Tag Archives: human rights

No Spies just Blue Skies

I lay in bed composing a scathing review of the Air B&B in my head. The one photo of the place hadn’t done it injustice enough. When I did fall asleep I slept straight through the night for eight hours, which never happens.

I quickly dressed and gathered my few belongings. I just had to check in for my flight before I left for the workshop, since the agenda said there would be “no internet” in the venue and I would leave for the airport straight from there. Hmm … I wondered why I hadn’t received an email from Delta yet?

A cold wave of panic flushed through me when I saw that my flight was … tomorrow, not tonight. Noooo!! I had briefly discussed staying two nights with our travel agent but distinctly remembered sending him an email saying I’d settled on just one night. It was my bad, I know. It’s my responsibility to check the details before accepting an itinerary. The agent had been careless, and so had I. This was what moving, my mom’s stroke, and moving my mom had done to my brain, I guess.

Thank goodness I had only written the scathing review in my head, because now I had to ask if I could stay here one more night. The manager said yes, and even said she wouldn’t charge me because the cleaners hadn’t shown up before my arrival. That explained a few things.

I felt virtuous, saving my organization hundreds of dollars, even though I was sure my coworkers wouldn’t be lining up to do the same. I didn’t have my laptop so I wouldn’t be able to get much work done. I would take a day off in DC, which was something to look forward to. But first, the USG workshop.

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No internet in the venue—I wondered if that was some kind of cool spy vs. spy thing where they blocked satellite transmissions? No, it turned out they had just meant there was no wireless. Correction: one person did.

Since the election, federal employees have left Washington in droves. The new administration put a hiring freeze in place, so every bureau is woefully understaffed. The poor DRL people are no exception. Three of them were trying to work out how to make coffee for 150 people. This was bureaucracy in action, and it failed miserably. They blew a fuse and had to start over. Finally, we all lined up to get a lukewarm cup, only to be greeted by a sign, “No Food or Drink in Auditorium.” The coffee servers literally winked and nodded at us as we filed in with our cups in hand.

I found a seat and introduced myself to the guy on my right. He had a heavy accent and I thought he said he was from Grecian Aid but based in the Dominican Republic. “That must be interesting,” I said, “working for a Greek organization from Latin America.” He looked at me a long time, then smiled. “Eet ees Chreeeshchun Aid,” he said slowly, handing me his card that said Christian Aid.

“Ahh,” I smiled, “that makes more sense.” We talked shop; we were both what’s called “new business” people and we had a lot in common.

The first speaker opened by admonishing us not to have any food or drink in the auditorium, as she winked toward her cup of coffee balanced on the lectern.

A paper-shuffling sigher had sat behind me. On my left was a woman wearing a flower-festooned headband. Was she from Ukraine?

I looked around to see about half the audience paying attention while the rest were staring at their mobiles while the speakers were trying to hold their attention.

The content was helpful, and chock full of insider lingo like, “Decisions were made on 7^th Floor,” “Folks at post want this,” and “’F’ Indictors.”

One speaker mentioned “blue sky options.” I had no idea what this meant but I always come back from workshops with jargon to spring on my coworkers to make them think I’m up to date. Once I Googled it and knew what it meant I would try to drop it at least once in every meeting.

What We Don’t Know

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One more post about prison stuff, then back to the European travelogue.

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A couple organizations have been pushing legislation that would improve conditions in solitary confinement in Minnesota prisons. We Minnesotans think we’re so progressive, and we are in many ways, but we are one of the worst abusers of seg, as testified to by the letter from a prisoner in my last post. I read the bill and made some suggestions, like that a prisoner’s next of kin be notified when they are put in seg. I was never notified when Vince was kept there for six days. I’m sure the prison system would hate that, because they’d have all sorts of mad moms like me calling to demand what happened. It’s a Republican controlled legislature now, so I’m keeping my expectations low.

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If you think US prisons are bad (and they are), Lynn mailed me an article about UK prisons which shocked me—me, and I’ve written a hundred posts about prison. The link isn’t publicly available, so I’ll recap it for you.

UK prisons are overcrowded and violent. Assaults against guards and other prisoners are way up, there are riots and strikes, and there were 107 suicides and five homicides in 2016.

I assumed the violence was due to overcrowding, which was due to the same forces as in the US—harsh sentences, corporate interests, institutionalized racism and classism, poverty that causes people to use drugs and alcohol and to deal drugs, and an aging prison infrastructure.

Of course it’s complicated and there are underlying causes. But the article attributes the violence directly to new “psychoactive substances” which have “dramatic and destabilizing effects.” They’re called names like “Spice” and “Black Mamba” and they can’t be detected in urine tests.

And this is where I laughed out loud: these drugs are being delivered by drones. Yes, drones! It’s kind of hilarious, until it’s your son, husband, or brother getting knifed in the kidney by someone who’s high out of his mind.

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The US version of The Week ran an excerpt from a Bloomberg Businessweek article which profiled the founder of MyPillow. Mike Lindell is a recovering addict and I give him lots of credit for that and for building his business.

However, all of his products are stamped with “Made in the USA.” Lindell is a big Trump supporter and would probably cheer the cutting of government benefits to the poor, which is interesting since MyPillow has contracts for prison labor that must net them millions.

I know this because one of the facilities in which Vince was incarcerated, Moose Lake, had a MyPillow factory line.

And so MyPillow can stamp “Made in the USA” on every box, and it’s true, but that pillow may well have been made by a prisoner who netted $2.00 an hour.

I can’t find anything anywhere to substantiate that MyPillow benefits from prison labor or even that it operates in prisons. This is the beauty of working inside prisons—it’s a secret!—literally behind locked doors.

I’m not saying MyPillow is doing anything illegal. However it is hypocritical that Mr. Lindell, a conservative, takes government subsidies.

I wrote to the editor of The Week, Bill Falk, and he wrote right back, which impressed me. He suggested I write to the author of the original story in Bloomberg Businessweek, Josh Dean. This should have occurred to me in the first place, but better late than never. So I wrote to Mr. Dean and he responded right away too. I didn’t expect BB to amend his article; I just wanted him to have the additional information. There’s no reason a reporter would ask every businessperson he interviews, “Do you operate inside prisons?” You might think that a “jobs for inmates” story line might be good PR for MyPillow, but Mr. Lindell didn’t bring it up.

Bill Falk also suggested I contact one of my local newspapers, which might have investigative reporting resources and an interest in pursuing the story, since MyPillow is a Minnesota company. Mr. Dean also urged me to do this, and I did. A local editor was interviewing Vince within an hour of me sending the email. Stay tuned.

Susan B

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I know you people don’t “like” it when I writing about prison issues instead of travel. Literally, the prison posts are the least liked of my posts.

Well too bad. That’s how this blog got started—when my son went to prison—and once in a while the absurdities of prison issues pile up to the point where I just have to share them. So you can skip the next few posts if you want, but I hope you don’t.

You may recall that my local newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, ran a series on solitary confinement (segregation, or seg) a few months ago. I wrote a letter to the editor which was published. Jewish Community Action, the group I’m active with on criminal justice reform, received the letter below in response. It’s from a woman incarcerated at Shakopee Women’s Prison. She was found guilty of shooting and killing her cousin and wounding an attorney at the Hennepin County Government Center over an inheritance dispute in 2003.

So keep in mind that everything she writes may not be 100% true. If you would shoot someone to death in a crowded public place, you might lie, too. But maybe not. Even though this is all public information, I’ve edited out her last name. Sorry if the writing is a bit blurry; it was the best I could do.

The End of America

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This is a series of posts about Italy, Malta, and Spain that starts here.

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Before I move on to Spain, I’m inserting a few real-time updates.

It’s weird to be writing about the November election almost three months later. I recall my sense of unreality. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed. I can’t believe we are now using the words “President” and “Trump” together. I am still in a state of denial, maybe because I haven’t figured out what to do, or how to live, in this new world.

I went on the women’s march in St. Paul with 100,000 other like-minded men, women, and children to protest the new administration’s policies and tone. It was the first day in months I felt optimistic, but also, sadly, the last.

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Conservatives think that liberals hate America. That’s unfair. We criticize our country when it acts wrongly. That doesn’t mean we hate America. It means we hold it to high standards. For instance, one thing that has always made me proud of America is all the refugees we take in. It’s not as many as 100 years ago. It’s not as many as Germany. Still, we were on track to accept 110,000 refugees in 2017, with about 10,000 slots designated for Syrians. That’s one of the things that makes America great. Oops, made.

All that is on hold for four months. If and when it restarts, the number of refugees will be cut in half. Syrians will be banned, along with people from other Muslim-majority countries except the ones Trump want to make deals with, like Saudi Arabia, the main producers of terrorists, including 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers.

Why is Trump fixated on Syrians? I don’t believe there have been any terrorist attacks perpetrated, anywhere, by Syrians. In my opinion, Syrians are victims of war and terrorism. But there are a lot of Syrian refugees, and they are in the news frequently, so maybe they’re just an easy target. Most Americans haven’t heard of Tunisia, which actually produces a lot of terrorists.

The mood where I work, the Center for Victims of Torture, is dark. Our clients in the US are afraid they’ll be deported, or that their families will never be allowed to join them. We wonder if we will lose our government funding, and thus our jobs. We worry this administration will return to the use of torture, which is illegal under US and international law.

There’s so much going down. One final item: Donald Trump managed to talk about Holocaust Remembrance Day without mentioning Jews or antisemitism. Was it intentional? Ignorance? As a Jew, I think it’s ominous. The Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers, it started with nationalist words and laws against certain groups and bullying of the media and control of the messaging coming out of government agencies.

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Thanks for reading this. You probably already knew most of it. Now you know why I write about travel and not politics most of the time.

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My son and I went on a small adventure recently. He had asked if I wanted to see John Cleese in person on a certain date, and I said, “sure!” John Cleese is an English comedian and actor best known for the Monty Python movies and Fawlty Towers TV series.

What I didn’t realize until after Vince bought the tickets was that the show was on a Monday night, five hours away in Green Bay, Wisconsin. So I took two days off work, got a room at EconoLodge, and we went on a road trip.

It was really fun. We joked about the cheap hotel and the terrible steak dinner we had at Texas Roadhouse. We visited Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers football team, which fits nicely into the neighborhood unlike our own new US Bank Stadium that looks like the Death Star.

We watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail, then listened to John Cleese tell stories for an hour. Did you know Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin financed the making of the Holy Grail, and that George Harrison paid for the Life of Brian, which he considers the troupe’s best film? Cleese is almost 80, and still full of piss and vinegar. It was good to Just Laugh.

A Very Bad Good Woman

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I’m interrupting my series of posts about Italy, Malta, and Spain to write about a memorable New Year’s Eve.

I was in Nairobi carrying out a number of volunteer projects for a human rights organization. The most interesting was interviewing activists, including a dozen slum-dwelling women who were organizing to fight police shake downs and a guy who had been tortured after protesting the 2007 election results.

I was there for December and January, and just as I was ramping up, the director announced that the office would close for two weeks over Christmas and New Year’s. I was renting a flat with a 22-year-old German guy who was also volunteering. He was thrilled about this development and immediately made plans to go to Ethiopia with friends to take photos of the ancient churches there. This would undoubtedly require massive amounts of alcohol.

The prospect of hanging out in the flat for two weeks was depressing. Kenyan TV featured the dregs of American shows, like Baywatch, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon. The Internet was maddeningly slow. Going for walks was considered dangerous. My supply of books was already running low; English ones were hard to come by and very expensive in the local malls.

So I booked myself on a safari.

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I will always feel very lucky to have had this experience. I went to Basecamp Masai Mara, a “luxury eco-resort” run by a Norwegian company where Senator Barak Obama had stayed with his family. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. These links are to my safari Facebook albums.

The organization sponsoring my volunteer gig, American Jewish World Service, had paid my airfare to Nairobi. For Americans, airfare is half the price of a safari. It still wasn’t cheap, but it was possible.

So I spent 10 days going on game drives, touring a Masai clinic, reading, and sleeping. Each morning I awoke to the dawn chorus of hooting, howling, growling, croaking, and cackling coming from the bush.

For each meal I sat at a white-linen-covered table, by myself except once, when a couple of fellow international development people invited me to join them. He was Norwegian and she was Swedish.

“We know how it feels to eat alone,” he said.

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For the last two nights I moved to a remote camp. I spent New Year’s Eve gazing out over the Masai Mara and Just Being. Words cannot describe the beauty of the land and the light.

At my last dinner, a Masai guide named Manfred pulled a chair up across the table from me. This familiarity was unfamiliar behavior. Manfred was 30ish and had a sweet, innocent face. He was short and muscular and his skin had a reddish sheen from working outdoors.

He sat back in the cow-hide chair, spread his shoulders and legs wide, and clasped his hands together in front of his chest. His body language wasn’t confrontational but he was staking his ground. He smiled at the floor for a few seconds, then up at me.

“When you first arrived, we all thought you were a very bad woman, but now we know you are not.”

I wasn’t completely surprised by his comments. I’d had the sense that they didn’t know what to make of me, a woman traveling alone. But I wondered what theories they had about me.

“Did you think I deserted my husband and children?” I asked.

No, he shook his head but didn’t counter.

“Did you think I was a lesbian?” I asked next.

Manfred laughed uneasily, tipping his chair on its back legs. Now that’s a universal male thing, I thought.

“No, we have had many homosexual guests and they are very nice people.”

That sounded like a line he’d been instructed to say. I knew from interviewing a transgender activist that alternative sexual orientations had yet to gain acceptance in Kenya, to put it mildly.

He couldn’t contain himself any longer; he leaned forward and said, “We thought you were a sex tourist.”

I burst out laughing. I would turn 50 in a month. I don’t condone sex tourism, but being suspected of it felt like a compliment.

Happy New Year’s! Enjoy every moment of your precious life!

Prison Update

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If I don’t step up my posts about my recent trip, I’ll still be blogging about it by the time I go on my next one, which I just booked—a week of hiking, snorkeling, and kayaking in Belize and Guatemala in February with Wilderness Inquiry. It may sound precious, but I need something to look forward to. We’re in the midst of our second blizzard in a week now, and today’s low will be -11F (-23C). Need I justify myself further? I was able to book with a deposit and somehow I’ll come up with the rest. Somehow it always works out.

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But it’s time for a post about prison. My son’s imprisonment was the reason I started this blog, in case you are new here. He’s been out for a year and is doing great. I continue to do what I can toward changing the system.

Last Sunday I went to a summit on criminal justice reform organized by Jewish Community Action. About 300 people attended. At my table were two people whose parents or grandparents were holocaust survivors. As we talked about the election and the prospects for meaningful prison reform (or reforms of any kind), they both said they felt afraid for the first time in their lives to live in America. They both said something like, “I remember my father talking about how it happened so gradually that people kept thinking it couldn’t get worse.”

There were a number of passionate speakers. A professor of African American studies at the University of Minnesota talked about how we needed an abolitionist movement to get rid of prisons all together. Others echoed this language.

Coincidentally, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had run a feature story about the abuse of solitary confinement this very day. The last speaker at the summit was the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and one of the questions posed to him was about completely banning solitary confinement and abolishing prisons in the US. I could sense he was struggling to be diplomatic. “There are people in prison …” he began, “… who have raped five year olds. I have had other prisoners tell me that they would murder again if they could get out of seg.”

Yep. I’m an idealist, but I hope we can focus on issues that stand a chance of delivering meaningful change to prisoners.

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I wrote a letter in response to the Strib story:

Dear Editors:

Thank you for the feature, “Extreme Isolation Scars Inmates: Minnesota prisons pile on solitary confinement, often for minor offenses ….” Last year my son, who was serving a 50-month sentence for a nonviolent drug offense, was transferred from St. Cloud to Moose Lake, which didn’t have a bed ready for him in general population. So they put him in solitary for no offense. I was not informed, and became concerned after not hearing from him for days, but fortunately he was released after “only” six days in solitary, with no explanation, apology, or even an acknowledgement that something had gone wrong.

We didn’t bother protesting. I had turned to the American Civil Liberties Association after being banned from visiting my son for six months (when I protested a visiting policy). The ACLU told me that corrections officers and facilities have “almost total discretion.” It would be their word against mine, and I didn’t want to risk being punished again.

The terrible experience of having a family member in prison has led me to become active in the movement to reform the correctional system, specifically through Jewish Community Action (JCA), which has made the issue one of its advocacy priorities.

I happen to work for the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), and I organized an event in September which brought together experts from CVT and JCA—and my now-released son—to explore the physical, psychological, and social effects of solitary confinement. The effects are heartbreaking. My son experienced some of them after only a few days. Imagine spending years in “seg.”

I hope others will be moved to demand prison reforms after reading this series.

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My letter was the featured letter; I really do hope it gets more people involved.

Don’t Read This Post

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Do not read this post or look at the photos if you think you will irreversibly upset by torture techniques.

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This is a supplement to my last post, in which I described a museum exhibit about torture. Interestingly, the museum—the Casa Sephardi in Granada, Spain—offered no spin on the exhibit. It wasn’t a “human rights” museum, it made no call to action at the end. It also did not make light of torture. It was just straight-out torture, torture, and more torture, leaving interpretation and follow up to the visitor.

There were creepy masks people were forced to wear to be humiliated (as in women who had allegedly been unfaithful to their husbands).

The pig mask was, of course, specifically designed to humiliate Jews, who don’t eat pork. These masks may look kind of funny (as in humorous), but they weren’t. As you can read in the paragraph in the first photo, they often also had spikes in strategic places, cut into victims’ necks, and the wearers typically died of starvation.

This confirms another lesson about torture that is relevant today: Torture is rarely used to get security information from terrorists to prevent attacks. It’s almost always used to punish people and to intimidate others not to rebel. It puts a chill on entire communities, who stop speaking out and being politically active. It’s the favorite tool of dictators.

To reinforce my point, here’s a photo of a set of branding irons. The “crimes” for which people were branded included “slave”, “blasphemer”, and “rogue.” Really—Rogue? I can think of a dozen friends of mine who would have been branded by now. I could have been branded as a blasphemer a hundred times over.

The exhibit proceeded to get worse and worse.

It included the iron maiden (not the rock band), thumb screws, chastity belts (for men and women; with and without spikes), the saw (victim hung upside down and sawed down the middle starting from the crotch), the iron bull (victim forced inside a hollow iron statue of a bull under which a fire was slowly built), the rack—with a without spikes—which pulled the victim’s spine and other joints apart one by one; the cage, in which victims were locked and suspended from a bridge where they were exposed to the elements and starved to death.

I will leave it to your imagination to figure out how the spike was used:

I didn’t take photos of most of it; it was just too horrible to share.

If you have read this post, you are either very brave or a weirdo. Or you are one of the over 50% of Americans who think that torture is okay. If, like me, you don’t agree, please go to the Center for Victims of Torture website and sign the Reject Torture declaration. Thanks, and I promise that the next post will be about Italian food or art or something more uplifting!

Back in the Homeland

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15 museums

8 flights

7 hotels

6 palaces and villas

5 train rides

4 countries, if you count the Vatican

3 weeks

2 friends who are miraculously still good friends

1 drained bank account, but totally worth it

Zero muggings, rip offs, illnesses, or other crises.

Uncountable numbers of churches, nameless restaurants and cafes, glasses of wine, paintings of the Virgin Mary, and taxi rides to and from bus stations and airports.

I’m on a plane back home after 3 weeks of traveling around Italy, Malta, and Spain. I’ve got nine hours ahead of me on the way to Atlanta, then another flight to Minneapolis/St. Paul before I land at 6:40pm. They guy sitting next to me, Ryan, is from Atlanta. He told me he was traveling on business and I immediately assumed he would be a conservative Republican who sells B2B online storage solutions or something but it turns out he works for a progressive Baptist international nongovernmental organization. We chatted about what our respective organizations do, about how different countries examine their pasts, and then touched briefly on the election results before he put in his headphones to watch a movie and I flipped open my laptop. He said half his organization’s employees are African American, and the day after the election their regular check-in meeting was just dead silence.

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When I checked in with a colleague where I work (the Center for Victims of Torture), the day after the election, she said the office was like a morgue. We had been running a two-month anti-torture campaign to educate people about how torture is illegal. Now we may have to kick it into high gear to push back against US use of torture.

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I’ll have a lot more to write about this trip, but speaking of torture, I visited a museum in Granada, Spain that advertised a special exhibition about torture. Lynn rolled her eyes when I asked if she wanted to go. It was about the only time we didn’t do something together.

What I didn’t realize was that the museum’s name was Casa Sephardi, Sephardi being the term for Jews who used to live in Spain and Portugal.

The exhibit started off easy, with displays of artifacts like menorahs, prayer shawls, and wedding costumes. Then came the Spanish Inquisition. Jews had done well in Spain for the most part, sometimes prospering even more under Muslim protection than under Christian rule. But, as has happened over and over throughout history, Jews became a victim of their own successes. There were religious differences, for sure, but economics was a prime motivator to get rid of the Jews so their property could be confiscated. In 1391, 4,000 Jews were massacred in Seville. This was followed by mass forced conversion to Christianity. Judaism provides a “get out” clause that allows us to convert if our life is at stake. We’re practical like that. So most Jews “converted” but continued to practice Judaism covertly.

The Inquisition imprisoned and tortured the Jews who had converted, sincerely or not, and their property was sold off to cover their expenses—which I guess would have included bread and water and manacles. Their families were turned out into the streets.

Surprise! They were all found guilty and executed. In 1492, all the remaining Jews were expelled from Spain. About a hundred years later, Muslims were also subjected to forced conversions, Inquisition and expulsion.

Lastly, there was the “special” exhibit about torture. It was awful, truly awful, and I am someone who works for a torture rehabilitation center. I’ll write about it more in a separate post, and stop reading here if you know you could be upset by disturbing images.

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Here’s my take away: the displays, which appeared to be decades old, confirmed two themes in CVT’s anti-torture campaign:

Waterboarding is torture, and a medieval technique at that:

Torture is not effective in obtaining accurate information.

This is one of the reasons travel is important, especially for us Americans, especially now: so we can learn from history (Spanish history is our history), learn from other cultures, learn the truth, and come back prepared to fight for our values.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers! May we somehow find some harmony during the holiday season and in the year to come.

Prison as Trauma

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Most people never get to go to an event about prison. I went to two in one week.

The first was a phone-a-thon to ex cons. It felt like a worthwhile use of my time and I would recommend doing something similar if you are depressed, angry, or frightened about some issue. Like oh, let’s say … a presidential election.

Two nights later was an event I organized at my workplace, the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), and co-sponsored by Jewish Community Action. It sounds complicated, I know. What does torture in foreign countries have to do with prisons in Minnesota?

A lot, it turns out.

It was a small event, just 18 of us, but to us Jews the number 18 is a mystical one symbolizing “chai,” the Hebrew word for life.

I was a little concerned that the topic might be a tough one for Vince, my son, who had actually experienced some of the things we would discuss. My childhood friend whose son is in prison came, and I was worried it might add to her worries.

Our first speaker was a CVT psychotherapist who described quite viscerally how trauma happens and what its effects are. She had us close our eyes and imagine a baby. Assuming he has a loving parent who holds him and meets his needs, he learns to trust people and look to them for help in times of need.

Trauma happens to almost everyone, eventually. It could include abuse and neglect in childhood, a serious illness, the death of a loved one, or a car accident. Normally, we turn to other humans for comfort.

Torture is intentionally perpetrated by one human being against another under “color of law.” In other words, it’s authorized or at least there’s a “wink and a nod” from some type of government official.

Usually, there is no one to turn to for comfort because you are locked in a cell. Your torturers may have your family locked up too; in fact one of the most common forms of torture is to force someone to watch or listen to a loved one being tortured.

Much of the abuse that takes place in US prisons every day—assaults, rapes, solitary confinement—would likely be legally ruled as torture if we ever investigated it fully, in my opinion.

Torture destroys trust. Rebuilding trust is at the core of recovery.

The second speaker was a CVT volunteer who is a practitioner of Rolfing Structural Integration. I don’t know jack about rolfing, but she does it for our clients for free and it helps them. She talked about the physical fallout of trauma, which starts in the brain. When someone feels threatened, the first thing they do is look for other humans for help, as the psychotherapist had said. If they are being threatened by those other humans, the right side of their brains “light up” and they go into flight or fight mode like an animal. I think we’ve all heard about that, right? What I didn’t know is that the left side of the brain shuts down. That’s the organizing, verbal, and thinking side of the brain.

And so people who have been tortured, for example, cannot put into words what happened. On the witness stand they come off as not very believable.

One thing I also didn’t know which I found fascinating was that people kept in small spaces actually stop being able to see beyond the parameters of that space. Someone kept in solitary for a certain length of time, when they get out, cannot see farther than six feet in front of their face. They regain their vision eventually, but!

Vince was the third speaker. He and I read excerpts from blog posts he wrote in solitary, where he was kept after being transferred to Moose Lake—because they didn’t have a regular cell ready. They told him it would be temporary. How long would you assume “temporary” meant? Six days, as it turned out. He described the cell and his experience in great detail. I felt myself getting outraged again. We haven’t talked about it, but I wonder if it raised feelings for him too.

Jim Crow, Old and New

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This is the latest in a series of posts about a road trip from St. Paul to New Orleans that starts here.

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If you don’t learn something about yourself when you travel … well, that’s okay—I’m not going to sermonize—but I was pleased to learn something important about myself in Memphis.

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In the morning, Lynn and I took a walk along the riverfront, which is beautiful:

We walked back to Beale Street, found a restaurant, and ordered breakfast. We were excited to try southern foods like grits and biscuits. We waited, and waited. You could say this restaurant put the “wait” in waitress. She kept coming by and giving us a dose of another southern treat—calling us “honey”, “sweetie”, and “darlin’” as in: “Your food’ll be up in just a minute, darlins’”

It seemed like half the morning passed away before we got our meals, then we wolfed them down and headed over to the National Civil Rights Museum.

It was difficult to find—there was no signage—but then we turned a corner and there it was, the former Lorraine Motel where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I recognized it immediately, having seen it a hundred times in iconic photos.

And this was the beginning of learning something about myself, because I got so choked up I had to turn away so no one would see me in tears.

I have been to Holocaust museums in Washington, DC; Jerusalem, Berlin, Prague, Chicago, and elsewhere, and they’ve been tear-filled experiences too. But then, I’m Jewish. Were my tears only because the story was about my people? That fear—that I only felt empathy for my own kind—was laid to rest in Memphis.

I wiped my tears away but they welled up continually inside the museum, which was one long, sad horror show that traced the abuse of African Americans from slave days up through the assassination in 1968.

There was a large group of school children, mostly African American, going through with docents. I wondered what they felt seeing Africans in chains, the police dogs, the fire hoses? If it was my kid I would want to be on the tour to put my arm around him. There was the usual laughing and fooling around that any group of kids will exhibit, but I wondered if they would have trouble sleeping that night.

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I commented to Lynn, “A coworker of mine at Oxfam used to find every opportunity to mention, ‘the UK never had slavery’ in a superior tone.”

“We may not have had slaves in the country, but we certainly benefited and participated in the system,” Lynn replied as we read a display about how global the slave trade was.

And of course it didn’t end with the abolition of slavery. “Jim Crow” was the system in the southern United States from reconstruction up through the civil rights era in the 60s that kept “negros” in their place. Here are a few of the ridiculous laws from that time:

Really? Checkers!? Who knew checkers could subvert the social order?

Then we marched slowly through exhibits about bus boycotts, lunch counter protests, and strikes. Then there were the cross burnings, lynchings, and bombings by white racists; somewhat counterbalanced by the support of white and other allies (including Jews).

I watched a video about James Meredith, the first black student to be accepted to the University of Mississippi, in Oxford Mississippi. Of course he hadn’t mentioned his race in his application, and when he showed up to enroll all hell broke loose. After weeks of rioting by whites, which resulted in two deaths, he was reluctantly let in, and as Lynn read later, he did graduate and lived a normal life afterwards.

The museum was really well done. There was a second building that explored African American activism post 1968, but after three or four hours in the first building we had to leave.

—

Last week Vince and I talked to a group about mass incarceration. One of the audience members referred to it as the New Jim Crow. I agree, although in my opinion it’s about poverty, addiction, mental health, and class as much as racism.

Breaking Free

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Tag Archives: human rights

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Susan B

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Jim Crow, Old and New