Cecelie S. Berry

A cover story in Newsweek on “Women’s Leadership” takes a polar tack. There, successful women from politics, science, media and business expound on the unique emotive capacities that women bring to their management style. Unlike the women in the Times story, the women in Newsweek share a sensitivity to work-life balance issues, to building a sense of community at the office, and a keen, unapologetic recognition of the obstacles to advancement women continue to face.

It seems that when it comes to assessing whether women’s emotions are a hindrance or, simply, a difference, we are still as divided as Janus.

I discovered early on that crying was controversial. “People will think you’re weak,” my older sister said, when I came home from a schoolyard fight in tears. “People will think you’re unstable,” I was told as a summer associate in a big city law firm, when I went crying to a female lawyer after a senior partner obliterated one of my memos. “People will think you’re unhappy,” my mother warned when I cried at my son’s brilliant performance as Charlie Brown in the kindergarten play.

Often I’ve been cautioned that emotions make people uncomfortable. As a black woman, I am also aware that my crying jags might fulfill a stereotype: that all black women are prone to fly off the handle, to be illogical, perhaps uncontrollable. I remember, after the O.J. Simpson verdict, how the exultation of many blacks was seen by some as a collective intellectual failure to understand the legal issues of the case. Emotions can be used against you, rendering you either too human, or less than human. And yet, yielding to the tornado of feeling that whirls inside me at times is irresistibly cathartic, and ultimately empowering. Public tears feel liberating, an act of defiance against those who would subdue me with decorum and logic.

My father was the first person to tell me it was OK to cry. Perhaps it was this early support from a male authority figure that has given me the license and the confidence to remain emotional. I was about 7 when he caught me sobbing at the end of the film “Heidi,” at the denouement, when Heidi’s friend Clara tosses her crutches away and ambles across the Swiss mountaintop. My father took me on his lap and said, “Princess, never be ashamed to cry.”

Of course, I was a girl. I never saw him cry, and I don’t know that he ever said as much to my brother, but I doubt it. It’s too bad because they both would have benefited if they’d had the freedom to let the tears flow.

I have become a crying booster. When I see my sons, or other boys, crying, I want to say, “That’s right! Just do it! You da man!” If men and women became more comfortable with expressions of emotion, we could humanize the workplace, lead more fulfilling personal lives and welcome authentic compassion into political life.

The response to Katrina had me over the moon because it illustrates my point: Emotions, particularly when expressed by men, are powerful. Mayor Ray Nagin’s expletives; Kanye West saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on national television; NBA basketball star Stephon Marbury weeping uncontrollably at a press conference; the breakdown of Jefferson County Parish president Aaron Broussard, as he described the calls for help from a friend’s mother who drowned in her nursing home. These incidents placed heartbreak on the political agenda. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s cool appraisal, “It’s an emotional time,” seemed a paternalistic understatement intended to dismiss these protests as uncontrolled ravings. But on display in the days after Katrina were unvarnished tears and genuine empathy, which eventually compelled action.

Tears teach. What stirs us to public emotion reveals our needs, reflects our values. It also asks others to evaluate what, if anything, they are doing to provoke our tears, to take responsibility for our feelings by trying to make things better. This is why emotions are politically incorrect; they impose on us burdensome questions: What have I done? What can I do? The images of men breaking down and speaking out after Katrina exemplified true compassion, not the propagandistic kind that is safely contained and manipulated with photo ops and false camaraderie. It was raw, it was real and it won the hearts and minds of the nation. Let’s hope we haven’t seen the last of it.

According to the Daily Mail, the increased use of cautions is part of a wider program to reduce the number of criminal court cases clogging the justice system and to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Under the new guidelines, a caution may now be used at the discretion of the arresting officer if the offender has no prior record. According to the Daily Mail, those circumsatnces might include situations in which the accused is elderly, and the victim required acknowledgment that a crime had been committed; or when the offender is very young and has been referred to treatment or rehabilitation outside the criminal justice system.

Not surprisingly, domestic violence advocates find the changes troubling. Nicola Harwin, chief executive of Women’s Aid, a charity devoted to eradicating domestic violence, comments, “I think it is worrying that cautioning for rape is something that is not discussed, explored or explained … We need to be told the exact circumstances in which cautions are given, what the ground rules are and whether they are applied properly.” And those concerns seem especially valid given the fact that the number of rapes reported to the police has increased annually, while the number of convictions has declined from one in three cases in 1977 to one in 20 in 2004.

Now 20, Jane Doe has brought a civil action against the three, and named Haidl’s father, a wealthy former assistant sheriff in Orange County, as a codefendant. Doe alleges that Haidl’s father should have been aware of the parties, which featured drugs and alcohol, that were held in his Corona del Mar home, where the assault occurred. In an unprecedented legal move, the $26 million case also names Haidl’s defense attorney, Cavallo, and his two investigators, John Warren and Shawn Smigel, for their actions in causing the plaintiff extreme emotional distress.

Doe alleges that Cavallo and his investigators crossed the bounds of appropriate representation of her attackers when they “staked out her Rancho Cucamonga house, went through her trash, stalked her, improperly obtained her medical records, broadcast her identity and once cornered her in a parking lot while snapping pictures.” Doe recalls that after the defendants were arrested, fliers appeared in the parking lot of her high school naming Jane Doe as the accuser. When she sought refuge in another school, she says, investigators appeared in the parking lot of the new school and screamed her name.

Cavallo said in response, “Everyone knew who Jane Doe was anyway.”

Because of the existence of the videotape, Jane Doe has a strong civil case against her attackers. The outcome of the case against Cavallo is less certain. It challenges the established “litigation privilege” that prevents the actions of a defense attorney in a court case from becoming the subject of a lawsuit. Doe is seeking to overturn legal precedent; her claim against Cavallo will test the boundaries of what actions an attorney may authorize in the defense of clients. If she succeeds, she will have stripped away key weapons in the arsenal of cruel tactics that have intimidated many sexual victims into silence.

Ramos has become a symbol of the country’s small antiwar movement. The protest letter states that El Salvador is “an accomplice to a military occupation that violates the fundamental laws of this country and a co-participant in widely denounced human rights violations.”

After Ramos delivered the letter a group of army officials showed up at her home and told her that her letter would not prevent the deployment of another battalion to Iraq. Ramos told them, “I don’t want those troops to go.”

Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Lutheran Church of El Salvador described Herminia Ramos’ courage. “She is a poor woman of few words whose pain led her to speak out. She’s dared to stand up to the powerful, to our government, and above all, to the military.”

Despite the ongoing cultural debate over what kind of family is best for children, the new policy is supported by findings that single mothers and their children fare just as well as those in two-parent households. The NHS move came as hospitals and clinics began worrying that they could face discrimination claims for denying single women fertility-related treatments.

Natasha Zuka, 35, a software developer, tells the Independent that while she is “considering being inseminated,” she has some reservations about the new NHS policy. Although she believes “that all women should have the option of accessing some NHS funding,” she worries that “the consultation for donor insemination shouldn’t be like a routine check-up.”

Choosing to become a mother “is a very tough decision,” said Zuka, “and shouldn’t be made ‘on the fly.’”

As the editor of an anthology on motherhood by black women writers, I am often asked if all mothers aren’t essentially alike. Many people want to believe that some human experiences transcend the boundaries of race and should be treated accordingly: Motherhood is motherhood. Can’t we all just get along? I’m not altogether unsympathetic to that view, since, as a society, we hope to move toward seeing each other as equal human beings; our hopes, dreams and struggles as uniting and not dividing us.

Bennett’s statement clearly shows why we are not there yet. Black babies come into the world burdened with the prejudice that they will become criminals, probably violent criminals, and that it would be better for America if their lives were cut short. His words give no thought to what it might cost America to lose these black babies — to what leadership, what innovation, what artistry might be forgone. Every black mother must take note of the fact that this view is still extant; their children are considered by some to be a drag on the bright, boundless promise of America. To some, there is no upside in sustaining or investing in their lives.

Knowing this makes our lives as mothers fraught with worry and suspicion, a radically different experience from those of our white counterparts, no matter how criminally predisposed their babies may be. Criminal tendencies exist, according to Bennett, not in some black babies but in every black baby. Apparently, it would take the elimination of every black baby to decrease the crime rate. There is no succor then for those of us who are blessed with education and income: His words lead inescapably to the conclusion that every black baby is guilty before having taken his or her first, tentative steps in the world of polluting it. Bennett defines the problem of crime in America exclusively in terms of race, not of class or conditions, not of poverty or lack of opportunity; it is not, claims the advocate of traditional values, even a problem of moral choice, to be addressed through religious or ethical instruction. It is purely, simply a matter of race.

Bennett’s comment is shocking but revealing, even timely. Until his dethroning for gambling addiction, Bennett was a poster child for the family values movement, which still has tremendous influence in the country and the current Bush administration. Though he should have been completely discredited by his personal failures — no doubt the consequence of his “mistakes” rather than any genetic deficiency — he still retains enough credibility to have a radio show, called “Morning in America.” Regrettably, some people still listen to this man; you have to wonder how many of his followers remain in government, making policy decisions that impact African-Americans.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, David Remnick explores the conspiracy theories that are circulating in the black community in the wake of disasters that have disproportionately affected them. Well, no wonder. When casual comments by white politicians reveal the extent of their racial biases — and an intellectual fondness for genocidal notions — grist is duly added to the mill. There has been among African-Americans a lurking suspicion that the family values movement is not about values but about how some groups, blacks in chief, are morally void, and therefore expendable. Is it any wonder that we postulate, when this view is popularized by conservative leaders, that it might help explain why inner-city schools remain segregated, underfunded breeding grounds for delinquency; why government policies make prisons a better investment than early education programs; why the death penalty, though embattled by DNA evidence, still remains unbowed in many states? And is it so surprising for us to ask whether the racist assumptions of Bennett and men like him were behind the federal government’s dilatory rescue of the overwhelmingly black and poor residents of New Orleans?

Black Americans cannot afford to be naive about the far-reaching tentacles of racism in politics, but neither can white Americans. Of the relationship between aborting black children and decreasing crime, Bennett stated that “extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.” Tricky? The truth is that they are irresponsible and dangerous, a threat to the delicate fabric of racial tolerance that has been sewn in the last half-century and an undermining of America’s greatest value: equality.