#JusticeForEthan - Who is the Villain?

Every story needs a villain or two. One reason the Trayvon Martin story caught on so powerfully is that the dramatic cast was set from the start, with the rogue vigilante versus the innocent teenager on a snack run. One reason that Zimmerman was set free is that his lawyers successfully convinced the jury of 6 white women that Martin might have been the actual villain here, the thug, and Zimmerman was a law-abiding protector of the community. As humans, we interpret our lives in part based on the stories we consume, and every story needs a villain.

Ethan Saylor's story has no clear villain. The deputies who broke the cartilage in his neck have been identified, but so far no specific pattern of violent behavior has been ascribed to any one of them. They were just doing what cops do - when someone is non-compliant, you get physical (more on this later if I can find someone to take an essay on the topic).  The theater manager might make a good scapegoat - he made a terrible decision to call the cops, one not justified by Maryland law (where the aide didn't have to buy a ticket, but did anyway, so the theater had its extra 12$). Saylor attended this movie theater often, so he was known, and probably the manager had seen stubborn behavior before. So I'd be happy to see if the press can get a better read on this guy and see what words he uses to describe people with Down syndrome. But in the end, he didn't touch Saylor.

The sheriff isn't my favorite kind of guy - tea partier, anti-immigrant, believes that the problem is the "redistribution of wealth" - and was my candidate for villain. His whining that the press is only telling one side of the story while refusing to talk to the press (on camera) is classic, and there's plenty of room for bad actors here, but he's recently been eclipsed by the president of the Frederick County Board of Commissioners Blaine Young.

Saylor isn't the only person killed by deputies in Frederick County lately - another man was killed after they set off a flash-bang in his apartment and shot him 18 times. He allegedly had a shotgun and I do not know the details of the case, but there is a lawsuit involved. In response to both killings, Blaine Young said the following:

 “If people get in trouble and would just do what the officers say, we wouldn’t have any incidents.”

This is blaming the victim. It's classic. And when it applies to Saylor, we can immediately wipe it away as nonsense. Yes, it's true, if Saylor had just done what he was ordered to do, then he'd still be alive today. But the reasons he did not are complex, involve both context and his disability, and we know he is not to blame for what happened. But here's the point I keep trying and trying to make:

No one, disabled or abled, male or female, black or white, gay or straight, no one ... needs to be handcuffed and dragged out of a movie theater. Write them a ticket. Take their ID. Call their mother. Talk to them. Be patient.

And just in case you aren't convinced, last week Young got the five commissioners together to write a letter thank the deputies for all their hard work in light of the "recent controversies." In the minutes, he claimed he wanted to "separate the men from the boys," referring to the one commissioner who declined to sign the letter. So this is using Saylor's death as an internal political stunt to isolate Commissioner Gray (though Young claimed, innocently, that this wasn't the case).

Blaine Young - Right now, you are my official villain.

But stay tuned, there's lots of room at the bottom.

#JusticeForEthan - Film at 11

Yesterday I was briefly interviewed by Debra Alfarone, a reporter for WUSA-9 in D.C. She, and her station, have been pursuing the Ethan story with considerable diligence lately. The video clip is here.

I am really grateful to Alfarone's willingness to pursue this story - not just for one clip or one quick hit of outrage, but to really dig and understand what's going on. This is what journalism looks like.

At the end of the clip (I appear very briefly in the middle, making the argument that everyone should be concerned about this, not just people with disabilities), Alfarone notes that blame is beginning to be cast on the theater manager for not allowing Ethan to stay in without a ticket. This is surely true. If the manager just said, "Oh, you have Down syndrome, you can see the movie again," then none of this would have happened. But every choice here has deep implications for how people with disabilities interact with the world. Is the manager responsible for waving the rules in the face of disability? I'm not sure.

Ultimately, as I read the report, the deputies made the decision to put their hands on Ethan as the aide pleaded for patience. This is where I place the pivot point when multiple possible outcomes to the situation coalesced into one grim reality, Ethan's death.

And here's one final point, a point that no one else seems to be making - Ethan's death is not an isolated incident and it's not just about disability (although it's also about disability). Across America, police have decided that non-compliance demands a physical response, a taser shot, or pepper spray.  Ethan's story is just as much a part of the growing erosion of our civil liberties as many more highly publicized events in the last few years.

Jenny Hatch

I haven't followed every twist and turn of Jenny Hatch's case, now decided in her favor, but here's the quick summary.

Hatch, a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome, wanted to live with two friends, Kelly Morris and Jim Talbert, and work in their thrift store. Hatch's verbal skills are great and she expressed this as clearly as anyone could.

Hatch's mother, for reasons I have not quite untangled, had removed her from living with Morris and Talbert, had placed in her a group home, and was trying to impose a highly restrictive guardianship order on her daughter (including limiting with whom she could come in contact and her movements).

It's easy to side with Jenny and her friends against her mother, so let's assume for a moment that all the principles here are people of goodwill who are trying to do the right thing for Hatch. Let's even assume that Morris and Talbert are bad influences, driving a wedge between Jenny and her family, taking advantage of Jenny's naivete, or even trying to get Jenny's social security check! Let's assume the mother in fact is right that living in a group home would be the best thing for Jenny in both the short and long term.

DISCLAIMER: I BELIEVE NONE OF THESE THINGS. NOW ON WITH THE THOUGHT EXERCISE.

Imagine, especially other parents of people with Down syndrome, that this is your child, your child with whom you have played, laughed, cried, and worked worked worked through so many thousands of hours of therapy. Now she can talk. Now she can work. Now she's healthy. And now she wants to leave. And you know it's the wrong thing for her.

But our children grow up.

So much of my focus is on agency, how to help Nico in particular be his own advocate, express his desires, and be active, not passive, in his engagement with the world.

Hatch (note, not Jenny) is a high-functioning 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome. She gets to make her choices, even if they're the wrong ones.

And in this case, I and the courts both think, Hatch was right in her decision making. It's also a precedent, and a powerful one, that helps shift more agency towards people with disabilities, something both our culture and our legal system badly needs. Here's what the essay says:

Legally, Hatch’s case came down to two questions: Was she an incapacitated adult in need of a guardian, and, if so, who would best serve in that role — her mother and stepfather, or Morris and Talbert?

But for national experts on the rights of people with disabilities, several of whom testified on Hatch’s behalf, the case was about much more. It was about an individual’s right to choose how to live and the government’s progress in providing the help needed to integrate even those with the most profound needs into the community.

In the end, Newport News Circuit Court Judge David F. Pugh said he believed that Hatch, who has an IQ of about 50, needed a guardian to help her make decisions but that he had also taken into account her preferences. He designated Morris and Talbert her temporary guardians for the next year, with the goal of ultimately helping her achieve more independence.

So this is good news.

Our Children Grow Up

This week, I'm going be writing about adults with disabilities, especially (of course) Down syndrome. A number of stories have been circulating lately and I have thoughts!

I think I was onto something yesterday when I wrote that Ethan Saylor doesn't fit the media narrative, and that's part of why his story hasn't "caught" in the national media the way that other stories of police abuse do. It's not clear how to write about a 26-year-old, 300 lb, swearing, man with Down syndrome who wants to see "Zero Dark Thirty" again. Now if it was Muppets on Ice, that would make sense. We often see adults with disabilities as perpetual children, which makes it hard to process things like enjoying violent movies or their sex drives. And it's a fair thing - because I am DEEPLY uncomfortable with the idea of a 26-year-old with Down syndrome seeing Zero Dark Thirty (let alone, say, pornography). I think yesterday I responded a little defensively, because I know that reaction is both wrong and right. Lots of adults with DS in their 20s might have trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality, especially for a film like that (filmed to be realistic) - how do you decide when they are ready?

But our children do not stay children. They grow up. The world gets more complex the minute our children pass out of school age, but lots of people are working on this situation, some better than others. So this week I'm going to write about David Effgen, an Oak Park resident who died recently, and his son Andrew. I'm going to write about Jenny Hatch. I'm going to write about Goodwill. And I'm going to write about Nico and Ellie.

But not right now, because none of my children are wearing pants yet, and it's almost 9:30.

#JusticeForEthan and the Media Narrative

Two new essays on Ethan Saylor caught my eye this morning:

First - Debra Alfarone, a reporter for W-USA 9 News in D.C., wrote a good short piece on the state of the Ethan Saylor case. The best reporting on the case has all come out of the D.C. area, even as the story has struggled to reach beyond the local area.

Speaking of that struggle, Nick Cull - like me an academic and father of a boy with Down syndrome, applied his expertise (he's in a Communication department) to think about the lack of coverage. He writes that he is particularly "troubled that so many people seem not to have heard about the case more than six months after Saylor’s death."

I'm troubled by that too. When I submitted my essay on the case to The Nation, it was championed (to the extent I understand these things) by an editor (Liliana Segura) who writes more broadly on police brutality and prison culture. She knew about the case, but told me that others had missed it. If some of the staff at The Nation missed it, some of the smartest and most plugged in people around after all, then Cull is definitely right that the absence of focus on Saylor's case is odd. Cull writes:

Part of the problem is the fragmentation that has come with social media. In our wired world, some stories stay within closed loops of people directly concerned with an issue by virtue of shared race, location or other marker of identity. That is understandable. Yet Saylor’s story has been reported in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Huffington Post. It’s also attracted notice on some right-wing websites and the libertarian Cato Institute’s blog that keep an eye out for violations of individual liberty. But the trail of mainstream media commentary soon runs cold. WTOP news in Washington, D.C., did a story on the case, but NPR has not mentioned it and neither, it would seem, have its local affiliates. There has been nothing in The Daily Beast. Sources with a track record of sound coverage in the civil rights domain such as Mother Jones and Truthdig (until this piece) have also passed over the story. Some parents in the Down syndrome community began an email campaign to try to get journalist George Will, whose son Jon has the genetic condition, to say something about Saylor in a column but he hasn’t done so.

He concludes:

One thing that those who have been following the story detect is an underlying lack of empathy for someone with special needs, on the part of the management and the deputies who seem to have exacerbated the situation and perhaps on behalf of the wider society. The Down syndrome support community is well aware that other categories of people who have been mistreated by the police have attracted national coverage; other names have become causes célèbres. One of the troubling things about Saylor’s case is the nagging fear that the silence is not a response to careful consideration of the available evidence but a symptom that in the last analysis in the America of 2013, people with an intellectual disability simply do not count.

I'm not sure, as I ponder the subject, about "not counting." At least I don't want that to be true.

I think the issue is that people with disabilities don't fit neatly into narrative categories that drive media attention, except as "inspiration porn" (a category worth exploring here and here, for starters). It's unclear how to write about a 300-lb man with Down syndrome who was swearing at police and watching a movie about torture and assassination ("Zero Dark Thirty"). How does that fit our models? He doesn't tie into the stories of race and class that permeate our national discourse about urban violence and police brutality. He wasn't tased, or I think the anti-taser movement would have picked up on it (I have another essay on tasers out for consideration right now). And without an obvious hook or fit, why should readers in other parts of the country worry about Ethan Saylor?

That's part of why my essay in The Nation tried to link Saylor into a bigger pattern and to provide a framework for analysis going forward. Because while I'm focused on Justice for Ethan (this is the Facebook group), I also fear that there are going to be more Ethan's in the future, and I don't want their stories to be buried.

Male Feminism Considered

My good friend K. sent me these links yesterday on male feminism. I'm increasingly interested in articulating my thoughts as a male feminist (as opposed to just being one), now that I've personally experienced how threatening such an idea is to so many men (see the comment section here).

In The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland argues that men have to be part of the struggle against misogyny.

That there is a battle to be fought is surely beyond doubt. Whether it's a prosecuting barrister branding a 13-year-old female victim of sexual abuse "predatory", or the ongoing death and rape threats against women who speak out on social media, all those who care about even basic notions of fairness or justice can see there is a momentous struggle to be joined. Yet men hesitate. Register the voices who rise up to object to these or any of the other instances, constant and ubiquitous, of sexism and misogyny and they overwhelmingly belong to women.

Perhaps that's inevitable. An attack on any group will be felt first and most keenly by that group: it usually falls to Jews, for example, to sound the alarm over antisemitism. But that rule is not universal. The backlash against the Home Office's "Go Home" vans, a hateful scheme now under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority, has not been the exclusive preserve of immigrants, legal or illegal, or the descendants of immigrants. Even Nigel Farage denounced it.

But somehow men leave the heavy lifting against gender bias and gender hatred to women. The most charitable explanation is that men worry they cannot speak about this subject authentically, that their perspective is of less value than a woman's. Others fret they'll get it wrong, that they'll inadvertently say something that is itself sexist, thereby revealing that they too don't "get it" – so it's safer to say nothing. The diffidence of the men who took part in last week's #twittersilence was striking, several indicating that they were only "sort of" taking part.

He finishes strong:

That means a change in men, but also perhaps in the struggle itself. For there is not just a gender gap on this issue. Wary as I am of pointing it out, there does seem to be a gulf separating the feminist conversation currently aired loudest in the public sphere and the kind of monotonous, grinding experience recorded by @EverydaySexism. It is the culture wars that grab media interest – a run of pop videos featuring topless women; proposed "modesty" wrappings to hide the covers of lads' mags; Jane Austen on bank notes; horrors on Twitter – yet it is the stubborn problems of unequal pay, low conviction rates for rape, workplace discrimination against mothers and, say, the need for statutory carer's leave, which probably speak more directly to the lives of women outside the media bubble.

For now, though, the challenge is for men to find their place – and to be welcomed – in a struggle that may be led by the women's movement but which is surely a human cause. We've tried sitting in silence – and it hasn't worked.

 I really like the contrast between the big issues (on which men often speak up) and the "grinding experience" of Everyday Sexism. I tried to get at that in my writing on the subject, emphasizing that while sometimes patriarchy and its effects are overt (Wendy Davis/Texas/etc.), in many ways the covert is just as important to recognize and fight (McDonald's, "Best Dressed" awards, etc.)

Which brings me to the second piece, from South Africa. The young author explores his growing awareness of sexism and the feminist response to it, and focuses on the question of attraction. How can a man express attraction without being sexist?

The first source of my confusion is chivalry. Part of my village’s training related to giving women precedence. A woman must have your seat, you must carry her bags, you must open the door etc. I learned later that westerners call these teachings “chivalry”. It has occurred to me that I can’t reject my village’s teachings without also rejecting chivalry.

The second source of my confusion is physical attraction to women. While I distaste misogyny, objectification or any other notion that equates a woman’s value to her looks, I still am attracted to women. In moments of honesty, I do admit that my attraction to a woman is influenced by my prejudice on looks. It has then occurred to me that proclaiming myself a feminist, while still placing some kind of value on looks, is revolting hypocrisy.

Attraction and chivalry may seem like trivial issues, but they lie at the heart of many male questions about how to be a feminist or how to be an ally. How do you hit on a woman without being a sexist? I see this question asked again and again. It's good to read a young South African man working through these issues.

Ender's Olympic Games

When I was an early teenager, I read many marvelous books. Life was complicated in that privileged way upper middle glass over-educated way. My social skills and self-confidence were poor. I talked too much. I talked too much about the wrong things. I was teased and sometimes bullied in school. All of this is to say that like many nerdy kids, I took solace in games and reading. Ender's Game has no particular place in my personal iconography of books, it's not like Lord of the Rings or Narnia, which I read and re-read so many times before I was 10. But Ender's Game was a good book, one I liked and re-read, and part of the many worlds into which I escaped. It wasn't a /nice/ world, but it was one in which nerdy kids got to fight in zero-G and then defeat the aliens. I could identify. In fact, I read everything that Orson Scott Card wrote, buying some and borrowing others from friends and libraries. I loved his story-telling.

Ender's Game is now a "major motion picture," starring Harrison Ford, coming out in November. I will not be going to see it.

For those who don't know - and I certainly didn't know until about five years ago - Orson Scott Card is a bigot with a history of making incendiary statements against homosexuals. He's also put his money where his mouth is, contributing to anti-marriage-equality groups. Here are some well-circulated examples his statements.

Card writing in 1990: “Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.”

So that's not good, right?  Keep sodomy illegal so that every so often someone can be publicly pilloried, in order to keep everyone in line. It gets more specific. In 2008, he wrote a piece for the Mormon Times, quoted at length here, in which he called for rebellion in the event of the legalization of gay marriage.

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

 And

If America becomes a place where our children are taken from us by law and forced to attend schools where they are taught that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that motherhood doesn’t require a husband or father, and that homosexuality is as valid a choice as heterosexuality for their future lives, then why in the world should married people continue to accept the authority of such a government?

What these dictator-judges do not seem to understand is that their authority extends only as far as people choose to obey them.

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

So that's pretty incendiary. 

But, suggest many well-intentioned liberal gay-marriage-supporting friends, we can separate art from the views of the artist. Lots of artists have had offensive views - that doesn't mean they don't make good art, and to enjoy the art doesn't make one complicit in their view. I think that's absolutely true. I don't want to narrow myself to a world in which I can only enjoy the creations of people with whom I politically agree, and I won't. But Card's insertion of his voice into a contemporary political debate is more that just disagreement, it's active, he's taking a principled stand in an attempt to make the world less just.

And we know the consequences of Card's positions when given power, because right now we are seeing them unfold in Russia. It's not just the new law that bans any discussion of homosexuality as anything but an abomination, though that's bad enough. The law seems to have enabled wide-spread violence against homosexuals. Here's a selection of further stories about violence, rape, and the state's cheerful complicity. Behind these acts of violence, one finds the same epistemology as Card's - homosexuality is unnatural and should be criminalized. In fact, other American anti-equality groups have explicitly endorsed Russia's position, calling for us to learn from them (while claiming the violence is over-rated).

Stephen Fry wrote a beautiful letter linking the Berlin Olympics to the Sochi Olympics, noting (and here's the "How Did We Get Into This Mess" moment) a similarity between Nazi discourse about the Jews and Russian discourse about homosexuals. It's where my decision to skip Card's movie really crystallized. Because if I believe that Card and the anti-homosexual movement in Russia share an epistemology, then how can I do otherwise?

There are bigger fish to fry than Ender's Game. I don't make it to a lot of movies as it is. I expect Ender's Game to make tons of money, especially as conservatives rally to go see it (the Chik Fil-A effect), and I'm sure it will have a great Russian release.

But to those who think Card is just a crank with objectionable views, but one who is harmless. I think Russia, in all its hyperbolic violence, suggests otherwise.

Trayvon and Ethan

So I published an essay on Ethan Saylor today, placing his death in the context of other episodes of police violence against people with disabilities. It's at The Nation, my first publication there, and I'm pleased with it, though social media sharing has been a bit light (not a direct indication of readership, but suggestive of lower than I'd prefer).

Both in finishing the essay and today, I've been aware of an ugly racial undercurrent among white people responding to the lack of national outcry over Ethan's death. The argument goes as follows - people everywhere cared about a black boy's death (Trayvon), but didn't care about a person with Down syndrome's death; ergo - black lives are valued more heavily than DS lives.

A twitter follower asked me of Obama had weighed in for Saylor like he did for Martin. I replied no, but he also doesn't respond to every black person killed by police every 28 hours or so (according to this study. No idea how accurate it is).

A commentator on the essay at The Nation wrote:

However, our nationals decided to use this as an opportunity to push for training (thus strengthening the sheriff's blame of his death being because he had Ds) and the majority of its members aren't even aware of the case.  Think this might have been different had he been black or gay?  Absolutely - without a doubt.

This feeds into a discussion that's very much inside the DS community. Angry people (including me) feel that the call for more training emphasizes that Ethan died because of his disability (and the police ignorance about it), not because of police mistakes or brutality. That's part of why I want to emphasize the broader context of police responding to any non-compliance with physical violence. Yes, had the police been more savvy about DS they might have responded differently. But had Ethan just been some 300-pound guy swearing, he still didn't deserve to have his larynx crushed.

But the question of race - no one who studied police and racial violence in this country could argue, based on Trayvon, that somehow violence against black men (or gay men) gets massive media play. The Ethan case is an outlier, a tragic outlier to which I have tried to call attention for its own sake, and to point at broader issues of police conduct in the face of non-compliance.

Here's an essay from Oregon that compares Trayvon and Ethan. It calls for training and is a fine essay, if not my take. But a commentator writes:

There is a good reason why this Ethan Saylor case will go nowhere in the media. That is simply because Ethan is white. Nobody cares if a white person is killed, even if it is a black person that does it. That is not newsworthy, since the media cannot called it race related. But now if Ethan were gay, THAT would make headlines all over the country as a hate crime. This is a perfect example of how screwed up this country is.

He's right. His post is a perfect example of how screwed up it is that white people believe their whiteness makes them victims. The conflation of black violence at the hands of police (or Zimmerman) with gay violence (which is largely not at the hands of police anymore), and then setting that in opposition to Saylor, so that his death is about his whiteness - well, this is not a new delusion.

But that's no reason not to call it out as a delusion.

Ethan's death was unusual. It doesn't conform to simple media narratives in some ways, but does in others. People with Down syndrome tend to be portrayed as either victims or inspirational heroes, and rarely as complex people. Ethan was complex, highly functional in some ways, but also vulnerable. And his diagnosis surely enabled this story to descend from public view, kept alive by two local Washington Post reporters and the outrage of the disability community. Because when the deputies and sheriff said that it was just a tragic mistake and blamed the disability, enough people believed them.

Disability and Dinosaurs - with thoughts from Jane Yolen

Here's the conversation between me and my son, Nico, last night, as he headed to use the toilet.

Me: Nico, do you need a book?
Nico: Di-no
Me: Dino?
Nico: Okay!

So I handed him our shiny new copy of How do Dinosaurs Go to School.

Nico has Down syndrome. More relevant: he has speech apraxia, and every word represents hours and hours and hours of work from him, his therapists, his teachers, his parents, and especially the aforementioned him. One of my  experiences of disability involves the intense joy and pride that each tiny accomplishment brings, a joy directly related to the amount of work that went into it. 

The comparison I like to make involves my kids learning to walk. I was proud of both them for when they walked. Nico stood up for the first time at 12 months, learned to take two steps between objects (say a chair and a table) about six months later, started walking on a treadmill with hands held that year, and became a real walker at 2 and a half - so there was an 18-month period in which we worked. And worked. And worked. Ellie stood up for the first time at around 4:00 when she was 11 months old. She had learned to walk by 7:00 that night. I was proud of her, and I worry a lot about making sure we celebrate her accomplishments sufficiently (the subject for another post). But 3 hrs vs 18 months; easy natural development vs intensive work. This matters.

So now we focus a lot of our attention on language, carve out words, and then try to reinforce them (as words come and go with apraxia) and make them part of his regular pattern of communication. 

In sharing Nico's "Di-no" locution, Jane Yolen, the author of the book series (her son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids are friends of ours), chimed in to say that she had heard from many parents of kids with disabilities to say that the Dino books were special favorites and useful in helping the kids through their day. I wondered if it was visual, that the images of giant dinos making their way through a tiny world somehow echoed cognitively for kids who often feel out of place in the world. She replied (quoted with permission):

"I think it begins with the dinos having a lack of control over themselves, and how they slowly (after the NO. . .) get that control. And so the readers/listener by becoming like the dino can see themselves getting a measure of control. But also, even when the dinos are at their most misbehaving, the message is (as much as I ever put messages in my books) that mommy and daddy always love them. But as it's all done with humor, it doesn't feel like a lesson. I hear over and over the children say to their parents, "I'm a good dinosaur.""

So that's beautiful.  The /children/ say to their parents, "I'm a good dinosaur," even though in the books it's the parents/author speaking to the kids.

Now if only I could Nico to eat some vegetables.

Public Engagement - Go Speed Racer

Yesterday, I received an email from Rebecca Sharpless, Associate Professor of History at Texas Christian University.  It began (shared with permission):

Dear David Perry,

Thanks to you, I have now published in the New York Times.  Last Thursday, when I was debating on whether to weigh in on the Paula Deen flap with her cook, my best friend sent me the link to your piece in the COHE.  So when I wrote to the editor and he asked when I could have 850 words to him, I took a deep breath and said, "Tomorrow morning."  

Here's her essay. It sets the current Paula Deen story in a historical context of southern white women exploiting African-American food culture. Sharpless has a book, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, which gives her the kind of deep knowledge of the subject that only a scholar can have. That she found a way to share that knowledge more broadly, to explore "how we got into this mess," as I like to put it, is exactly the kind of engagement for which I am advocating most strongly.

As my story illustrates, getting published has required some luck, good timing, and learning how to write more quickly. The speed required is particularly challenging.
Like many academics, I like to linger over my writing, but that's not how the journalistic world works. I have had to submit essays on breaking news that were "good enough" rather than perfect.
- See more at: http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.dom.edu/article/My-Initial-Public-Offering/140407/#sthash.DHav5cz9.dpuf

In my Chronicle essay on public writing, I stressed speed, writing, "As my story illustrates, getting published has required some luck, good timing, and learning how to write more quickly. The speed required is particularly challenging. Like many academics, I like to linger over my writing, but that's not how the journalistic world works. I have had to submit essays on breaking news that were "good enough" rather than perfect." In fact, I felt my own piece on Paula Deen from when the story on her alleged racism first broke wasn't quite written fast enough to find a home on a major site, so I just put it on the blog.

So this is an exciting concrete outcome. But speed isn't always necessary. On Monday, I've had confirmed, The Nation will publish an essay of mine on disability and police violence. I researched this one more deeply than others, sent it to them in May, tried to get it into the magazine, but finally we've decided to put it online. It's not hitting a news cycle, but trying to shape awareness of a buried issue. My piece on the Ottoman legacy at stake in the Turkish uprisings was rejected 4 times, the last time by CNN, as being off-cycle. Then the violence swelled up again (regrettably), and CNN quickly asked for it back.

At any rate, congrats to Rebecca Sharpless for the terrific essay and I'm honored to have played any part in inspiring you to write fast and send it in.