Juan Williams, Fox News: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion that you made was about a lack of work ethic and I’ve gotta tell you my email account and my Twitter account has been inundated by people of all races who are asking if your comment was not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities … you saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina by a woman who asked why you refer to Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.” it sounds like you’re trying to belittle people.

Newt Gingrich: first of all Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by barack obama than by any president in americanhistory. I know that among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable. Second, you’re the one who, earlier, raised a key point: the area that oughta be I-73 was called by Barack Obama a “corridor of shame” because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built a road, they haven’t helped the people, they haven’t done anything. One last thing … so here’s my point: I believe every American, of every background, has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”
- Video via The Grio

The growth partly reflects an increase in need, as millions of Americans have lost income and lost jobs or remain out of work. In addition, food prices have increased, eligibility has been expanded, and the 2009 economic stimulus law temporarily increased benefits.

Before Mr. Obama took office, food stamp participation was rising, in part because of federal policies that encouraged low-income people to seek aid for which they were eligible.

Nearly half of food stamp recipients are under age 18. Nearly 30 percent of food stamp households have earned income. Only 15 percent of such households have income above the poverty level ($18,500 for a family of three in 2011).

– Robert Pear, New York Times

“Do you see how these remarks might offend people?” Williams asked.

Newt replied, “No, I don’t see that.” He then defended his position, citing anecdotal accounts of young people who prospered as janitors, or as doughnut deliverers. Gingrich went on to say that he got the idea from a Joe Klein article about New York City schools, which is true.

“Only the elites despise earning money,” Gingrich said. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, if you hired 30 kids for one janitor contract, those kids wouldn’t be able to form an emotional attachment to earning money, because they wouldn’t earn very much.
- Jason Linkins, The Huffington Post

- Video via Buzzfeed

The audience at the South Carolina GOP debate interrupted a question to Mitt Romney that referenced his family’s ties to Mexico with an audible boo from what sounded like several people as the question was asked.

Romney’s father was born in Mexico, where his parents were part of a Mormon enclave that had moved temporarily from the United States.
- Benjy Sarlin, Talking Points Memo

In New Hampshire last Sunday, Romney mentioned that his father, George, was born in Mexico and came to the United States at age five. On Wednesday he took to the airwaves in Florida with a new Spanish-language ad entitled “Nosotros,” meaning “us.” The Republican National Committee got in on the act, too, announcing a beefed-up outreach effort to Hispanic voters.

But it may be too little, too late. Even before his DREAM Act comments, Romney faced an uphill battle with Latinos. A poll conducted by Latino Decisions for Univision in November found that among registered Hispanic voters in the 21 most Hispanic-heavy states, Obama held a whopping 67 percent to 24 percent lead over Romney.

While Romney could make up some ground among Latinos by selecting someone like Cuban-American Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as his eventual running mate, the GOP may have missed a golden opportunity to swing the 2012 election by earning the backing of Latino voters.
- Matthew Jaffe, ABC News

From the TV cutaways they seemed clean, well-dressed, and drug-free. And yet their reactions would scare off any sane, sensible person. In previous debates the right-wing GOP audiences booed a gay soldier. Someone shouted “Let him die!” in response to a question about an uninsured person.

But in South Carolina they took the cake. The crowd booed the mere mention of the name of the country of Mexico. Just the name. I might understand it if they booed, say, North Korea or Iran or Texas A&M—centers of evil. But Mexico? Good luck with that Latino vote in November, guys.

Then, when Ron Paul said the Golden Rule should guide our foreign policy, the crowd booed. They booed the Golden Rule. Apparently nobody told them that Jesus wrote the Golden Rule. On second thought, they’d have booed Jesus.
- Paul Begala, The Daily Beast

In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: “What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?” These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, when you are very much in it, it feels impossible sometimes. And so instead of describing what Occupy Wall Street feels like I say: “It is all happening so fast, it changes everyday, it is overwhelming, I am tired but I am also excited again, I’ve made new friends, new lovers and new enemies, I couldn’t have imagined my life would be like this a month ago.”

When I said this to my friend Amy last week she laughed and replied, half-jokingly: “That sounds like the start of the revolution.”

“Not yet,” I replied “but we’re trying.”

But my inability to answer this question has been nagging at me: Why is it so hard to describe what it feels like to be part of this movement that is not really a movement, this moment, this space? Maybe the fact that it is hard to describe is part of its strength?

Here is the thing: Occupy Wall Street has changed a lot over the past two weeks. It has grown tremendously, garnered more and more media attention and seems to be staying put for a while. While two weeks ago I walked away from Liberty Plaza thinking of how beautiful and inspiring it was, but also worried about how long it will be there, now the terrain of questions have shifted, it isn’t: When will the cops kick us out? but How will we grow? How do we sustain all the people that have come here? Should we occupy somewhere else too? That doesn’t mean that the cops getting rid of us isn’t still a major concern, but simply that now we feel like we are semi-established in some ways, or at least in enough ways that we can sustain something.

That said, on Friday I realized how much I have grown attached to the actual space of Zucotti Park when we were threatened with eviction by Brookfield Properties, the private real estate company who owns the park. That day I woke up at 3am and made my way over to the park, anxious and deeply sad that it might all be over. Arriving at the park I saw friends, old and new, and we hugged in the chilly pre-dawn air, “I don’t want to lose all of this” I kept saying over and over again. “We won’t” they replied, “and even if we do we’ll build it somewhere else.”

We didn’t lose on Friday morning, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people willing to stay in the park, refusing to back down even if the cops threatened arrest was powerful beyond what I can express here. The moment made me realize that the way that I feel about all this, and the way I talk about it, has shifted. All of a sudden I am using personal pronouns– this is “our” movement, “we” are worried about the cops kicking us out. I don’t know when this happened but at some point I started feeling some sense of ownership over this movement. And I’ve started calling it a movement. I’ve started saying things I never thought I would , things like “in the movement….”

As I wrote in my last post, I still think OWS is more of a space than a movement, a space of radical possibility, but I also think it is becoming something else. It is a space, but it is also a moment: a moment in which radical critique of our political and economic systems and the harm they have caused, a critique that many of us have had for a while, feels possible to have on a larger scale. It is a moment in which people who never thought they would be out on the streets protesting are protesting. And this is revolutionary in itself.

So what does it feel like to be part of Occupy Wall Street, to be there everyday almost? In some ways it has become an addiction, I wake up some mornings telling myself that today I won’t go by, that today I will take the day off and go back to being a graduate student. But somehow I find myself there, either to go to a working group meeting, a working group sub-committee meeting, to attend a training, to go on a smaller march, to see a performance, to hear and be a part of what is being discussed in General Assembly that night, or just to hang out at the margins and observe what is happening for a few minutes. There is the celebrity watching aspect to being in that space, as all the leftist intellectuals and left-leaning pop culture icons make their stop-by (a conversation I had with a friend: “I saw Deepak Chopra last night” “well I saw Talib Kweli tonight” someone else chimes in: “Neutral Milk Hotel a week ago was my favorite”).

But this is not what is addictive about being there. What is addictive about being there is that this space, this moment, this movement, suddenly has me thinking about things in a new way. It suddenly has me hopeful again. And it has me excited to think about my own, and all of our, potentialities and possibilities. Everything feels possible again. I never thought I would feel this way.

And I’m not the only one- like I said above, I’ve made new friends, good friends, friends all of a sudden I can’t imagine my life without. And I’ve made the occasional new enemy, the kind of enemies that you see at smile and nod at but know that you share different theoretical views, different personal views, different perspectives. This enemies are necessary too for without them the space wouldn’t be what it is: a place of frustration sometimes but yet hope and expectation too.

But what does everyday life look like at OWS? This is hard to describe because it changes depending on what time of day you are there, what day of the week it is, what the weather is like, who is there, what is happening there. It can seem both incredibly chaotic yet incredibly organized. It can seem underwhelming yet overwhelming. Sometimes it seems like just a bunch of people standing around holding signs or sometimes it looks like groups of people milling about, sitting on the stairs, on the ground, sleeping on top of tarps. But look more closely: what these people are actually doing, what this space is actually doing, is shifting the terrain of our imaginations. These bodies in this space are inherently challenging.

More pragmatically though:

You can hear OWS before you see it now. If it is during the evening General Assembly, which can last for hours, you can hear the voice of hundreds of people talking in unison, amplifying one person’s words so that everyone can hear them- the General Assembly has grown so much in the past two weeks that now the “People’s Microphone” needs 2 and sometimes 3 waves through the crowd so that everyone knows what is going on. I get chills every time I see this process in action- something about the way it makes everyone listen, repeat and really take on what someone is saying. You can also hear the drum circle on the west side of the square that has hundreds of people playing in it, dancing around it, the rhythm they make bounces off the walls of the office towers around the square and reverberates throughout the square. And above all this you can hear the general din of hundreds of people in one space together: talking, debating, arguing, or just sitting with friends and being in that space together. Every time I bike towards Occupy Wall Street, dodging cars and buses and taxis on Broadway, my heart starts beating a little faster when I hear this din, I start biking faster and I can’t wait to just be there. To hear what is being discussed in that night’s General Assembly, to meet my friends, to attend a meeting or just to wander through and see what there is to see, make a new sign, or browse through a book in the library, eat something from the food station or just generally observe the beautifully overwhelming spectacle of it all.

A few nights ago I was there around 10pm when it was drizzling and everyone was getting under their tarps and sleeping bags and settling in for the night. I was with a friend from out of town who is trying to start up Occupy New Orleans (read about that here). She is also a street medic, so we made our way over to the medic’s station, someplace I have only wandered by but never stopped at. The medic’s station is impressive in that you can smell it before you see it: it smells of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. And indeed while we were standing outside of it they were disinfecting and washing down their entire area, scrubbing the concrete and all the surfaces clean. The medic we spoke to was slow speaking and one of the calmest people I have ever met.

“Oh yeah we’ve had to deal with some serious stuff,” he said, “but this is one of the best teams I’ve come across.” He went on to describe how they had doctors and nurses on call, a whole team of street medics at all times, as well as access to low-cost or free clinics in the neighborhood. He offered help to Occupy New Orleans in whatever way he could, and together they brainstormed supplies and ways that OWS might be able to help.

Thinking about this moment of solidarity and support while winding our way out of the park around all these tarps with people’s feet poking out at the bottom of them made my heart swell for a moment. When I got home I joked to my roommate: “If you get sick, go to OWS, they have better free healthcare there then anywhere.”

And in part this is the point: that OWS is such a challenge to the state because it is, in many ways, functioning by itself. It is governing itself, it is feeding itself, it is making art, making music, reading a book, sitting on the steps and talking to friends, it is taking care of itself. This is radically different than a march or a rally, which have ending points. I realized this last week when after the big Wednesday march (which my friend Sonny writes about here), I got drinks with some friends, and we all sat around and talked both about how amazing the march was but then we also asked the inevitable question of “What’s next?” And as this question was being asked, I realized that it was the wrong question for OWS. It is the wrong question for a few reasons: because when we are reproducing everyday life we don’t need to ask “What’s next?” because this question is already answered. But it is also the wrong question because in a movement without leaders and without demands, the question isn’t “What’s next?” but rather: “What do I want to do next?”

The next day on the subway coming home from another evening at OWS (7pm General Assembly and then an awesome dinner from the food station: beans and rice and pizza and apples and ice cream and salad and macaroni and cheese. While in the food line someone came and made everyone sanitize their hands and then passed out plates and I felt so well-taken care of for a moment), the people I was with asked each other exactly this question: what do we want to see happen here, in this movement, in this space? The answers were varied: Z. wanted there to be more occupations, C. wanted there to be walking tours of banks, A. wanted more dancing and singing, I wanted to re-write the declaration. This moment felt so different than the night before, and this difference matters because it is the difference between endings and beginnings.

Occupy Wall Street is not an ending, it is a beginning.

The idea behind this presentations was to start framing the conversation around gentrification differently, and start this thinking at the inception of the planning process. How do we create a more just and equitable living environment? How do we design with intention? How do we ensure that everyone gets to enjoy the benefit of increased prosperity in a given area? I co-paneled with Peter Taitan of the Urban Institute, who provided stats about historical changes in the DC population – and had the fun job of explaining the concept of “white flight” after looking at the dramatic fall in DC’s white population from 1960-1980.

The coolest part were the countries represented: Bhutan, Cambodia, Egypt, Finland, India, Lesotho, Macedonia, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Slovak Republic, Sweden, Trinadad and Tobago, Turkey, and Vietnam.

The questions were insightful and fascinating, as all of the attendees tried to understand how American governments allowed gentrification and displacement to happen. There was also a conversation (though all too short) on gentrification’s unintended consequences, since it has a very positive connotation in some fields. I learned that Egypt is staring down the barrel of a housing crisis that mirrors issues with long-time residents and property taxes, and that DC could probably learn a lot from India’s ideas on making the law match social will. I also learned that America’s regionalism is really puzzling to other nations – I never had to think through things like WHY every state and local government has different policies around housing and urban development and quite a few of the questions (like what are the national needs around housing) had me stumped. So all in all, an excellent conversation.

One thing I wish I had time to go into more was the Kirwan Institute’s discussion on opportunity mapping. The paper/presentation looks at neighborhoods as more than just residential or commercial use, and into the idea that neighborhoods are clusters of opportunity. I’ll try to do a full write up on this next week, as I’ve alluded to the report a few times over the past year, but never committed to a full write up.

Strongly Recommended Reading: The Kirwan Institute’s Paper on “Opportunity Mapping: Mapping the Geography of Opportunity for Public Interest Advocacy”

Selected Conversations on Gentrification:

On The Rapid Gentrification of DC
The Gentrification Shuffle
The Gentrification Shuffle, Redux: Rebranding Anacostia
Gentrification has Nothing to Do with White Hipsters
More Notes on Gentrification
Another Perspective on Gentrification
I Colonize

And our full archive on gentrification is here.

To those who want to support the Occupation of Wall Street, who want to struggle for a more just and equitable society, but who feel excluded from the campaign, this is a message for you.

To those who do not feel as though their voices are being heard, who have felt unable or uncomfortable participating in the campaign, or who feel as though they have been silenced, this is a message for you.

To those who haven’t thought about #OccupyWallStreet but know that radical social change is needed, and to those who have thought about joining the protest but do not know where or how to begin, this is a message for you.

You are not alone. The individuals who make up the People of Color Working Group have come together because we share precisely these feelings and believe that the opportunity for consciousness-raising presented by #OccupyWallStreet is one that cannot be missed. It is time to push for the expansion and diversification of #OccupyWallStreet. If this is truly to be a movement of the 99%, it will need the rest of the city and the rest of the country.

Let’s be real. The economic crisis did not begin with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008. Indeed, people of color and poor people have been in a state of crisis since the founding of this country, and for indigenous communities, since before the founding of the nation. We have long known that capitalism serves only the interests of a tiny, mostly white, minority.

Black and brown folks have long known that whenever economic troubles ‘necessitate’ austerity measures and the people are asked to tighten their belts, we are the first to lose our jobs, our children’s schools are the first to lose funding, and our bodies are the first to be brutalized and caged. Only we can speak this truth to power. We must not miss the chance to put the needs of people of color—upon whose backs this country was built—at the forefront of this struggle.

The People of Color Working Group was formed to build a racially conscious and inclusive movement. We are reaching out to communities of color, including immigrant, undocumented, and low-wage workers, prisoners, LGTBQ people of color, marginalized religious communities such as Muslims, and indigenous peoples, for whom this occupation ironically comes on top of another one and therefore must be decolonized. We know that many individuals have responsibilities that do not allow them to participate in the occupation and that the heavy police presence at Liberty Park undoubtedly deters many. We know because we are some of these individuals. But this movement is not confined to Liberty Park: with your help, the movement will be made accessible to all.

If it is not made so, it will not succeed. By ignoring the dynamics of power and privilege, this monumental social movement risks replicating the very structures of injustice it seeks to eliminate. And so we are actively working to unite the diverse voices of all communities, in order to understand exactly what is at stake, and to demand that a movement to end economic injustice must have at its core an honest struggle to end racism.

The People of Color working group is not meant to divide, but to unite, all peoples. Our hope is that we, the 99%, can move forward together, with a critical understanding of how the greed, corruption, and inequality inherent to capitalism threatens the lives of all peoples and the Earth.

The People of Color working group was launched on October 1, 2011. Join us at http://groups.google.com/group/POC-working-group?hl=en. For inquiries, we can be reached by email at unified.ows@gmail.com. We can also be found online at http://pococcupywallstreet.tumblr.com. We meet Sundays @ 3 PM and Wednesdays @ 6:30 PM under the large red structure in Liberty Square.

JohnPaul Montano on colonization and “occupations”:

It seems that ever since we indigenous people have discovered Europeans and invited them to visit with us here on our land, we’ve had to endure countless ‘-isms’ and religions and programs and social engineering that would “fix” us. Protestantism, Socialism, Communism, American Democracy, Christianity, Boarding Schools, Residential Schools,… well, you get the idea. And, it seems that these so-called enlightened strategies were nearly always enacted and implemented and pushed upon us without our consent. And, I’ll assume that you’re aware of how it turned out for us. Yes. Terribly.

Which brings me back to your mostly-inspiring Occupy Wall Street activities. On September 22nd, with great excitement, I eagerly read your “one demand” statement. Hoping and believing that you enlightened folks fighting for justice and equality and an end to imperialism, etc., etc., would make mention of the fact that the very land upon which you are protesting does not belong to you – that you are guests upon that stolen indigenous land. I had hoped mention would be made of the indigenous nation whose land that is. I had hoped that you would address the centuries-long history that we indigenous peoples of this continent have endured being subject to the countless ‘-isms’ of do-gooders claiming to be building a “more just society,” a “better world,” a “land of freedom” on top of our indigenous societies, on our indigenous lands, while destroying and/or ignoring our ways of life. I had hoped that you would acknowledge that, since you are settlers on indigenous land, you need and want our indigenous consent to your building anything on our land – never mind an entire society. See where I’m going with this? I hope you’re still smiling. We’re still friends, so don’t sweat it. I believe your hearts are in the right place. I know that this whole genocide and colonization thing causes all of us lots of confusion sometimes. It just seems to me that you’re unknowingly doing the same thing to us that all the colonizers before you have done: you want to do stuff on our land without asking our permission.

Meagan La Mala on the colonization of Puerto Rico and framing movements:

What I didn’t see or hear was a self-challenge among the participants regarding the language they chose to use. “Occupation” does not sit well with me. As a woman whose country has been occupied by the United States for hundreds of years hearing white men hand out fliers, inviting people to “celebrate the occupation” made me cringe. In a conversation I has with a friend and her friend, I asked if they had heard any discussion of the language used in any of the general assemblies or anywhere really. It was clear that to some (many?) there is no sense of why using the language of occupation is a problem, how it could alienate the very people who are most impacted by the corporate/government policies.

“I saw a sign that said “occupy Wall Street not Palestine,” I was told, as if that was enough. It didn’t feel that way.
I also saw a lot of signs based in the idea of privilege and the bullshit notion of who deserves what. Young people held signs lamenting not being able to pay their student loans and how having gone to college didn’t bring the jobs and success they expected. I thought about the high Latino high school drop out rates and my own lack of a college degree. Were we included in this dialogue/narrative or even within this “movement” were there some who weren’t worth fighting for – some who don’t deserve the “American Dream” because of not following the prescribed order of things.

I didn’t see one sign about immigration. I didn’t see one sign about people of color and the prison pipeline. I didn’t see one sign in any other language except English.

I’m not saying they weren’t there – I’m saying I didn’t see them. [...]

It’s hard for me to fight for “an America” that has made clear that it’s success is to come at my domination – my erasure.
I challenge those who are so strongly supporting this movement hold themselves accountable for the language and framework they put their struggle in. It can’t all be about fighting the powers that be without the acknowledgement of how we be those powers.

Kai Wright, of Colorlines, on what OWS symbolizes from his perspective:

It’s clear to me that NYPD could and would behave dishonestly. It’s less clear, however, what any of this has to do with the fact that millions of people have lost their homes—many in fraudulent, illegal foreclosures on fraudulent, sadly legal mortgages. It’s also unclear what it has to do with the jobs crisis. Or the trillions of dollars in taxpayer money that banks ran away with, while ignoring congressional orders that they ramp up mortgage modifications and small-business lending in return. I mean, I can’t rightly say I know a thing about organizing a movement and I’m all for “a symbolic gesture of our discontent,” as organizers have described this one. By all means, take over the park, the bridge, the street—you name it. But it’s hard to imagine how this becomes anything more than what it is now: a running battle with individual cops over the right to public space in Manhattan.

Which, by the way, is an important issue. NYPD systematically undermines public protest of any sort, often using unnecessarily aggressive tactics. It happens widely enough to suggest it is driven by policy. You see it everywhere from anti-war marches to the Gay Pride parade. So this city could certainly use a movement designed to pressure the mayor and the police chief to change their “crowd control” policies and respect the right to public assembly. We could also use a movement against police brutality. I’d love to see a national movement ally, for instance, with organizers in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and Brownsville to help the hundreds of young black men who get harassed daily as a matter of NYPD policy. They could stand in solidarity to occupy precincts until that racist policy changes. But none of this is happening, at least so far.

Nor is it what the movement declared itself to be about. It’s supposed to be about the deeply entrenched economic inequity that has come to define our lives in the 21st century. I argue this inequity grew out of decades of predation on black families, specifically. But the organizers were wise to make room for as wide a range of perspectives on the problem as possible. The point, as organizers have so movingly put it, is that everyone gets screwed by an economic system that amasses so much wealth in so few hands. “We are all races, sexes and creeds. We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent,” they have written.

RodStarz of the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, noted after heading to the OSW:

Out of curiosity we visited with the RDACBX team after a meeting and the result wasnt the greatest. Besides being stared at and looked at as if we were invading their space, the predominantly young, white and liberal Occupiers sent over one of the few African American men over to talk to us. When we asked them why they didnt approach us themselves and build with us, they replied that “they thought we would get mad because they were white.” The situation was pretty bizarre as a woman started ranting incoherently about Nazi symbols being seen over the skies of California, and another man from the Media Team repeatedly offering us the chance to perform if we spoke to the Arts and Culture team. He didnt seem to get that we werent there to perform, rather we were there just to build. After being mean mugged for taking a free slice of Pizza, we decided it was time to leave the hippie fest.

Our intention is not to dismiss it as just this, but the gut feeling was that there is a serious disconnect down there. We left with mad questions! Where was the hood? Where was the poorest congressional district in the USA, from The South Bronx at? Like we say in Hip Hop, where Brooklyn at? Could it be that perhaps the working class couldnt afford to just leave work and the responsibility of bills and family survival to camp out in a city park? Did folks from our communities not know about this? If people of color were occupying Wall St would we have lasted this long? All in all the questions remain, yet with time and reflection , we refuse to just dismiss it. Its a historic time in the world in which general assemblies are starting to happen all over, as cities across the US are also now having “occupations”.

We are looking at race and reactions to the march, but reader Sue sent in a picture that really does speak 1,000 words:

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The analysis from the BagNews blog:

Seems like everybody (1, 2, 3, 4- just for starters) led this morning with this Occupy Wall Street photo. Hmm, I wonder why? (The power of the image is not only the 10 for “beauty,” but that it also doubles down on the “martyr/saint.”)

If you can get past the saintly/insanely beautiful girl and her cleavage, though, what we’ve got here also is the latest law enforcement adjustment in the battle for Wall Street — women arresting women.

(Image Credit: Vivir Latino)

(Note: These are my undeveloped thoughts about Occupy Wall Street, which may be unfair to many people. I would love to have my views checked and challenged by anyone who might see things differently. Thanks.)

For the past few months, the vague idea of a revolution had been constantly on my mind, and though I didn’t know how exactly it would be carried out or what specific changes it could achieve, it seemed like the only way out of the ridiculous state of our country. So it should have seemed like a serendipitous turn of events event for Occupy Wall Street, the vague idea of a revolution incarnate, to pop up in New York and very rapidly gain widespread support. Yet for some reason, I felt very hesitant to sign onto the movement in any way. I would never want to discourage or discount the efforts of people who recognize the need for change in our country and actually take a stand for it. But try as I might, I couldn’t seem to connect to the whole thing. It wasn’t a matter of being jaded or cynical – my ideals easily and constantly compel me into action, but nothing about Occupy Wall Street seemed to compel me. In fact, what I was seeing and hearing about it made me feel even more disempowered. I didn’t know how to explain it exactly, but thought it might have something to do with:

· the fact that it was popularized by admittedly privileged organizations and individuals
· the empty and misleading symbolism of “Wall Street”
· the demographics drawn to it and the exclusive methods of communication used to reach out to them
· and the disconnect I observed between this movement and the historic work of marginalized communities throughout the country, especially in this city, which continues to be carried out day by day with very little attention.

Struggling with these feelings and recognizing my own biases, I approached the protest as open-mindedly as possible. I showed up at Liberty Plaza last Friday night, with some people from my program, and we made our way through the almost theatrical encampment at Liberty Plaza and sat in for the occupation’s general assembly. Once there, however, I realized that the representation was even more limited than I had expected. The crowd was overwhelmingly and undeniably white and, from the looks of it, “hip” in a way that privilege enables people to be. All the moderators were young, educated white people, as were all those who seemed to be playing a more direct role in the assembly.

As one who has been subjected to spaces dominated by white privilege all my life, I felt a guttural negative reaction to the scene, and could not help but feel oppressed by it, despite my hope and desire to feel solidarity with the people there. I can’t fully explain or justify my feelings, and I know a lot of it is a matter of my own biases, which have developed through a long process of struggling against white dominance and power in my own country, city, school, etc. and having to overcome feelings of Otherness in all spaces. I don’t want to take away from the presence of people of color at the protest, who I am sure have been actively involved and dedicated to the process. In my personal experience of the protest, however, Occupy Wall Street was just another place in the world where I felt marginal and tokenized, where the terms of the game were once again being dictated to me by the white majority.

I recognize that these feelings are personal and in need of more critical exploration, and I’m sure many people of color would disagree with me completely. Aside from these feelings, my hesitance toward Occupy Wall Street has to do with my own vision of an American revolution. I believe that a true revolution cannot be carried out by those who are comfortable enough with the power structures that exist. It cannot have been initiated by a privileged organization of educated people who are shielded from the worst aspects of our unjust society, who have plenty of options in life and to whom the fact of oppression is not much more than an intellectual entity. A true revolution must be carefully and gradually mobilized by those who have been most oppressed and marginalized by the current state of our government and economy, whose continued existence in this world really depends on a radical change. Otherwise, we are replicating the structures of power that continue to oppress us.

It was shocking to me to see how poorly immigrant communities and communities of color had been included in Occupy Wall Street. I guess the reasoning or justification is that, since all the dispossessed masses and people of color are covered by the “99%”, this protest is all-inclusive. But the fact is that amongst that 99% exist great inequalities of their own and extreme gradations of wealth and privilege, which are inextricably tied to race, despite the general assembly’s blatant attempt to suggest we live in a country “formerly divided by race” (Read this: http://henaashraf.com/2011/09/30/brown-power-at-occupy-wall-street/). To act as if we share one experience and one problem and therefore seek the same solution would be a terrible lie and an extremely weak and superficial grounds for collective action, especially if the voices that have begun to dominate the movement have the least to lose if the movement were to fail. It’s great to feel solidarity with one another against the people who rule over the 99%, but within the 99% are plenty of people who rule over the rest in their own way, and this makeshift solidarity can only go so far.

The fact that there is no clear demand reveals the lack of urgency on the part of those who are shaping it. It’s a movement fueled by ambiguity and theater, and it’s hard to say that this movement could survive the process of forming real demands that can significantly improve the lives of the 99%. The reality is that there are a lot of VERY urgent demands out there, which have been very carefully researched and formulated by marginalized communities, but this movement seems to have all the time in the world when it comes to deciding on what it really wants to take action for. I saw signs about college graduates not having jobs and signs protesting the lack of funding for art students, and it is great that these people are taking a stand to change a world that does not allow them to achieve their dreams even though they did everything in their power to make it happen. But while those people might be unemployed or underemployed because they can’t find a decent job in the field of their choice, on the other hand there are people cleaning toilets and being subject to all sorts of abuse, who have never had the option to pursue their dreams, and as evidenced by the turnout, don’t have the time to come perform their feelings about the injustices they live.

After the general assembly, we stopped by a dinky little sushi restaurant nearby, where an Asian immigrant woman was working frantically into the late hours of the night to prepare noodles and make the last of her day’s earnings. It struck me that this woman, working around the clock and living a life in the United States that could not have been the life she had imagined for herself, could not participate in, much less lead or help determine, the movement being carried out a block away in her name – a movement which would more readily include her as a nameless point in their argument than a voice in its future.

(Image Credit: Occupy Wall Street)

I first went down to Occupy Wall Street last Sunday, almost a week after it had started. I didn’t go down before because I, like many of my other brown friends, were wary of what we had heard or just intuited that it was mostly a young white male scene. When I asked friends about it they said different things: that it was really white, that it was all people they didn’t know, that they weren’t sure what was going on. But after hearing about the arrests and police brutality on Saturday and after hearing that thousands of people had turned up for their march I decided I needed to see this thing for myself.

So I went down for the first time on Sunday September 25th with my friend Sam. At first we couldn’t even find Occupy Wall Street. We biked over the Brooklyn Bridge around noon on Sunday, dodging the tourists and then the cars on Chambers Street. We ended up at Ground Zero and I felt the deep sense of sadness that that place now gives me: sadness over how, what is now in essence, just a construction site changed the world so much for the worse. A deep sense of sadness for all the tourists taking pictures around this construction site that is now a testament to capitalism, imperialism, torture, oppression but what is also a place where many people died ten years ago.

Sam and I get off our bikes and walk them. We are looking for Liberty Plaza. We are looking for somewhere less alienating. For a moment we feel lost. We walk past the department store Century 21 and laugh about how discount shopping combined with a major tourist site means that at any moment someone will stop short in front of us and we will we bang our bikes against our thighs. A killer combination, that of tourists, discount shopping and the World Trade Center.

The landscape is strange. I notice that. We are in the shadow of half built buildings. They glitter and twist into the sky. But they also seem so naked: rust colored steel poking its way out their tops, their sides, their guts spilling out for all to see.

We get to Liberty Plaza and at first it is almost unassuming. We didn’t entirely know what to do. We wandered around. We made posters and laid them on the ground (our posters read: “We are all Troy Davis” “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “Tired of Racism” “Tired of Capitalism”)

And I didn’t know anyone down there. Not one person. And there were a lot of young white kids. But there weren’t only young white kids. There were older people, there were mothers with kids, and there were a lot more people of color than I expected, something that made me relieved. We sat on the stairs and watched everyone mill around us. There was the normal protest feeling of people moving around in different directions, not sure what to do with themselves, but within this there was also order: a food table, a library, a busy media area. There was order and disorder and organization and confusion, I watched as a man carefully changed each piece of his clothing folding each piece he took off and folding his shirt, his socks, his pants and placing them carefully under a tarp. I used the bathroom at the McDonalds up Broadway and there were two booths of people from the protest carrying out meetings, eating food from Liberty Plaza, sipping water out of water bottles, their laptops out. They seemed obvious yet also just part of the normal financial district hustle and bustle.

But even though at first I didn’t know what to do while I was at Liberty Plaza I stayed there for a few hours. I was generally impressed and energized by what I saw: people seemed to be taking care of each other. There seemed to be a general feeling of solidarity, good ways of communicating with each other, less disorganization than I expected and everyone was very very friendly. The whole thing was bizarre yes, the confused tourists not knowing what was going on, the police officers lining the perimeter, the mixture of young white kids with dredlocks, anarchist punks, mainstream looking college kids, but also the awesome black women who was organizing the food station, the older man who walked around with his peace sign stopping and talking to everyone, a young black man named Chris from New Jersey who told me he had been there all week and he was tired but that he had come not knowing anyone, had made friends and now he didn’t want to leave.

And when I left, walking my bike back through the streets of the financial district, fighting the crowds of tourists and men in suits, I felt something pulling me back to that space. It was that it felt like a space of possibility, a space of radical imagination. And it was energizing to feel like such a space existed.

And so I started telling my friends to go down there and check it out. I started telling people that it was a pretty awesome thing, that just having a space to have these conversations mattered, that it was more diverse than I expected. And I went back.

On Wednesday night I attended my first General Assembly. Seeing 300 people using consensus method was powerful. Knowing that a lot of people there had never been part of a consensus process and were learning about it for the first time was powerful. We consens-ed on using the money that was being donated to the movement for bail for the people who had been arrested. I was impressed that such a large group made a financial decision in a relatively painless way.

After the General Assembly that night there was both a Talent Show (“this is what a talent show looks like!”) on one side of the Plaza and an anti-patriarchy working group meeting (which became the safer-spaces working group) on the other. (In some ways the juxtaposition of both these events happening at once feels emblematic of one of the splits going on down there: talent shows across the square from anti-patriarchy meetings, an announcement for a zombie party right after an announcement about the killing of Troy Davis followed by an announcement that someone had lost their phone. Maybe this is how movements need to maintain themselves, through a recognition that political change is also fundamentally about everyday life and that everyday life needs to encompass all of this: there needs to be a space for a talent show, across from anti-patriarchy meetings, there needs to be a food table and medics, a library, everyone needs to stop for a second and look around for someone’s phone. That within this we will keep centrally talking about Troy Davis and how everyone is affected by a broken, racist, oppressive system. Maybe, maybe this is the way? )

I went to the anti-patriarchy meeting because even though I was impressed by the General Assembly and its process I also noticed that it was mostly white men who were in charge of the committees and making announcements and that I had only seen one women of color get up in front of everyone and talk. A lot was said at the anti-patriarchy meeting about in what ways the space of the occupation was a safe space and also not. Women talked about not feeling comfortable in the drum circle because of men dancing up on them and how to change this, about how to feel safe sleeping out in the open with a lot of men that they didn’t know, about not-assuming gender pronouns and asking people which pronouns they would prefer.

Here is the thing though: I’ve had these conversations before, I’m sure a lot of us in activist spaces have had these conversations before, the ones that we need to keep having about how to make sure everyone feels comfortable, how to not assume gender pronouns and gender roles. But there were plenty of people in this meeting who didn’t know what we were doing when we went around and asked for people’s names and preferred gender pronoun. A lot of people who looked taken aback by this. Who stumbled through it, but also who looked interested when we explained what we were doing. Who listened to the discussion and then joined the conversation about what to do to make sure that Occupy Wall Street felt like a space safe for everyone. Who said that they had similar experiences and were glad that we were talking about it.

This is important because I think this is what Occupy Wall Street is right now: less of a movement and more of a space. It is a space in which people who feel a similar frustration with the world as it is and as it has been, are coming together and thinking about ways to recreate this world. For some people this is the first time they have thought about how the world needs to be recreated. But some of us have been thinking about this for a while now. Does this mean that those of us who have been thinking about it for a while now should discredit this movement? No. It just means that there is a lot of learning going on down there and that there is a lot of teaching to be done.

On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the “Declaration of the Occupation” read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn’t realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about “being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class…” was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.

But now we were realizing that this was actually a really important document and that it was going to be sent into the world and read by thousands of people. And that if we let it go into the world written the way it was then it would mean that people like me would shrug this movement off, it would stop people like me and my friends and my community from joining this movement, one that I already felt a part of. So this was urgent. This movement was about to send a document into the world about who and what it was that included a line that erased all power relations and decades of history of oppression. A line that would de-legitimize the movement, this would alienate me and people like me, this would not be able to be something I could get behind. And I was already behind it this movement and somehow I didn’t want to walk away from this. I couldn’t walk away from this.

And that night I was with people who also couldn’t walk away. Our amazing, impromptu, radical South Asian contingency, a contingency which stood out in that crowd for sure, did not back down. We did not back down when we were told the first time that Hena spoke that our concerns could be emailed and didn’t need to be dealt with then, we didn’t back down when we were told that again a second time and we didn’t back down when we were told that to “block” the declaration from going forward was a serious serious thing to do. When we threatened that this might mean leaving the movement, being willing to walk away. I knew it was a serious action to take, we all knew it was a serious action to take, and that is why we did it.

I have never blocked something before actually. And the only reason I was able to do so was because there were 5 of us standing there and because Hena had already put herself out there and started shouting “mic check” until they paid attention. And the only reason that I could in that moment was because I felt so urgently that this was something that needed to be said. There is something intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people, but there is something even more intense about speaking in front of hundreds of people with whom you feel aligned and you are saying something that they do not want to hear. And then it is even more intense when that crowd is repeating everything you say– which is the way the General Assemblies or any announcements at Occupy Wall Street work. But hearing yourself in an echo chamber means that you make sure your words mean something because they are being said back to you as you say them.

And so when we finally got everyone’s attention I carefully said what we felt was the problem: that we wanted a small change in language but that this change represented a larger ethical concern of ours. That to erase a history of oppression in this document was not something that we would be able to let happen. That we knew they had been working on this document for a week, that we appreciated the process and that it was in respect to this process that we wouldn’t be silenced. That we demanded a change in the language. And they accepted our change and we withdrew our block as long as the document was published with our change and they said “find us after and we will go through it” and then it was over and everyone was looking somewhere else. I stepped down from the ledge I was standing on and Sonny looked me in the eye and said “you did good” and I’ve never needed to hear that so much as then.

Which is how after the meeting ended we ended up finding the man who had written the document and telling him that he needed to take out the part about us all being “one race, the human race.” But its “scientifically true” he told us. He thought that maybe we were advocating for there being different races? No we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street.

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to.

This all has been said by many many strong women of color before me but every time, every single time these levels of power are confronted it I think it needs to be written about, talked about, gone through over and over again.

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I’m going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it. It felt worth it to sit down on the on a street corner in the Financial District at 11:30 pm on a Thursday night, after working all day long and argue for the changing of the first line of Occupy Wall Street’s official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. It felt worth it not only because we got the line changed but also because while standing in a circle of 20, mostly white men, and explaining racism in front of them: carefully and slowly spelling out that I as a women of color experience the world way differently than the author of the Declaration, a white man, that this was not about him being personally racist but about relations of power, that he needed to, he urgently needed to listen and believe me about this, this moment felt like a victory for the movement on its own.

And this is the other thing. It was hard, and it was fucked up that we had to fight for it in the way we did but we did fight for it and we won. The line was changed, they listened, we sat down and re-wrote it and it has been published with our re-write. And when we walked away, I felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed a movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see– one that takes into account historical and current inequalities, oppressions, racisms, relations of power, one that doesn’t just recreate liberal white privilege but confronts it head on. And if I have to fight to make that happen I will. As long as my people are there standing next to me while I do that.

Later that night I biked home over the Brooklyn Bridge and I somehow felt like the world was, just maybe, at least in that moment, mine, as well as everyone dear to me and everyone who needed and wanted more from the world. I somehow felt like maybe the world could be all of ours.

Much love (and rage)

Manissa

Are you participating in Occupy Wall Street? Send your stories to team@racialicious.com if you would like to see them published here.

Once again, it is Thursday night, and once again, I am writing this because I think it needs to be documented and shared. And once again, this is about mass actions taking place in NYC. Once again, please feel free to share this.

The following is from my perspective:

Tonight was my 4th time down at Occupy Wall Street. I felt drawn to the protests, like I needed to be there, and I guess I was meant to be, as well as the people I ended up with.

At the general assembly a document was introduced called “The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City”. To my understanding, this document has been worked on for many days, by many people, in a working group. It was announced that this document would be disseminated to the media, to the Internet, to everyone who planned to occupy other cities in the country. Basically – this document is REALLY IMPORTANT, and the audience is meant to be everyone, we were told.

The general assembly read the document together, line by line. The GA has grown a lot in the past few days and has noticeably (finally?) gotten slightly more diverse. For me, reading the document together was a very powerful and moving moment, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Immediately after this I turned around and joined my friends Thanu and Sonny, who were with Manissa and Natasha. They had all just come back from the first local meeting for South Asians for Justice.

Without knowing we had spontaneously formed a bloc of South Asians present at the General Assembly. While it continued, we began to discuss the document amongst ourselves, specifically the second paragraph, and our issues with it. We weren’t the only ones who had concerns; numerous people spoke up and requested changes to the document. The facilitators kept wanting to go back to agenda items, but I personally felt, if people wanted to discuss this document, right here, right now, let’s do it, instead of pushing something else. To be heard, a person would shout “mic check!”, said a few words at a time, the crowd repeated their words, and so this process continued until the person’s message was finished.

I, Thanu, Sonny, Manissa, and Natasha felt that some language needed to be urgently changed. Please keep in mind that this document is a living, working document, and is unpublished, and is being changed as I type with the (as they are called) “friendly amendments” that were proposed. The line was: “As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or lack thereof, political party and cultural background, we acknowledge the reality: that there is only one race, the human race, and our survival requires the cooperation of its members…”

The first major concern amongst us was that the phrase “formerly divided by” was unrealistic, and erased histories of oppression that marginalized communities have suffered. The second concern was that the “human race” language also felt very out of touch.

We debated amongst ourselves whether to speak up about this. As I mentioned, individual people were airing their concerns about the document, even though the facilitators had requested to email any changes to them, or to speak to them later. I felt though, that our thoughts needed to be shared with the general assembly, and not just to a few over email. I was urged by our impromptu bloc to be the one to speak up. So I did.

I started shouting “mic check!”, got the crowd’s attention, and said that we did not agree with the phrase “formerly divided by” and instead felt it could perhaps be “despite”, and said that the original phrasing erased histories of oppression. Unfortunately, even though about 4 or 5 presumably white people had spoken up before me about changes to the document, I was told that this was a time for questions, not changes to the document – by a facilitator who was a man of colour. Talk about feeling shut down.

The main facilitator, a white man, said that the document and the paragraph was meant to reflect the future that we wanted, and that “formerly divided by” should stay. I again shouted “mic check!” and our spontaneous Brown Power crew again shouted my words after me – I reiterated again that the phrasing erased much history, and that it was idealistic and unrealistic. I think at this point I looked around and realized everyone was staring at me; it hit me what we were doing, that we had the floor, that we were demanding a change.

The protestors at Occupy Wall Street have been saying that there will be efforts to reach out to people of colour, to have communities of colour engage and be a part of the protests, to help create real change – because, let’s face it, the protests have been very white and people of colour need to be present, and need to speak up. Well, that’s exactly what we were doing, and I realized that we were helping to make that change happen.

The facilitators asked if our issue was an ethical concern – if it was, then it would have to be addressed. I said, yes it was, meaning, we were blocking the document in order for this ethical concern to be addressed. Manissa then read out what we felt the change should be to the phrase, after thanking the crowd and facilitators for working with us. The change was instead of “formerly divided by” to have it be “despite” or “despite the divisions of…etc”.

The change was accepted by the general assembly. Our impromptu crew/bloc turned to each other to discuss what just happened, and people listened in and expressed their agreement with what we did. We still felt however that the paragraph as a whole needed to be changed, and Sonny pointed out that the language left invisible or attempted to erase the dynamics of power. An Iranian man who had been at Occupy Wall Street for a number of days remarked that as a group we were conspicuous. Sonny noted that as a group of 5 brown people, with a hijabi and one wearing a turban, of course we grabbed attention in this still-mostly white crowd, and “how real can you get?”

The GA finished and we immediately proceeded to the impromptu meeting being held to address the document. Note, our proposed changes about the language to the sentence I mentioned above had already been accepted, but we still felt the document did not address or ignored issues of power. This is extremely important because a document being shared by Occupy Wall Street to the so-called 99% should not be ignoring or erasing issues of power. We found the guy who had been the main facilitator (and who also had been visibly frustrated with us) and started to discuss the paragraph.

Unfortunately though, there were many who tried to cut us off, and as we sat down on the ground, with Thanu bringing out her laptop, these people gathered nearby, pointed fingers at us, and made me feel very uncomfortable, as if we weren’t welcome. They clearly didn’t like what we were doing, but what we were doing was participating and engaging with Occupy Wall Street, and making ourselves heard – after all, isn’t that what the organizers want? The facilitator who had earlier attempted to shut us down, came and said we should come back the next day to finish our discussion. We said no, let’s do this right here and now, and hammer it out in 10 minutes, which we did. A white woman came up to me and asked, why didn’t we leave the main facilitator alone? I told her he wanted to listen to us and chose to sit down here with us, we didn’t force him. These were the unfortunate distractions and disruptions we had to deal with. I realized that change on the ground is hard, messy, and painful, and we could feel all of this.

This discussion was around the wording of the 2nd paragraph, which I won’t quote here, because like I said, this document is being changed and is unpublished as of right now. We didn’t like the language of how we are all one human race. The facilitator said that that is scientific fact, that we are all one race. We agreed, but had to explain that socially, there is inequality. It was highly problematic that we had to break down systems of oppression to this man who seemed to have the final say on this document, this document that will be shared with the world, that is supposed to represent Occupy Wall Street, as well as supposedly the 99%. Manissa had to explain that he as a white man had more power and privilege than her as a woman of colour. That racism isn’t about feelings, as he thought, but about power and oppression, as Sonny and Thanu explained. It boggled our minds that we were discussing power and privilege while at the same time we could feel this man’s power and privilege over us, and that he is a facilitator/organizer for Occupy Wall Street! Clearly there needs to be a lot of self-education workshops at Liberty Plaza.

Long story short, we got the paragraph changed to adequately address our concerns that it reflect issues around dynamics of power and privilege that marginalized people feel every single day. This was a very hard discussion to have, and it felt so real, it hurt. It hurt that it had to happen, it hurt that we had to explain what is really behind racism to this man, and the people around him, it hurt that so many tried to disrupt us. But at the same time, we were meant to be there, meant to be heard, to make this happen, to make these changes occur. And there were a lot of people sitting there and listening in and contributing constructively. We walked away realizing what we had just done – spontaneously come together, demand change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with, but also feel a need for constructive criticism.

This document, “The Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” will be shared with the world soon, and the five or so of us were able to come together, indeed we had to come together, to make sure this document didn’t reflect the ideals of a few people unaware of their power and privilege, but instead could reflect more of the reality of the 99%.

Thank you for reading.

peace,
Hena Ashraf

The full transcript is here, but below are the segments I found most interesting.

TAVIS SMILEY: The bottom line is that our body politic—I want to be clear about this—both Republicans and Democrats, both Congress and the White House, and for that matter, all of the American people, have got to take the issue of the poor more seriously. Why? Because the new poor, the new poor, are the former middle class. Obviously, the polls tell these elected officials, these politicians, that you ought to talk about the middle class, that resonates. Well, if the new poor are the former middle class, then this conversation has got to be expanded. We’ve got to have a broader conversation about what’s happening to the poor. And the bottom line for me is this, Amy, with regard to this legislation and all others that are now demonizing, casting aspersion on the poor. There’s always been a connection between the poor and crime, but now—between poverty and crime, but now it’s become a crime, it would seem, to be poor in this country. And I believe this country, one day, is going to get crushed under the weight of its own poverty, if we think we can continue to live in a country where one percent of the people own and control more wealth than 90 percent. That math, long term, Amy, is unsustainable. We’ve got to talk about poverty.[...]

AMY GOODMAN: A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found 86 percent of African Americans expressed approval of the job President Obama is doing, even as support for him has slipped among other groups. This is from the Washington Post. The view is nuanced, though: “Among blacks, approval of the president’s economic policies has weakened, with only 54 percent saying the policies have made the economy better compared with 77 percent in October.” Cornel West, you have been both a supporter of Senator Obama in becoming president and a fierce critic. These polls are shifting, even among his hugest support group. What about what has happened, and where you think President Obama is trying to take the country, and where you think it needs to go?

CORNEL WEST: Well, I think, on the one hand, large numbers of black people rightly want to protect President Obama against the vicious right-wing attacks, the Fox News-like attacks, the lies about him being socialist, Muslim and so forth. On the other hand, the suffering intensifies. It’s very clear that President Obama caves in over and over and over again. He punts on first down. If you’re in a foxhole with him, you’re in trouble, because he wants to compromise, you want to fight. He doesn’t have the kind of backbone he ought to have. So black folk find themselves in a dilemma: how do we protect him against the right-wing attacks and at the same time keep him accountable, especially when it comes to poor and working people?

Unfortunately, Tim Geithner and his economic team have nothing to do with the legacy of Martin King, have indifference toward poor and working people. He listens to them, hence he’s rightly associated much more with the oligarchs than with poor people. We hope he changes his mind. We hope he gets a progressive economic team, even though, as you know, many of us are exploring other kinds of possibilities in the coming election, given his lukewarmness.

It’s well worth a full listen, particularly as article after article has dropped on our completely unsustainable plutocracy, particularly the unbelievably high racial wealth gap. However, I am withholding a full analysis until a bit later in the year – long time readers will remember that my initial decision back in 2008 was based on the candidates proposed poverty plans. Once the GOP field stabilizes, we will take a look at what all candidates (including Green and Independent) have advocated for in terms of legislation around poverty.

In the meantime, West and Smiley are attempting to spark a conversation on poverty that is long overdue. However, their credibility as messengers is a bit skewed – both Smiley and West have had public falling outs with Obama over matters that are equal parts policy driven and ego driven. Still, I don’t think we can afford to ignore their pointed message. London is on fire, financial markets are in a crisis, and at some point, Americans will have to acknowledge our debts to each other or lose our children to the Pied Piper.

Mother Jones recently published “My Summer at an Indian Call Center,” which looked at the other side of the “these people are stealing our jobs!” outsourcing scenario. It was written by Andrew Marantz, an American who spent a summer in India and took a training course for call center agents, and focused on his experiences during this training and his views of the industry. Some parts were interesting, such as the strange and amusing anecdotes from his cultural training bootcamp, and it provided a much needed counter to the idea that the current system of globalization brings greater happiness and prosperity to everyone.

Points like this were particularly insightful:

Call-center employees gain their financial independence at the risk of an identity crisis. A BPO salary is contingent on the worker’s ability to de-Indianize [16]: to adopt a Western name and accent and, to some extent, attitude. Aping Western culture has long been fashionable; in the call-center classroom, it’s company policy. Agents know that their jobs only exist because of the low value the world market ascribes to Indian labor. The more they embrace the logic of global capitalism, the more they must confront the notion that they are worth less.

But its critique was ultimately limited, full of over-generalizations, and at times contradictory. Below are four reasons I found it so, and why I would hesitate to recommend this article.

(1) Near the beginning of the piece, Marantz quotes a 2003 Guardian article which states: “The most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.” It’s factually correct that this is a marketable skill, but by labeling it the most marketable skill the article is overreaching. It also fails to make a distinction that few Indians overlook. Namely, that there’s very little money that a middle class urban Indian can earn by slipping into the identity of, say, a villager in Orissa, or a farmer in rural Nigeria. The marketable skill is the ability to slip into an affluent Westerner’s identity.

By itself, this is a small omission and overgeneralization, but there are similar ones throughout this article, forming a pattern indicative of a lack of awareness or concern for the underlying hierarchies that govern many aspects of a call center employee’s life, as well as a lack of nuance.

(2) The most interesting, as well as most questionable, parts of the article were those which talked about the cultural training call center agents are required to undergo. In this training, Marantz says,

trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture” — which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one.

While in this instance learning “international culture” is obviously corporate doublespeak for “If you sound too Indian, you’ll be fired,” to claim that there’s no international culture seems similar to the claim that white people have no culture, especially in its glossing over of underlying hierarchies. The point of this culture training, it must not be forgotten, is to give the Indians at these call centers names, accents, mannerisms, and cultural signifiers that help them to pass for Westerners, to circumvent the “protectionism” instincts of the callers. This isn’t a melding of two cultures into something no one is familiar with; it’s the attempted erasure of one to avoid instigating the anger and scorn of those from the other.

Furthermore, to say the signifiers of this “international culture” are recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one is to imply that the playing field is equal, that there’s no hierarchy in the making of said signifiers or in the awareness/consumption of them. It glosses over the history of colonialism as well as current economic inequalities, and implies something that’s partly disproven by the author’s own experience: that an American, walking into a call center recruiting office, would have the same chances of being hired as an Indian.

Marantz further exacerbates this by characterizing call centers, where Indians are pressured to pass as Westerners, as “one of the largest intercultural exchanges in history.” And the unacknowledged irony is that in this globalized world, it’s Westerners such as Marantz — who have spent a semester in Nepal, or gone through some call center training, or have had their jobs outsourced — that largely define for international culture what it means to be an Indian call center agent.

(3) The author makes statements that seem factually questionable, such as the following:

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do.

Most workers in the BPO industry, of which call centers form a part, are not from Himalayan tribes or coastal fishing towns, but are “urban English-speaking youths“. One of the prerequisites of working at call centers, as Marantz himself states, is complete mastery of English, which is difficult to achieve in most schools to which Indians from Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns have access. Here, it seems like Marantz is trying to shove the lives of call center agents into a certain assimilation narrative — ambitious young men leave their traditional communities to make a name for themselves in (increasingly Westernized) cities, and in the process lose their identity — whether or not all the facts fit.

There are two other problems with this. The first, to paraphrase Charles Ramirez Berg, is that this assimilation narrative endorses the very system it sets out to criticize, because the only happy ending sends the ethnic/non-Western Other back to where he began, leaving him to cope with the negligible opportunities that exist for him there. The second is that it presents an oversimplified, binary view of the world. This is also evident in other parts of the article, where Marantz makes quite sweeping generalizations. For example, when describing a call center trainee, Marantz writes, “Growing up in rural Haryana, Nishant got his picture of the world from grainy Sylvester Stallone movies on a neighbor’s TV. Like all the boys in his village, he dreamed of living in California.”

For many young men and women, particularly those living near poverty, globalization has displaced nationalism as an ideal. For them, success is defined not in climbing local hierarchies, which can be quite rigid, but in bypassing them entirely and reaching affluence by finding work abroad. That said, I would have suspected at least one or two of the boys in Nishant’s village to have dreams of becoming, say, world famous cricket players, professions that would not require living in California. That Marantz doesn’t makes me wonder at the absoluteness of his perceptions.

And from parts such as this –

Twenty years ago, before India opened its markets to the world, career prospects were bleak. Men might have been laborers or government workers, but even the most ambitious women often gave in to social pressure and stayed home.

– it’s clear that Marantz sees pre-1991 India as having almost nothing to offer ambitious men and women. That this statement ignores doctors, businessmen, professors, etc, is perhaps belaboring the obvious. What is also questionable is the implication that the last twenty years have brought nothing but progress. For while it’s true that middle and upper class urban Indians, on average, have become more affluent in this time period (and not always, or even mainly, by adopting Western identities, even in the BPO industry, despite the impression this article gives), the same can’t be said for others. When India bowed to international pressure and began opening its markets, some of the largely ignored consequences were greater income inequality, increased poverty, currency shocks, food insecurity, and a “crisis of extinction” faced by small rural farmers.

(4) The concluding paragraph of the article comprises the main reasons that I’m hesitant to recommend it. It begins:

In a sense, Arjuna is too westernized to be happy in India. He speaks with an American accent, listens to American rock music, and suffers from American-style malaise. In his more candid moments, he admits that life would have been easier if he had hewn to the traditional Indian path.

As stated above, I believe that this article contains a much needed — though limited — critique of the justifications of global free market capitalism. However, it often implicitly and explicitly reiterates the same essentialist East/West binary that such justifications rely on, the worldview that the East is conservative, traditional, stagnant, and ultimately (and deservedly) powerless against the dynamic, modern, independent, and ruggedly individualistic West. The statement that Arjuna is “too Westernized to be happy in India” contains an unthinking reliance on this East/West dichotomy — which is also present in the statements quoted above — and works to undermine Marantz’s critique of Western-style free market capitalism not being the path to happiness and prosperity.

I know of desis who were born and brought up in America who are now living quite happily in India, as well as Indians who are unhappy with their “traditional Indian” path and those who are happy with their “modern Western” one (I put these in quotes because I would be quite curious to know the exact criteria that distinguish a traditional Indian path from a modern Western one). The crucial difference, it seems to me, isn’t the degree of Westernization, but the available career opportunities. And however lucrative call center jobs might appear in the short-term, in the long-term such jobs are physically- and emotionally-demanding career dead-ends.

From the facts stated in the article, it can be inferred that Arjuna is highly educated and comes from a relatively privileged family. The problem isn’t that such a person became too “Westernized to be happy in India,” but that even with all his education and privileges, there were few options available to him. All that he — and hundreds of thousands of other Indians — have to show for their efforts are graveyard shift call center jobs that leave them physically and mentally disconnected from the world outside. Jobs where they’re required to speak English even among themselves, where they must take timed bathroom breaks and don’t have the freedom to step outside, where they’re minutely judged on their ability to pass as those more valued in global hierarchies and passively endure whatever abuse the customer throws at them. And the problem is that these are some of the people who are considered globalization’s success stories, and the hardships others face — those, say, from “Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns” — are generally greater and far more pressing.

Last year, at a Poynter function, I had the privilege of meeting Jose Antonio Vargas in person. Both charming and interesting, with a huge drive to make journalism a true tool of democracy, he seemed like someone I wanted to get to know.

Last week, Vargas wanted the world to get to know exactly who he was. So he took the bold step of writing a piece that could change his life forever. Called “My Life as an Undocumented Worker,” Vargas used the New York Times platform to reveal his secret:

Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Vargas artfully describes the pain of the political becoming personal:

The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only a year after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected in part because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from attending public school and accessing other services. (A federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my encounter at the D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-immigrant sentiments and stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain on society. They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to contribute.

Something that I adore about Vargas’ piece is how he quietly discusses class in the context of immigration. As he describes the hurdles he jumps through to obtain forged documents or to participate in society, he makes a few disclosures:

Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-paying jobs that undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I brought coffee and helped around the office; eventually I began covering city-hall meetings and other assignments for pay.

For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

Something I noticed, while working in higher class gigs – the subtle indignities of working are mostly removed. At a certain professional level, you are no longer subjected to random drug tests. You have access to an HR department. And most importantly, there are a lot more assumptions that you are who you say you are. I work in DC, where a security clearance is worth your weight in gold – but outside of that, employers aren’t very strict. They may ask to see your documents once, but that’s all. There is no further interrogation. Especially if you possess the highest work document of all, a US Passport. Then, nothing else is needed.

I think about this gap often in terms of Ana. I mention her from time to time, the woman I used to babysit for. Ana fled the civil war in El Salvador and landed in America, only to flee the abusive husband that had come with her. She and her two kids had made a life for each other, but it was one ruled by fear – fear that their father would arrive in the night, and they would have to run again, and fear that others would show up at their door and ruin what she had worked for. I’m not sure, to this day, of Ana’s legal status – since she was a refugee, she could have been admitted to the United States under legal pretenses – or there may not have been time for that. What I remember the most clearly was Ana’s doctorate degree hanging on the wall. One day, as she was going to work as a nanny for a wealthy white couple, she saw me looking at it and informed me she had been a doctor in El Salvador. She often wanted to practice English with me, in hopes of practicing medicine again one day.

Class factors heavily into perceptions of undocumented workers – so I am glad Vargas chose to share his story. The profile that people who are anti-immigration like to paint are people who come to draw on government benefits or people who just commit crimes. Vargas has ascended to the white collar elite – a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, currently employed at The New York Times.

But Vargas explores still more aspects of the immigration debate through one more disclosure:

Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”

I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a green card.

Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.

Read the whole thing.

Vargas’ decision to embrace the truth so publicly hasn’t been easy. His editor, Chris Suellentrop, posted to the Times’ 6th floor blog about accepting the piece:

That afternoon, Peter called back with the news: Jose Antonio Vargas is an illegal immigrant. He had been planning to tell his story in The Washington Post, but for reasons unknown to him, The Post killed his story on Monday. [...] I called Peter and told that we wanted to see Jose’s story, but if there was any chance of closing it in time — of editing it, fact-checking it, photographing Jose, designing it, etc. — we needed to see it right now. Just before 5 p.m., 48 hours before the magazine is supposed to close, Jose e-mailed me a draft of the story.

And within a hour, we decided this wasn’t a story we were going to give to anyone else.

The Washington Post passed. There statement was unsatisfactory to me, but hey, it’s my hometown paper. My heart really wants to believe that the piece was killed because they were worried about Vargas’ safety and legal status – but my more cynical gut says they are worried about seeming too liberal friendly going into 2012.

NPR has been digging up bits and pieces of the story. First they checked in at the Washington Post, to see why they passed.

Post reporter Paul Farhi does give us a clue, though, to the reason the Post spiked the story:

“Given the subject — a reporter’s dishonesty about his personal life — The Post subjected Vargas’s story to an unusual degree of scrutiny. One red flag popped up during weeks of checking: Vargas hadn’t disclosed that he had replaced his expired Oregon driver’s license with a new one issued by Washington state (the license had enabled Vargas to pass airport security and to travel to distant work assignments). Vargas later conceded that he had withheld the information on the advice of his attorney. The disclosure set off internal discussion about whether the newspaper was getting the full story from its former reporter.”

Then, they checked the likelihood of Vargas being deported for his admissions. NPR doesn’t think the odds are high, based on changes in ICE policy:

In memorandums issued by ICE Director John Morton, the agency clarified that its priorities are to focus on illegal immigrants who present “a clear risk to national security.”

In one of the memos, released June 17, Morton said ICE is focused on felons and repeat offenders, gang members, and those with numerous immigration violations such as illegally re-entering the U.S. and committing fraud.

The memo also directs ICE officials to avoid proceedings against a wide array of individuals, including U.S. military veterans, minors and seniors, pregnant women, those who grew up in the U.S. and “long-time lawful permanent residents.”

The Washington Post’s Ombudsman has a better take, asking “Why Did the Post Deport Vargas’s Story?”

Why would The Post punt to a rival a riveting, already edited story that could provoke national discussion on immigration — an issue that sorely needs it — and that also included possibly illegal, and perhaps forgivable, conduct by a former Post reporter and current member of management?

Beats the heck out of many in The Post’s newsroom and beats the heck out of me. The cardinal rule of journalism, or politics, is that if there’s bad or questionable information, put it out yourself, be thorough and transparent, and don’t pull any punches.

Brauchli said in an interview with me and in other public statements that he prefers not to discuss internal Post deliberations about news judgment. “We made a judgment not to run the piece,” he said. Fair enough. Few editors go on the record about internal deliberations over a published news story, unless the story later results in accolades and awards.

And, I, too, see cautionary notes about Vargas that might have led to Brauchli’s decision. He left behind a reputation in The Post’s newsroom for being tenacious and talented but also for being a relentless self-promoter whom many colleagues didn’t trust. Editors said that he needed direction, coaching and constant watching.

It’s also disturbing that Vargas has formed a nonprofit group to advocate for immigration reform. He has crossed the line from journalist to advocate.

There is so much to parse here, but for now, I’ll leave the discussion to you readers. Some things I’m wondering:

1. Are we still trying to hold on to the tattered notion of “objectivity” – or did Vargas usher in a whole new take on radical transparency?
2. Seriously, a relentless self-promoter? Have you met any journalists in DC? Everyone, this writer-advocate-sometimes-journo included, is guilty of that. Or is it only cool when the approved new members of the boys club do it?
3. Considering our changing global realities, shouldn’t America be grateful cultivating talent like Vargas? Why do we want to force out a person who I would consider to be a true patriot?
4. ICE may be under directives to leave undocumented workers like Vargas alone, for now – but how will that change in 2012?

(Image Credit: Business Insider)

When I was about 5 or so, I used to go to my grandmother’s house during the day while my Mother went to work. I remember catching the bus and sleeping across my Mom’s lap until we got there, and then her hugging me and heading off to do whatever it was she did all day. (I was five. Clearly, I had no idea.)

Grandma was cool, but there was always a bajillion people at her house. She lived in the projects*, and spent a big portion of her day being “Mama”to everyone even though she was well into her 50s.

I remember, as a kid, how the big thing was for us to run across the street to the convenient store and get a Big Red pop and a bag of chips. All for $0.50. I mean, it was how we spent every afternoon. Because Grandma’s house was full of people, it was never hard for me to get a hold of two quarters – ahhh, two shiny, glorious quarters – so that I could be like the rest of the kids and sit in the middle of the grass and eat my funyuns or my munchos and my Big Red pop.

(I’m from the Midwest. We say pop, thank you very much.)

It wasn’t that I was Grandma’s favorite, but…. well, I was Grandma’s favorite. She invested a lot of time and effort into me. She taught me to read – she’d hand me the newspaper and make me read every page out loud – and she taught me how to be a little lady. She taught me how to love, as a young girl, because outside of that typical adoration that a young girl has for her mother, you learn that that thing that binds you to Grandma emotionally and you understand it even more so once she’s gone. That made her valuable.

However, I must admit. If there’s one thing I don’t remember, it’s going to a grocery store with Grandma. We just.. we never went together. At least, we didn’t go to a grocery store as I know a grocery store to be today. The only store I ever saw her go to was the convenient store across the street.

And now that I think about it, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember about that time with Grandma.

I don’t remember a lot of cooking going on. I don’t even know that I remember any fresh vegetables there. I mean, I remember my Great Grandma – my Grandma’s mother – having that gorgeous garden in her fenced-off backyard, but Grandma didn’t have that kind of backyard. The soil didn’t even have grass on it. It was just hard dirt. I know. I fell on it and scraped myself up a few times.

I guess that’s to be expected. It’s not like it was quality, “prime” real estate or anything. It’s not even like anyone cares to maintain the area. I guess.

I remember running to one particular house in the building in the back of the projects where the free lunch was given out. Bologna, milk, cheese, bread, and little mustard packets to dress the makeshift sandwiches. All the kids used to make a mad dash back there because they were always limited in how much they had and how many kids would be able to sit in there, and if you were last, you went hungry.

As a different woman today, I can acknowledge that that housing project community was a food desert. That even though Grandma was doing all she could to make sure I never went hungry, there was rarely a vegetable on the plate. Even though she meant very well and did the best that she could, I know I picked up a lot of bad habits from that time in my life.

In fact, it sounds a lot like this paragraph from the NYTimes blog:

Poor urban neighborhoods in America are often food deserts — places where it is difficult to find fresh food.   There are few grocery stores; people may do all their shopping at bodegas, where the only available produce and meat are canned peaches and Spam.  If they want fruits and vegetables and chicken and fish, they have to take a bus to a grocery store.   The lack of fresh food creates a vicious cycle; children grow up never seeing it or acquiring a taste for it.  It is one reason that the poor are likelier to be obese than the rich. [source]

When I hear people complain about the cost of fresh food and use this as an excuse to not eat it, it makes me think about those projects where so many people who were, actually, given money by the government to eat couldn’t even access the healthy food. My Grandma, while she might’ve been able to catch a bus to hit the grocery store, might’ve had difficulty doing this since she was the family babysitter. Her, four kids (one of them facing a mental disability), and countless bags with enough food to feed the numerous people that’d be in and out of her house to eat? On the bus? You’re joking, right?

Back to the point. All that food stamp money in the projects, and no fresh food in the area to spend it on.

Whenever we talk about problems with our food system, we often talk about access… and yeah, we might toss around the phrase “food desert,” but is that ever quantified? Are the ramifications of growing up in a food desert ever discussed? Do places like the Morris Brown projects ever come up for discussion? Or are they never mentioned because it’s assumed they don’t matter?

A while back, I wrote the following:

I can specifically remember a time when I lived in a food desert, and the only food store nearby was a gas station. My daughter was on formula at the time, and I used to purchase that in bulk and have that shipped. For myself, though, it was whatever I could get at the store. A bag of chips for breakfast, a bag of chips for lunch, a bowl of ice cream for dinner. If I wanted to go to the grocery, I had to either beg one of my girls to take me or call a taxi. I eventually called the taxi and cut back on groceries so that I could afford the ride, but… it was a lonnng time before I came to that realization.

It made perfect sense, though, that the grocery stores would be on the other side of town from me. The area where I lived was wholly college students living on that good ol’ beer and pizza diet… as evidenced by the abundance of pizza joints, sub shops and drive-thru liquor stores. The stores that a young Mom like me needed… were at least two miles away. With no car, that was quite the struggle.

But if you think about it, isn’t that how Capitalism works? When there is a demand, the promise of profit guarantees that there will always be someone willing and able to jump in and fulfill that need, right? In my neighborhood, there was a high demand for pizza joints and liquor stores. That’s what the college kids wanted. I was the random weird outlier with an infant in a college apartment complex.

Excerpted from The Myth of The Food Desert: Where The Root Went Wrong | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

The reason that food deserts exist is because it is assumed that the people in those geographic locations cannot afford the products that a fresh food-selling store would provide. This is also an automatic assumption of the projects, because the implication is “if these people had any money, they wouldn’t be living in the projects after all.”

That’s just how Capitalism works. Big C. Supply goes where the demand is located. If there’s no money, then clearly there’s no demand off which the investor can profit.

My question, really, is what do we gain from denying the realities of food deserts? How do we benefit from silencing the voices of the un-privileged? If we can identify that fresh food is expensive, why wouldn’t we want to hear from the people most affected by that? If we deny the fact that food deserts exist, you silence the input of those of us who have been affected by this problem the most. Those of us who have been on government assistance and live in still-impoverished areas offer up the critique of the system that says that the government is giving away money to be spent on the very things making us ill and preventing us from healing ourselves.

We also shoot ourselves in our collective feet when we decide to downplay food deserts because it prevents us from ever finding a solution to the problem. What about offering incentives to investors – franchise, corporate and otherwise – who build in food deserts? Why can’t we do that? Why not offer incentives up the chain – tax incentives for security measures (since a lot of these places fear theft and property damage), incentives for the space of the store dedicated solely to fresh produce? We can’t do that because we’re too busy debating their existence. Y’all know I have a problem with that.

So, it saddens me to know that the big politicians that I vote for to get the big checks are not offering up the answers that we need to solve this problem in particular, especially since they’re never walking through (or helicoptering through, even) the projects (or a trailer park, or a low-income community in general) to see what struggles people like this face. Realistically speaking, they’re facing the same struggles that “middle-class” Americans are facing. Middle-class America , for the most part, just knows how to hide it better. If anything would’ve taught us that, it would be the up-spring of foreclosure signs in our very nice, quaint neighborhoods.

Photo/Image Credits: Caitlin Quade, Tulane University; Slow Food USA

This is a public service announcement intended for journalists, news outlets, bloggers, folks in charge of creating policy, and people who have been lucky enough to have never relied on government assistance for basic necessities like food.

Just stop. Just stop the madness.

The latest in this ridiculousness? Fast Company weighing in on what people should and should not be eating on food stamps.

The writer is pulling all of these assumptions out of the air, based on what can theoretically be purchased on food stamps and an assumption that silly poor people don’t know that they will need to maximize their monthly allotment.  They also seem to ignore that some people do eat well on SNAP – there isn’t much data about what types of food are most commonly purchased using EBT cards, but national studies don’t really show much of a link between eating well or eating poorly and food stamps.  It really depends on the person.  Which is why lines like this are infuriating:

[I]f you live in cities like New York City and San Francisco, you should revel in your clean tap water, and save your food stamps for other things. [...]

If [the New York soda ban] passed, the ban would prevent people from using food stamps to buy carbonated and non-carbonated beverages that are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or sugar and have more than 10 calories per eight-ounce serving. Is this over the top? Quite likely. But it’s an interesting thought experiment: What would happen to obesity and diabetes rates if soda was taken off the food-stamp approval list? [...]

One fancy lobster would suck up a good portion of a monthly food stamp allowance–and if you can afford to do that, you should just use cash. Not that poor people shouldn’t get to enjoy lobster. They just shouldn’t use our tax dollars.

13% of Americans are on SNAP.  It’s certainly one of the highest rates of SNAP usage since the program has started but let’s be real here – if every single person on SNAP was completely healthy and fit, we wouldn’t make a dent in America’s problem.  (And, in general, when people talk about issues with America’s health, it’s really just a veiled way to say “eew, fat people.”  Measuring national health is a set of shifting goal posts, and the solutions to a lot of these problems is ending subsidies on certain products.  But its easier to pretend that a growing nation is the result of three hundred million individual failures.)

The SNAP program is also considered one of the most successful government programs there is.  Families are hungry – people get food. It’s rather simple.  The problem comes in when people try to nickel and dime the SNAP program, like the writer above, in service of…well whatever.  Small government, personal responsibility, straight up bigotry, political expediency – the SNAP program takes the hit.  It’s a popular program, but thanks to the way we demonize people on any sort of government assistance, it seen as something that we need to regulate, lest the undeserving poor get to live the high life on taxpayer dollars.

And what a high life it is. Let’s look at the numbers.

From the government’s SNAP FAQs:

In 2008, SNAP served 28.4 million people a month at an annual cost of $34.6 billion. In February 2009, SNAP served 32.6 million people, an all-time record.  SNAP participation fluctuates with the economy and with the pattern of poverty in America. As the number of persons in poverty rose, SNAP participation grows. When poverty falls, so does reliance on SNAP. Participation for the latest available month can be found on Program Data.

Here’s how broke you have to be to qualify for SNAP:

And here’s what the MAXIMUM allotment is:

(Please note, they may give you less than the maximum.)

For comparison’s sake, here’s one of my favorite financial shows, ‘Til Debt Do Us Part.

When Gail Vaz-Oxlade slashes people’s budgets, she rarely allots less than $100 a week for food – even for a two person household. The government allows for even less than that.

The SNAP program normally works in tandem with programs like Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to serve low income women who are at nutritional risk.  WIC is tightly regulated, and one can use this program to see what life would be like if we started putting similar restrictions on food stamps.

Interestingly, one of the best explorations of reversal in fortune and life on public benefits has come from MTV. I love, love, love this episode of True Life, called “I Can No Longer Afford My Lifestyle,” for a host of reasons – it really illuminates a lot of the issues with how quickly a person can go from being financially stable to financially destitute. Three people – Adam, Caitlin, and Aja -were living large right when the bubble burst, and all three start the episode in the same state: broke, jobless, and with grim employment prospects for the future.  Aja, a single mother of three, takes a trip to the grocery store to pick up supplies on WIC, starting at 10:35:

For those of you who can’t see the video, Aja hits the grocery store.  She has a lot of problems with the WIC restrictions and it takes her a long time to actually make her selections.  WIC allows Cheerios but does not allow Honey Nut Cheerios because of the added sugar content.  Aja spurns the unflavored Cheerios (and opts for the WIC-approved Frosted Mini Wheats), but still hits a problem at the register, because she selected sharp cheddar cheese and WIC only allows regular cheddar cheese. “I just got cheese checked at Von’s,” she says in disbelief. “What kind of day is this?”

I have a memory, from long ago, where I am sitting in the parking lot of a McDonalds, with my mom, trying to count out 63 pennies from the floor around the car, the change jar, and the pavement around the car in order to purchase two hamburgers from McDonalds for our evening meal. Cheap food exists for a reason. 63 cents doesn’t go far in the grocery store if you want a hot meal, and have no where for food prep. (Something that people also conveniently forget about – a lot of eating well on a budget requires prep with at least a hot plate, running water, and basic utensils. If you don’t have these things, you have to eat ready made food. Needless to say, living out of a car doesn’t provide you with consistent access to these things.) But a whole hamburger meant a lot to a seven-year-old stomach that was going to go hungry. What kind of day is that? These are broke people choices.

I’m sure that if I shared this story on the NYT Health blog, there would be people berating my mother for buying me a hamburger and not, say, an apple or something. Or maybe some dried lentils we could have soaked overnight on the carburetor using a car fluid funnel and woken up to a wonderfully healthy and cheap pinch of beans.

What many folks, in this land of endless theory, tend to forget is that just like there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there is also Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs.

There at the bottom is a concept: enough food.

You want to know what getting to enough food looks like? There’s an area, on the DC/Maryland border, that is the home to a lot of immigrant communities. This means a lot targeted grocery stores. I went into one, in search of jicama, and marveled at the retailer who was selling dollar bags of produce. The produce in the bags was actively rotting. I’m not talking about bruising or discoloration, which gets things bounced off grocery store shelves. I’m talking about mold. Rot. Things that most people wouldn’t want to touch, but there is enough demand in that area for affordable produce that it’s bagged up and sold along with the other wares. That’s enough food. Buying the dollar bags of rotting food that you will go home, cut around the gross parts, and put the rest in a pot since your family has to eat.

Or as Erika wrote in the “Unbearable Whiteness of Eating“:

When we make food an issue of choice, there is an underlying understanding that everyone, in fact, has that choice to make. There is an accepted belief, in conversations about choosing to eat healthily, that everyone stands between a produce section and a frozen TV dinner section and, invariably, chooses at their discretion. There’s an underlying acceptance in these conversations that food deserts do not exist. That food deserts don’t exist in inner cities… mostly populated by Black Americans. There is an acceptance that food availability doesn’t need to be discussed, because all the people involved in the conversation have access.

Is that a happenstance? A mere coincidence? I might’ve thought so before, but now? I’m not so sure.

Choice is a strange thing.  Americans demand choices, stocking our grocery stores with dozens of options for everything from orange juice to plastic bags.  And yet, people seem to have no issue stripping the right of choice from others.  Clearly, if you start talking in specifics, these “woulda, shoulda, coulda” arguments start falling to the wayside.  Would you personally deny a person a lobster, if they chose to budget for it, on their birthday? Even if the month before they bought canned goods to make sure they could afford that once a year splurge? And where does the policing stop? Soda is bad for you – but many health advocates warn against drinking fruit juice as well, noting that people should eat, rather than drink their calories.  Does that mean we ban juice too? What about Sunny D, a favorite of kids which is described as “an orange flavored drink.” Drink. I, and a lot of people I know, grew up on drink, which generally isn’t mentioned by health advocates, since it seems like they cannot conceive of adults and children drinking fruit flavored sugar water. And yet…

Considering the fact that so many kids could realistically answer “what the fuck is juice,” why don’t we just start banning all drinks that aren’t coffee, tea, and water? Oh wait, we banned bottled water (because you know, poor people can’t like sparkling). Because poor people have always been poor, and have never known otherwise, and they’ve never had nice things, like water that bubbles. And poor people don’t need to exercise choices over what food they eat and what food they prefer because poor people aren’t allowed to have preferences. We aren’t allowed to access nice things.

And access is what brings us to what’s wrong with the one “allowance” the author grants.

Instead, Use Stamps At The Farmer’s Market

The generic complaint against farmers’ markets is that the food is too expensive to serve everyone who needs food. But, lo and behold, SNAP recipients are legally allowed use their food stamps to purchase food at farmer’s markets. The practice is only now gaining popularity because paper food-stamp coupons have been replaced by special debit cards, and many farmer’s markets only accept cash. This is the kind of thing we would like to see more of: widespread access to healthy, fresh foods that are reasonably priced (on a good day). It certainly beats bottled water.

Well, gee gosh golly, why haven’t people just thought of strolling on down to the farmer’s market and buying the yummy fresh food there?

Here’s a reason – the quality of your farmer’s market varies by region, location – and what the seller’s think the market can afford. Last summer, I did an investigative piece for the American Prospect into farmer’s markets in the DC area. As a patron of the markets, and someone not currently on food stamps, I wondered exactly how far those double dollars went. I discovered:

One of the major influences on how farmers markets function is a 1999 report called “Hot Peppers and Parking Lot Peaches: Evaluating Farmer’s Markets in Low Income Communities.” In it, Andy Fisher, on behalf of the Community Food Security Coalition, provides concrete steps for both market organizers and policy-makers to consider when trying to serve low-income populations. Some of his suggestions were heeded — the United States Department of Agriculture standardization and WIC cooperation were instituted in 1992 and greatly expanded in 2009. However, some basic steps are still in need of a champion. Fisher made three very important points yet to be addressed: Markets must tailor their offerings to “focus on basic food at affordable prices”; should pay attention to the availability of transportation and the market’s location; and must involve the community to provide a sense of ownership with the market.

Recent visits to markets near the White House and Silver Spring reveal a serious problem: It would be very difficult to put together a full meal for a family of four based on the selections available. Many items were exotic, not staples. Ground bison was running at $6.25 per pound, and ham retailed at $7.95 per pound. Hunting for side dishes was also a problem. Since prices varied by vendor, it took a keen eye and comparison shopping to find the best deals. One vendor charged $4.50 for approximately four asparagus spears, while another stall sold two hefty bundles for $7. A meal for four people consisting of 2 pounds of ham, two containers of baby potatoes, and two baskets of spinach retailed close to $34. Even with double dollars, at $15 it still may prove to be a stretch.

Now, this doesn’t mean all farmer’s markets are terrible or overrpriced.  Eastern Market, one of the longest running markets in the area (which is also one of the few places in DC where you can still see butchers and fishmongers) has an amazing selection of tasty, inexpensive fruits and veggies.  There is an older woman who comes every summer, selling big bags of produce for $4 (it used to be $3 – the recession continues to harm us all).  Last week, I bought vegetables for an entire week, along with a few treats (coconut dates, some fennel, golden beets) – it still only set me back $40. Farmer’s markets, in many cases, can be cheaper than supermarkets – but it really depends on a lot of factors.

However, those type of markets don’t exist everywhere.  Markets are scarce in low income areas, and higher priced areas tend to traffic in jams and artisan bread as opposed to basic foodstuffs.  Furthermore, your region determines what type of food is at the farmer’s market, and what price that food will be.  When I went to California, I was astounded at how cheap vegetables where.  At what my friend called a “so-so” market, there were bunches of kale and swiss chard for $2, along with some of the best looking tomatoes and oranges I’ve ever seen in my life.  That kind of produce just doesn’t make it all the way to the East Coast in the same shape (and definably not for the same prices.)  So access here is vital. This is something easy to overlook if you generally have enough money to buy the food you want to eat most months.  But for people on limited budgets, or in areas with limited to no access, expecting farmer’s markets to magically replace a missing food infrastructure is an pipe dream.

Luckily, some bloggers and writers truly get some of the issues with eating well on a restricted budget, in areas of limited access.  Erika of A Black Girl’s Guide to Weight Loss has a whole series about eating well on a budget and clean eating on food stamps. Stephanie Quilao of Noshtopia/One Mile, One Meal/Back in Skinny Jeans, started by doing food comparisons to show why Whole Foods wasn’t necessarily more expensive than a trip to the regular grocery store.  More recently, she’s started a campaign to eat well at WalMart, to showcase healthy eating options for all budgets and access levels.

Instead of trying to regulate government policy (particularly programs that have never been used by the authors of these pieces, particularly not in situations that were longer than a month long “experiment”), how about we all try to meet people where they are to create a healthier nation?

–

Earlier in the month, I had spotted a Fast Company article discussing the changing nature of diplomacy in the Obama White House. Alex Ross, the Senior Advisor for Innovation for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, granted a sprawling interview to Fast Company which addressed embracing transparency and collaboration in a mistrustful global environment.

Some interesting bits:

Upon entering office, Obama vowed an end to cowboy diplomacy. Ross says the U.S. is exercising influence “on a more multilateral basis, and doing so under the frame of global citizenship, less than quote ‘America’s Values’.”

“The language matters,” continues Ross. “We live in such an interconnected world.”

While, to some, talk of interconnectedness may seem like political pandering and boilerplate, to a large swath of the country, it’s an aggressively contentious worldview. Former UN ambassador John Bolton recently called Obama the “most radical president who has ever been elected,” in a speech pointedly titled “the Case against Global Citizenship.”

For instance, while Bolton and other conservatives slammed Obama for prioritizing Egyptian democracy over an America-friendly despot, the State Department was been busy supporting overtly subversive technologies.

[D]irect access to senior officials has been traditionally been reserved for voting constituents–i.e., American citizens. Yet, after the Egyptian revolution, Secretary Clinton held a YouTube-like press conference, especially targeting the tech-savvy activists angry at the U.S. for years of supporting Mubarak.

“The way this would have been done 10 years ago,” says Ross, “is we would have spent a week pre-screening a dozen a Egyptian youth who could have sat with Hillary Clinton around a mahogany table and they would have asked polite questions and we would have gotten a photo op, and we would have had a handful reporters in the room writing nice stories about it.”

Instead, what the below video reveals, are candid responses to hard-hitting questions that include, surprisingly, some unequivocal admissions of failure. When one video commenter asked why the United states “shook hands” with a known dictator, Clinton’s said that the United States had attempted to influence human rights through appeasement and back-door channels, “we were not successful, I will be very honest with you,” she said.

The State Department has limits–and, Wikileaks is one of them. “We don’t believe in radical transparency,” concedes Ross. “Diplomats cannot conduct business in an environment of total transparency”

As an example, he notes, “one of the most effective members of the diplomatic core, Carlos Pascual, our Ambassador to Mexico” had to resign in the wake of leaked cables.

“While I come from a community that implicitly embraces tools and organizations that can open up historically closed institutions and processes, that has its limits, and I think Wikileaks bore that out.”

Ross is cognizant, however, that the level of secrecy has permanently changed. “Going forward, that transparency is only going to increase. The ubiquity and power of the networks and the tools that attach to the networks is only going to increase.”

In our conversations on racial dynamics and oppression – both Stateside and around the globe – we often touch on the issue of global power dynamics. The way in which nations pursue power has long lasting effects, and when we discuss ideas like colonialism, colonization, globalization (and its discontents, to crib from Stiglitz), policy shifts like this one have a major impact on how people relate to each other and how policy is formed.

Readers, what do you think about Ross’ comments?

A first grade teacher in Paterson, New Jersey was recently put on administrative leave after she took to the internet to vent her frustrations about work. According to NBC New York, the teacher was suspended for “allegedly making Facebook comments that her six-year-old students are “future criminals” and referring to herself as a “warden,” according to school officials.”

Much of the handwringing over at Jezebel concerned the fate of the poor, poor teacher who probably just had a bad day. At Jezebel, Margaret Hartmann concludes her piece by saying:

It’s horrible to hear about an adult disrespecting the children in her care, but it also casts a bad light on teachers, who for the most part, got into the profession because they want to help children succeed. But that’s not news — that’s their job, and they do it every single day.

Are teachers definitely our undersung heroes? Yes.  Do they often work long hours at thankless tasks in order to make their children’s lives better?  Oh yes.

But do all teachers treat all children the same? No, no, no.

My radar pinged when I heard the term criminals employed, so I checked the demographics of Paterson.  And my suspicions were borne out.  According to Neighborhood Scout:

Paterson is a blue-collar town, with 35.4% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 24.7%. Overall, Paterson is a city of sales and office workers, service providers, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Paterson who work in office and administrative support jobs (18.20%), sales jobs (9.45%), and building maintenance and grounds keeping (6.25%).

The population of Paterson has a very low overall level of education: only 8.19% of people over 25 hold a 4-year college degree or higher.

The per capita income in Paterson in 2000 was $13,257, which is low income relative to New Jersey and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $53,028 for a family of four.

Paterson is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Paterson home come from a variety of different races and ancestries. People of Hispanic or Latino origin are the most prevalent group in Paterson, accounting for 50.17% of the city’s residents (people of Hispanic or Latino origin can be of any race). The most prevalent race in Paterson is White, followed by Asian. Important ancestries of people in Paterson include Italian and Jamaican.

Paterson also has a high percentage of its population that was born in another country: 32.79%.

The most common language spoken in Paterson is Spanish. Some people also speak English.

But that’s just a coincidence, right?

Maybe this was just a bad day for this teacher – but the problem is that bad days in public serving positions can have huge, lingering consequences.  And from what other administrators and school advocates are saying, the suspended teacher wasn’t the only one.

The New York Times provides more background information, explaining:

Irene Sterling, president of the Paterson Education Fund, a nonprofit group that supports the local school community, said parents were angry about the teacher’s comments because anyone, including her own students, could have read the negative characterizations. She said it highlighted a lack of commitment by some teachers. “It’s horrible,” she said. “And unfortunately, I don’t think she’s the only teacher in Paterson who thinks that way.”

The Paterson district, with 28,000 students and 2,425 teachers, has long been one of New Jersey’s most troubled school systems; it was taken over by the state in 1991 because of fiscal mismanagement and poor academic performance.

And NBC NY quotes the Board of Education president who makes other saddening disclosures:

Paterson Board of Education President Thomas Best said the alleged comments were “disheartening and unacceptable.”

“I think it’s extremely disappointing that we have teachers in the classroom who are responsible for ensuring that their students have a bright future not even giving those children a chance,” he said.

It’s also not the first time a teacher has made such comments about students, he said.

“Overall we have a good teaching force, but I’ve heard comments like this before,” said Best. “It’s not on Facebook, but a lot of times the kids are referred to as ‘animals.’”

If we like to believe the tales that it just takes one teacher to make a difference, one shining light acting as a beacon out of the darkness for children struggling in school and in life, then why is it so hard to apply that logic to teachers who make negative comments? That their dismissal could act like a wrecking ball? That some teachers could negatively impact the lives of their students?

When you call a six-year old a “future criminal,” you are speeding that child along a path that is tough to escape – the school to prison pipeline.  Impacting low income students of color the hardest, here’s how the pipeline manifests in different communities.

From the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The School to Prison Pipeline (STPP) is a nationwide system of local, state, and federal education and public safety policies that pushes students out of school  and into the criminal justice system. The system disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities. Inequities in areas such as school discipline, policing practices, high-stakes testing, wealth and healthcare distribution, school “grading” systems, and the prison-industrial complex all contribute to the Pipeline.

The STPP operates directly and indirectly. Directly, schools send their students into the Pipeline through zero tolerance policies, and involving the police in minor discipline incidents. All too often school rules are enforced through metal detectors, pat-downs and frisks, arrests, and referrals to the juvenile justice system. And schools pressured to raise graduation and testing numbers can sometimes artificially achieve this by pushing out low-performing students into GED programs and the juvenile justice system.

Indirectly, schools push students towards the criminal justice system by excluding them from the learning environment and isolating them from their peer groups through suspension, expulsion, ineffective retention policies, transfers, and high-stakes testing requirements. [...]

Suspensions indirectly feed the Pipeline

• A child who has been suspended is more likely to fall behind in school, be retained a grade, drop out of high school, commit a crime, and become incarcerated as an adult[3]

• The best demographic indicators of children who will be suspended are not the type or severity of the crime, but the color of their skin, their special education status, the school they go to, and whether they have been suspended before[4]

From California Rural Legal Assistance:

CRLA has identified educational disparities in our communities of service that affect Latino children and children of limited English proficiency, in particular.  When school- and district-wide statistics relating to discipline, class assignment, dropout rate, graduation and enrollment in college are tracked by race, ethnicity and language it is clear that a disproportionate number of Latinos and limited English speaking children are not succeeding in California’s rural schools.  Education experts and advocates throughout the country have acknowledged similar disparities affecting other children of color and children enrolled in special education programs and numerous studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between failure in school and a higher chance of ending up in the criminal justice system and called this trend the “school to prison pipeline.”  CRLA is committed to addressing these disparities which result, not only in an increased chance of incarceration, but limit the work and life opportunities for these children.

From the LA Progressive, reporting on “Plugging Pasedena’s School-to-Prison Pipeline“:

“A black boy born in 2001 in America has a one in three chance of going to prison,” said moderator Saudeka Shabazz. “For a Latino boy, the odds are one in six.”

The school-to-prison pipeline is a set of policies combined with failing institutions that lead young men of color to prison or violent early death, according to Shabazz, a Berkeley grad who worked in gang intervention before becoming an outreach coordinator for the Children’s Defense Fund. She cited two early factors that put children into the pipeline:

• Health and mental health access: “Low birth weigh children often have learning delays or disabilities,” she said. “And poor mothers get less prenatal care, which leads to these problems.”

• Early childhood education: Children who get early education are higher achievers later on in life, according to Shabazz. “Teachers mark children early if they can’t keep up.”

Poverty works hand-in-glove with racial discrimination to put children of color behind the eight ball long before they reach high school.

From Reclaiming Futures’ report on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s publication “”Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis:”

[A]fter reviewing over 30 years of data from nearly 10,000 middle schools nationwide, it concludes that suspension is over-used as a disciplinary tool, and that youth of color — black males especially — are suspended far out of proportion to their numbers.

The authors looked specifically at types of suspensions where school staff could exercise discretion — incidents of fighting, disruptive behavior, and so on. They analyzed how many youth were suspended and broke down differences by race/ethnicity, and gender. What they learned was appalling: suspension rates have nearly doubled for students of all races/ethnicities since 1973; African American, Latino, and American Indian youth were suspended at higher rates than White youth; six percent of all black students were suspended in 1973, compared with 15 percent in 2006; and a breathtaking 28.3% of black males were suspended in 2006, compared with 10% of White males.

When researchers looked at the 18 largest urban school districts, they found that most “had several schools that suspended more than 50% of a given racial/gender group.” They even found schools that suspended more than half of their White and Hispanic female students. [...]

The disparate impact on youth of color, and black youth in particular, makes this a civil rights issue, the authors say. Here’s why:

Research on student behavior, race, and discipline has found no evidence that African-American over-representation in school suspension is due to higher rates of misbehavior (McCarthy and Hoge, 1987; McFadden et al., 1992; Shaw & Braden, 1990; Wu et al., 1982). Skiba et al. (2002) reviewed racial and gender disparities in school punishments in an urban setting, and found that White students were referred to the office significantly more frequently for offenses that appear more capable of objective documentation (e.g., smoking, vandalism, leaving without permission, and obscene language). African-American students, however, were referred more often for disrespect, excessive noise, threat, and loitering - behaviors that would seem to require more subjective judgment on the part of the referring agent. In short, there is no evidence that racial disparities in school discipline can be explained through higher rates of disruption among African-American students.

And from Fairtest.org’s position paper on No Child Left Behind and The School to Prison Pipeline, released March 2011:

In the nine years since Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), startling growth has occurred in what is often described as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”1 – the use of educational policies and practices that have the effect of pushing students, especially students of color and students with disabilities, out of schools and toward the juve- nile and criminal justice systems. This phenomenon has proved incredibly damaging to students, families, and communities. It has also proved tremendously costly, not only in terms of lost human potential but also in dollars, as states struggle with the soaring costs of police, courts, and incarceration amidst continuing economic difficulties. Yet far too little emphasis is being placed upon the pipeline crisis, its causes, and its consequences within most of the discussion around federal education policy and the reauthorization of the ESEA.
The swelling of the pipeline has many causes. But as Congress works to reauthorize the ESEA, it is essential to examine how NCLB itself has contributed to the pipeline phenomenon. Congress designed NCLB to hold schools accountable for student performance, correctly paying specific attention to differentials in outcomes by race, socioeconomic status, disability, and English language proficiency. However, the law focused its accountability frame- work almost exclusively on students’ standardized test performance, placed punitive sanctions on struggling schools without providing enough tools to actually improve their performance, and failed to address significant funding and resource disparities among our nation’s schools. As a result, NCLB had the effect of encouraging low-performing schools to meet benchmarks by narrowing curriculum and instruction and de-prioritizing the educational opportunities of many students. Indeed, No Child Left Behind’s “get-tough” approach to accountability has led to more students being left even further behind, thus feeding the dropout crisis and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. [...]

The sharp rise in the use of all of these practices in communities across the country over the last decade represents a prioritization of swift and severe punishment of students over the thoughtful consideration of how to better meet their educational needs, such as through academic and disciplinary interventions, counseling services, health services, special education programs, and other “wraparound” services. As a result, huge numbers of students have been put on a path to academic failure that is difficult to interrupt and often has devastating long-term consequences.

Teachers are often unjustly blamed for the failures of an overburdened and underfunded system.  However, let’s not pretend that all students are on a level and equal playing field, or that racism and perception of a student’s background can’t play a role in how we describe, view, or treat these kids.  First graders are six years old.  Six. Years. Old. No one’s life is set in stone at any age, much less the tender childhood years.  So let’s take a second to think of the children before immediately jumping to the teacher’s defense.

(Image Credit: The Youth Justice Coalition via Suspension Stories)

Who does Rep. Peter King (R-NY) actually represent?

According to his website, the 3rd Congressional District is:

• Overwhelmingly white
• Overwhelmingly involved in cis-hetero marriages
• Making more income per household (median income $56,060) than the national average (median 2010 income $49,777)

Has King always had issues with Muslims?

Not according to a profile piece on him by CNN: King reportedly supported then-President Bill Clinton’s military push to defend Muslims in the Balkan regions, and had close ties with the small Muslim community in his own district, but renounced them after he found local Muslims “covering up” for Al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11th attacks, and refusing to cooperate with “police at all levels.”

That’s a pretty serious charge. How many law-enforcement officials does King plan to call on to provide evidence?

Zero.

Isn’t this hearing reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communism crusade?

King might know the answer better than we think; as Politico noted, he worked for McCarthy’s counsel, Roy Cohn, early on in his career. Of course, King also dismisses the comparison as “fanaticism.” Uh huh.

Who is Zuhdi Jasser, and what qualifies him as an expert on Islam?

According to The Washington Post, Jasser is the only witness King plans to call who isn’t a legislator. King also plans to call Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim. Democratic members of King’s committee plan to call Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to respond to King’s allegations that Muslims are “not cooperating” with law enforcement.

Jasser has already made himself a favorite in conservative media circles, though, by being their Muslim Friend (even though he admits to not being “a formal expert” in Koranic Arabic) and through his work with the Middle East Quarterly with Daniel Pipes, a man described by Media Monitors Network thusly:

Daniel Pipes is as much a scholar on Islam and Muslims as David Duke is a scholar on Judaism and Jews. He does not seem to know where scholarship ends and where political advocacy begins. He does not initiate his research by asking questions for which he seeks answers, but by providing answers for which he cherry-picks evidence.

Pipes is wedded to his personal political agenda to such a point that it dominates his worldview invalidating his ability to act as a neutral scholar on Muslim-related topics. Concerned with the interests of Israel above all else, he consistently defines Muslim-Americans exclusively as a function of their position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Pipes, a “bad” Muslim is a Muslim who challenges his views on Israel and a “good” Muslim is one who agrees with them; in his “scholarly” lingo, the code terms are “Islamist” and “moderate” respectively.

Who else is King going to for advice on this subject?

At least one person we can confirm, thanks to Lee Fang at Think Progress, is Brigitte Gabriel, an anti-Islam activist who, though she will not be testifying, shed some light into what King will be talking about during the hearings:

GABRIEL: Glenn Beck is right in what he’s talking about and what I’m holding in front of me right now is the Muslim Brotherhood project for North America. [...] The Muslim Brotherhood wrote a plan in 1982. It’s a one hundred year plan for radical Islam to infiltrate and dominate the West and establish an Islamic government on Earth.

FANG: So what’s going on in Western Europe and North Africa, what’s going on in Egypt, this is all part of the plan?

GABRIEL: [nods] In the counter-terrorism circles this plan became known as The Project. [...]

FANG: Is Peter King, in his hearings, is he going to talk about this issue? And is he going to ask about this wider, global threat; its happening in Egypt, its happening in Western Europe and frankly it could be happening here?

GABRIEL: Exactly. He’s going to be talking about these issues.

Who’s standing up against this?
We’ve already seen protests being held against the hearings. And at least 28 members of the House of Representatives have added their signatures to a letter of protest being circulated by Reps. Pete Stark (D-CA) and John Dingell (D-MI). For his part, Rep. Michael Honda (D-CA) wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle calling King out:

Rep. King’s intent seems clear: To cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia. By framing his hearings as an investigation of the American Muslim community, the implication is that we should be suspicious of our Muslim neighbors, co-workers or classmates solely on the basis of their religion.

This should be deeply troubling to Americans of all races and religions. An investigation specifically targeting a single religion implies, erroneously, a dangerous disloyalty, with one broad sweep of the discriminatory brush.

Honda’s column speaking out against King, according to the Post, is part of a larger bond between some Japanese-Americans and Muslim-Americans on the West Coast, fueled by the similarities between the ethnic targeting both groups have faced.

What’s being ignored by the media because of King’s shameless plea for attention?

Lots of things, but here’s one particularly vile omission: the fact that, even after they went viral, the following public remarks by elected officials were not written about or dissected nearly as heavily by CNN, or MSNBC, or most major network outlets – at least online:

“A big part of the problem that we face today is that our children have been taught at schools that every idea is right, that no one should criticize others’ positions, no matter how odious. And what do we call that? They call it multiculturalism and it has paralyzed too many of our fellow citizens to make the critical judgments we need to make to prosper as a society.” – Congressman Ed Royce

“I know quite a few Marines who will be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.” – Villa Park City Council member Deborah Pauly

Where’s that investigation?

What is the tipping point for a revolution?

Normally, there are many different things brewing – a political climate, social unrest, gross inequality that all contribute to turn a nation inside out. Yet many reports want to trace a revolution back to a single, definitive event. Crispus Attucks is considered the first martyr of the American Revolution, Rosa Parks is widely considered the catalyst of the US civil rights movement, her actions sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Mohamed Bouaziz is the name behind the sudden surge in interest in self-immolation.

Bouaziz’s last protest made its way to cameras, which then spread the news that Tunisia was on the cusp of a revolt. Al Jazeera frames the story:

In a country where officials have little concern for the rights of citizens, there was nothing extraordinary about humiliating a young man trying to sell fruit and vegetables to support his family.

Yet when Mohamed Bouazizi poured inflammable liquid over his body and set himself alight outside the local municipal office, his act of protest cemented a revolt that would ultimately end President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year-rule.

Local police officers had been picking on Bouazizi for years, ever since he was a child. For his family, there is some comfort that their personal loss has had such stunning political consequences.

“I don’t want Mohamed’s death to be wasted,” Menobia Bouazizi, his mother, said. “Mohamed was the key to this revolt.”

And yet later, it is revealed that Bouazizi was one of many who had started to sound the alarm – an alarm suppressed by government officials and widely ignored by media under governmental control:

Mohamed Bouazizi was not the first Tunisian to set himself alight in an act of public protest.

Abdesslem Trimech, to name one of many cases occurred without any significant media attention, set himself ablaze in the town of Monastir on March 3 after facing bureaucratic hindrance in his own work as a street vendor.

Neither was it evident that the protests that begin in Sidi Bouzid would spread to other towns. There had been similar clashes between police and protesters in the town of Ben Guerdane, near the border with Libya, in August.

The key difference in Sidi Bouzid was that locals fought to get news of what was happening out, and succeeded.

“We could protest for two years here, but without videos no one would take any notice of us,” Horchani said.

I often wonder what ignites a protest and what does not. I specifically think of Lee Kyoung Hae, who stabbed himself in protest of the World Trade Organization’s policies toward South Korean farmers and their agricultural policy at large. I was in high school when the Battle in Seattle occurred – I’ve been fascinated by the World Trade Organization ever since. But while Lee did not die in vain, his protest did not lead to the type of uprising that could topple the WTO. Why? Why do some protests galvanize into movements, and others fade into time?

There are no clear answers to these questions, and yet the world keeps moving. Egypt, hot on the heels of Tunisia, also underwent a revolution, one that garnered a bit more attention from media outlets here.

Reader Lara tipped us to this amazing piece by Sarah Ghabrial, which delivers some much needed context:

As much as Egyptians may have surprised themselves and their neighbours, no one seems more caught off guard by this recent turn of events than members of western mainstream media and political officials. The western media appear bewildered, their commentary halting and unsure. Perhaps this is because, for so long, news agencies have stacked their rolodexes with analysts on the Middle East whose area of expertise lay primarily in terrorism and religious fundamentalism. They now seem ill prepared to comprehend this past week’s events, which have been so free of religious rhetoric, much less offer any insight on what the world may expect to come next. More than one commentator has remarked on the possibility of an Islamist take-over in Egypt and elsewhere, as though for lack of anything else worthwhile to say. Some appeared at a loss as they reported that protesters were not shouting “Death to America.”

The response to civil unrest in Egypt has been strangely unlike the response to the Iranian would-be “Green Revolution” of 2009. Because Iranians were standing up to a long-hated Islamist regime, their struggle was immediately embraced in the west across the political spectrum.

By contrast, western observers in the cultural mainstream have been hesitant about the Days of Anger, as they lack a clear and ready-made approach for identifying and understanding Arab discontent. This is probably due in part to the ostensible “secularism” of these regimes, and because instability in the Middle East is seen as a breeding ground for terrorism. Ironically, most terrorists out of Egypt are largely a product of the Mubarak school of stability — imprisonment, repression, and torture. But apparently the alternative is more horrifying: a scenario in which Egyptians may choose their own government. One can picture the Egyptians who populate the imagination of policymakers and journalists: a pious and incorrigible bunch, impelled in the direction of fanaticism as though by gravity. (Read the rest…)

And Larbi Sadiki pinpoints the real catalyst - and why so many news outlets missed the signs:

Regimes in countries like Tunisia and Algeria have been arming and training security apparatuses to fight Osama bin Laden. But they were caught unawares by the ‘bin Laden within’: the terror of marginalisation for the millions of educated youth who make up a large portion of the region’s population.

The winds of uncertainty blowing in the Arab west – the Maghreb – threaten to blow eastwards towards the Levant as the marginalised issue the fatalistic scream of despair to be given freedom and bread or death. [...]

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage, including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.

The armies of ‘khobzistes’ (the unemployed of the Maghreb) – now marching for bread in the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman, Rabat, San’aa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirut – are not fighting the terror of unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology. The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are ‘les misérables’ of the modern world.

Already, discussion of a domino effect looms large – and while some pundits are wondering which country is next, the larger question is what will these changes symbolize in the world within the next decade?

Last week, Tricia Rose was invited on PBS’ Need To Know for a segment titled “Fixing America.” Amid discussions of federally funded campaign dollars and guaranteed employment, Rose explained that what America needs is a way to have a real conversation about race and campaigns to “end racial illiteracy.” She’s on at the 6:00 minute mark.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Professor Tricia Rose:

One way I would fix the country is to create a program that focuses on ending our racial illiteracy. I’m concerned that we’ve been asked to be afraid to talk about race, how talking about race is a racist thing to do, our educational system is driven by very significant differences on race. Our incarceration rate is extraordinary on this matter. Housing segregation, wealth accumulation, access to various resources, they way Obama is being handled – it has everything to do with race and yet we can’t figure out how to mention that word. We need to have a collective way of talking about race, that includes everyone talking together. Ask the artists, ask the historians, ask the teachers, ask the journalists. What do we need to know, in order to be literate?

The FCC is scheduled to vote tomorrow on a huge merger between Comcast and NBC Universal, which would create a new media mega-corporation.  This has brought quite a bit of controversy over the future of the web, with many digital justice activists protesting the increase of corporate control over the web.

Angry Asian Man reports on an unexpected silver lining: the FCC has proposed that Comcast and NBC must improve diversity if they are going to complete the deal, to ensure minority broadcasters are not left out.  According to ABC News:

Public interest groups have urged the Obama administration to reject the deal. They fear Comcast might charge other cable distributors higher fees to transmit NBC Universal-owned content, leading to higher cable bills, fewer independent programing choices and less competition.

Comcast said in agreements filed with the FCC that it would add four new cable networks either owned or partly owned by African-Americans within eight years if the deal goes through.

It would also expand an existing channel carrying Asian-American programing to more markets, or create a new English-language channel that caters to Asian-American interests.

More diversity on major networks is definitely something to celebrate, but I’m not so sure this is the major step forward as some are quick to claim.

Most of what I’ve heard about the merger has been from the net neutrality aspect.  Back in August, Colorlines broke down why it was so important to keep an eye on Comcast:

The fight started because those scary scenarios about blocking and slowing traffic aren’t merely speculative. In 2005, Comcast blocked its users from sharing BitTorrents, which are popular ways to send and receive large files. The company claimed that it was preventing its users from committing copyright infringement, since the file-sharing platforms are often associated with quick and easy ways to get free music and movies.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stepped in and ruled that no Internet service provider could block or interfere with user traffic—unless it was for “reasonable network management purposes.” Comcast challenged the ruling and this year a federal court overturned it, finding that the FCC didn’t have the authority to regulate broadband in the first place.

The court ruling has added yet another layer to the debate. The FCC is scrambling to regain its regulatory authority. That authority actually began eroding years ago, when a conservative majority of commissioners ruled that broadband be treated differently from landline phone and TV services, which are seen as essential to every household and therefore subject to federal oversight.

Meanwhile, service providers have argued vehemently against net neutrality regulations, saying that any formal rules would stifle competition and innovation—which would in turn keep prices up and limit broadband expansion into poor and rural communities.

So the issue on the table Tuesday is really a continuation of an earlier move – what right do large service providers have to restrict access for certain users?

The Comcast site even dips into the debate, explaining in a roundabout way that space online is limited, and most companies are making moves to ensure that there will be enough bandwidth for all our phones and devices.  However, they seek to control content providers, with far reaching impacts:

Level 3 Communications, a company that helps Netflix Inc stream videos online, has accused Comcast of charging it unfair fees to deliver content to Comcast subscribers.

(As a Comcast customer – they have a chokehold on my area – I find it interesting this is happening.  On Demand now promotes their movies by saying “Get it 28 days sooner than on Netflix!” so if I was Level 3/Netflix, I’d be pissed too.)

In addition to higher fees for certain types of content, there is the looming threat of “paid prioritization” – essentially the idea that certain content providers can pay more for more access and faster speed, which means smaller sites may be left to fight for the remaining scraps of slower, free bandwidth.

Senator Al Franken is not having it:

Just days before the FCC’s scheduled Tuesday morning vote on net neutrality, Franken blasted Genachowski for offering too many breaks to communications giants. “Let’s be clear. This is not real net neutrality,” the lawmaker said during the rare Saturday session. “This is the first time the FCC has allowed discrimination on the Internet,” he warned, referring to provisions that would let corporations pay for faster transmissions, creating Internet toll lanes.

The proposed rules, he further complained, would allow dominant wireless providers to block access to various applications, such as Google Maps. “I sincerely hope that the FCC will make significant improvements” before the Tuesday vote, he demanded.

While I am thrilled we will get some new programming out of the deal, I don’t feel like that’s a good trade or compromise.  Comcast-NBCU agreed to create the networks within four years.  They have yet to say what type of support the networks will be given, or if they feel any obligation to stick with these networks until they are financially viable.  They also agreed fairly quickly to creating more networks and the formation of “a diversity advisory board” – but the creation of these things has historically been a smokescreen for large corporations to hide behind, not avenues to lasting, institutional change.

The vote on Tuesday is impossible to call – there are too many factors in play.  However, this is one of those decisions that is ripe with unintended consequences, and we should all keep our eyes and ears open.

I’ve been buried in work for the Public Media Corps – the program ends December 17th, so there is a lot of work to accomplish between now and then.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to provide as many updates as I would have liked to on the program, so I am planning a series after I finish to talk about the things I learned over the last six months.

However, I did want to share one quick thing.

Back in September, I helped my co-fellows Brittany and Danielle with their social media club mixer at Anacostia High School.  The mixer was one of my favorite parts of the program since it allowed me to do what I like best – to engage with people.  The kids who came to the mixer were funny and high spirited, just as interested in tech as they were in pizza and trash talking.  I met Tony, a sweet kid who decided he was ready to be the next Jazze Pha and used my help to create his own beat using GarageBand, which he then attempted to convert into a ringtone for his cellphone.  One kid, named Robert, wanted to start a blog but did not have an email address.  So we worked through that process.  A girl named Tiny said she wanted to be a teacher, but later decided she wanted to start a blog to showcase her poetry.

And then, there was Mardez.

Quiet and serious, Mardez was one of those kids with a confidence that permeated the room.  Other kids seemed to genuinely like and respect him, and he had his priorities straight, soaking in knowledge like a sponge.  Mardez walked into the room and asked questions about being a graphic designer.  He showed me his portfolio, which was a printed binder full of graphic designs and effects, many featuring 50 Cent.  I told Mardez he should start scanning his work and putting it online – one, to create a holding space for all of it, and two to create a copy of all his work.  I saw Mardez again at the What’s Good DC taping on Tuesday and he chatted for a bit, mentioning he wanted to catch up.

Today, I found out from another fellow that Mardez was featured on a blog called The People’s District, an amazingly cool blog that tells the story of DC through all the types of people who live here.  When I read Mardez’s story, I felt my heart drop.

“I dropped out of high school after my freshman year. I had teachers who put me down and a school counselor who encouraged me to get D’s. I told him that I wanted to do better than that, but he said, ‘You ain’t gonna be any better than that.’ When my Mom had a baby, I knew that I needed to help my family get money and I left school because there was no future for me in the D.C. public schools. [...]

“A couple of months after I dropped out, we got put out of our house. The landlady put our stuff out in the snow along with my newborn baby brother. When we asked her for help, she just laughed in our face. When I saw my friends get off the bus, I thought they would laugh at me, but they didn’t. I just sat there and looked angry because there wasn’t nothing else that I could do. [...]

My cousin ended up helping me get back into school. He said, ‘You can’t drop out of high school and drop into a good job. It don’t work like that. You are not Bill Gates. You can do more help to your family by finishing school.’

“He helped me get to Anacostia High School. I changed my attitude and am doing the best I can. I want to go to college and even got a scholarship. So far, I have visited 13 colleges so far, and am trying to find a college that fits what I want to do in life, which is graphic design.”

I felt pain, not because of the sadness of his story, but because of how common that narrative is here in DC.  Our dropout rate is atrocious, with only 48.8% of students graduating from high school within four years of beginning 9th grade.  Mardez is one of the success stories – he was able to re-enter school and is on target to graduate this year, with a plan to go to college and a dream of becoming a graphic designer. But the problems still swirl around him.  Tony, the burgeoning producer, recently confessed at a social media club meeting that he was planning to drop out of school. Mardez told his story that day, to convince Tony to stay in school, and added one crucial detail: in 9th grade, one of his teachers embarrassed him by pointing out Mardez’s wrinkled clothes, ignoring all the issues Mardez was going through at home.  I really hope Mardez got through to Tony.

I wish I had been there for that meeting. I wish I had read Danielle’s post earlier, so that on Tuesday, I could have pulled Mardez aside and told him I was homeless too once, and I know what that feeling is like, and that life gets a little better once you can financially support yourself, and that he was on a good path.  I wish I had read that post earlier, so I could tell Tony that I knew exactly where he was, that I too had almost dropped out of school in my senior year, that my 3.5 average fell to a 1.5 and I missed 70 days of class.

But I didn’t know this, so I just let them play computer games on my Android tablet and talked to them about tech.

Then again, maybe that was better – I hated when people tried to talk to me about my life in senior year, when all I wanted to do was escape it.  Maybe leaving it alone was the best course of action. Let them play and explore possibilities.  Watching Mardez, Tony, and three other boys I didn’t know crowd around the tab and critique the gameplay aspects of Asphalt 5 reminded me of how much work I have left to do when talking about black boys, play practices, technology, and video games.

It’s stories like the ones Mardez and Tony told that remind me of why I got into this work in the first place, and why we focus a lot on structures on this blog.  Mardez has a good shot at making it, but he is surrounded by kids in the same boat, struggling against all kinds of social issues and political issues to try to craft lives for themselves.  Mardez’s story pains me because it reminds me of people that I knew, and people that I still know, kids who were exposed to the ways of the adult world a little too early, trying to make adult decisions (i.e. I need to drop out of school to help my family) without adult perspective and understanding how each of these actions could alter the course of their lives.

All of the fellows joined the Public Media Corps hoping we could impact our communities in some way.  But doing the work exposes how large the problems actually are.  We are all staring down at the end of the program, just fifteen days away.  I think everyone feels some sense of unfinished business.  But how do we keep moving forward?

How do we even begin to evaluate our work, when so many things are intangible?

And how do we reconcile all the things we’ve learned and grown to understand with the edicts laid out by those who fund programs like these?

(Image Credit: Danielle and Brittany, for the Public Media Corps)