Weekend Reads: Growing up Coy, Women’s March 2017, and Goodnight Moon is Goodnight Gay
Happy Weekend Readers! The Hellions and Mom and Dad spent the Martin Luther King Day weekend hiking at Hocking Hills State Forest, a peak Ohio experience that we recommend for anyone. And I mean anyone, the hike to Ash Cave is designed to be accessible to folks with disabilities. But we’re back and we have some exciting links for you. A tip of the cap to our own Mary, who did a bang up job sharing some great stories to our super secret back channel while I was limping, drinking beer and watching football.
Autostraddle has a review of a touching new documentary. Growing up Coy tells the story of the adorable Coy Mathis, a trans girl growing up in Colorado who just wants to be treated like the other girls. Check it out, it’s streaming on Netflix.
Biloxi, Mississippi has garnered some negative attention for substituting “Great Americans Day” for the official Martin Luther King Day observance. I wonder if the count general and traitor Robert E. Lee as one of those great Americans… they do celebrate his birthday there, side by side with MLK.
Especially around MLK Day, and as we head into Black History Month we hear a lot about the struggle for equality in the past but are often discouraged form examining inequality in the present. The Brown versus Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in schooling was 64 years ago for instance. But as NPR’s Fresh Air reports in an interview with journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, many schools remain segregated or are in the process of re-segregating.
When I started what I kind of call the segregation beat about five years ago … I think we had stopped talking about this as a problem. If you look at No Child Left Behind, which comes out of the Bush administration, that was all about giving up on integration in schools and just saying, “We’re going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability.”
So no one was discussing integration anymore. I think it’s because … we never really wanted this. … It’s always had to be forced, and as soon as … our elected officials and our courts lost the will to force it, most white Americans were just fine with that. …
One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating this segregation and inequality, and we’re willing to put almost no effort in fixing it, and that’s the problem.
Like that excellent reporting from National Public Radio? The incoming Trump administration doesn’t, already making plans to privatize public broadcasting, as well as eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment of the Humanities. These are long term conservative goals often justified as cutting wasteful spending. Which is ridiculous, these programs represent a minuscule portion of the federal budget.
Did you know Margaret Wise Brown, author of classic children’s book Goodnight Moon was bisexual? And a badass? Now you do.
Did you participate in the Women’s March on Washington or one of the sister marches around the globe? We did here in Cincinnati, it was amazing. The New York Times has pictures…
On a final note, I did a web interview about being a Dad and blogger at Dad of Diva’s , the 738th Dad in the Limelight. It’s kinda cool 😉
Featured Image Credit: Me and the Scmoo, Love Wins
