Rowena or Rebecca

Clearly I have not yet watched the City Council meeting yet.  I generally save that for the day after when I turn it on in the background while doing some work that allows for multitasking of that sort.   So instead, first a few feel good type notices.

First up!  CASA Alameda will be hosting a Town Hall tomorrow, 6:30 p.m. at Independence Plaza with the purpose to:

CELEBRATE the progress Alameda has made in the last year

CHALLENGE Alamedans to build on those successes and engage more of the community, and

CHAMPION some great Alamedans who have shown leadership locally and globally

Also, at the meeting will be Caitlin Grey, a Senior at Alameda High School, who was selected as one of only 16 U.S. students to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference this December in Copenhagen, Denmark.   She will be attending as the youth delegate for the Sierra Student Coalition.    However, she needs some help to offset the cost to attend the event and need to raise $2500 by December.   If you would like to help Caitlin, you can send checks made out to “Caitlin Grey” and mail them to 1422 Gibbons Drive, Alameda, CA 94501.   But she will be speaking at the Town Hall, great time to send a few ducats to help out an awesome Alameda youth.

And at the exact same time Alternatives in Action will be hosting its fall open house, in case you are interested in seeing what the program is all about.  They are located at the former Woodstock Elementary site.

And speaking of school type stuff, if you have not been checking out Susan Davis’s contributions to In Alameda, you really should.  She is doing a phenomenal job.  Her latest post about inter-district students (aka kids that don’t live in Alameda) is not to be missed.    She points out that the latest offering from the crack news team over at Action Alameda —  which asserts that the East End parents should be allowing more  inter-district students of color into their schools in order to prove to people that they aren’t racists — failed to provide the tidbit that inter-district students generally only fill seats where there is capacity to add additional kids.     And in the fairly recent past, given the skirmishes over lottery vs first-come-first-serve systems, the East End has not really had the capacity to accept additional inter-district students in order to, in the words of Action Alameda, “put their children where their mouth is.”

In addition to being a rather strange choice of words and an extremely discomforting visual, Action Alameda had this to say about East End (and Franklin and Bay Farm) parents as well:

Sadly, some of our most vocal local proponents of “diversity” in Alameda schools are also moms who send their kids to Franklin, Otis, Edison or one of the Bay Farm schools where they’ve evidently been able to shut-out the non-white inter-district transfer students from Oakland. They refuse to put their children where their mouth is.

Alameda’s west-end census tracts, have traditionally been predominantly African-American or otherwise non-white, such as census tract 4276. (See graphic below.) Judging by the refusals to consider elementary school consolidation, and cries for parcel taxes which reinforce the status quo, it seems there are a number of WASP parents and Jewess moms – and other non-white parents too; racial discrimination against African-Americans or other races is not the exclusive purview of Caucasians – in town, who aim to keep it that way.

First of all, I don’t think it is just the East End (and Franklin and Bay Farm) parents are are against school consolidation.   And elementary school consolidation on the East End would be a tricky task since neither Edison nor Otis has the capacity to engulf the other school into its population, and there aren’t too many large developable spaces in the East End to build a mega elementary school.   Second, the suggestion that Edison, or Otis, or Bay Farm, or Franklin bump kids that live in that attendance zone in other to, um, accept a “fair share” as though the inter-district students are some detriment to that school is absurd and would be a logistical nightmare.   Third, “jewess”?   Really?  Seriously, I think the last time I have read the term “jewess” in print was possibly in Ivanhoe.   Oh, and that Saturday Night Live skit, but if Action Alameda is trying to pass themselves off as anywhere near as funny as Gilda Radner they are failing miserably.   When I looked up “jewess” in the online dictionary, according to the Random House dictionary:

Jew⋅ess  [joo-is]
–noun Usually Offensive.
a Jewish girl or woman.
Origin:
1350–1400; ME jewesse.

And the American Heritage Dictionary had this to say:

Jew·ess (jōō’ĭs)
n. Offensive
A Jewish woman or girl.
Usage Note: Like many other English nouns in which the suffix -ess is added to a gender-neutral word to indicate femaleness, the terms Jewess and Negress are now widely regarded as offensive. It is interesting to note that the objection to words formed with the -ess suffix does not apply to words such as Latina and Chicana, whose contrasting forms Latino and Chicano are not gender-neutral but rather refer even in English primarily to males. See Usage Notes at -ess, Latina

Only Easton’s 1897 Bible dictionary gives a benign definition for the term:

Jewess

a woman of Hebrew birth, as Eunice, the mother of Timothy (Acts 16:1; 2 Tim. 1:5), and Drusilla (Acts 24:24), wife of Felix, and daughter of Herod Agrippa I.

But I don’t get the feeling that it was being used in a strictly biblical sense.   It’s seems a strange tact to take when one is talking about being open to diversity.