Finding Fernanda is a sobering story–even more so when you stop to think that it focuses on two women out of thousands at opposite ends of a corrupt system.

Journalist Erin Siegal’s book stretches across the continent: it examines the notorious child adoption business in Guatemala via the ordeals suffered by both Guatemalan native Mildred Alvarado, who loses two of her children not just to kidnappers but to her country’s legal and political processes, and Tennessee resident Betsy Emanuel, an American lured in by a Christian adoption agency when she begins the process of adopting one of the children, not knowing the dirty business behind her wish for another child.

Working with a local journalist over the course of three years, Siegal sheds light on the various players: the American agencies and their in-country networks of handlers and attorneys; the medical professionals and court officials who are either on the take or willfully negligent, like the Guatemala City pediatrician who sees his practice expand as he becomes a go-to resource for adoptionists:

On a child’s first visit to his office, Dr. Castillo would ask about his or her background and felt he had no choice but to take the answers provided to him by cuidadoras (caretakers) at face value. Every time one of the women hesitated, he felt chilled. More than half the children examined at his office didn’t have proper paperwork, such as a birth certificate. Sometimes the names would change. It wasn’t his responsibility to investigate, the pediatrician told himself; he was just there to make sure that the kids were being cared for.

Over time, cases like Mildred’s become a cause celebre in Guatemala, attracting more and more attention from the press and the underfunded authorities before a human rights organization represents her in court. For her part, Betsy also feels her own betrayal at the hands of the agency, pushing her to ask questions of her own, culminating in an encounter with Mildred.

In an e-mail interview with Racialicious, Siegal shared more details about the women at the heart of Fernanda, the industry that brought them together, and her own experience as an American journalist working in Guatemala. The transcript, which includes some spoilers, is under the cut.

Racialicious: Let’s start, literally, from the beginning: you went from wanting to do a human-interest piece on Guatemalan adoptions to finding out about the sordid industry behind it, to shifting your entire storytelling style to cover it. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience at Columbia University, and how it prepared you to put this book together?

Erin Siegal: Spending a year in an intensive program like Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism was a starting point, a shortcut of sorts towards assembling an investigative skill-set. Before this book, I’d written some freelance pieces, but mainly worked as a photographer. I wanted to feel confident taking on complicated investigative stories. A friend who’d finished the Stabile program ahead of me offered very sage advice: J-school is worth it only if you get into Stabile, and if Columbia underwrites your study. It was a huge privilege and a joy to be able to spend a year under the tutelage of Sheila Coronel, the director of the Stabile program. She’s an incredible investigative journalist, and a founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

As far as first-time book writing, “Finding Fernanda” had an intrinsic narrative structure—the book flows in chronological order, from beginning to end, as both women’s experiences unfold. Much of the time, it felt like my chief role as author was not to get in the way of the story.

I would have loved to write a book filled with sparkly, snappy writing, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Instead, I tried to reflect some of the awesome, understated grace and dignity of some of my sources; some of the book’s characters.

R: How long did it take for Mildred Alvarado to trust you with her story? What was going through your mind when you reached her on that initial reporting trip?

ES: Frankly, I was a bit terrified the first time I met Mildred. Her safety and the safety of her family was a primary concern. I also didn’t want to re-traumatize her or pry too much. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t have to speak to me, even though Norma Cruz had asked her to—Mildred feels deeply obligated to Norma, the director of Fundación Sobrevivientes, and I wanted her to understand that she could say no; that it was fine for her to say no.

When we first spoke, I didn’t know how much of Betsy Emanuel’s story checked out. I was still a student, trying to get a handle on what exactly had happened. Mildred and I had a slow conversation, without many direct questions. That first interview was brief in comparison to later ones, when highly specific, difficult details had to be drawn out. Much of the time, my interviews with Mildred were long and meandering; her story came out in chunks and pieces.

R: Throughout the process, you worked in tandem with a local journalist, J (Note: name withheld by request.) How long did it take you to feel comfortable living and working in Guatemalan spaces with J, the journalist who helped you?

ES: Dumb luck and mutual friends led me to find J. When we met, there was an instant connection. What was supposed to be a quick morning coffee turned into a day of hanging out, driving around and trading life stories. It’s rare to find a best friend so quickly, but that’s what J. became, faster than anyone I’d ever met. I still count my lucky stars that I not only had someone like him to turn to for help with context and insight for the book’s investigation, but that I have him as a friend. By the time of my last month-long reporting trip in Guatemala, I was sleeping on his couch. It was invaluable to be able to talk the story through with him, to see what he thought about certain hypotheses. It was also invaluable to have someone to crack stupid jokes with, as the investigation unearthed some incredibly sad situations. He also accompanied me to some rough neighborhoods to knock on doors. J. never admitted how he was scared was with me in certain situations until after the book was written.

R: We’ve talked about transnational adoption on Racialicious in the past but focused more on South Korea and Haiti. I know you mention Congo and Ethiopia in the book; have you gotten a chance to compare the “cultures” behind the adoption industries in various countries? Is this a case of one racket fits all?

ES: There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between the developing countries that have served as “sending” countries for adoption: endemic poverty; a lack of social structures or programs supporting women and families; deep-rooted corruption. Many, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Guatemala, are postwar societies that have struggled with socioeconomic and governmental stability.

I’d say the “racket” is quite simply the lack of regulation—not abroad, but here in the United States. These gaps in oversight mean that child buying, selling, and trafficking for the purpose adoption can still happen today, with little consequence. No adequate legal framework exists in the U.S. for prosecuting adoption crimes, aside from trying to prosecute adoption agencies or facilitators based on money laundering or tax evasion charges. The definition of human trafficking relates exclusively to either forced sex or labor. There are good arguments both for and against expanding that definition.

During my research, I filed numerous public records requests for official U.S. government communication around the issue of adoption fraud. It took three years, but the State Department finally sent me hundreds of pages of previously-unreleased cables. I compiled them into a collection, The U.S. Embassy Cables: Adoption Fraud in Guatemala, 1987-2010, which exposes the U.S. government’s struggle, for over 20 years, tried to navigate the demands of providing fast “customer service” to adopting American families while avoiding complicity in cases of presumed child trafficking. The book of cables is available from www.findingfernanda.com or Amazon as one 718=page paperback or a 3-volume ebook.

R: I saw Adoption Today’s positive review of the book on the FF website. How has the adoption industry at large reacted to the stories you brought to light?

ES: Finding Fernanda has gotten a very positive reception from the adoption community; and I’m very surprised and happy about that, as I tried to make this book widely accessible. My colleague E.J. Graff from the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism warned me beforehand about the probability of receiving hate mail from adoptive parents after writing what some may call a “negative” adoption book. It pleases me to no end that adoption advocates are able to understand this book; to read it and take away information. If there’s a takeaway to Finding Fernanda, it’s that ignorance can and does perpetuate abuses.

Buying and selling children isn’t just an issue to the adoption community—it’s a basic human rights issue. We as Americans need to hold our own government accountable. Through the late 1980′s and 1990′s, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City faced serious problems related to adoption. As Guatemala’s adoption industry began to grow, so did fraud. Women mysteriously turned up dead. Unknown people relinquished children they weren’t related to. Adoption lawyers, whose profit margins depended on volume, acquired “orphans” in any number of creative ways.

R: Regarding your initial conversation with Betsy Emanuel, you wrote that you didn’t understand “how adoption hooked some families.” How close was the answer you got to Melissa Fay Greene’s statement that “we simply wanted more kids”?

ES: It was pretty close! Betsy felt called to adopt. Many other adoptive parents I spoke with related a similar sentiment.

R: Staying with Greene’s statement, it sounds like she came around to thinking about her own privileges and how those played into the adoption game. Did the Emanuels–who undoubtedly had their hearts in the right place–make any similar realizations during their experience?

ES: Betsy’s experience with Fernanda, and then Mildred, was an eye-opener for her in many, many ways. She was forced to confront the ugly side of adoption: entitlement, imperialism, greed, selfishness. She went head to head with people she had considered to be close friends and community when she chose to speak out. She lost friends in doing so.

Both she and Mildred are regular women, who made mistakes, acted naively at times, and then had to face the consequences of their actions. Their story is painful but important. Through the experience of Fernanda and her baby sister’s kidnappings, both women lost a great deal of innocence. Yet they both, Mildred especially, found an incredible amount of inner strength and bravery.

Today, Betsy Emanuel is much more savvy and worldly than she was before. She’s still so very warm, loving, and spunky as hell, but she’s definitely also more cynical; she’s lost her ability to blindly trust. The same is true, perhaps more so, for Mildred. She lives in constant fear that someone will take her children away from her again.

R: And speaking of privilege, companies like CCI seem to play on that, as much as a parent’s heartstrings, what with their focus on adopting children as part of “God’s plan” and whatnot. Is that a fair assessment?

ES: I’d say so. Many of the Christian adoptive parents I spoke to selected adoption agencies based on faith and the desire to do business with those who shared their values.

R: Finally, could you give us an update on the Alvarados? When was the last time you heard from Mildred? Have you gotten to talk much to Fernanda and Ana Cristina?

ES: I heard from Mildred this fall. She had a bad dream, about J. and I getting kidnapped and killed in her neighborhood, and she called to make sure we were OK. Communication isn’t easy: she had to have her sister take her to an internet café, pay to use a computer, and then send us an email asking to call her, since she didn’t want to write the dream out. I’ll be returning to Guatemala later this spring and will be see her then.

Today, Mildred and her family are doing well. Both kids continue to heal. Fernanda is still a beautiful little girl, she’s still crazy for Pollo Campero fried chicken and she attends school. Ana Cristina doesn’t really talk much, she’s a very quiet child. Both girls are close to their other siblings, too.

The last time I saw Ana Cristina, we were standing in Mildred’s patio, and one of the family’s two chickens strutted past. Ana Cristina reached out, quickly, and grabbed it—this tiny kid, who at age four still teeters when she walks and struggles daily with the aftereffects of severe trauma– she caught a chicken, effortlessly. Then she looked over at Fernanda, holding the bird, and grinned.

To be clear, Rosa Parks left us a deliberate legacy of activism, not an accidental activist moment. Furthermore, she, like many other Black women, should not be remembered in the shadows of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. or any other Black male civil rights activist, but rather right alongside of them. We must realize and teach that when Rosa Parks was helping lay the foundation for the civil rights movement, Dr. King was still in high school.

- From “Black Herstory: Rosa Parks Did Much More than Sit on a Bus,” in Ms. Magazine

Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

Courtesy of Illume Magazine

By Guest Contributor Sara Yasin

The Arab Spring shattered everything that I thought I knew about the Arab world. As unrest broke out in the region, and regimes fell, I realised how little I knew. As a Palestinian-American, it has been routine to reference my heritage, from explaining why I do not look like Princess Jasmine, or distancing myself from suicide bombers. The politics of the land of my parents always frustrated me, and I suppose what I understood was mostly gleaned from exhausted conversations overheard in our home or headlines.

To my shock, even though I proved to know very little about what caused the Arab Spring, many seemed to automatically think that the first half of my hyphenated identity automatically made me an authority on the region. While I feel tied to and interested in the struggle for change across the Middle East and North Africa, this is not my Arab Spring.

I last visited my family in Amman around 1995, as a pint-sized feminist homesick for cereal and episodes of Boy Meets World. While I seemed to be fluent in some Southern variation on Arabic, my cousins lived in an entirely different world than I did. The most noticeable difference involved religion; my own culture seemed to incorporate more Muslim values, and I remember my cousins being shocked at my declaration that I would soon wear hijab. Visiting my relatives made me realize I would forever be caught between two worlds.

Despite being identified through my Arab identity in the United States, I was “the American” abroad. Growing up in my hybrid Muslim and Arab American communities, my peers and I routinely referred to new immigrants as “boaters,” swearing that we would never marry a “FOB” (fresh-off-the-boat), in fear of a wife-beating stereotype who could not speak English. Since I never felt that I could entirely belong to the Palestinian or American communities, I launched myself into the world of the mosque, and – particularly after 9/11 – I spent much of my time harping on the fact that Muslims were diverse in faith and views, and blamed a lack of progress on culture, rather than religion.

I eventually learned that the lines between religion and culture could not be as easily separated as I would have hoped. The Arab Spring, as well as meeting friends that actually grew up in the Middle East made me realize I was projecting my own experiences onto an entire region. It did not occur to me that the world that my parents spoke about, and perhaps many of the cultural norms they adopted were part of a world that they left long ago – one that grew and changed after they left. Their views of culture are stuck in nostalgia, embalming their history and identity in a foreign world.

Courtesy of Associated Press

My parents, and many of their friends, had resigned themselves to the fact that the Arab world was rife with corruption and inconsistencies, and that mentality was passed along to us. I did not think that would change, and I suppose I thought that the Arabs without hyphens resigned to the same inevitability. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, I remember calling my stunned father, who said that he never thought he would see such a thing during his lifetime. While attempting to express his trademark amount of pessimism, I swore that in that moment, I heard hope in his voice. That was when I realized how out of touch he and I really were.

Though previously disengaged with the politics of the region, I feel passionate about expanding my understanding. However, I think it is important to make a distinction between my own culture, and that of those in the Arab world. As the children of immigrants, our lives are complicated by a number of cultural notions, rules and norms that can be tied to the lands of our parents, but they grow and change on an entirely different plane. Therefore, my lived reality is far different than that of a cousin living in the West Bank, despite our shared heritage. It is dangerous to fall into the trap of thinking that my shared heritage would automatically make me understand the situation better, or have the authority to speak on it.

I think it is also important to make this distinction, because I feel that many changes need to occur in the respective Arab and Muslim communities that I grew up in. I am proud of the victories of the Arab Spring, but I do not take ownership of them; not only because they are not my lived reality, but also because we need our own shake ups and changes in many Arab-American communities. We cannot claim those victories as our own – if anything, they just show how much work we have left to do.

While I still have an opinion, take an activist interest in the Arab Spring and continue to learn more, this still is not my reality. My childhood involved a world of hummus, fried chicken, Islamic studies, Southern Baptist churches and a world away from war and dictators. While being identified as an Arab in the United States is a large part of who I am, treating me like a voice of Arabs across the globe encourages a static notion of culture, a detrimental thing to reinforce when thinking about issues of history and identity. Treating me like I am not American, only serves the right-wing, closet-Jihadi fantasies of the Anne Coulters and Newt Gingrichs of the world, and only serves to hasten our Arab-American Spring.

On Thursday, Racialicious joined the many websites around the world in shutting down for most of the day to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which threatens to undermine the same creative freedom it was allegedly designed to protect.

SOPA supporters say the bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in October 2011, would protect copyright holders against online piracy. SOPA’s counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), is scheduled for a Jan. 24 vote.

The idea is, the two bills would give authorities more ways to starve  “rogue sites,” as Politico’s Mike Zapler and Kim Hart explain:

Here’s how it would work: If the Justice Department or a copyright holder believed a site was directing users to pirated content, they would go to court. Depending on who’s complaining, different remedies would come into play: In some instances a judge could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site. In others, a search engine like Google could be directed to delete links to an infringing site. The idea is to starve the offending sites of the web traffic that keeps them in business.

And, already there are indications that companies are interested in bringing broad actions for infringement against organizations that most people would consider perfectly legal. Advertising giant GroupM recently asked its entertainment industry customers to compile a list of “sites dedicated to infringement,” not unlike what’s found under PROTECT IP. Universal Music, Warner Bros. and Paramount were three key providers to that list, which ended up covering a large number of perfectly legitimate sites including the famed Internet Archive (widely recognized as the library for the internet). It also included numerous innovative startups that are frequently used by content creators to get their works out, such as SoundCloud and Vimeo. Even more worrisome, it included a variety of publications and blogs, including Vibe Magazine, the quintessential hip hop and R&B magazine founded by Quincy Jones, as well as Complex, a popular lifestyle magazine recently recognized as one of the most valuable startups in New York.

Even worse, it appears that Universal Music also included the personal website of one of its own top artists, 50Cent. The hiphop star has a personal website as well as a website owned by Universal Music. The personal website is much more popular… and it appeared on the infringement list. Suddenly, you can see how letting companies declare what sites are dedicated to infringement can lead to them looking to stifle speech and competition.

— “The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas” by Mike Masnic for TechDirt

So why did Racialicious go dark yesterday?

SOPA and PIPA are bad business for the internet, but are particularly problematic for those of us who engage in cultural critique. If we discuss TV shows, music, movies, comics, and video games, that means that we will illustrate our points with music videos, clips from TV shows, promotional trailers, scenes that make it to YouTube, and scanned images. And all of those things could technically be put under a copyright claim.

We rely on the really tenuous concept of Fair Use to continue to exist. We have some legal protections, but not as many some groups of people (like documentary film makers) who have fought these issues in court. Without fair use Byron Hurt wouldn’t have been able to create Beyond Beats and Rhymes and Sut Jhally would not have been able to create Dreamworlds 3 – if they had to seek permission from the person they were critiquing they wouldn’t have been able to use the material. The problem is there are no hard and fast rules for Fair Use. The EFF cautions us to guidelines and best practices but it is really a matter of what will stand up in court.

I’ve talked to Patricia Aufderheide, director of American University’s Center for Social Media and author of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, off and on for about two years on these issues. She has encouraged folks like me to continue to do our work since, in her summation, fair use is part and parcel with freedom of speech.

But as the owner of an indie media site, there are some serious risks with that. A while back, Boing Boing pointed their readers to a piece by Waxy, who talked about how his transformative project involving Miles Davis turned into a legal nightmare. The quick and dirty – Waxy cleared the samples he used for the album tribute, but pixelated the image cover believing that the work was changed enough under the guidelines. The judge on the case disagreed. While Waxy and his legal team believed they were in the right, he eventually settled for $32,500 – just to stop the mounting legal fees. Aufderheide, who I interviewed for a piece that will run next week on the ONA site, says that this is part of the process and that by exercising free speech, we are also accepting some of the risk that things won’t be seen our way.

But most of us out here in the internet wilds would drop cases and abdicate our rights because our pet projects and sites would not make enough money for us to defend ourselves, let alone continue operations while we do so. And it’s always the little things that can get you – Sepia Mutiny’s legal issues from a few years ago taught us that we have to watch not only what we say about folks, but also what commenters say – since we actively moderate comments, the court of law might see us as endorsing a commenter’s statement even if we disagree and challenge it.

SOPA and PIPA would essentially take the perilous place in which we operate and obliterate that safety net. If we could get shut down every time we post a Beyonce video or a segment of a movie or show that is outside of the promotional material, then this site isn’t worth running. Especially since these arguments wouldn’t be in public – the way the bill is written means that they would shut us down first, and force us to prove why we were not infringing before we could come back up. Allegedly, SOPA and PIPA would mostly target foreign websites – but we all know how legislation and laws tend to creep and mutate depending on who is doing the interpretation.

We aren’t saying intellectual property is a bad thing – for African Americans in particular, it is important to understand our rights to the work we create, for both historical and financial reasons. However, the laws governing intellectual property have not kept pace with the way we live and passing vague new laws is not going to solve this problem.

So do us a favor – write your congressperson. (And someone write for me – I live in DC now, so I don’t have anyone to appeal to with voting power.) If you’re outside of the US, petition the State Department. We have until January 24th to formerly protest, and while most of the co-signers of the bill are backpedaling, it doesn’t mean the bill is dead.

Originally delivered Aug. 16, 1967, at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. Transcript courtesy of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute

Dr. Abernathy, our distinguished vice president, fellow delegates to this, the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, my brothers and sisters from not only all over the South, but from all over the United States of America: ten years ago during the piercing chill of a January day and on the heels of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a group of approximately one hundred Negro leaders from across the South assembled in this church and agreed on the need for an organization to be formed that could serve as a channel through which local protest organizations in the South could coordinate their protest activities. It was this meeting that gave birth to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of southern society. Negroes with the pangs of hunger and the anguish of thirst were denied access to the average lunch counter. The downtown restaurants were still off-limits for the black man. Negroes, burdened with the fatigue of travel, were still barred from the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Negro boys and girls in dire need of recreational activities were not allowed to inhale the fresh air of the big city parks. Negroes in desperate need of allowing their mental buckets to sink deep into the wells of knowledge were confronted with a firm “no” when they sought to use the city libraries. Ten years ago, legislative halls of the South were still ringing loud with such words as “interposition” and “nullification.” All types of conniving methods were still being used to keep the Negro from becoming a registered voter. A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or a chauffeur. Ten years ago, all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.

But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. It is no longer possible to count the number of public establishments that are open to Negroes. Ten years ago, Negroes seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today, civil rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans. In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them.  And the courage with which he confronted enraged mobs dissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom.  He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society, but powerfully integrated within. This was a victory that had to precede all other gains.

In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We gained manhood in the nation that had always called us “boy.” It would be hypocritical indeed if I allowed modesty to forbid my saying that SCLC stood at the forefront of all of the watershed movements that brought these monumental changes in the South. For this, we can feel a legitimate pride. But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.

And before discussing the awesome responsibilities that we face in the days ahead, let us take an inventory of our programmatic action and activities over the past year. Last year as we met in Jackson, Mississippi, we were painfully aware of the struggle of our brothers in Grenada, Mississippi. After living for a hundred or more years under the yoke of total segregation, the Negro citizens of this northern Delta hamlet banded together in nonviolent warfare against racial discrimination under the leadership of our affiliate chapter and organization there. The fact of this non-destructive rebellion was as spectacular as were its results. In a few short weeks the Grenada County Movement challenged every aspect of the society’s exploitative life. Stores which denied employment were boycotted; voter registration increased by thousands. We can never forget the courageous action of the people of Grenada who moved our nation and its federal courts to powerful action in behalf of school integration, giving Grenada one of the most integrated school systems in America. The battle is far from over, but the black people of Grenada have achieved forty of fifty-three demands through their persistent nonviolent efforts.

Slowly but surely, our southern affiliates continued their building and organizing. Seventy-nine counties conducted voter registration drives, while double that number carried on political education and get-out-the-vote efforts. In spite of press opinions, our staff is still overwhelmingly a southern-based staff. One hundred and five persons have worked across the South under the direction of Hosea Williams. What used to be primarily a voter registration staff is actually a multifaceted program dealing with the total life of the community, from farm cooperatives, business development, tutorials, credit unions, etcetera. Especially to be commended are those ninety-nine communities and their staffs which maintain regular mass meetings throughout the year.

Our Citizenship Education Program continues to lay the solid foundation of adult education and community organization upon which all social change must ultimately rest. This year, five hundred local leaders received training at Dorchester and ten community centers through our Citizenship Education Program. They were trained in literacy, consumer education, planned parenthood, and many other things. And this program, so ably directed by Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, Mrs. Septima Clark, and their staff of eight persons, continues to cover ten southern states. Our auxiliary feature of C.E.P. is the aid which they have given to poor communities, poor counties in receiving and establishing O.E.O. projects. With the competent professional guidance of our marvelous staff member, Miss Mew Soong-Li, Lowndes and Wilcox counties in Alabama have pioneered in developing outstanding poverty programs totally controlled and operated by residents of the area.

Perhaps the area of greatest concentration of my efforts has been in the cities of Chicago and Cleveland. Chicago has been a wonderful proving ground for our work in the North. There have been no earth-shaking victories, but neither has there been failure. Our open housing marches, which finally brought about an agreement which actually calls the power structure of Chicago to capitulate to the civil rights movement, these marches and the agreement have finally begun to pay off. After the season of delay around election periods, the Leadership Conference, organized to meet our demands for an open city, has finally begun to implement the programs agreed to last summer.

But this is not the most important aspect of our work. As a result of our tenant union organizing, we have begun a four million dollar rehabilitation project, which will renovate deteriorating buildings and allow their tenants the opportunity to own their own homes. This pilot project was the inspiration for the new home ownership bill, which Senator Percy introduced in Congress only recently.

The most dramatic success in Chicago has been Operation Breadbasket. Through Operation Breadbasket we have now achieved for the Negro community of Chicago more than twenty-two hundred new jobs with an income of approximately eighteen million dollars a year, new income to the Negro community. But not only have we gotten jobs through Operation Breadbasket in Chicago; there was another area through this economic program, and that was the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community. The two banks in Chicago that were interested in helping Negro businessmen were largely unable to loan much because of limited assets. Hi-Lo, one of the chain stores in Chicago, agreed to maintain substantial accounts in the two banks, thus increasing their ability to serve the needs of the Negro community. And I can say to you today that as a result of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, both of these Negro-operated banks have now more than double their assets, and this has been done in less than a year by the work of Operation Breadbasket.

In addition, the ministers learned that Negro scavengers had been deprived of significant accounts in the ghetto. Whites controlled even the garbage of Negroes. Consequently, the chain stores agreed to contract with Negro scavengers to service at least the stores in Negro areas. Negro insect and rodent exterminators, as well as janitorial services, were likewise excluded from major contracts with chain stores. The chain stores also agreed to utilize these services. It also became apparent that chain stores advertised only rarely in Negro-owned community newspapers. This area of neglect was also negotiated, giving community newspapers regular, substantial accounts. And finally, the ministers found that Negro contractors, from painters to masons, from electricians to excavators, had also been forced to remain small by the monopolies of white contractors. Breadbasket negotiated agreements on new construction and rehabilitation work for the chain stores. These several interrelated aspects of economic development, all based on the power of organized consumers, hold great possibilities for dealing with the problems of Negroes in other northern cities. The kinds of requests made by Breadbasket in Chicago can be made not only of chain stores, but of almost any major industry in any city in the country.

And so Operation Breadbasket has a very simple program, but a powerful one. It simply says, “If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” It simply says that we will no longer spend our money where we can not get substantial jobs.

In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of ministers have formed an Operation Breadbasket through our program there and have moved against a major dairy company. Their requests include jobs, advertising in Negro newspapers, and depositing funds in Negro financial institutions. This effort resulted in something marvelous. I went to Cleveland just last week to sign the agreement with Sealtest. We went to get the facts about their employment; we discovered that they had 442 employees and only forty-three were Negroes, yet the Negro population of Cleveland is thirty-five percent of the total population. They refused to give us all of the information that we requested, and we said in substance, “Mr. Sealtest, we’re sorry. We aren’t going to burn your store down. We aren’t going to throw any bricks in the window. But we are going to put picket signs around and we are going to put leaflets out and we are going to our pulpits and tell them not to sell Sealtest products, and not to purchase Sealtest products.”

We did that. We went through the churches. Reverend Dr. Hoover, who pastors the largest church in Cleveland, who’s here today, and all of the ministers got together and got behind this program. We went to every store in the ghetto and said, “You must take Sealtest products off of your counters. If not, we’re going to boycott your whole store.” A&P refused. We put picket lines around A&P; they have a hundred and some stores in Cleveland, and we picketed A&P and closed down eighteen of them in one day. Nobody went in A&P. The next day Mr. A&P was calling on us, and Bob Brown, who is here on our board and who is a public relations man representing a number of firms, came in. They called him in because he worked for A&P, also; and they didn’t know he worked for us, too. Bob Brown sat down with A&P, and he said, they said, “Now, Mr. Brown, what would you advise us to do.” He said, “I would advise you to take Sealtest products off of all of your counters.” A&P agreed next day not only to take Sealtest products off of the counters in the ghetto, but off of the counters of every A&P store in Cleveland, and they said to Sealtest, “If you don’t reach an agreement with SCLC and Operation Breadbasket, we will take Sealtest products off of every A&P store in the state of Ohio.”

The next day, the next day the Sealtest people were talking nice, they were very humble. And I am proud to say that I went to Cleveland just last Tuesday, and I sat down with the Sealtest people and some seventy ministers from Cleveland, and we signed the agreement. This effort resulted in a number of jobs, which will bring almost five hundred thousand dollars of new income to the Negro community a year. We also said to Sealtest, “The problem that we face is that the ghetto is a domestic colony that’s constantly drained without being replenished. And you are always telling us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, and yet we are being robbed every day. Put something back in the ghetto.” So along with our demand for jobs, we said, “We also demand that you put money in the Negro savings and loan association and that you take ads, advertise, in the Cleveland Call & Post, the Negro newspaper.” So along with the new jobs, Sealtest has now deposited thousands of dollars in the Negro bank of Cleveland and has already started taking ads in the Negro newspaper in that city. This is the power of Operation Breadbasket.

Now, for fear that you may feel that it’s limited to Chicago and Cleveland, let me say to you that we’ve gotten even more than that. In Atlanta, Georgia, Breadbasket has been equally successful in the South. Here the emphasis has been divided between governmental employment and private industry. And while I do not have time to go into the details, I want to commend the men who have been working with it here: the Reverend Bennett, the Reverend Joe Boone, the Reverend J. C. Ward, Reverend Dorsey, Reverend Greer, and I could go on down the line, and they have stood up along with all of the other ministers. But here is the story that’s not printed in the newspapers in Atlanta: as a result of Operation Breadbasket, over the last three years, we have added about twenty-five million dollars of new income to the Negro community every year.

Now as you know, Operation Breadbasket has now gone national in the sense that we had a national conference in Chicago and agreed to launch a nationwide program, which you will hear more about.

Finally, SCLC has entered the field of housing. Under the leadership of attorney James Robinson, we have already contracted to build 152 units of low-income housing with apartments for the elderly on a choice downtown Atlanta site under the sponsorship of Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the first project [applause], this is the first project of a proposed southwide Housing Development Corporation which we hope to develop in conjunction with SCLC, and through this corporation we hope to build housing from Mississippi to North Carolina using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout. And it is our feeling that in the next two or three years, we can build right here in the South forty million dollars worth of new housing for Negroes, and with millions and millions of dollars in income coming to the Negro community.

Now there are many other things that I could tell you, but time is passing. This, in short, is an account of SCLC’s work over the last year. It is a record of which we can all be proud.

With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact, however, that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is there’s almost no room at the top. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him. For more than half of his American history, he was enslaved. Yet, he built the spanning bridges and the grand mansions, the sturdy docks and stout factories of the South. His unpaid labor made cotton “King” and established America as a significant nation in international commerce. Even after his release from chattel slavery, the nation grew over him, submerging him. It became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.

And so we still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom. Yes, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt, and we have crossed a Red Sea that had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance, but before we reach the majestic shores of the promised land, there will still be gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice. We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand. Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are.

Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep.” Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority. [applause] The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.

To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents, and now I’m not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black , but I’m black and beautiful.” This, this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

Now another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in to economic and political power. Now no one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. Now the problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now, power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love, implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Now we must develop progress, or rather, a program— and I can’t stay on this long— that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in the century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the, that of a taskmaster or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Now, our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Now, yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with the causes for them. Today I want to give the other side. There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.

And when one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard, and finally, the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him and up in the hills, but he would have never overthrown the Batista regime unless he had had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people. It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.

This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced, and I’m still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country.

And the other thing is, I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we aren’t moving wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.

And so I say to you today, my friends, that you may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels; you may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing. Yes, you may have the gift of prophecy; you may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules; you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights; yes, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge; and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but if you have not love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. You may even give your goods to feed the poor; you may bestow great gifts to charity; and you may tower high in philanthropy; but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. You may even give your body to be burned and die the death of a martyr, and your spilt blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history’s greatest heroes; but if you have not love, your blood was spilt in vain. What I’m trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” These are words that must be said.

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.

What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social.  And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

And if you will let me be a preacher just a little bit.  One day, one night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic: that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

In other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”

And so, I conclude by saying today that we have a task, and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

Let us be dissatisfied, and men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation from the words so nobly left by that great black bard, who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way
That with tears has been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.

Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow, with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome! We have overcome! Deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

Martin Luther King – Where Do We Go From Here? (Conclusion) from MLK Speeches on Vimeo.

It’s time for a true celebration of Martin Luther King Day. This week, Americans everywhere will remember the selfless and historic contributions made by one of the most important figures of the 21st century. Rebuild the Dream members are hosting MLK Day Movement Meet-ups to celebrate Dr. King and link the Civil Rights Movement with today’s struggle for an economy that works for all. We will come together to reflect on the struggles of our past, and unite to secure our future.

This is a chance to touch base with people who are passionate about fighting for Dr. King’s dream. Neighbors and friends will gather in schools, libraries, community centers, and living rooms to watch a short video and open up a discussion on how we can strengthen our movement in 2012.

MLK day is a chance to look back and look ahead — let’s reflect on one of the most important movements of our past as a springboard for the ongoing fight for justice. There is a lot left to fight for, and every day people are continuing Dr. King’s struggle. With a powerful movement sweeping the country, we must gather together and ask: What would Dr. King and other civil rights leaders do today? How can we continue their legacy in 2012 and beyond?

• Reflection for MLK Day: N.J. is failing African Americans (The New Jersey Star-Ledger)

Any honest assessment of New Jersey would show that we have much to do. The recession has exacerbated economic disparities between ethnic groups and genders. As of December, one in six black men were unemployed and looking for work. Among white men, one in 13 were in the same position. And according to the latest data, 27.4 percent of African-Americans live in poverty.

Unfortunately, our state’s current policies are failing the African-American community. Tax cuts and incentives for big business have failed to bring the jobs we need. Meanwhile, devastating budget cuts have burdened struggling families. Over the past two years, New Jersey has taken money out of the pockets of the working poor by cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, slashed property tax rebates for homeowners and tenants, raised bus and train fares and made the dream of a college education more expensive and less attainable. Cuts to municipal aid have led to crime spikes in urban centers such as Newark, Camden and Trenton, and it took the state Supreme Court to guarantee the constitutional rights of students in New Jersey’s cities to a thorough and efficient education.

Meanwhile, cuts to the public sector have had a disproportionate impact on the African-American community. The labor movement has been the pathway to the middle class for people of color and minorities throughout the 20th century, and minorities continue to be the fastest growing part of today’s labor force. With the decline in industrial employment, more than one-fifth of African-Americans now work in a public sector that is facing widespread layoffs and the loss of basic collective bargaining rights for pensions and health benefits.

• Martin Luther King in the Era of Occupy(Religion Dispatches)

King’s insights could very well be “mic checked” at any Occupy rally across our nation. They are even more important in this 2012 election, where the Republican candidates, in their desperation to be on top, have not hesitated to play the Willie Horton race card—whether it is Newt Gingrich’s ridiculous racist statement that President Obama is the Food Stamp President, or Rick Santorum’s declaration that he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

The fact of the matter is, not so much has changed since 1967. African Americans under the first African American President have watched the bottom fall out of the black middle class. What will the 2012 election change about this situation?

Perhaps it is time for the churches to begin to “Mic Check” MLK’s words on poverty, in addressing all of our branches of government in order to bring about Kings’s Beloved Community.

• OWS Prepares to Occupy Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Daily Finance)

[Monday,] OWS plans a march from New York’s African Burial Ground to the city’s Federal Reserve Bank, which is located mere blocks from Wall Street. The event, called “Occupy the Federal Reserve,” will be one of thirteen linked protests taking place in every city that has a Federal Reserve Bank, as well as Los Angeles (which doesn’t have a Federal Reserve Bank, but is pretty important anyway).

Asked why OWS has taken aim at the Fed, Holder argues that the institution has become a key driver of economic injustice in America: “The Federal Reserve undermines our democracy. It’s filled with bankers who are pushing for a deflated currency that will help inflate their pockets.”

But ultimately, she notes, Sunday and Monday’s protests will focus on honoring Dr. King’s legacy of social engagement — and making sure that it continues: “We’re hoping to help inspire a new generation of activists and visionaries.”

• Inequality in 2012 by the Numbers (Center for American Progress)

• 46.2 million: The number of Americans in poverty in 2010.
• 76.7 million: Number of people in families who were living below $44,000 for a family of four (two times the federal poverty line).
• 27.4: Percentage of African Americans in poverty.
• 26.6: Percentage of Hispanics in poverty.
• 9.9: Percentage of non-Hispanic whites in poverty.
• 45.3: Percentage of young adults facing poverty, when they are considered independently of their parents.
• 5.9 million: Number of young adults living with their parents. Those who aren’t saw a 9 percent decrease in their income.
• 39.1: Percentage of African American children less than 18 years old in poverty.
• 12.4: Percentage of white children less than 18 years old in poverty.

To start fixing this problem, it’s important that we grow the country’s number of low-skill jobs, so that those in poverty can begin to find a way out. We also need to maintain a solid safety net for those who can’t work, such as the elderly and the disabled.

By Arturo R. García

Hola mi gente. Seems like a few of you felt uncomfortable with a line my character said on #Workit. I understand your feelings. The show is a comedy and is meant to be viewed in that context. Soy Boricua de pura sepa. I am proud of our culture and I’ve always strived to uphold the positive image of my beautiful island and our people in both my career and personal lives. Pa’lante mi gente.
- Jan. 11 statement by Amaury Nolasco posted on WhoSay, as quoted on LatinoRebels

As his show Work It continued to get skewered by both activists and critics, Amaury Nolasco released the statement above in an attempt to defuse some of the tension.

To be sure, Nolasco’s in a tough spot, seeing as how he’s still under contract. But there’s no way not to consider the statement a missed opportunity. The best he could do here was to hide behind the “it’s a comedy” card, a tactic which is especially unhelpful when nobody’s laughing at any of the jokes – let alone the line, “I’m Puerto Rican. I’ll be great at selling drugs,” which he was forced to deliver in the premiere.

And make no mistake, the chorus against the show is growing. The New York Daily News’ Dolores Prida called it “gratuitously offensive and, worse yet, not funny.” And Time magazine has chimed in by collecting more scathing reviews of the program.

Nolasco’s bosses aren’t doing him any favors, either: after days of silence from ABC executives, ABC Entertainment head Paul Lee took a tone-deaf tack on the topic on Wednesday, according to Entertainment Weekly:

While talking to reporters at the annual Television Critics Tour in Pasadena [Wednesday,] Lee said he was stumped by a campaign from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Human Rights Campaign that accuses the cross dressing comedy of being harmful to transgenders. “I didn’t really get it,” he said. “I loved Tootsie. I still love Tootsie. I didn’t get it. But that’s probably me.”

But he clearly realizes the polarizing show remains a hot topic — which is why he began his morning panel with his idea of a joke: “So what do you think of Work It?” The Brit was loath to say exactly how he feels about the comedy’s (dreadful) performance so far, other than to stick to his original mantra about developing “ambitious” shows. “We thought there was room for a very very very silly show.”But apparently, there isn’t room for another light comedy.”

These continued public-relations gaffes have done little to stop what could be a sizable protest scheduled for 5:30 p.m. today at ABC corporate headquarters in New York City – specifically 77 W. 66th Street and Columbus Avenue. Organized by the National Institute for Latino Policy, the demonstration will continue calls for a public apology from ABC for the show’s content.

If any Racializens are going, we’d be very interested in hearing from you, be it on this thread, or by contacting us on Twitter or e-mailing your pictures and notes to team@racialicious.com.

By Guest Contributor Manissa McCleave Maharawal, cross-posted from in front and center

(In some ways this is a response to Esther Choi’s piece, and in some ways it isn’t…)

I spent yesterday evening as I spend many of my evenings: in the Financial District, at Occupy Wall Street, attending a Direct Action meeting, eating dinner, going to the General Assembly, and going to a POC-DA affinity meeting. As I was standing in the food line, waiting for my portion of beets, greens, cole slaw and bread, the conversation turned to Esther Choi’s article, “Private Danny Chen, and why I will never again reach out to OWS about something that matters to me.” Yesterday when I read this article it nearly made me cry: both because of how right she is, but also because I, somehow, felt personally responsible for the injustices and unjust and oppressive behavior that she had experienced at OWS. As someone who both identifies with the movement and as someone who has worked from the very beginning of my involvement at OWS to confront issues of racism and oppression within OWS, while still standing in solidarity with it, reading Choi’s article I suddenly felt very, very tired, sad, and angry.

To be honest, I was angry at both OWS and at her. I think OWS is strong enough and mainstream enough now to withstand serious critiques, and I think whether weak or strong, every movement should be self-critical. I’m tired of hearing that we can’t take on issues of racism and oppression because it would be “divisive.” I’m tired of hearing people call People of Color (POC) Caucus at OWS divisive because we bring up uncomfortable truths.

A friend of mine who is visibly Muslim (she wears hijab) said the other day, after recounting an incident where she was told that she had made people in a meeting “more uncomfortable than they had ever been” by telling them that she had been triggered by a racist sign: “If this is the most uncomfortable you have ever been, then please realize how lucky you are.” I laughed and agreed with her, but her comment stuck with me. In fact, this is exactly what some people everywhere, including at OWS, don’t want to have to realize–that they have a certain set of privileges in not feeling uncomfortable and that these privileges impact them and everyone around them.

So in these ways I completely understood what Choi meant and why her article feels and is so very viscerally and justly angry.

But in other ways I think her article includes troubling oversights. In making sweeping generalizations about the way an entire movement acts in regards to community events based on the actions of three people, in making them typical of an “OWS protester,” Choi does the movement and herself a disservice. Yes, some people act in these ways, I have seen and experienced similar actions. But not everyone does. If we are going to be strong as a movement, then we need to hold those who do act in oppressive and violent ways accountable while not collapsing the whole movement into their actions. To ignore the work of the POC Caucus, the Anti-Racist Allies Group and countless other people within the movement that do crucial work around racial justice issues is to do us all a disservice. It, in effect, actually silences the work of these people and groups in problematic and irresponsible ways.

All that said, I think we need to take the space that Choi’s article has opened up to talk about issues of accountability, oppression, racial justice and the way that these issues affect politics of our movement, frankly. That is not to say that people haven’t already been working hard to open up these spaces. They have, and I truly believe that more and more openings for these conversations are being created. The openings for these conversations are being created, for example, through the racial justice training that took the place of Spokes Council a few weeks ago, through a shift in language where we think about how to organize from the margins to the center, through the creation of new affinity groups and accountability structures, through holding each other as a community accountable and having conversations about what this means.

And so in the spirit of having these conversations I made a list of some of the ways that I think OWS needs to push itself to make sure that this is a movement that has has racial justice and anti-oppression at its center:

1) The “99%” does not mean that differences do not exist: I love the rhetoric of the 99%, I really, really do. I chant it at marches, I write it in my pieces about OWS. But we need to be aware of the ways that it erases difference by saying that because we are all in the same percentage bracket, we all experience this bracket the same way. This isn’t true. Let’s be careful and understand the 99% as a “complex unity” as Angela Davis so smartly said when she addressed the People’s University. Let’s draw strength from the differences within the 99% while also being explicit that, let’s say, white supremacists might technically be a part of the “99%,” but that they aren’t who we want in our movement nor who we would organize with.

2) We need to have a critique of the language of “Occupy” built into our movement: This has been said, very well, many times so I won’t rehash it. I don’t actually think we need to change the language of “Occupy.” At this point it seems like we have re-claimed the term, and if this is a movement about re-claiming then I think we might count this as one of our successes. But I want to be very careful here: we need to be critical of its use, we need to say both things at once: “De-colonize Wall Street” and also “Occupy Wall Street” and to understand how these things can be understood together. We need to say: “Occupy Wall Street, Unoccupy Iraq”. We can do this, it is possible, but the only way that this can happen is if a critique of the “Occupy” language becomes front and center in our movement (a good piece on this is here and here).

3) Privilege still exists even as people feel their conditions worsening: The Occupy movement has taken hold and sparked the nation’s imagination because so many Americans are currently experiencing the effects of the country’s economic downturn–the effects of years of corporate greed and power in this country. Many of those affected were economically privileged, and have seen this privilege start to disappear. However, they don’t like to hear that they still have a lot of access to other types of privilege, namely white privilege. So, what to do about this disturbing disconnect? People need to understand their privilege as having damaging consequences not just to those who don’t have access to it but also to themselves, simply because oppression anywhere creates oppression everywhere. Until there is first, a recognition that privilege exists and then the recognition that privilege oppresses us all, we won’t be able to move forward (for more on this go here).

4) Capitalism has always relied on racism to exist: If this is a movement about confronting capitalism and creating alternatives to it, which is my understanding of Occupy, then we also need to understand that capitalism relies on racism to perpetrate and reproduce itself; that it has always relied on a racialized division of labor and that we cannot tackle either without taking on both. The capitalist class has historically used racism to divide the working class, so if we are going to survive, we have to work hard, right now, to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us. When racism is thought about in this way, it is everyone’s problem. Everyone is affected by it, not just people of color. I am talking about both interpersonal racism as well as structural racism. In order to be strong, grow and survive, we need to be able to address both these levels of experience and analysis. We need to be both anti-oppressive as well as organize with a racial justice framework, and both must be done simultaneously in order to move forward.

The movement I am a part of still inspires me all the time. It inspires me for a range of reasons: because hundreds of people show up and stand in the freezing cold for the General Assembly like they did this past week; because I still have some of the most inspiring and exciting conversations with my friends from OWS; because on New Year’s Eve we re-assembled in Liberty Plaza and danced and hugged and chanted: “Whose year? Our year!”; because we are re-occupying homes in East New York; and because I think we do have the potential to create real change in this country. I am excited for the future of this movement and our communities and I agree with Choi that oppression should always be intolerable, but I also believe that in order to create the spaces that we want to see, we have to work for them. This is constant work, this is work that I do in my personal life and my political life, and I have found true allies within OWS who take on this work with me.

Received word through social media that civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, best known for being one of the few people to openly defy the government’s unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has died. He was 93.

Hirabayashi was arrested, convicted and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the Supreme Court (Hirabayashi vs. United States) — the first challenge to Executive Order 9066. The Court ruled against him, 9-0. However, his wartime convictions were successfully overturned forty years later.

Rest in peace. Here’s the Facebook post from Mr. Hirabayashi’s son, Jay Hirabayashi, announcing his passing:

My Dad, Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who was ninety-three, passed away early this morning. He was an American hero besides being a great father who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity, and justice. My Mother, Esther Hirabayashi, who was eighty-seven, also passed away this morning about ten hours later. She was a beautiful, intelligent, generous soul. Although my parents were divorced, they somehow chose to leave us on the same day. I am missing them a lot right now.

Here’s a good summary of Hirabayashi’s landmark case:

During World War II, Gordon Hirabayashi was a 24-year-old senior at the University of Washington – an American citizen by birth – when, as acts of civil disobedience, he defied a curfew imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry and refused to comply with military orders forcing Japanese Americans to leave the West Coast into concentration camps. He appealed his convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in one of the most infamous cases in American history, held that the curfew order was justified by military necessity and was, therefore, constitutional. A year and a half later, in Korematsu v. United States, the Court relied wholly on its decision in Hirabayashi to uphold the constitutionality of the mass removal of Japanese Americans.

Forty years later, in 1983, represented by a remarkable and dedicated team of lawyers, Mr. Hirabayashi reopened his case, filing a petition for writ of error coram nobis in Seattle, Washington, seeking vacation of his wartime convictions on the ground that the government, during World War II, had suppressed, altered, and destroyed material evidence relevant to the issue of military necessity. In 1986, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion authored by Judge Mary Schroeder, vacated both Mr. Hirabayashi’s curfew and exclusion convictions on proof of the allegations of governmental misconduct.
Hirabayashi v. United States, 828 F.2d 591 (9th Cir. 1987).

Next month, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality will host a major conference to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Ninth Circuit opinion in the Hirabayashi v. United States coram nobis case. It’s happening February 11 at Seattle University. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, and to register, go here.

UPDATE: Here’s a statement on Gordon Hirabayashi’s passing from the Korematsu Institute and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice: Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education and the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice Remember Civil Rights Leader Gordon Hirabayashi.

There will be a memorial service for Gordon Hirabayashi this Friday, January 6 in Edmonton, Alberta:

Quaker Memorial Meeting for Worship
1:00pm Friday, January 6, 2012
Edmonton Japanese Community Association
6750 88 Street Northwest Edmonton, AB T6E 5H6
(780) 466-8166

In lieu of flowers for Gordon Hirabayashi, donations can be made to:

1. The CapitalCare Lynwood, where Gordon Hirabayashi was cared for in the last three years of his life.
2. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Scholarship Fund within the Dept. of Sociology at the University of Alberta.
3. The Gordon K. Hirabayashi Endowment Fund at the University of Washington.

In lieu of flowers for Esther Hirabayashi, donations may be made to the Canadian Association of Medical Teams Abroad, c/o 103 Laurier Drive, Edmonton, AB, Canada T5R 5P6.

By Guest Contributor Yvonne Yen Liu, cross-posted from Mobilizing Ideas

Marshall Ganz calls Occupy a moment, but we have a history and a future.  My generation, in North America, was birthed over 12 years ago, in the streets of Seattle, when trade unionists joined with anarchists to disrupt the workings of global capital, well, in this case, the meeting of a major player, the World Trade Organization.  We refused to accept capitalism as a natural way of ordering our social world; “Another World is Possible” was a popular slogan.  We manifested alternatives in organizing our collective refusal.  Instead of relying on institutions created under capitalism, we created our own clinics, schools, decision-making bodies, and media outlets.  Some of which have formalized into counter-institutions that exist today.  The global network of independent media centers and community health centers, like the Common Ground clinic in New Orleans, started after Hurricane Katrina, are our legacy.

The Millennials may find inspiration when their peer, 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi, educated yet unable to find a good job, self-immolated himself on the steps of the Tunisian governor’s office, sparking the uprisings of the Arab Spring.  Or, when 24-year old Bradley Manning, in a fit of frustration with military bureaucracy and the war abroad, uploaded confidential documents onto the Wikileaks website.  What is the future of the Occupy movement?  Approximately a half-year in and many camps have been violently evicted from the land on which they pitched their tents.  Many of us spent this late fall awake in an overnight vigil to defend a camp or recovering from being pepper sprayed by cops when trying to setup a new one.  At the time of writing this, only Occupy D.C. remains intact.  But, that is not the end of Occupy.

Like seeds released into the wind, we lodged into soil, to hibernate through the winter, and to unfurl new shoots in the spring.  For what Occupy has created is an opportunity for us collectively to create new subjectivities and to dream of a new world.  Social theorists have long thought about the relationship between the individual and society as a dialectical one, each informing the development of the other.  George Mead, for instance, wrote that social reality was an external thing that impressed itself upon and shaped a child during the process of socialization.  But, the self that had ideas that challenged social norms could win acceptance by the larger group, therefore changing society.

Under capitalism, Herbert Marcuse thought, the individual lost her capacity to think critically and the desire to yearn for freedom.  We lost our sense of self, subjectivity, and became objects in the process of production.  All of human life was organized for the instrumental means of achieving profit for the 1%.  We became mechanical producers, who worked to make a salary to enable us to passively consume mass culture and media.  This one-dimensional thinking dominated culture and ideology, focused only on keeping calm and carrying on.

One outcome of Occupy can be foretold by the example of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).  Today, 350,000 families occupy 20 million acres of land, a challenge to global capital, which has setup white picket fences around the world, cordoning off what was once the commons.  MST’s flag celebrates the industry of the landless worker, represented by a couple holding aloft a machete, and their willingness to fight for land reform, with blood if necessary.   This flag accompanied MST leader Janaina Stronzake, when she visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment, before it was evicted from Zuccotti Park.  “Occupation was a time to grow,” she told the assembly, “To grow education, empowerment, and food community.”  The crowd echoed after her, amplifying Janaina’s words using the human microphone, “Occupy, Resist, and Grow!”

Janaina grew up in a MST occupation.  Her family lost their land to banks in the late 1970s because, like many family farmers in the global south at the time, they borrowed money in order to adopt industrial agricultural techniques.  Indebted and unable to pay back what they owed, the bank seized their land, displacing newborn Janaina, her eight older brothers, and parents to the city, where they survived precariously as field laborers.  But, in 1985, her family joined the MST and they moved into a camp, with 225 other families, for two years, where they studied and prepared to occupy land in the western part of the Parana state.

The MST uses a two-step method to expropriate land lying fallow, owned by corporations or latifundios, for collective use.  First, families are moved in rural camps, typically dwelling in shacks alongside highways, until land is identified for settlement.  This can take anywhere from six months to five years, but camp living has proved to be important preparation in transforming atomized individuals into collectively minded occupiers.  Camp residents receive a rigorous dose of participatory education, on politics and critical thinking as well as practical matters such as sustainable farming techniques and how to manage a cooperative.  Without this experience, families that move directly onto occupied land typically leave within a few months.  But, with this preparation, more than 90 percent stay for the long run.

The second step is occupation of the land by families, usually at dawn when security guards and police are sleeping.  Janaina remembers arriving early one morning with her family to an unused piece of land, but the police were waiting and prevented the families from entering the land.  So, they camped on the side of the road for two months, where conditions were difficult,  “hunger and cold were always stalking us,” Janaina recalled.  Brazil is unique in that, beginning in the nineteenth century, one had legal claim to land if it was serving a social function.  While petitioning through bureaucratic pathways for the title, the MST also moved the camp to occupy the plaza in front of the state capital, Curitiba.  After participating in seven occupations, Janaina’s mother finally acquired land, collectively.

Once land is occupied, the collective immediately begins to dig in and grow roots.  Peter Rossett describes how “crops are planted immediately, communal kitchens, schools, and a health clinic are set up, and defense teams trained in nonviolence secure the perimeter against the hired gunmen, thugs, and assorted police forces that the landlord usually calls down upon them.”  This is the new society that the MST is building alongside the current model of global capitalism.

Already, we are experimenting with land occupations.  A faction of Occupy Oakland tried to takeover a foreclosed homeless shelter on the day of the general strike.  They were unsuccessful, but planted a seed.  A seed that took root on December 6, the national day of action, where organizers across the country occupied foreclosed properties.  Next, come spring, as Max Rameau promises, we will emerge and bloom.

Postscript: I had the opportunity to ask Janaina: How does the MST example apply to Occupy, which does seem primarily to be urban? I found her response quite profound. She said, “It’s time to break the Cartesian dualism, step away from the rural versus urban dichotomy, and think of other ways to defend land, grow food, and distribute resources… We who are living in ‘urban’ places can create ‘rural’ spaces, to grow our own food.”

I can’t stress enough that the following article only represents my opinions as an individual, and are not to be affiliated with any other person, organization or community.

December 15, 2011

Tonight was the march and vigil for Private Danny Chen, who was killed in the army on October 3, 2011. We don’t know how he died. The army is withholding all evidence, which it owes to the family, that could answer this question. What we do know is that he did not die in combat. We know he was constantly harassed and discriminated against by his fellow soldiers for being Chinese. We know some really twisted, violent hazing was committed against him by his superiors, right before he was found dead. We decided to hold a march and vigil because the army is currently carrying out an investigation, and we have to show them that the public is watching and that they cannot get away with another cover-up.

Just yesterday, board members of OCA-NY along with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and Council Member Margaret Chin went to the Pentagon to meet with high-ranking army officials, where they made demands that may fundamentally transform the way that hazing and bias crimes are dealt with in the military. We need them to know that the public and the media are watching, and that if they do not meet our demands, we will redirect our campaign to focus on our young men and women who are thinking of enlisting. These young people need to know before they enlist, the Army will not protect them from harm by fellow soldiers.

Before the vigil, we reached out to many organizations to support, and 36 signed onto our cause. We also reached out to Occupy Wall Street because justice and government transparency are in its mission, and we thought we could use the numbers and networks in OWS to bring out more support for our vigil, and we also wanted to show our solidarity with OWS.

So imagine my surprise when protesters from OWS showed up with OWS signs, not to stand with others lining up for the march to Columbus Park in support, but to stand in front of everyone, trying to direct them. These people, who had not, until that very moment, put in one bit of effort into organizing this action, who had no idea what the plan was, who had no idea who we were or who the family was, decided that they were going to make this an OWS event.

Conflict erupted when one of the OWS-affiliated protesters came with a giant Communist Party of China flag. This white man decided that he was entitled to represent us, at this protest for an American soldier, with a flag that has been used by this country to vilify the Chinese American community. When people began asking him not to demonstrate that flag because it was not the purpose of the event and we were in no way representing China or political parties, he began screaming at us about how we were ANTI-COMMUNIST and trying to take away his first amendment rights. We told him that Danny Chen was an American soldier and we wanted to respect the family and their wishes, but he continued screaming violent accusations at us at the top of his lungs and disrupting the event, until one of Danny Chen’s family members, on the verge of tears, finally convinced him to leave.

Then I overheard another OWS protester, who had earlier been trying to direct the protesters, give a video interview, and heard him saying, ever so solemnly, “They don’t want me here.” My question is: who are we and who are you? How do you expect to be welcomed as one of “us” when you have, from the beginning, made every effort to set yourself apart? Why do you think that you as an individual should be primary in this march for Private Danny Chen and his family? Why are you here giving video interviews?

Another white OWS protester began trying to use the human mic to direct the protest, and told me that I shouldn’t be using the blowhorn because the cops were going to take it away. I told her that, no, we had a parade permit and sound permit, which was why the police were there clearing the streets for our march. She looked confused and stopped yelling.

OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me – she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

This is the problem I’ve always had with OWS—that it was a movement that came to earth as Christ himself, here to save us, to make the history of struggle, and the ongoing social justice work in this country by marginalized communities, irrelevant, and then to take the moral high ground and act as if we were the face of THEIR oppression when we took issue with their tactics.

I understand many people who came to the vigil from OWS were there with the right intentions, and it was great to have their support and solidarity. But these incidents of ignorance from OWS have been way too frequent and predictable to be isolated events. These incidents show that the OWS movement, while creating new opportunities to change the unjust world we live in, is, in many ways, the beloved child of our racist, sexist, intolerant capitalist society.

As marginalized people in this country rise, new forms of oppression are at work – those who have not experienced systemic oppression are claiming it anyway, turning social justice on its head and diluting the messages and movements that have been our hearts and souls. I think this quote from the New Jim Crow sheds a lot of light on why OWS emerged the way that it did: “Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.”

I tried to love the movement. Since I wrote about OWS last, I’ve been attending OWS meetings and marches. I reached out to OWS about this action. I tried so hard to understand the movement, to check my own biases and question any negative feelings I had towards it, to engage with it as much as time would allow. I had so many conversations with people in OWS spaces, which usually just left me feeling perplexed, as the basic factors involved in social and economic inequity always seemed to be news to the people I was speaking to or a curious piece of trivia to be quickly passed over, and people would instead start talking to me about things like herbal medicine as if I had any fucking clue, or would say really ignorant things that would leave me feeling attacked.

I deal with ignorant bigots every day and am willing to do so as part of my own commitment to my work, but when bigots come posing as allies and then very dramatically play the martyr when we call out their bullshit, it really derails our ability to do our work.

I now realize that my time cannot be wasted trying to work in spaces that are paralyzed by ignorance. I will continue to engage in my activism using my experiences and empathy to guide the way I choose to live and work. But I’ll choose to do it in spaces where bigotry, drama, and ignorance do not masquerade as the thing I love. And I’ll choose to work with people who join community actions to respect and support those communities, not to objectify and use them as ornaments for their movement bereft of genuine compassion and understanding.

Besides the oppression brought by some OWS protesters, the march and vigil were beautiful. Over 400 people came out, and the interactions were passionate and heartfelt. I am proud to be an Asian American and glad to be involved in the struggle for a military and a world that does not ruthlessly exclude and exterminate those who are different in any way. I feel blessed to have a fierce mentor who, during the meeting with the Pentagon, told the Assistant Secretary of the Army to sit back down when he tried to leave their meeting early, and he actually listened. I think that our capacity for resistance is growing and we are finally feeling empowered and entitled in this country. We have taken far too much shit, and we are unapologetically asking to be seen as fully human. I am excited for the future of our communities and look forward to growing with each other and our true allies, and despite the importance of building relationships with the more enfranchised, we should never have to tolerate that kind of oppression, least of all in the spaces where we are trying to fight it.

Photos courtesy of Kwong Eng

Click here for coverage about the march and vigil.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after this one, Esther wrote a second piece. She wanted to center Danny Chen and the struggle for justice and not OWS. Also, in the time between the articles, eight soliders were charged in the death of Danny Chen, meaning that some progress was made. Click here to read “Private Danny Chen and threats to justice everywhere.” Next time the Chen case surfaces up in the news cycle, we’ll post the full piece here. – LDP

Starting off 2012 with action, Decolonize PDX released a statement on New Year’s Day by framing January 1st as a day of rememberance for those lost to state violence. And who is this collective?

Decolonize PDX is a collective of people of color.

We decolonize because we know this land is already occupied.

We decolonize because communities of color have been on the front lines of the 99 percent here and globally for centuries.

We decolonize because the system is not broken; it is working exactly the way it was intended.

We decolonize because any movement that doesn’t acknowledge this replicates oppression.

Check the full statement here.

“Whose food?”

Our food.

Signs of “Turn the beet around!” (an obvious nod to the fact that most beets in the US, the source of a large percentage of our granulated sugar, are genetically modified), “Zucchini Park,” and “Take back our food!” filled Wall Street as the members and supporters of the #OccupyBigFood movement made their way into Zucotti Park, with myself and the toddler in tow, bringing up the rear.

I’d made the decision to go a long time ago, when one of the supporters left a link in my comments regarding the original affair. That scheduled Saturday was also the date of the first “Big Snow” of the pending 2011-2012 disgustingly-wet-and-blisteringly-cold season, so it was ill-attended (which meant that I wound up out there among the #OWS Tent City.)

The human mic system at Zuccotti Park blasted valuable message after valuable message, meaningful morsel of info after meaningful morsel:

“Corporate entities are ensuring big subsidies for themselves while convincing Congress to cut money from programs like SNAP…”

“The Union that makes up the people that SERVE that food stand in solidarity with the people who are treated inhumanely and are made to harvest that food for pennies,”

“We want a sustainable system that ensures and guarantees access for everyone,”

All things that we stand for here, though it may not be coming from the same angles as those at the #OccupyBigFood rally.

I attended the rally because, aside from the fact that I felt some kind of solidarity to a movement that supports living la vida locavore, but I felt like it needs to be clear that the people who complain about the current food climate are not merely wealthy and white. Persons of color, women, mothers, children… we are all affected by poor decision making, favoritism, nepotism and ass kissing that takes place in Congress, and it’s important for us to do what we can do to prevent people from dismissing valuable dialogue as “elitism,” which – as we all know – is code for “privileged white people talk.”

I stood as a part of the huge human mic system and helped convey the message that we are not powerless, we are not to be dismissed as merely “foodies” and we are not going anywhere. We – according to “you” – have money and will spend it locally and support our own system. We’ve decided yours isn’t working.

That’s what I left #OccupyBigFood with – a renewed sense in the fact that not only is the current system an utter failure, but it is up to us to change it for ourselves. If the government that we elect can justify cutting the program that funnels money into small businesses in underserved areas – because, let’s face it, that’s exactly what food stamps is and exactly what it does – thereby causing the businesses in the area to suffer as well as the people who use food stamps to buy their products, then you can rest assured that it’ll be a long damn time before they do anything to secure our food supply. They don’t care like we do, and that – at least, to me, is fine.

Why? Because if we are conscious enough to know that we should buy locally, we are also conscious enough to know that there are those of us who don’t have access, and need help getting there. If we can innovate enough to turn a backwards bathrobes (also known as a Snuggie) into a million-dollar invention, surely we can innovate to create small sub communities that can enjoy produce and meat without adulteration. We can continue to educate about healthy choices and assist, as well as support, our peers in making them.

There were a few speakers at the event – the leader of a food workers’ union, a gentleman who identified himself and his wife as “One of the 1%ers you complain about, but we stand in solidarity with you!” and a certain nutritionist you might’ve heard of, but at the end of it all, I wish I had grabbed the mic and had my OWN mic check:

“In a world where any human being with a heart believes it is acceptable to cut money intended to assist the poor in staying fed as well as funding the small businesses in the area who service those poor, it is unfathomable to me that people could turn their backs on the idea of genuinely helping and supporting one another. These companies, with their lies and disregard for their customers, they don’t give a damn about you and me… they only care about what’s in our wallets… well now, they’re not getting what’s in THERE either! I’m spending my money as far away from those corrupt big names as I possibly can, and maybe THEN the Krafts, General Mills’ and Kelloggs of the world will finally change their ways!”

Alas, I didn’t. I was too busy consoling the ornery kindergartner (!) standing on my leg. My overall point is that we don’t have enough time to wait for someone else to do this for us, and our best means of supporting the movement is by trying to funnel as much money as possible into its expansion. Multinationals started out as tiny operations once, too. Money helps any-and-everything grow. You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. I think that message was conveyed well without me, anyway.

At any rate, the rally was successful. I’m interested in what coverage – if any – the rally may have received, and whether or not anyone was able to get my full ‘fro in a shot… er, I mean, whether the diverseness of the crowd was covered adequately. I also got to meet a certain awesome author and professor named Marion Nestle, and thank her for her book. If you didn’t notice, I’m a bit of a “follow the money” type, and talking to me in terms of logic and corrupt policy in regards to corporate decision making is a pretty good way to convince me that money, not health, was the reason behind so much of what we see in food today. You follow the money, you can find the reality behind anything. I wish more people thought that way.

Would I attend again? Of course. To help express the fact that there are people who live in food deserts who have no choice other than frito-lay products and lunchables; to remind us all that even in our quest for food sustainability, the issue of compromised health is plaguing those of us who either struggle with affording or struggle for access to fresh and local produce; and to help us realize that education and conscious consumerism are the best ways to affect change. No greater reminder of this exists, for me, than the fact that our community is so culturally and financially diverse. Some of us are in cow-pools; others have given up meat completely because they can’t afford the ethically grown stuff. Some of us are complete locavores; and some of us are strictly frozen-vegetarians. Some of us are wild pescetarians, and others are, well, budgetarians. We know Hippocrates was right – “let thy medicine be thy food, and let thy food be thy medicine” – and now it’s time the rest of the country learns that, as well.

PS: Okra pie, though?

Image credits: Erika Nicole Kendall

Illustration by Gary Bedard

By Guest Contributor Chris Fan, cross-posted from Hyphen Magazine

Last Monday, Oakland’s mayor Jean Quan ordered the forcible eviction of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s Oakland encampment, which had been situated directly outside of her office at City Hall off and on for the past two months.

Wakened in the early morning by an army of police outfitted in riot gear, demonstrators remained peaceful as more than 100 tents were destroyed, and dozens of arrests were made. The action precipitated the resignation of two of Quan’s top staffers, bringing the total resignations in response to her handling of Occupy Oakland to three. It also deepened this writer’s disappointment and embarrassment over the actions of someone who, not too long ago, could have been described as embodying the best of the Asian American movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Quan was intensely involved with the Third World Liberation Front’s (TWLF) radical efforts to create ethnic studies programs, ultimately spearheading the establishment of the Asian American Studies program there. After graduating, she continued her activism in New York’s Chinatown, and, much later, joined Oakland School Board, and City Council, where she fought for a variety of progressive causes. Last summer, when large-scale demonstrations broke out in protest of a lenient verdict handed down to BART police officer Johannes Mehserle — who was on trial for shooting Oscar Grant while the latter was face-down and restrained — it was hardly a surprise when Jean Quan joined in a human chain to protect demonstrators from riot police. She was just dusting off an old skill set.

So, when Quan won the mayor’s seat last November, I and so many others were overjoyed not only that she had become Oakland’s first Asian American and first female mayor, but that Jean Quan the progressive activist had become mayor.

Why she decided to step onto the other side of the riot shield is a question that cannot be adequately answered now.

My disappointment and embarrassment for her aside, it would be unfair to characterize Quan as a tyrant, or unequivocally beholden to business and police interests. In fact, it’s been precisely her ambivalence over Occupy Oakland that has provoked resignations and her alienation from city agencies — especially the Oakland police. She has explicitly expressed support for the movement (as, to be sure, have so many mayors who also justified their endorsement of excessive force in the same gesture), and her husband (Floyd Huen, also a TWLF alum) and daughter have been considerably less ambivalent in their support of it. We might even take the divisions within the Quan family as a kind of parable of the American left.

Monday’s eviction was, of course, not the first. Quan’s first attempt at permanently dismantling the camp came early in the morning of October 25, when she authorized hundreds of police officers to evict its residents with a “shock and awe” strategy. In just a few hours, they cleared and destroyed over 150 tents, as well as an elaborate system of services that had maintained the encampment for more than two weeks: including a fully operational kitchen, medic tent, library and children’s area.

Later that afternoon, Occupiers marched from the steps of the city’s Main Library (which librarians, in solidarity, refused to close, in defiance of police orders) back to the encampment site with the intention of re-occupying it. This resulted in large-scale confrontations with police, in which the latter employed an excessive amount of force that resulted in serious injuries, including the critical wounding of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen. Widely circulated videos depict a police officer tossing an exploding tear gas canister directly at Olsen’s head, after he had already been rendered unconscious by a projectile fired by police moments beforehand.

In a painful example of precisely the kind of tragic irony that the Occupy movement is trying to highlight, that same night, just a few miles from the thick of the demonstrations, Oakland’s school board voted to close five elementary schools in an attempt to save $2 million. The cost of the police actions for that day alone ran well over $1 million.

Along with the cost of last week’s actions, the total cost of police services rose to over $1.5 million. Considering how Occupy Oakland has made every attempt at cooperating with health and safety standards, and how its demonstrations have been largely peaceful, the costs seem not only unjustified, but somehow idiotic. I say “idiotic,” because it reminds me of that paradigmatic scene of idiocy from Steve Martin’s film The Jerk, when a barrage of gunshots fired at the main character miss him, hitting piles of cans instead, and which we can paraphrase like this: “They hate the tents! Stay away from the tents!”

Quan’s involvement in the decisions of October 25 prompted international condemation, as well as ridicule by the likes of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann. But perhaps the most damning criticism came from a group of Asian American Oakland residents who were just as excited about her election as I was. A few days after the eviction, they circulated an open letter in which they wrote: “It is a sad day. We once believed you to be an ally to low-income, communities of color; to progressive politics; to real democracy. What happened?”

What happened?

I’ve been following Occupy Oakland since it pitched its first tent on October 10. Unfortunately, with an infant son vigorously engaged in his own protest against sleep, it was impossible to join the encampment, and difficult to spend a significant amount of time at Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the Occupiers). Nonetheless, my wife and I donated what we could, and I stayed involved via Twitter — something that, prior to this Spring, would have sounded ridiculous.

Even with my meager involvement in virtual and meat-space, I have never in my lifetime seen the American Left so invigorated, so hopeful — or so unified. The movement certainly has its problems, not least of which being its demographics (although as our own Tammy Kim reports, Zuccotti Park is an exception). And with the onset of winter — and the Bay Area’s own rainy version of that mythical season — the question of demands, thus far strategically deferred, is becoming all the more pressing. If there’s anything we’ve learned, however, it’s that the movement’s astonishing resilience is generated more by its form than its content. And it’s not like Occupiers aren’t unaware of their contradictions; they’re working through them slowly and earnestly.

Occupy Oakland shuts down the Port of Oakland during the Nov. 2 general strike

As encouraging as the past two months have been, the tragedy of Mayor Quan stands as a sobering reminder of what a movement like Occupy risks becoming as time wears on. She is precisely the kind of future the movement resists when it militates against co-optation.

In a way, Quan also signals the incoherence of “Asian American” as a radical coalition. No other public figure dramatizes more powerfully just how distant those heady days of action and idealism have become.

This may seem like an odd claim to make, with Asian Americans so much on the rise just across the Bay in San Francisco. Two weeks ago, Edwin Lee became the first elected Asian American mayor of that city, making him the latest instance of an ascendant and formidable wave of Asian American political influence there. But that influence flows from a largely Chinatown-centered voting bloc that is either more closely associated with the Chinese-language press and China’s international political dynamics, or would more readily identify as Chinese and American than Asian American.

Also consider the example of Occupy Oakland’s renaming of Frank Ogawa Plaza to Oscar Grant Plaza, a deliberate displacement of Asian American politics for a narrative of white-on-black state violence.

Ogawa, a gardener by trade, was Oakland’s first Japanese American and longest-standing city council member, as well as an internee at Topaz Camp. He was known for his moderation and record of breaking racial barriers. It’s possible that his conservative politics would have clashed with the Occupy movement’s values — but that doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason. What’s more telling is the startling lack of commentary on this issue (with very few exceptions).

The fact that this move could be passed over in silence is perhaps the most poignant epitaph to a coalition that once I so lovingly knew.

But, alas, Quan herself is the best evidence of what I want to call, polemically, “the Death of Asian America.” The idea of the “Asian American” was born in the ’60s with Quan and her Third Worldist comrades. If it still had any life in it, it died this fall, along with her political career. To use a clunky sociological term, Quan has become a symbol of Asian America’s broader “embourgeoisiement” over the past forty years.

Rather than despair, I believe that, at this moment, we should gauge our optimism against the endurance of the Occupy movement itself. We need to risk it.

Help them through the winter.

What hope is left for us is to be found in solutions that haven’t been formulated yet. We need new coalitions. We don’t yet know what they are, which is why we need the space — indeed, the interruption — to think these things through clearly and honestly. It’s precisely that space and time that the Occupiers are putting their bodies and selves on the line to create and defend.

Those chains of students linking arms and getting pepper sprayed by the officer John Pikes of the world aren’t defending tents, or the spaces they occupy. It’s ridiculous to think so. They’re defending our time to think.

Floating signifiers. A scene from Occupy Cal. Photo by Aaron Bady.

Update, 11/22/11

 It’s been brought to my attention that there has, indeed, been lively discussion on the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant renaming issue.

The best commentary on it is from the artist Kenji Liu, who designed two posters — one with Ogawa’s image, and the other with Grant’s — emblazoned with the caption “Memory is Solidarity.” These were widely distributed during the Occupy demonstrations and general strike at the beginning of November. Liu writes:

We can have a more complex and nuanced movement for economic and racial justice by honoring both Ogawa and Grant, not as equivalents but in solidarity. This is not just about inclusion, but about having a complex analysis from which to act together. As Audre Lorde has written, “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark.” We can recognize the different ways capitalism has attacked each of our communities. We can bring this imagination to our aspirations for our places, our movements and our society.

For me, this is the crucial point: that solidarity and a “complex analysis” of capitalism are more fundamental than the identity politics at the heart of the renaming issue. That doesn’t of course make Asian American-specific or black-specific politics disappear; it forces them to incorporate a broader analysis than identity politics can accomodate.

In the case of Oscar Grant, the discourse has evolved from outrage over a long history of white-on-black violence, to a critique of police force, to a critique of the police state, and then to a critique of the police state’s inextricabile link to capitalism. This evolution, for me, is what I hope will be one of the most enduring legacies of the OWS movement. And what I believe we need to do is risk accepting that broader critique, even if that means letting go of some aspects of those old identity-based coalitions.

People often tell me that I don’t look like your average Occupy protestor. I was initially drawn to the Occupy movement for several reasons. As an educator, anything that gets young people paying attention to the world around them is something that I feel the need to support. As an activist and organizer, I generally believe in the need for all citizens to engage in this kind of political discourse. As a black woman, I feel any conversation about economic inequality is incomplete if it doesn’t also address racial inequality as well. The various occupations across the country present spaces for such conversations to take place. I’ve found plenty of reasons to support the Occupy movement, but does the movement support me?

Much has already been said about race and the Occupy movement. Some have criticized the movement for its perceived lack of diversity and aggressive “whiteness.” Earlier this month, organizers took heat for refusing to allow state representative and civil rights legend John Lewis to address the crowd. A protester at Occupy Philly claimed volunteers called her a “nigger” while she waited to use a communal cell phone charging station. She responded to the incident by forming her own coalition within Occupy Philly: The People of Color Committee.

She isn’t the only protester working to bring race into the central message of the movement by mobilizing occupiers of color. Occupy Harlem’s first general assembly was largely black and Latino and included veteran black activists like Professor Cornell West and Nellie Hester Bailey.

After being confronted by the whiteness of the protesters, two friends from New York and Detroit started Occupy the Hood, a movement that works within Occupy Wall Street to mobilize people of color on issues of economic injustice. According to their Facebook page, “Occupy The Hood stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement… It is imperative that the voice of POC is heard at this moment! We must not be forgotten as the world progresses to the next economical stage. We can all agree that the voices in our communities are especially needed in this humanitarian struggle. We are our future and we possess the energy needed to push the Occupy movement to the next phase.”

These attempts to bring race into the conversations taking place at various occupations are integral, as racial injustice and economic injustice go hand in hand. Despite under-representation at Occupations around the country, black and brown people make up the majority of those suffering economically. A new report from the Center for Social Inclusion confirms this disparity, maintaining that “today, Jim Crow exists in the job market as more black and Latino workers are cast as second-class workers: over-represented in low-skill, low-wage occupations with limited chances to move up the ladder of opportunity.”

As we all know, racism exists, even within well meaning progressive movements. It exists as a kind of pathological denial of the privilege in which white progressive activists are actively rooted. Ignoring complex issues of race and privilege in the Occupy movement will only suggest that it actually is steeped in the kind of racial intolerance of which it has been accused.

During my time spent at Occupy K Street and Occupy Wall Street, I was disgusted by the amount of white protesters who happily waved signs likening student loan debt to slavery, with seemingly no thought to how the co-option of slavery rhetoric might look to black protesters. While being in debt is undeniably unpleasant, to compare it to the literal enslavement of millions of Africans is ridiculous. This is the kind of racial obliviousness that will alienate black and brown folks who might otherwise be sympathetic to the overall message of the protests.

That being said, some Occupy movements are more racially inclusive than others. Many seem to have openly embraced the sometimes-thorny intersections of race and class that tend to pop up during discussions of economic injustice. In Albuquerque, occupiers renamed their movement “UnOccupy Albuquerque” out of respect to the Native American community’s distaste for the word “occupy.” In LA, protesters reached out to black and Latino homeowners who were facing foreclosure. In Atlanta, Occupiers renamed their occupation site Troy Davis Park.

If it is to be successful, the entire Occupy movement needs to take deliberate steps to be racially inclusive, even if that means addressing the white privilege that exists from within the movement. Only then will they be capable of wielding strength as a unified movement. As Color Lines puts it, “The Occupy movement is clearly unifying. Centralizing racial equity will help to sustain that unity. This won’t happen accidentally or automatically. It will require deliberate, smart, structured organizing that challenges segregation, not only that of the 1 percent from everyone else, but also that which divides the 99 percent from within.”

I encountered a perfect illustration of this kind of racial inclusiveness during the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, D.C. on Friday, October 28th. The march, which included organizers from the Occupy movement, began at Howard University and ended with a rally outside of the US Chamber of Commerce. The group of marchers began as a mix of mostly black Howard students, faculty and alumni. Karen Spellman, a Howard University alumni and a veteran of 60s era SNCC civil rights organizing, was in attendance and she said a few words before we departed. We marched down Georgia Avenue, encouraging most bystanders to join us (some did). When we made our way through McPherson Square, the site of Occupy K Street, more white Occupy protesters joined us.

Blacks and whites marching together might be the norm for protests in Oakland or New York, but D.C. has a different kind of racial landscape all together. Thanks in part to the rapid gentrification of many neighborhoods, DC is a city with a tense racial divide. With the influx young, white professionals embarking on D.C., the once “Chocolate City” is quickly becoming less brown. Neighborhoods that were once mainstays of black nightlife and culture have become increasingly white. Rising rents and property taxes have pushed many black longtime DC resident elsewhere. D.C. is a city where one can actually see this racial divide unfold over time in neighborhoods. So, I wasn’t terribly surprised when this divide began to play out during our march.

As we continued our march, some of the older black activists began to lag behind as the young and mostly white Occupy K Street protesters took the lead. Sensing a fracturing of the group, a young white occupier shouted, “We all need to stay together!” Everyone waited for the rest of the group to catch up. Someone in the crowd urged Spellman to get up front and handed her a bullhorn. She tells the crowd, now a mix of black and white, that she wants to teach us the classic civil rights protest anthem “Oh Freedom.” The entire group falls silent as they listen to Spellman, a black woman who led her own protests decades before Occupy, sing the tune. Eventually, the entire crowd joined in the singing and we continued marching. We marched: old with young, black with white; all united by one cause, our voices blending together and echoing into the D.C. night.

(Image Credit: The Washington Post)

Dear Occupy San Diego,

We, the All Peoples Revolutionary Front, have been intrigued by the developments of Occupy Wall Street and the way this action has compelled many around the world to engage in public protest. While acknowledging the ways in which our struggles converge, we must articulate the ways in which our struggles diverge. We continue to observe brutality in the legacy of capitalism, a system that relied upon the enslavement of African and Caribbean peoples, the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the violent seizure of lands for colonial profit. Economic exploitation of labor and resources is only one process of continuing colonization that disproportionately impacts communities of color and third world peoples. Our struggle for self-determination in the present moment contributes to the histories of resistance that began long before us.

APRFront is a collaboration of all abilities, generations, genders, gender non-conforming, sexual orientations, indigineity, race, ethnicities, cosmologies, faith and spiritual practices, and identities. We are a constellation of collectives involving students, activists, community organizers, artists, educators, justice advocates, and all those who engage critical knowledge to inform political struggle. APRFront identifies with a diverse range of practices, including Social Justice Education Pedagogy, anti-oppressive movement building, critical consciousness development, and privilege-checking strategies. We acknowledge all levels of education in our coalition, and welcome folks with a willingness to learn, teach, and engage in the different political ideologies of revolutionary liberation such as socialism-marxism-womyn of color feminism, intersectionality, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and zapatismo. We realize these terms and ideologies may not be immediately accessible, but we will provide explanation to those who desire to learn and practice our methods. While we believe in education, we also believe that part of our self-determination is not having to fully disclose our identities and the practices we study in every public statement we make to “Occupy” movements.

We recognize the necessity and strategic importance of visible demonstrations which movements for social change rely upon, understanding that our struggle continues the legacy and knowledge of critical consciousness in direct action. We are concerned that Occupation is a romanticized and idealized form of activism, one that does not consider what must follow civil disobedience in the long-term. We envision the sustainability of organizing within our communities and collective contribution to accountable leadership, involving structured consensus-based decision making through the guiding power of the masses. Within this framework of self-determination, the colonizing language of Occupation does not translate. Because this land called “San Diego” has endured centuries of colonial conquest and domination at the expense of Indigenous Kumeyaay peoples, APRFront cannot support, endorse, or conscientiously mobilize in solidarity with the concept of Occupation. Our level of engagement with Occupy San Diego serves the purpose of claiming space for people of color and articulating the movement to decolonize on a local and global scale.

When we imagine decolonization, we do not make demands of those in power or those who are behind Occupy movements; we create power and frame the alternative. We envision our autonomy and our destinies to be liberated from government dictation, intervention, and colonization. This does not mean “inclusion” and token representation within existing systems of oppression, but an elimination of the systems themselves. It is neither our desire nor our intention to simply reform the colonizing structures of capitalism and white supremacy, but to dismantle them and create the terms of our existence. We understand why Occupy San Diego is meaningful to local activists–veterans and newcomers alike–but it is not our vision. Cherokee scholar Andrea Smith writes: “On one hand, it is necessary to engage in oppositional politics to corporate and state power by taking power. Yet if we only engage in the politics of taking power, we will have a tendency to replicate the hierarchical structures in our movements. So it is also important to ‘make power’ by creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are trying to create.” It is the uncritical nationalism of Occupy movements, often expressed in the spirit of “taking ‘our’ country back,” that indicates to us a taking of existing power and a perpetuation of oppressive systems. If we return to the “revolutionary” moment of “America,” we must also return to slavery, genocide, and the total monopoly of white male supremacy.

We have an understanding of revolution that does not conform to the US colonial model; our revolution continues in solidarity and dialogue with slave rebellions and Black Power, Indigenous resistance and zapatismo, Arab and African uprisings, queer and womyn of color organizing, Third World Liberation movements, and all peoples movements that have battled colonization and imperialism. APRFront is a people of color-lead coalition allowing white identified anti-racists and activists, who challenge internal and structural white supremacy, to play a supporting role. We find the dynamic of this model to be crucial to self-determination, revolution, and social change. We are also conscious in ensuring that our leadership is not only intentionally people of color-lead, but that gender non-conforming people, cis-gender, and queer womyn of color assume leadership roles. It is important to emphasize the radical political education and diverse identities folks bring to this coalition, rather than placing the emphasis on skin color alone. It was Critical Race scholar George Lipsitz who said “white supremacy is an equal opportunity employer,” meaning the practice of whiteness is not exclusive to folks with white skin. Further, we recognize white supremacy and racism as structures that exist and operate beyond individual violence and interpersonal conflict. We do not believe social justice has been achieved with one individual of color in a position of power, whether they are occupying the highest station of the white house or occupying the surrounding environment.

APRFront recognizes the need for leaders, but we make the distinction between leaders who are chosen, cultivated, and sustained by the people, and leaders who are upheld by oppressive governance, state regimes, and dictatorial power. We are following the journey of the Civil Rights movement, and by this we mean the interconnected and enduring struggles of Chicano Resistance, the Philippines’ People Power movements, the American-Indian movement, the Cuban Revolution, Third World Feminist movements, and others. We do not perceive the Civil Rights Movement in the US to be a temporary historical event that began and ended with the dynamic of Black vs. white, but a globally interconnected and persistent struggle for self-determination. We believe we must organize beyond the superficial language of multiculturalism and diversity into the organizing work of dismantling white supremacy. Although we respect the work that is being done by our fellow community members in Occupy, it is our position that committees and/or caucuses of color within Occupy movements reinforce structures of white supremacy. The relegating of people of color to the secondary and supporting roles of working groups, committees and/or caucuses creates a hierarchical design in which whiteness is again privileged and enforced through what is described as “leaderless” organizing.

APRFront works for collective agency in community empowerment to disrupt and subvert the focused individualism of capitalist greed, imperialism, globalization and all other forms of white supremacy. In the spirit of movements like the Third World Liberation Front and the solidarity movements built amongst the Filipino-American and Mexican-American farm workers in 1965, we were inspired to form the APRFront coalition. We visualize a radical people-of-color led movement to be organized and structured with a revolutionary leadership that directs, coordinates, and strategically develops the revolutionary process while making power and building a new vision with the consensus of the masses. Part of people power is having multiple leaders from local, national, and global movements with a selfless passion for revolution and a deep devotion to the masses, as well as a strong understanding of strategic tactics needed to work with the masses and pave the road to revolution in line with our vision. We must also have leaders who challenge the internalized colonization embedded within our educational institutions that reproduces inequity by controlling access to social mobility based on race, immigrant status, and class.

When we reflect on the “leaderless” approach of Occupation, we find no space in which to honor our leaders of movements for radical change, and the masses that made their work possible. Although iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. inspired many Blacks, there were multiple unsung local leaders that built and sustained the movement. It was Black womyn leaders like Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson that led the bus boycott before King led the Montgomery Improvement Association. It was the work of other womyn of color leaders like Dolores Huerta who played a huge role in farm worker organizing which eventually led her to co-founding the United Farm Workers with César Chavez, Philip Vera Cruz, and Larry Itliong. Gabriela Silang is another important figure who lead an uprising in the Philippines against the Spanish imperialists, after her husband Diego Silang, who was the original leader of the movement, was killed. While there is more than one leader in mass movements for decolonization, it is important to realize that many leaders are also womyn of color who are often forgotten and unnoticed. The erasure of these herstories is one historical example of how patriarchy manifests, and a contemporary example concerns men, particularly white men, monopolizing Occupy movements and denying the voices of people and womyn of color.

As a solution and community-based effort, APRFront exercises deep organizing as an essential part of revolution and mass movement. Deep organizing can be attributed to our internal coalition practices and the everyday work folks within our communities do to mobilize and educate our people: from the service workers who maintain our public spaces to the young teens who advocate transforming their gang community-family into social action, from the elders that make us meals and ensure we are well nourished to the Pelican Bay prisoners on hunger strike. We continuously work to embody the practice of acknowledging those within our movements who are behind the scenes contributing work that is often unrecognized. It was Ella Baker, an important Civil Rights leader who said, “I would rather pass the water to people marching, than hold the picket sign in the march.”

APRFont struggles with the apparent high expectations within Occupy San Diego for communities of color to be present and consistently active with Occupation; however, this expectation fails to adequately address the reality of racial profiling, police brutality, the corrupt criminal justice system and the threat of deportation for both citizens of color and undocumented peoples. When considering issues of movement safety and participation in Occupy demonstrations, we understand the racial distinction between experiences with law enforcement in everyday situations and civil disobedience. While the theoretical purpose of law enforcement is to defend constitutional rights and humanity, this has been and continues to be untrue for communities of color. We’ve witnessed the unjust capital punishment in the legal lynching of Troy Davis which is deeply connected to the increasingly privatized prison industrial complex. Corrupt corporate greed is not exclusive to Wall Street: Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group and Management and Training Corporation have made incarceration a profitable business, intentionally creating a system that imprisons people-of-color and specifically undocumented peoples to serve as present-day slave labor. We are not all protected equally by the police or paramilitary forces.

While we value protest as an integral part of revolution, we understand that we must also continue forth with long-term planning and deep organizing practices. It is imperative to acknowledge that many people of color will be hesitant to attend Occupy demonstrations, while others are not at the capacity to be present due to poor health, being caretakers for their families, and/or just trying to survive everyday life. We also recognize that essential activism exists behind the gaze of the media and outside the realm of public visibility. All Peoples Revolutionary Front understands and encourages deep organizing, for it is the practice of taking care of each other, our families, our communities and the lands we live upon that contributes to a sustainable movement. While affirming our own present-day skills and knowledge, we organize in honor of our ancestors as an intentional practice to remember our histories, for they are often erased by white supremacy in popular movements. We have learned from our ancestors that a true mass movement can only be led by genuine revolutionary leaders. We also acknowledge that we have multiple leaders but we will not survive or succeed without the help of the people who organize, protest, and perform the same work. APRFront understands that without the masses, leaders would be nothing. And without sincere leaders, the masses would not be able to arrive at liberation. Leadership, the masses, and the vision are inseparable. They must be accountable to each other and must work in tandem in order to create a united front for true revolution. This is the movement in which we embrace, this is the movement in which we strive to become. This is the vision we seek.

We believe that intersecting legacies of injustice must be understood and brought in to dialogue in order to inform our movement. The colonial creation of Wall Street is evidence that an occupation has been taking place long before protesters in Zucotti park arrived. In the late 1600s, the Dutch colony located in the land presently called “New York” became the site of a fortification built under the direction of the Dutch West India Company with the labor of enslaved African peoples. Settlers erected this wall on Indigenous Lenape land to specifically prevent these peoples from “attacking” the land they originally inhabited. Manna-hata, meaning “island of many hills,” was the Lenape term converted to “Manhattan” when translated into English. The stolen land surrounded by colonial borders would eventually translate into English as “Wall Street.” Through neocolonial control, occupied cities and countries terrorized through war and illegal settlements continue to exist in the contemporary moment. Whether it is the militarized occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the armed imposition of US forces in Libya, US government intervention in the affairs of the Philippines, the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the apartheid wall of the West Bank, or the violation of international law and false “statehood” voting which led to the colonizination Hawaii, these geographies endure human rights abuses within systems of imperialism and conquest.

On the eve of the renewed police violence in Oakland, it is even more apparent that we must work towards a new vision for a socially just society and continue to engage in a process of decolonization and anti-oppression practices. This entails acknowledging that our current institutions have systematized inequality, oppression, and exploitation of people of color for the benefit of capital gain, expansion, and power. We cannot afford to reproduce the same system that is the root of our oppression if our intention is revolutionary liberation. Rather, we must be critical about our potential as agents of transformation and recognize ways that we further the oppression of people of color and Third World peoples.

In the strength of “making our own power”, All Peoples Revolutionary Front has organized our own National Call to Action titled “Rise & Decolonize! Let’s Get Free” on November 18, 2011 at 5:00 pm. We invite all those who have a genuine willingness to engage and listen to attend our solidarity rally, and become an ally to people of color in continuing the work of decolonization.

We welcome other communities of color to organize in solidarity with us on November 18th to affirm the decolonization of all Occupy movements.

Isang Bagsak,
All Peoples Revolutionary Front

Scene 1: Manissa

The text came at 1:05am just as I was just getting out of the shower:

OccupyNYC:URGENT:Hundreds of police mobilizing around Zucotti. Eviction in progress.

I both could and could not believe it. But it didn’t matter right then, what mattered right then was that I get on my bike and get there as soon as I could. I threw on the first clothes I found and started texting everyone I knew. It wasn’t even a thought if I would or wouldn’t go: of course I was going. I somehow remembered to fill my water bottle.

Half an hour later with my friend David, I locked my bike a few blocks from Zucotti Park. We started up the street towards Broadway when, out of nowhere I was body checked by three cops in riot gear and thrown against the side of a van, pinned there by a baton. I looked over and David was surrounded and being shoved. I start to scream, threw my arms up and simple thoughts started going through my head: there is no one here to see this, what did I do, how do I get out of this safe? Suddenly it is all over and we are being pushed down the block, being told we can’t go this way. I’m shaking. I grab David’s hand. He holds it tightly and I start crying silently.

Scene 2: Zoltan

By the time I arrived at the scene it was 1:30am, a mere half hour after the emergency text message had gone out. Already the park was fenced in and we could only get within a one-block radius of the square. People were arriving from all over the city, our numbers were growing quickly, and the police decided to push us back before more supporters arrived. There was spontaneous solidarity: along side many faces I recognized from the long weeks of occupation and many that I did not, we linked arms, we tried to stand our ground, we chanted that this was a peaceful protest and we were met with wanton violence. The police had hardly started to move and already to my right three people were pepper-sprayed, a man to my left was being repeatedly gouged in the stomach with a police baton. A few minutes later we were penned in and the police were grabbing people at random from the crowd and arresting them. They made a small opening and now were throwing people violently through it. One man had fallen to the ground, and the cops did not step in to help him up, but rather kept throwing more people out towards him, tripping and stepping on him as he was down. When we tried to help him up we were met with batons, shoved and cursed at.

Scene 3: Many of us, Broadway

It is late and we are walking back towards Liberty Plaza down the sidewalk on Broadway. When 50 feet ahead of us a few cops jumped out of a police car and grabbed our friend N. She was an organizer at Occupy Wall Street and it seemed clear that she had been singled out for arrest. We ran up to the police car she had been roughly shuffled into and tried to yell to her through a slightly opened window: “Anyone we can call for you? Anyone we can call?” Suddenly 10 officers are surrounding the car pushing us back, yelling over her as she tries to answer. A man with a camera was shoved violently to the side and his press pass grabbed. “We’re just trying to ask her if she wants us to call her family,” we said. They continued to push us away from the car, telling us to keep moving or be arrested as we continued to call out to our friend. Through all the yelling a line from one of the officers is clear: “You can’t talk to her, she’s a prisoner. Move along or you’ll be arrested.” We shuffled away, N. in the car behind us surrounded by officers. One of us nearly starts to cry: “It’s her birthday, I just wanted to see if there was anyone she wanted us to call.” We all try and remember when it stopped being allowed to make sure our friends are okay as they are arrested for walking down the street. When we started being referred to as prisoners.

Scene 4: Zoltan

It was now nearly 4am, the crowd had thinned, but were still marching around Manhattan expressing our outrage at this calculated attack against political freedom and disgust at all of the wanton brutality we had seen that night. The police would follow us for a while, then would cut off one street and we’d turn onto another. Again and again they would jump into a crowd single out an individual and violently shove that person to the ground or against a wall, when others would try to intervene more arrests would be made. This time someone next to me had been grabbed and before I could react I was struck in the back of the head, and losing my balance heard someone say, “take that motherfucker.” My friends pulled me out of the crowd and I turned to see one that it was one of the white shirted officers simply swinging at random at peoples faces, backs and shielded bodies. “They’re trying to provoke violence to legitimate the repression” one of my friends commented. I walked away smarting, my neck sore from the blow but thinking we’re on the cusp of something huge. Police only act this way when they’re scared.

The actions of the police and city government last night were reprehensible: peaceful protesters were beaten, subway stations were shut down in lower Manhattan during the raid, the the Liberty Square library was destroyed (yes they are destroying books again) and finally the whole park encampment was dismantled, people dragged out, their stuff trailing behind them. The area around the park was closed off for blocks. No media was allowed in. The smell of pepper spray, the sound of people yelling and cops decked out in full riot gear were everywhere. These are the kinds of actions pursued by authoritarian regimes, the kinds of actions that prove to us that we do indeed now live in a police state. But thinking on all this today one thing becomes clear: this movement is important and the state is scared of us. And ultimately, this spectacle of repression should not distract us from the important tasks we have at hand, nor should it overshadow the great strides we’ve made in the past months. There is no evicting a movement.

This movement has clearly entered its second phase. We may have lost Zuccotti Park and we may have not, and it seems that city government is keen on keeping us out of other public spaces that we have been using for meetings. But the movement is far from dead. We are just beginning. Working groups from OWS have meetings and events planned for months ahead. They will continue to meet and they will continue to grow. There is a nascent student movement in New York. General Assemblies now take place on most major college campuses in New York City and around the country. Each of these has its own working groups that are meeting constantly and planning the next steps. This week has been called a Student Week of Action, and the calendar of over 50 events on campus across the city testifies to an unprecedented scale of collaboration, solidarity and collective planning. The movement is spreading to new spaces. Proliferating in our places of employment and education.

Police repression can expel an occupation from a particular space, individuals can be locked up, thrown into the back of police cars and openly called political “prisoners,” but ultimately none of this will solve the social, political and economic problems of our times. If anything it will simply aggravate them. This ultimately is the underlying reason why this social movement cannot simply be repressed out of existence. Our economy is still in crisis, our political system is still broken, people are still over-burdened with unmanageable debts, unemployment is still rising, and people are still losing basic rights of access to health care, education and work. The occupy movement is actively working to channel these destructive synergies into a force for positive change. It gives people a voice, it fosters dialogue, it asks people to take the future into their own hands. This is why it has been so inspiring for many. This is why it is spreading.

The synchronized raids and evictions of occupations across the country were clearly coordinated at a national level. We can expect further repressions and acute struggles over public space to ensue. These struggles will be important. They will set the tone of the movement in the coming months and they will be the fiercely debated. But equally important is what happens within institutions, workplaces, and schools as this movement extends horizontally beyond its initial confines in the small mostly concrete and drab lot of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. In these and other spaces the movement is building, it is evolving, and it is gaining momentum.
But perhaps the greatest testament to the strength of this movement is that it is changing the very terrain of political discourse in America. When Mayor Bloomberg today, in a statement justifying the eviction, said snarkily that “now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments” he actually missed the point entirely. It is not just that the power of our arguments are winning or losing a discursive competition with other equally legitimate arguments in some mythic public sphere. The power of our movement, of our actions and of our practices is that they are changing the very coordinates of how people think about politics, they are changing the political imagination.
In this regard the Occupy movement has really only just begun. That we have actions planned for months to come, meetings, working groups and an organizational infrastructure that is entirely independent from the space of the park, already testifies to the robustness of this movement. Our movement is not contained by a park, our ideas are not contained by a park and we will not be contained by a park. We are multiple, territory is plural and we are strong.

Last scene:

We drag ourselves home at 7am. Nap. Shower. Eat. Text messages and emails fly around all afternoon about the court order, whether we will be let into the park again or not, responses from around the country. We send emails all afternoon, we’re still organizing: should we reschedule the People of Color caucus meeting? Should we push the student planning meeting back? But most urgently: where should we meet tonight? We know we are all going back out.

6:45pm: Going back to Zuccotti for a General Assembly.

(Image Credit: New York Times)

I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip