Growing Up With Roe

I first became aware of abortion around the same time I became aware of many things related to sex and sexuality – during puberty. It was 7th grade, and I was nursing both a broken heart and raging hormones. One day during a break between classes, my best friend slipped me a piece of paper. On it were the names and numbers of every family planning clinic in NYC. Neither of was us was sexually active – YET, but we both understood the risks of becoming pregnant at such a young age. Although we were aware of HIV at that time, an unplanned pregnancy still posed the greater risk to our educations, happiness, and possibly our very lives. We all knew of girls who were beaten, forced to drop out of school, thrown out of their homes, and expected to get married because of an unplanned pregnancy. When we became sexually active, we needed to know where to go for information, advice, and yes, abortions.

At the time, abortion represented survival to me. As a little brown girl from the Bronx, I knew what the statistics said about girls like me and our chances of “success”. If I knew one thing, I knew this: I was not going to come home and tell my mother that I was pregnant. I was not going to have to tell my father that I was pregnant. And I would do anything to make that true. So I was always practiced safer-sex (my first boyfriend, poor guy, had to wear two condoms the first time we had sex). I limited the number of partners I had. And for years, I kept that piece of paper Selene gave me. For me, abortion meant a chance to go to school and get a job – to create the life I had dreamed of. Abortion gave me the chance to be a mom when and if I wanted to be, not just because my body said it was time. Abortion represented the chance to live.

During high school and college, abortion represented the awakening of my social and political consciousness. I argued on behalf of women’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination. I raged when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court for many reasons, the foremost being his opposition to abortion rights. In fact, for a great deal of my life, abortion was an IDEA. I placed a lot of my identity, political, social and cultural onto my support for abortion rights. In my view, if you didn’t support a women’s right to safe, affordable abortion, then you didn’t support women. No discussion needed. That line was drawn in not in the sand, but in concrete. That was my one non-negotiable.

As I began my 30s and my work in the reproductive justice movement, I carried all the past history with me. And I realized for all my ranting and raving, I had lost sight of the most important part of the abortion experience – the woman. On any given day, I could count more than two dozen women in my life that had had abortions: family, friends, acquaintances, sorority sisters, classmates, co-workers, and neighbors. Each experience was unique, and I was deeply thankful that each had legal access to abortion. My focus shifted from abortion as survival or political to abortion as a lived experience. The innovative work of Exhale and the life-saving efforts of the National Network of Abortion Funds and many other amazing organizations, reminded me that ultimately abortion is about each woman doing what is right for her.

Despite the barriers to access, the constant legislative and legal challenges to abortion, and the ongoing cultural warfare over abortion, I remain grateful for the rights granted under Roe v Wade. And as I approach my own 37th birthday I am more committed to Roe than ever before.

Originally posted at

read more

Choosing "Other"?

This was written by the daughter of a family friend...another swirl girl..represent. I understand that we are all mixed people (well most of us Americans in particular) but I believe that by growing up in a family where you are directly exposed to different cultures, ethnicities and backgrounds; you gain a lot of firsthand experience navigating different worlds and understanding of how people personally deal with race. And as the author states, we are fortunate to be exposed to a multicultural view; it's not confusing and putting ourselves in categories. And as goddesses rising, we continue to push away from the tragic mulatto stereotype and face the world with grace despite the mystery of our "race."

Don't box us in

Multicultural Americans are increasing in number and defining their own ways of life

By Ashanti M. Alvarez

Prompted by Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, The New York Times recently tackled the issue of mixed-race Americans, and did so by profiling a group of students from Rutgers. I read with interest, as I myself am mixed.

Common constructs abound in this article, and in most discussions of multiethnic and multiracial individuals. Invariably, these articles and discussions are about identity and the struggle to find one. What box do we check? Which cultural customs do we adopt? Who will accept us? How do we deal with rejection?

These inquiries and expositions almost always echo, however subtly, the persistent “tragic mulatto” meme transmitted through the decades from antebellum United States. The person born to parents of African and European ancestry (usually a woman, more easily portrayed as a sympathetic victim) struggles to navigate the fine line between a predictably privileged life and one relegated to the underclass. Her inability to find acceptance from others or from herself leads to self-undoing through alcoholism, insanity, or suicide.

But for me, being multicultural has brought great personal freedom. After all, who wants to be confined to a box? Not me. At times I wonder how it feels to grow up as part of a cohesive community, one with strong religious, culinary, and family customs. That must provide a distinct sense of security, belonging, and identity that I am missing.

Missing is a relative word however. I don’t feel deprived or aimlessly adrift because I am “missing” these things. Rather, I consider myself part of the broader world community, more like a global citizen with the independence to absorb and appropriate as part of my own “custom” culture those things that strike a deep chord within me as an individual spirit, and not as part of a larger set of norms dictated to me by family and history.

In a way, it mirrors the Web 2.0 movement. I am my own networking platform like MySpace or Facebook – I am born with a template and can customize it to my liking, and change it when I feel. I can grab applications from other websites and shape them to reflect my personality, principles, and values. I befriend those who find it appealing, regardless of proximity. It’s a sort of “open source” approach to culture, ever changing and improving, only through the contributions of a truly unbounded community.

I am an ethnic mash-up, a cultural sampler, a DJ at my own party. I am “Wikiculture.” (I couldn’t resist.)

It’s also reflected in my circles of friends – at my gatherings, no one race dominates, and many of my closest friends are themselves multicultural who share the sense of boundlessness that guides our consumption of what the world has to offer and our choices of whom to befriend and embrace. We teach each other and learn from one another.

I met many of those friends here at Rutgers as an undergraduate in the 1990s. Rutgers’ diversity provided a gift and a challenge for me. The cultural exposure was second to none; I met students from all walks of life. But the campuses’ heterogeneity meant that groups coalesced around political, personal, and ethnic interests. Today, student groups like Fusion, whose members were featured in the Times article, are providing more places for multicultural students to organize themselves.

The toppling of traditional boundaries is what moved me when I read Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama’s memoir of his life and pursuit of his father’s heritage. But it was his mother’s influence that was central to his creation and his formation as someone who can empathize with many points of view, and someone who continues to shape himself according to the demands placed upon him by his environment.

The book and this New York Times article about his mother’s emphasis on education about other countries and cultures illustrated how this worldview is not exclusive to multicultural people. Sometimes I find myself wishing more people, regardless of race or nationality, were more like Obama’s mother – a white American woman whose hunger for all that was different from her produced a rich life for herself as well as a remarkable public servant for our country.

If there is anything tragic about being a multicultural person, it’s the ongoing exoticization and fetishization that continues even in the new millennium. “What ARE you?” Well, I am human, I’m Ashanti, I’m a woman, a student, a writer. “Well, you know what I mean …what’s your background?”

My background is not particularly unlikely, from my view. My mother, an African-American woman with roots in the South (also with European and Native American heritage), married my father, a Puerto Rican (a mixed-race culture in itself) who arrived in the United States before he started formal schooling. They were both raised in New York City. They were working class – both children of building superintendent fathers and stay-at-home mothers – and college educated. They met while working in the social services. When they recount their upbringings, I hear many more similarities than differences. There are people who are considered “one race” who have more complicated parental stories. Yet I am typically the one regarded as a curiosity.

What am I? I could answer, “I don’t know,” and slide stereotypically into aimless, depressive angst. But I know what I am, and I know who I am – a member of a dynamic community, uniquely prepared to operate in a global world whose arms are open to all.

read more