Ghetto Girl”: Michelle Obama and Martha’s Vineyard’s black elite

virtualtourist.com Dock at Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard Are you ready? Here’s a quick lesson in African American social history. For more than a century, the East Coast black elite, including prominent artists, intellectuals and financially secure professionals, has gathered on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, to relax and spend time with one another. By tradition, other ethnic groups do the same, and while the groups mingle socially, they largely live in segregated communities on the island. The black community has always summered near the town of Oak Bluffs, on the Island’s northern coast. The idea that rich, smart, black people get together to entertain each other (there is little else to do there) has intrigued the media lately. Why the new focus? Well, this week, the First Family will join that tradition, another socially-prominent, African American family escaping the summer heat on the beaches of the Vineyard. When the news broke, the writer Toure penned an article for New York Magazine about this annual gathering of the clan, focusing on its elite status (generational ownership of homes on the island) and the myriad criteria for being welcomed there, especially during the popular Labor Day weekend. While trying to unlock the mystery of the island’s attractions and assess the Vineyard’s suitability as a vacation spot for our new First Family, one anonymous, snobby, long-time islander is reported to have questioned Michelle Obama’s place in the group’s hierarchy, referring to the First Lady as just a “ghetto girl”, one who did not belong in the august company of the regulars. Needless to say, this quote has sent shock waves around the country. My friend Abigail McGrath sent me this graphic of a t-shirt she expects to sell a ton of over the next week. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it. The very idea of confusing “ghetto” with negativity rather than historical disenfranchisement is wrong and offensive, says Vineyard resident Abigail McGrath: ” Folks are confusing cash with class.”  Only on the most poorly informed television networks and fictionalized TV series is “ghetto” equated with gum-chewing, finger-snapping air heads and gun-toting thugs. So Ms. McGrath has designed a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Ghetto Girls Rock!!!”, listing on it the names of 48 famous women who came from “the ghetto” and made the world a better place. Women such as Mother Theresa, Mother Hale, and Fannie Lou Hamer grace the shirt with dignity and aplomb. “Ghetto Girls” t-shirt design (For more information and to order, contact: Abigail McGrath at GhettoGirlzRock@aol.com) There is so much to be said about the history of African Americans at Martha’s Vineyard, but it’s Abby’s t-shirt and the questions it raises that deserve discussion. I’ll talk about the list of “ghetto girls” in my next post…stay tuned. From her press release: This piece was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition, : The Gate.

Lost and Found?

Eureka! I finally found this photo of me and my husband Bill with Walter and Betsy Cronkite

Eureka!…I found it! I found the lost, cherished photograph I recently wrote about in my encounters with the late broadcast legend Walter Cronkite (And that’s the way it was, The Gate, July 19, 2009).

Well, that’s not quite true…I didn’t actually find the photo, per se; but I did find someone who sent me another copy. No doubt the original will show up at any moment, after all the effort I put into locating it. As soon as I quit looking, it will probably reappear. It will step out of its flat little hiding place, probably somewhere right in my sightline or someplace I’ve already looked, announce “Here I am!”, then be heartbroken to learn that it has already been replaced by a copy of someone else’s little photo, this one a fancier, newer, digital version. 

The experience of losing and finding things is so much a part of my life these days. Certainly others must have the same experience. But as I tend to do with most things nowadays, I see a philosophical connection to a larger perspective on our world. In this instance, the frequent experience of misplacing and searching for something every day, brings to mind the state of our country these days.

We are the most successful democracy in the world. What’s gone wrong? What have we lost?

There is something that we dearly care about, it’s important to everybody, but we have misplaced it somewhere and we don’t seem to be able to put our hands on it. Without this special thing, something is missing in our lives. Each day that we cannot find it nags at us more than the last. Like an amputated limb, we can feel the missing entity more acutely in its absence. Our discomfort grows daily; the pain gnaws at our senses until they are rubbed red and raw. Everywhere we look, people have begun to act strangely, and it’s frightening. It’s not just my imagination that rudeness, violent talk, public gun toting and hate speech have become more frequent.

What have we lost? Where can we find it? What is this lost object? It is, simply, respect for our fellow citizens, even for people with whom we don’t agree. Respect is the key ingredient that makes our American brand of democracy so effective. Without it, we are not the same. Without respect, we degenerate into name calling, us-vs-them selfishness, paper-thin egotism, reflexive defensiveness and offensive, attacking activism. 

Let’s put an end to this situation. Let’s all ask around for a friend who’s got the original document, so that we can quickly get back on the road to wholeness and healthy, civil behavior. What are we looking for? It’s called the Constitution of the United States. This document contains instructions for ensuring respect among the citizenry and its governmental branches. Heck, even if we don’t have access to the original, due to its fragility and need for museum preservation, there exist many digital versions which will serve us just as well. It’s time we found our original bearings as a society again.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…”

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition, The Gate, July 19, 2009

Giving it all you’ve got

From the minute I first met her in 1983, it was clear to me that there were no half-steps for Faith Fancher. Whatever life tossed in her path, she took in full stride. Faith experienced life with gusto; no half smiles, no crocodile tears. She laughed loudly and easily, flashing her sparkling, white teeth. She cried with heavy, heaving sobs and flashing eyes. She said “I love you” often and easily, and clearly meant it. One always felt she was fully engaged in the moment, whatever moment that happened to be. 

These qualities made her good at her job: interviewing people for the local TV news, asking people to answer the most personal questions while they were smack in the middle of their own tragedies and disasters such as the Oakland Hills fire or the Loma Prieta Earthquake. She genuinely loved people and she loved hearing and telling their stories. You could say this was because of her Southern roots; she always had a natural knack for keeping it real. But for Faith, reality struck like lightning, like one of the tragedies and disasters she had covered, one day in 1997.

In 2003, Faith became one of the millions of women who have lost their lives to breast cancer. Her journey was a very public one. But of course the entire journey was conducted in the public eye, since for most of her too-brief life she had been a television reporter, working for 20 years at KTVU-TV in Oakland and 10 years previously at CNN and NPR, among other media outlets.
I still remember the telephone call: her doctor had just confirmed that the lump she discovered in her breast was malignant. Yes, she had cancer, but my friend Faith could not accept that a radical mastectomy was the answer—not for her. Yes, she was vain, proud of her looks and in love with her dashing, handsome husband. Like many women, she just couldn’t imagine facing her future while being “disfigured”, as she called it. I begged her to consider the more radical surgical option, to ensure she would be able to live—and love—long into the future.
I told her the story of a 32-year-old woman whom I had met years earlier while working on a story about the choices women faced back in the early 1970’s. This particular woman was alone in California and didn’t want to “worry” her family back home by sharing her sad news. Like Faith, she was young and attractive, and she decided against any surgical intervention at all. Within a year she had lost her life to breast cancer. Faith and I shed a few tears over the phone, thinking about the example of that young woman, then we ended our conversation, leaving Faith to consider her care options.

KTVU-TV reporter Faith Fancher

during her six-year struggle with breast cancer

When Faith’s doctor later informed her that her strain of cancer was a very aggressive one, she took the plunge. She decided to undergo the first of her seven surgeries and of course, she took all of us along with her through her Emmy Award-winning television reports. It was a wild ride. Faith lost her hair to chemotherapy, but she kept on working, exposing her cute, shiny, bald head to the public for the first time, telling her story on television, radio and in countless personal appearances, educating the general public and comforting hundreds of other women as they fought their own, very personal battles with the disease. We watched her hair re-grow and saw the sassiness return to her style as she cheered for all of her “warrior sisters”, her beloved, fellow breast cancer survivors. For them, she was one of their sisterhood, a heroine in their midst.

The very small club of women who work in Bay Area broadcast news formed an organization spearhead by Faith’s good friend Pamela Mays McDonald. We called ourselves Friends of Faith. In her life, and through her death, Faith did what we all want to do: she made a difference by giving it all she had to give, giving it all until she had nothing more to give. Now, six years after her death, the group continues the battle to raise awareness about breast cancer detection and raise money in her name, solely to help low-income, uninsured and underinsured women in need.  

She said it and wrote it often and easily, and she clearly meant it.

The death rate for breast cancer is declining, especially for women with higher incomes. But the day-to-day journey for survivors, especially poor, minority, immigrant and homeless women, is a tough one—both physically and psychologically. You can help. Here’s how:

Next Saturday, August 22, Friends of Faith will host the 5th Annual Faith Fancher Breast Cancer Challenge 5K Fun Run/Walk at Lake Merritt in Oakland. Join me and many of Faith’s friends in the media, as we give it all we’ve got to raise funds at this annual fundraising event. It’s going to be fun, with a great group of friendly people, healthy snacks and a soulful closing concert by Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir. 

If you can’t join us, take a moment now to make an online contribution—any amount, no matter how small, will be appreciated by our struggling clientele. The plight of fifty million uninsured Americans is a national disgrace. Faith Fancher had a big enough heart to do something about it, even as she struggled daily with the on-again, off-again roller coaster of metastatic cancer. Won’t you help, too?

 

For more information about Friends of Faith (a 501c3 charitable organization), check out its website.

To make a donation, click here:

Register to join the walk here: 

 

To volunteer, please telephone Friends of Faith, Inc. at (510)834 4142.

This post originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition, The Gate.

Fortunate fog and lucky summer sunshine

Life in San Francisco has a myriad of benefits, but a sunny, warm summer is not one of them.

I’ve lost track of the number of summer days I’ve awakened to the drab color and dense feel of our thick, misty morning fog. Of course, we are aware that this thick, white blanket usually burns off as the day warms, but the absence of even a single ray of morning sunshine starts my day on a somber note. It seems to take more energy to put on a happy face and gear up for the day’s challenges.

As our somber summer drags on, we remind ourselves of our good fortune. If we really want to feel warm sunlight, we know it can be found within minutes—by driving north, south or east. Life in The City offers great views from almost any neighborhood, but few districts escape the doldrums of the thick summer fog. For some of us, there is a mild depression that starts to settle in when the back-to-school ads start to appear, signaling the end of a summer that we missed, yet others enjoyed. 

Of course, many people move to this beautiful city because they love the sameness of the weather, the reliable coolness and mildness. As I prepare for a trip to one of my favorite cities, Chicago, I am reminded of the reason I don’t live there: its radical, extreme weather— the incapacitating, frigid, wind-chilled winter and the merciless summer heat and humidity. 

As drab as our San Francisco summer mornings and late afternoons may be, we can usually look forward to sunshine during the middle of the day. I, for one, appreciate the symbolism of our summer weather pattern. It’s like life, constantly shifting and full of wonder and surprise. Like our lives, our earliest days may begin in a mist; we are not quite able to see our futures, but we grow to recognize the outlines of the hills, landmarks and obstacles in our environment.

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The view

Eventually, as we approach our thirties, the perceptual fog of youth clears and the sunshine of comprehension bathes us in warmth and clarity. Finally, we see where our lives are headed and the prospects look good. Later, as our lives advance, the clarity of middle age gives way to the gradually overcast skies of our senior years. We can see everything around us, but the blinding, harsh light from above creates a stark landscape, illuminating the world’s ills. Aches, pains and ailments begin to intrude on our sunny view of the world. In our final days, the mental fog of youth returns and we revert to a time where it is hard to always know who and where we are, and our lives acquire the misty outlines of nostalgia for the good, old days. 

That’s why it pays to pay attention and to appreciate each and every day of our lives. If we are thoughtful enough to store our brilliant memories and feelings from one sunny day to the next, those foggy bookends of our days will have little effect on our spirits, because we will have had the good fortune to be able to perceive the clear, crisp contours of the startling, sparkling, paradise we call summer.

Oh! We are oh, so lucky to live here right now.

This post originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition, The Gate on August 7, 2009.

Connected by the Web

The Church for the Fellowship for All Peoples on Russian Hill lists itself as “an interfaith, interracial, intercultural community of seekers dedicated to personal empowerment and social transformation”. Sunday’s sermon concerned our relationship to one another as human beings. I believe that despite our superficial differences, we are all one people, reflecting each other in everything we do.

On Sunday, the Church’s pastor, Rev. Dorsey Blake, borrowed heavily from the writings of Rev. Nobuaki Hanaoka, a retired United Methodist minister and a survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, who lives in Berkeley but grew up Christian in the predominantly Buddhist culture of Japan. 

His book, “On the Back of a Buffalo: Eastern Stories for Western Journey”, is a collection of Buddhist parables written for a Western audience. One story in particular, “The Story of Indra’s Net”, has caused me to gain a new appreciation of the Internet. Read these excerpts from “Indra’s Net” and share your thoughts with me. The last paragraph in italics contains Rev. Hanaoka’s analysis of the story:

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Each drop of dew reflects the light from each other drop of dew

“Far, far above in heaven, there is a realm where Indra, the king of gods, lives. There hangs a canopy of magnificent net made of fine silk, undoubtedly the work of many extraordinary craftsmen. It is so vast that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions, and a glittering jewel is set on each node of the net. Since the net is infinite in size, the jewels are also infinite in number. Like the glistering stars you see in the sky above on dark nights, the jewels are brilliant and innumerable. The magnificence of Indra’s jeweled net is matched only by that of his power and glory. If you picked one of those jewels for inspection and looked closely at it, you would discover that within its polished surface are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.

Not only that, each of the jewels reflected on the surface of his own jewel also reflects all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is also infinite.

…Indra’s Net teaches that all things are in the web of interconnectedness and inter-causality. Nothing exists or happens in isolation. Everything reflects everything else. At each intersection of time and space (at each node of horizontal and vertical threads of Indra’s Net) is an individual entity, which is connected to all others through the web, and each entity reflects all other individual entities indefinitely…

…Exclusiveness, absolutism and ignorance are no longer acceptable in this pluralistic, global society…In the face of mass starvation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the AIDS epidemic, poverty and nuclear proliferation, those of us who stand on the rich spiritual legacy of our religious traditions have no time to waste in fights against each other, each claiming superiority and demonizing others. We must learn to respect and work with each other for we have so much to do today to protect its dignity and the environment everywhere in the world.”

We have entered the age of a new frontier, cyberspace, where theoretically all of us are now connected through the Internet. Some have suggested that Indra’s Net is a perfect metaphor for what the Internet can and ought to be. Like Indra’s Net, the Internet is infinite in size and the jewels in it are infinite in number. Each website can be linked to all others, and all are interdependent. We have an infinite amount of information at our disposal. It is our hope that our humanity has matured enough and evolved enough to use the power we now possess wisely to further our respect for each other and to protect life and dignity of all in the world. With the power we now have, we have no more excuses.

As I see it, the challenges we now face as citizens of California and the US require us to recognize our interconnectedness. As we train our focus beyond the political earthquakes that continually rock Sacramento and Washington, it is time to reconsider the impact of the coming budget cuts and program eliminations on education, health care, parks, even prisons. 

Now we must ponder the fates of millions of people who will have to adjust their lives to this new economic reality. If, as the metaphor of Indra’s web implies, our lives and our actions are truly reflected in the lives and actions of each and every other one of us, then it is clear we must concern ourselves with the goodwill of the entire population.

If the Internet is our new Indra’s Net, then we must use it to search for the best ideas and available resources to alleviate the suffering that is just around the corner for millions who have been caught in the budget squeeze. Our use of the Internet reflects our society as well. Hate speech begets hate, positive community-building begets a positive community. In our search for solutions to these worldwide problems, we must reach out to one another. It is truly a World Wide Web.

This post originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle online edition, The Gate on August 3, 2009.