applies to acting roles only and has no effect whatsoever on the sanctioning or gendering of social roles in the real world. Obviously not…

Originally published January 21, 2014 on Feministing.

Though the right and even the mainstream frequently try to co-opt and sugarcoat Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy, it is worth remembering just how radical Dr. King was. People familiar with U.S. history may not be surprised that the FBI was obsessed with and spied on King. But even the jaded may be surprised to learn the the FBI actually threatened King and encouraged him to kill himself.

In 1964, the FBI mailed Dr. King a letter as well as, apparently, an audio recording of King in bed with several women. The fake author is an African-American who is disgusted by the leader’s moral shorting comings:

King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God… Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. You, even at an early age have turned out to be not a leader but a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile.

The fake King-hater is so disgusted, in fact, he urges King to kill himself:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Now, you may think I–a socialist-summer-camp-attending-Wesleyan-graduating-Feministing-blogger–am being overly dramatic and paranoid in my interpretation of the letter. But this is also the view you will find in a congressional committee report on the FBI and Martin Luther King:

The nature of the Bureau’s campaign against Dr. King is vividly illustrated by one incident. Shortly after Director Hoover’s press conference in November 1964, in which he referred to Dr. King as the country’s “most notorious liar,” (50) a package was mailed to Dr. King. It contained an anonymous diatribe against the civil rights leader and a copy of an electronic surveillance tape, apparently to lend credence to threats of exposure of derogatory personal information made in the letter. (51) The committee was unable to locate the original letter, but an apparently authentic copy was found in the files of Assistant Director Sullivan. The final paragraph clearly implied that suicide would be a suitable course of action for Dr. King.

You can find a photocopy and transcript of the entire letter here. And check out our roundup of links honoring King’s legacy from yesterday

Originally published January 20, 2014 on Feministing.

We are taking the afternoon off in honor of Martin Luther King Day. But here are some great articles, videos, and links which honor King’s life and highlight his legacy speaking truth to power. (Video transcript and more after the jump.)

Democracy Now!’s “Martin Luther King in his own words” video and transcript can be found here.

‘No shots fired’ day urged to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebrations Honor The Late Civil Rights Activist

When Schools Stay Open on Martin Luther King Day

Listen and/or read Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture here.

The history of racist resistance to Martin Luther King Jr. Day

The FBI Wrote A Letter To Martin Luther King Telling Him To Commit Suicide

4 Ways Martin Luther King Was More Radical Than You Thought

Angela Davis on Martin Luther King

MLK’s Dream Of Economic Equality Is Still Far From Realized

Happy MLK Day: Your Friendly Reminder Martin Luther King Loved Planned Parenthood and Birth Control

An attorney representing a policeman acquitted of  involuntary manslaughter on Monday said this: “These peace officers were doing their jobs…they did what they were trained to do”: beating a homeless man to death, as he screamed for help.

What was I thinking? I was so naive to even consider that the policemen caught on surveillance cameras beating Kelly Thomas to death in Fullerton California in the summer of 2011 would be held accountable. I lived through Rodney King and, of course, Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and so many others. So, I should have known that these officers would be exonerated. Because, while Kelly Thomas was white, he was homeless and schizophrenic.

Police officers in Fullerton, CA were responding to reports about a man seen trying to break into cars near a bus depot on July 5, 2011. The police say Thomas, 37, fit the description and ran away after they found items belonging to someone else in his backpack. According to the police, Thomas resisted, so they called for backup and ultimately 6 officers were on the scene. The police say Thomas, who was unarmed and weighed 160 pounds was so strong and so resistant, that their force was necessary. But witnesses, medical reports and video say otherwise.

Witness Mark Turgeon recalled, ”They kept beating him and Tasering him. I could hear zapping, and he wasn’t even moving…. He had one arm in front of him like this, he wasn’t resisting. And they kept telling him, ‘He’s resisting, quit resisting,’ and he wasn’t resisting.” In a video of the incident one woman says, “They’ve Tased him five times already…. That’s enough!” Another witness says, “They’re freaking ruthless, I don’t know why they don’t just put cuffs on him and call it a night, instead of hitting him.”

Thomas can be heard screaming,  ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I can’t breathe,’ ‘help,’ ‘Dad,’

One of the innocent cops, Jay Cicinelli, Tased Thomas four times, hit him eight times with the Taser and kneed him in the head twice. Another innocent cop Manuel Ramos snapped on plastic gloves, made two fists held them in front of Thomas’s face and  said, “Now see these fists? They’re going to fuck you up.” The prosecutor explained, ”Kelly Thomas was not responding when blows to his face occurred.”

The cause of death “compression of the thorax,” that made Thomas unable to breath. Medical records also show that Thomas’s had bones broken in his face, choked on his own blood and was stunned with multiple times with two Tasers.

When the paramedic arrived, he was told to attend to an officer with a minor injury. But the paramedic couldn’t help but notice Thomas as he lay in a pool of his own blood. Ron Thomas, Kelly’s father and a former sheriff, said,  ”Nobody at all from law enforcement directed them to Kelly. Kelly is dying in the gutter.” The paramedic had to clear Thomas’s nose and mouth of blood and his heart stopped on the way to the hospital. Kelly Thomas was removed from life support and died five days later.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, Ramos, 39, was acquitted of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Cicinelli, 41, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and excessive use of force.

Ramos’ attorney, John Barnett, actually said, out loud, the following: “These peace officers were doing their jobs…they did what they were trained to do.” Apparently, murdering unarmed people is just part of the job.

Not only does the Thomas family have to deal with the tragic murder of their son, but with the miscarriage of justice of the acquittal. Cathy Thomas, the victim’s mother, said ”I’m just horrified. They got away with murdering my son.” Kelly’s father told reporters, ”This is carte blanche to police officers to do whatever they want…. I’ve never seen such a miscarriage of justice… It’s so blatant. It means none of us are safe.”

The FBI is going to revisit the case, in light of the acquittal. But when will shocking police brutality stop being so un-shocking?

Some journalists speak truth to power. But others, like former New York Times editor Bill Keller and the Guardian’s Emma Keller, write shaming and condescending advice to cancer patients.

Last Wednesday, Emma Keller decided to write about Lisa Adams, whose twitter bio reads, “Living w/stage 4 breast cancer. Writing about it at http://lisabadams.com . Mom to 3…. Doing as much as I can for as long as I can.” Well, for Keller, Adams is doing too much. In her op-ed “Forget funeral selfies. What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?” (which provoked so much criticism the Guardian has removed it) Keller writes of Adams:

As her condition declined, her tweets amped up both in frequency and intensity. I couldn’t stop reading – I even set up a dedicated @adamslisa column in Tweetdeck – but I felt embarrassed at my voyeurism. Should there be boundaries in this kind of experience? Is there such a thing as TMI? Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies? Why am I so obsessed?

Keller seems annoyed by the frequency of Adams’s tweeting: “Over the past few years she has tweeted more than 165,000 times (well over 200 tweets in the past 24 hours alone.)” At the same time, Keller is bothered that Adams is omitting crucial information: “She describes a fantastic set up at Sloan-Kettering, where she can order what she wants to eat at any time of day or night and get as much pain medication as she needs from a dedicated and compassionate ‘team’, but there is no mention of the cost.” I guess Lisa is guilty of too little information (TLI), as well.

Keller chastises Adams for expecting privacy, saying, in effect, if you didn’t want people you didn’t know to show up in your hospital room, you shouldn’t have written that tweet: “She was enraged a few days ago when a couple of people turned up to visit her unannounced. She’s living out loud online, but she wants her privacy in real life.” In case Adams missed Keller’s point, she reiterates it, addressing Lisa directly ”You can put a ‘no visitors sign’ on the door of your hospital room, but you welcome the world into your orbit and describe every last Fentanyl patch.”

Enter Bill Keller– former New York Times editor, current weekly columnist, and hubby/ knight in shining journalist armor of Emma Kelly– to the rescue. Bill decided to dedicate his column Monday to Lisa Adams as well. Speaking of TLI, Bill doesn’t even acknowledge that, coincidentally, his wife wrote about the very same woman less than a week ago, until the seventh paragraph! Bill condescendingly writes that, “Lisa Adams is still alive, still blogging, and insists she is not dying…” He contrasts Adams’s actions to the actions, or lack thereof, taken by his father-in-law:

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

Translation: “Hey Lisa! Some of my best friends are My father-in-law had cancer, too! I mean, he was 79, and you’re not 40 yet and have a few young kids, but whatevs. Couldn’t you be more…unplugged? Couldn’t you die a more honorable death?”

Now there’s more. But if you’re mansplain-dar has already gone off, you’re not alone. Journalist Xeni Jardin, who has also tweeted about her breast cancer and says she was taken out of context by Emma Keller, tweeted that the Bill op-ed was:

…bizarrely tone-deaf, ghoulish, & lacking in empathy all at once. It mansplains breast cancer, but as if talking about a pork chop….Women w/metastatic disease are marginalized in the feelgood pinkwar. This oped reinforces that lack of respect for dignity, and bullies…it feels like a privileged man telling a woman in a hard place to just shut the fuck up and disappear.

Bill mansplains that Lisa doesn’t need to fight or take any “heroic measures”: “Among doctors here, there is a growing appreciation of palliative care that favors the quality of the remaining life rather than endless ‘heroic measures’ that may or may not prolong life but assure the final days are clamorous, tense and painful. (And they often leave survivors bankrupt.)…every cancer need not be Verdun, a war of attrition waged regardless of the cost or the casualties.”

And then, in words that must have Dylan Thomas convulsing in his grave, Bill says, “There is something enviable about going gently.” In case you missed the point, Bill ends his article by quoting another man who is critical of how Adams is treating her cancer: Steven Goodman, an associate dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, makes the predictable disclaimer, “I’m the last person to second-guess what she did….I’m sure it has brought meaning, a deserved sense of accomplishment.” And then goes on to say, “But it shouldn’t be unduly praised.”

Bill would be wise to stop playing doctor, since he still hasn’t mastered journalism. As Adams pointed out,  ”If anyone even looked at my bio they would know I have three kids. Nice way to do research.” Speaking of shoddy journalism, as Greg Mitchell writes in The Nation, this “no fighting” advice comes “from the man who was a hawk on Iraq, staunchly defended Judy Miller and recently called for the bombing of Syria and backing the Al Qaeda rebels. ”

Unlike Bill, I’m not going to end my article by quoting a doctor who warns against praising Adams. I’m going to do what the Kellers, sadly, didn’t: let Lisa speak for herself and have the last word.

In a new investigative report, The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, the Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver look at the impact of poverty on women and the impact this poverty has on our economy, and society, in general. You can download the entire multi-media report (including the essay from Beyoncé that Maya cited yesterday) here until January 15th. And check out the “How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Need to Go“ infographic below the jump.

Joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, Sasheer Zamata will become the first African-American woman to grace the show in six years. You mean there are actually funny people who are simultaneously female and African American? Who knew? (Not SNL, apparently.) It’s truly mind-blowing! Where did SNL find this person? Really, though, SNL got the memo that their lack of diversity–which Syreeta and Juliana have written about recently–was unacceptable and in no way a reflection of the lack of talent of people of color. Because there is no lack of talent among people of color; there is just lack of opportunity, thanks to places like…SNL, to come full circle.

Anyway, not only is Zamata hilarious, but she’s a smart cookie and talented writer and uses humor to tackle serious issues. Here are three videos that bring the funny to the… racist-capitalist-patriarchy.

1. “White White Ad Execs Make Commercials for Black People” is a video by UCB Comedy, which Zamata wrote and appears in. As you’ll see, it addresses white businesses’ attempts to capitalize on and commodify black people and exposes the racist homogenization and dumbing down of African Americans. Unlike my description, however, it’s funny and enjoyable.

2. Written by Zamata and made by UCB Comedy, “Be Blacker” takes on racism, and in–a life imitating art imitating life je ne sais quois–shows how white Hollywood either doesn’t cast black actors and, when it does, attempts to minstrelize them.

3. “Sasheer Meets Her Flasher” is a video directed by Chioke Nassor and written by Zamata. It looks at street harassment, flashers, sexual assault, masculinity and…”dicks.”

Fingers crossed, we’ll see a lot more of Zamata’s  biting social commentary and satire and a lot less of the white dude bro-ishness plaguing Saturday Night Live lately.

If anyone is able to add transcripts in the comments, I’d be very grateful it.

Originally published January 7, 2014 on Feministing.

On this day, 59 years ago, Marian Anderson became the first African American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House in NYC.

Born in 1897 in Philadelphia, the contralto Marian Anderson broke through racial barriers and opened doors for countless African-American singers and performers. Being the first African-American person to perform at the Met would have been enough, but it was only one of her several achievements. Of course, Anderson’s fame and success–which included being the third highest concert box office draw in the U.S.–did not shield her from the horrors of Jim Crow and racism, and she was regularly barred from restaurants, hotels and performance venues.

In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), an organization comprised of women who can prove their relatives took part in fighting for independence in 1776, barred Anderson from performing in Washington DC’s Constitution Hall, which they owned. As a result, then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt rescinded her membership and helped organize a concert at another venue in the nation’s capitol. And on Easter Sunday, 1939, Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a crowd of 75,000 people and millions of radio listeners.

The Daughters of The American Revolution would later invite Anderson to perform at their Constitution Hall. And then, because they are such suckers for tradition, they barred Hazel Scott, a pianist and the wife of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY) from performing there.

But back to January 7, 1955. On this day, Anderson would become not only the first African-American woman, but the first African-American person to perform at the celebrated Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. She appeared as a fortune teller in the Guiseppe Verdi opera Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball). Miles Kastendieck wrote a review of the performance in in N. Y. Journal American:

Marion Anderson’s debut on January 7 became one of the historic moments in the Metropolitan Opera’s 71-year-old story. For her it marked the realization of a childhood dream. For the Metropolitan it not only broke tradition but also set a precedent for including Negroes in future casts. For all it created an emotional occasion out of tribute to her as a singer and out of recognition that to her should fall this signal honor of opening the door for singers of her race…. Miss Anderson graced the stage through force of personality, dignity of stage presence, and vocal artistry…. An ovation had greeted her on the rise of the curtain…. The dark quality of her voice fitted the opening aria; so did its brilliance as it warmed into the rest of the scene.

Anderson recalled, “The curtain rose on the second scene and I was there on stage, mixing the witch’s brew. I trembled, and when the audience applauded and applauded before I could sing a note, I felt myself tightening into a knot.”

In addition to these feats, Anderson received the NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal, in 1938; the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson in 1963; and honorary doctorates from more than two dozen universities. She sang at the presidential inaugurations of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. She was a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson remained a champion of the Civil Rights Movement and sang, once again, at the Lincoln Monument for the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice.

Anderson died in 1993 at the age of 96.