Reproducing this here in its entirety because when I want to read it ten years hence, twitter will probably be gone… or at least the URL linking to this will be broken. So:

In light of what’s going on with #Dreamers, it’s time to talk about Japanese internment. Because the #DACA showdown is Japanese internment 2.0.

Japanese immigrants in the 19th & early 20th centuries came to the US in large part for manual farm labor in California. Sound familiar?

Japan had much more advanced horticulture than the US at that time, so these immigrants weren’t just bringing brute labor. They were bringing a lot of basic how-to’s of commercial farming that built the foundation for California’s success as an agricultural powerhouse today. Japanese immigrant farm laborers American Dream’d so hard, many families were able to save money to buy their own land and start farming for themselves. “The California Farm Bureau was quoted by The News, saying that Japanese farmers were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the state, including nearly 100 percent of all tomatoes, celery, strawberries and peppers.” (San Francisco Museum)

The Central Valley used to be peppered with Japanese family farms. Not anymore. What happened to them?

WW2’s Japanese internment. Japanese internment was a land grab by white farmers. Full stop.

The initial call for Japanese internment came mere hours after the Pearl Harbor bombing, from the Salinas Valley Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association.

AKA, Japanese internment was initiated by the California farm lobby: “The average value/acre of all West Coast farms in 1940 was $37.94, whereas that of Japanese farms was $279.96… 3/4 acres of Japanese farm lands were devoted to actual crop production, whereas only 1/4 acres of all farm land in the areas was planted in crops.”

Check out those numbers. Japan’s farm traditions were based on maximizing use of space, so they made more $ per acre. That tends to drive up land prices. And rising land prices tend to make people whose farming skills can’t keep up feel very nervous. So. Japanese farmers’ success came from having tight management skills, and that threatened their white neighbors.

White farmers had a choice: level up their game, or play dirty.

Let me reiterate: given a choice between being good at their job and lobbying the gov’t to make their problems go away, US farmers chose the second option. This is a classic move that those in the farm industry will still recognize.

“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”
-Austin E. Anson, Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association

They weren’t even trying to hide it. Japanese internment was about white good ol’ boys being jealous of successful immigrants. There was a downside though. Remember how Japanese American farmers were growing nearly half the country’s produce? And the US war strategy was “an army marches on its stomach, so we need super solid supply chains for food”? It turns out putting most of the country’s skilled farmers in jail … didn’t help with making food. Once internment started, food shortages quickly followed.

How did the US handle that misstep? Victory gardens! “Victory Gardens were the propagandistic answer to the chaos created by FDR’s roundup and imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in early 1942. (Cindy McNatt at the Orange County Register)” So yeah, victory gardens were less “plucky nation pitches in with the war effort” and more “oh wow we systematic racism-ed so hard that we punched a hole in the economy. Do we admit we the mistake and fix it? Nahhhh, let’s foist the consequences off on civilians.”

Like Japanese families in the early 20th century, a lot of US immigrant population today is families that came to work on farms. And they’ve been here just long enough to actually get established and really start building a life. The US was kind of ok with immigration as long as it was get in, work for really cheap, get out. But we’re at a demographic turning point where a critical mass of farm immigrant families have reached some upward mobility and established themselves en masse.

And here’s the part that most people don’t know, unless they work in some really specific parts of the farm economy: Most of the US thinks of “immigrant farm workers” as grunt labor. And yes, most of the brute force work on farms is done by Latinx immigrants. But 1st and 2nd generation Latinx immigrants are also the knowledge base in modern US agriculture.

I’m gonna tell you guys a secret. A lot US farmers don’t actually know that much about farming. They know a lot about writing checks to Latinx contractors, who know how to farm.

The US farm industry isn’t just dependent on Latinx immigrants for labor. They’re dependent on Latinx immigrants for knowing HOW to farm. How to manage a harvest, how to run a packinghouse, how to keep a fleet of farm vehicles running. And I bet you money that scares the hell out of a lot of white people. Not the farmers, funnily enough. The actual farmers tend to be a lot more at peace with it than the rest of the rural/suburban white population. (Don’t get me wrong, they still mostly voted for Trump. Even though they knew his immigration policies are deadly for farms. They vote for conservatives and just expect things to magically turn out immigration-friendly anyway.)

The thing is, farmers aren’t the influential voting bloc they used to be. The new wrinkle entering the immigration debate right now, IMO, is private prisons. Prison labor’s been used in the US for manufacturing for quite some time. But it’s making significant new inroads into farm labor. Especially now that it’s becoming harder for immigrants to work in the US, farms are turning to inmate contracts. Prisoners working on a farm is a little different from manufacturing. In manufacturing, folks are locked down in a building. It’s pretty easy to control your workers. But farming is outdoors and, nowadays, super mechanized. That means to get anything done, you have to be able to give someone tools or a tractor and have a reasonable expectation that they’ll use them for work. Instead of, say, murdering the foreman and running off. You also need people with farm work experience. Farm work is an art. You just don’t get productive labor out of stoners. I say this as someone who’s personally supervised convict farm crews made of people in for minor drug charges. It’s… just a mess all around.

So say you’re a private prisoner contractor who’s looking at farm labor deals. To keep those clients happy, you need a steady stream of nonviolent criminals who are also have farm work experience. Talkin out the side of my mouth here, but if I were them, I’d see crackdowns on migrant laborers as a fantastic business move. I might even press my congressmen to write & sponsor bills like this one. Immigrants don’t even have to commit crimes to become part of my workforce, I mean go to jail. Just be poor. Or not have their green card in their pocket during a traffic stop.

Anyway, that’s my best guess as to why the GOP can’t get itself together to support a bill that most Americans want. There are a lot of primary voters, and a lot of donors, who have a vested interest in criminalizing immigrants.

To connect this back to Japanese internment. Internment was pushed through by a small farm lobby that wanted the land under Japanese American family farms, sure. But they couldn’t have pulled it off w/o the rest of the country’s xenophobia. Today we have private prisons whose business models look like they just kinda might depend on everyone being ok with jailing immigrants for being immigrants.
And there’s enough butthurt white people with “economic anxiety” to make that happen. Maybe. It’s really encouraging how many people support #DACA. We still have the same ugly dynamics that brought Japanese internment to life. But we also have a lot of people today who know better.

Keep those calls to your reps coming, folks.

— Sarah Taber

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Anna North, writing at Vox:

Meanwhile, girls learn from an early age that it is rude to reject boys. They learn to “let them down easily” and never humiliate them. They learn to give other people what they want, and to put their own desires second — especially when it comes to sex. And few girls get any sex education, either at school or from the culture they consume, that encourages them to think about sex in terms of what they actually desire, as opposed to how they will be perceived by others.

Recent abstinence-only curricula have included messages like, “Girls need to be aware they may be able to tell when a kiss is leading to something else. The girl may need to put the brakes on first in order to help the boy,” and, “girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex.”

Even when girls learn comprehensive sex ed, they frequently don’t learn how to ask for what they want, or even how to think about what that is. “We, as a nation, are uncomfortable with women having pleasure,” Lynn Barclay, president and CEO of the American Sexual Health Association, told Bustle in 2015.

I really like how Ms. North took the latest revelation during a transient phenomenon (the #MeToo movement) and took it back to the basic problem: unspoken, unexamined limitations and expectations placed only on women, starting shortly after birth. So I think men should keep getting called out, and here is why.

The bar for getting a man fired for sexual harassment is impossibly high. Men rarely go to prison for abuse. Therefore, to provide some ACTUAL PRESSURE on men to behave better, women publicly denouncing behavior of men must continue. Men should be recalling their previous actions and feel unsure. They should question assumptions about who deserves what in society. Guilt and shame aren’t enough. Men should feel fear. Once that happens, we might have a shot at inculcating TRUE EQUALITY in our next generations and making laws supporting equality of women and men.

I’m pessimistic to the point of dismissal that the United States will ever pull itself together enough to be a credible progressive voice on the world stage, but we can continue looking elsewhere for examples. Like Sweden:

[In Sweden] For a girl to own her sexuality meant she owned her body, she owned herself. Women could do anything men did, but they could also — when they chose to — bear children. And that made us more powerful than men. The word “feminist” felt antiquated; there was no longer a use for it.
…
In America, a woman’s body seemed to belong to everybody but herself. Her sexuality belonged to her husband, her opinion of herself belonged to her social circles, and her uterus belonged to the government. She was supposed to be a mother and a lover and a career woman (at a fraction of the pay) while remaining perpetually youthful and slim. In America, important men were desirable. Important women had to be desirable. That got to me.
…
But the American woman is told she can do anything and then is knocked down the moment she proves it. In adapting myself to my new country, my Swedish woman power began to wilt. I joined the women around me who were struggling to do it all and failing miserably. I now have no choice but to pull the word “feminist” out of the dusty drawer and polish it up.

I want Ess to have “Swedish woman power” and I fear that, here in the United States, we can only give her a shadow of that power.

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From all that dwell below the skies
let songs of hope and faith arise;
let beauty, truth and good be sung
in every land, in every tongue.

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Ess, you’ve been pushing everyone’s limits lately. Seeing what you can get away with, asking for things you’ve never asked for before. And tantrums — those are something else. But then we get to share a magical evening with you — one where we play at the kitchen table and build with dominoes together. One where you are smiling at us and imagining worlds and telling us you love us and giving HUGE hugs. Your mama had this Christmas instrumental channel on in the background and it kind of set the stage for thinking about the experiential and the remembering self at the same time: it was a rare gift to simultaneously enjoy the time with you while also experiencing the meta part. How important the memory of tonight will be in the future. We love you Ess. Forever and ever. Thanks for spending 2017 with us.

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Eighteen years of serving this website over insecure HTTP are over: I installed a certificate for HTTPS, though I suppose the purpose is more not wanting to be left behind than any true need. I’ve read it could make the site go faster, and I’ve read it might make it go slower, too. I suppose both could be true.

Some vignettes. I’m going back through random text files, where I’ve littered little phrases to jog my memory:

• There’s this one: you come into Essie’s bedroom in the morning, and you see that she has extricated herself from her sheets, carefully arranged and folded them, and is sitting very carefully in the small bit of mattress that remains uncovered. She may have her father’s penchant for orderliness.
• “Mama, where a pizza go?”
  “We ate it, Ess.”
  “Get it outta my tummy. I need to eat it back up.”
• Essie has woken up. Singing a song by herself in her room. She’s singing Baby Beluga. She doesn’t have those ‘s’ sounds yet, so we hear “Baby beluga in the deep blue shhee.”
• “What did you dream about, Ess?”
  “Mama!”
• I put Ess on my shoulders, which is a great way to carry her. I’m sure I’ll look back and regret the times I asked her to stop pulling my hair and flopping over my head because though it does hurt, there’s a lot more joy to carrying her than pain. Anyway, she was sitting up there and suddenly got really agitated. “Dada! Put me down, put me down!” I was initially unconvinced that anything was actually wrong, but she carried on, and so I set her down. “My leg feels funny!” Then I realized it had fallen asleep. The first time she’d ever felt that — and we were there for it. She walked it off in the aisles of Whole Foods. She’s reluctant to sit on my shoulders, now.
• In the summer, Mykala told Ess we were going to see the Okee Dokee Brothers, a lovely, folksy, local group of kid’s musicians. Ess thought that would be fine, but she had one question: “are they humans… or animals?” Of course, when Ess says it, it is more like “amimals” which, coincidentally, is quite close to Wanda Gág’s made-up word (“aminals”) for a story about a dragon called “The Funny Thing.” Ess hadn’t heard that story yet, though. Maybe “amimal” is more of a universal word, the way “mama” is pretty universal because stopping the air with your lips is one of the first things we learn to do, so “mama” is one of the first things we are coordinated enough to say.
• Years ago (like, 2004, the time we first met), Mykala gave me Genevieve the Owl. I never would’ve imagined that our daughter would be playing with that little owl, 13 years later, calling her “my favorite toy in the whole world.”
• Or how about this, watching your daughter… gently… flap… her imaginary butterfly wings while watching a scene in The Secret World of Arrietty.
• Or this: let’s say Ess is driving you crazy, refusing dinner yet demanding food later, running about knocking things over, literally making eye contact with you while she does precisely what you are asking her not to do. Or, as Mykala would describe it, “Tuesday.” But imagine all that, and then you peek around the corner, and now she’s singing an original song to the Christmas tree about how beautiful it is. She asks that you leave the room, because it is a private tree-only performance.

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“The Need to be Alone”:

At a certain point, we have had enough of conversations that take us away from our own thought processes, enough of external demands that stop us heeding our inner tremors, enough of the pressure for superficial cheerfulness that denies the legitimacy of our latent inner melancholy – and enough of robust common-sense that flattens our peculiarities and less well-charted appetites.

We need to be alone because life among other people unfolds too quickly. The pace is relentless: the jokes, the insights, the excitements. There can sometimes be enough in five minutes of social life to take up an hour of analysis. It is a quirk of our minds that not every emotion that impacts us is at once fully acknowledged, understood or even – as it were – truly felt. After time among others, there are a myriad of sensations that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us. Perhaps an idea that someone raised made us anxious, prompting inchoate impulses for changes in our lives. Perhaps an anecdote sparked off an envious ambition that is worth decoding and listening to in order to grow. Maybe someone subtly fired an aggressive dart at us, and we haven’t had the chance to realise we are hurt. We need some quiet time to console ourselves by formulating an explanation of where the nastiness might have come from. We are more vulnerable and tender-skinned than we’re encouraged to imagine.

I quote this at length because it is so-so good and if it ever disappears from the internet, I’d like to have some of it here. A great, brief, read.

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Another round of library books Ess is reading — she is rapidly moving beyond board books and into these easy-reader ones. Basic plot seems to hold her attention now, and we see the storylines incorporated into her imaginative play.

Those Mo Willems ‘Elephant and Piggy’ books are a hoot. Also, does anyone know how to pronounce “Bob Staake”?

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With the recent dusting of snow and the consistently cold temperatures, I think biking season is over. This means I have already taken my last ride with Ess on the front handlebars. It gives a dad watery eyes: the first realization of this, and then typing up the thought now. It’s hard to see something that brought so much joy be taken away by dispassionate, objective time. It makes you feel small, powerless, helpless. Mykala anticipated this day six months ago, and when I wasn’t thinking of taking a bike ride this past summer, she was, and got us out for jaunts I wouldn’t have even thought of. Even Ess helped out: asking to go on rides when I least expected it.

I was walking yesterday along the path of our longest route: an 11 mile tour of the parks and stream in Woodbury, and something caught my eye: 20 saplings in a row! I’d heard autumn was a good time to plant trees, and here they were. Strange, though, a closer look revealed potting soil and seeds between each young tree. Then I remembered: this was an entire line of pretty big trees just earlier this year! Which tripped my memory about something else. Earlier this year, Ess and I spent multiple bike rides talking about how these trees don’t quite touch yet, but someday they will. And we could go back there and see their branches reaching out towards one another. We could go see these very trees, and with just the passing time, they’d be bigger and someday form a solid line of shade. Now, they’re gone.

There’s no big truth here — I have no overarching philosophical conclusion from the anecdote. But it does show me that, sometimes time goes by and things proceed exactly as you think and sometimes not.

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Ess has a stuffed finger-puppet parrot, and she insists that this type of bird is pronounced “paragraph.”

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So, I anticipated this problem when we gave Ess her full name: Esmé… but I didn’t quite realize the extent of the problems she’ll have with computers accurately displaying her name:

… my girlfriend’s surname contains an ‘é’. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having ‘é’ on the address label where the é should be.
…
We’re Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode’s widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code that works perfect as long as all characters are part of the ASCII set, but fails on the characters that don’t conveniently match between UTF-8 (é) and ISO-8859-15 (é).

I doubt these issues will go away within even, say, twenty years.

Sorry about this, Ess. You’re going to receive a lot of mail addressed to ‘Esmé Micek’. And you’re going to learn character encoding the memorable way! I’ll be happy to teach you.

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