I don’t live in London, so I will not pretend to write the story of what Londoners are feeling. I live in the nation’s second city, Birmingham—a less than two hour drive northwest of London. This is my perspective on London, Birmingham and other parts of the country.

On Thursday, Tottenham (borough of London) resident Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police. He was being investigated by police for some time. Though armed, reports claimed Duggan had surrendered his gun before shots were fired. On Saturday, his family—tired of waiting for answers about the circumstances of his death—marched to a local police station to speak to senior officers. On the way there, other people joined them. Police were slow to respond to the family’s request for information. The crowd became restless and a young girl was reportedly pushed back by police. It was speculation and rumour around this confrontation that sparked the initial rioting in Tottenham. The looting and arson that followed on ensuing nights had nothing to do with getting justice for Mark. His family is outraged at the behaviour and violence that has spread across London and the country.

We’ve been glued to the TV since Sunday morning when we woke up to news of the rioting in Tottenham on Saturday night. We were gobsmacked at the devastation, questioning why this was happening. On Sunday night when we learned that the violence had spread to other areas of London, I had a sinking feeling that the trouble would reach beyond the capital, and we would see it in Birmingham. In fact, I said as much in an email on Monday morning to my best friend in DC.

On Monday evening, we went to a free cinema preview on the edge of Birmingham city centre. In an unusual move, we decided to take the car and go to the nearby Tesco grocery store afterwards. The supermarket’s parking lot was unusually empty. It was 8:30 PM. As we approached the entrance another shopper arriving at his car told us the shop had closed early due to “trouble in town”. I pressed him about the exact location of the trouble, but he did not know. We decided to go to the Tesco Express at the end of our street in the Jewellery Quarter (a desirable residential area near the heart of the city). My sense of unease continued. I stayed outside in the small parking lot of the store to keep watch while my partner went inside to shop. I noticed a youth in dark clothing with his hood up, surreptitiously talking on his phone. I looked to my right and in the distance spotted about 10 other youths in similar dress approaching. I loudly admonished G to “Get the fuck out NOW!” I could feel myself welling up with anger because they dared to bring their violence and bravado to my neighbourhood. I think I had residual anger from having had all three of our bikes nicked by young kids just two weeks before. G did not heed my words, so I had to yell like a mad woman for her to get out. As I turned my back, the youth were just feet away from me. I saw one quickly take off his balaclava (ski mask) and dump it behind the bin near the entrance of the store. To my left two police vans had just arrived. I begged the youths not to bring trouble to my ‘hood then jumped in the car to quickly get away. Later that night from my side window, I could see police in riot gear parading up and down my street. Ours is the only residential building on a street otherwise littered with jewellery shops. It’s important to note that these youth were not rioters. The term “riot” usually implies political purpose. These youth had gathered with the intention to cause damage and steal.

BBM messages like these have been sent out to organize people:

“Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O Dead the ends and colour war for now so if you see a brother… SALUT! if you see a fed… SHOOT!”

Interestingly, the message above is also temporarily advocating squashing gang turf wars and racial tensions (“dead the ends and colour wars”) in the name of free stuff. These give you some indication of the motivations of those who organized the violent gangs. Their intentions: rain havoc through any violence possible and get free shit while doing so. This was supposedly their way of showing authorities that they could do whatever they want. And they did. Four nights on, they’re still at it. I must stress that any justification the rioters in Tottenham may have felt they had to rail against authority on Saturday night, cannot be claimed by offenders who spread this to other parts of the country. How shameful that social media has been used for this purpose. Recently, we’ve seen how mediums like Twitter were used to mobilize the people of Egypt (and other countries) in their quest for democracy.

There was an appalling lack of coverage of trouble in Birmingham on the BBC and Sky News on Monday. I relied on this industrious young man’s tumblr: http://birminghamriots2011.tumblr.com/ to coalesce all the Birmingham area news. I’ve never been so frightened in my life. In all my years living in DC, I’ve never seen a group of people who don’t give even a hint of a fuck because they feel they have nothing to lose. Those that conducted violence and arson in London boroughs may have started out angry, but the violence that has spread across the country in the last two nights is mostly opportunistic copycat criminality by gangs. Highly organised to be sure. Take a look at the flyer instructing would-be criminals on how to keep their identity protected after looting.

Most of the violators are born and bred in England. While the initial trouble was mostly led by Black youths, the subsequent spread has seen increasing numbers of white youths and adults of both genders. Kids as young as 10 have been seen wearing make shift balaclavas (ski masks) and hurling debris at police. What has to be questioned is the mentality of the opportunistic looters. I saw news footage of a middle-aged man brazenly entering a T-Mobile store after the looters left, copping a netbook and slipping it under his shirt. Watching the images from the violence in Manchester, I could not help but notice the predominately white faces railing against police and kicking their way into stores.
These riots are largely not being committed by immigrants. South Asian groups are mostly absent from the violence (it’s also Ramadan!). In Birmingham, the last night has brought about a surge of “vigilantes” from Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and other communities protecting their properties and religious institutions. Tuesday night, three young South Asian men died in a deliberate hit-and-run collision just outside Birmingham while trying to protect their community.

People are angry. Very angry. I share that anger. In Birmingham, eyewitness accounts indicate that mobs are largely after cash. They have straight up robbed people, casinos, bars and even yanked ATMs out of the walls of banks. I just feel like I want to shake them and say: Is this what you want your life to be? And for what? £25 from a slot machine and a few pairs of jeans? But through all of this, the spirit of community is emerging. It started late Monday night on Twitter and Facebook with people forming #riotcleanup crews. They came out in force in affected communities with their brooms and gloves. This is the spirit of a country that has lived through violence in past decades and the Blitz of World War II. It’s not quite the “Keep Calm and Carry On” motto from the war, but there is a sense of getting on with things even as we grapple with deep questions.

England’s benefits system (welfare) is infamous for how easy it is to exploit. There are generations of people who have known nothing but this benefits system and frankly aren’t motivated to get off it. But much of the criminal behaviour is not coming from mostly poor, disenfranchised youth. In fact, I consider it an insult to blame the poor for this behaviour. It’s also wrong. Violence like this has noticeably not kicked off in poor areas in Wales, Scotland or the very north of England. Young people from poor, rural areas with naff all to do have not joined the fray. So it’s also a question of values and a lack of individual responsibility among those who have made the decision to deliberately ruin cities and lives. Some people have been left with only the clothes on their back. Small business owners have seen years of hard work disappear in hours. Reeling from austerity measures, the last thing this country needs is civil unrest and billions of dollars in property damage. The aftershocks will go on for quite some time.

It’s clear that stemming the violence is only the beginning. Coming from the US where guns are largely prevalent, I am thankful that guns have been absent from the hands of criminals and the riot police. There are two conversations going on as the violence starts to temper in London (but growing in the rest of the country). One is obviously tough talk about catching and punishing criminals, thereby sending a message that behaviour like this is not acceptable. As importantly, the other conversation is about how to prevent this in the future, but not just with police tactics and intelligence. People are beginning to search for the root causes that need to be addressed. The prevalence of gang culture and allegiance to gangs as a replacement for family bonds needs to be further examined and address. Certainly when Parliament is recalled on Thursday morning, some of their debates will focus on this and the consequences of deep cuts and lack of revenue growth. Sound familiar?

–

I called up a fellow young black professional friend of mine and told her about the findings of the study.  “Is it messed up that I’m kind of glad in a way?” she asked, “I mean, all this time I’ve been wondering why I can’t get my shit together, but it turns out I’m normal.” We both laughed at her small attempt at gallows humor around a situation many of us know a little too intimately – when it comes to our white counterparts, women of color are light years behind in wealth.

The study is a new report from The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, titled “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future.”  The report is an in-depth look at the issues in wealth accumulation particular to black women, Latinas, Asian and Native American women.  However, even as this report is one of the most comprehensive I have seen on the subject, the limited data for Asian American and Native American women means that their statistics are limited from entire sections of the report, and discussed in a subsequent section about the need for better stats.  The report’s title is should be a familiar refrain to many black women, but the author of the report, Mariko Chang, kindly includes an explanation of the origin of the phrase:

More than a century ago, the National Association for Colored Women was founded by African American women leaders in response to a vicious attack on the character of African-American women. A few decades distant from the abolition of slavery, the intensification of poverty, discrimination, and segregation impelled these women to action in defense of their race. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb,” signaling their understanding that no individual woman of color could rise, nor did they want to rise, without the improvement of the whole race. At the top of their agenda were job training, wage equity, and child care: issues that, if addressed, would lift all women, and all people of color.

The lift as we climb refrain was implanted into some of us from birth and a lot of my earliest lessons about black empowerment focused on financial empowerment.  Yet, these adages about saving money, investing in the community, and being a conscious consumer was like propping a footstool against a fifty foot high sheer rock wall.  Insight’s report focuses on the wealth gap, not the well documented income gap, for a good reason:

The current economic crisis has revealed why wealth is so important to the stability of households. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Without savings or wealth of some form, economic stability is built on a house of cards that quickly crumbles when income is cut or disrupted through job loss, reduced hours or pay, or if the family suffers an unexpected health emergency.

As the current crisis continues to unfold, it has become all too clear that it is not just “poor” people who are losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers; even households with some wealth found that they did not have enough to ride out the still unfolding economic downturn. Wealth impacts not just current economic security, but retirement security as well. With concerns over the solvency of Social Security and the shrinking number of jobs that provide pensions, it is of increasing importance that people have the means to save for their own retirement. Wealth is also tied to the well-being of the next generation, as it provides parents with the ability to help pay for their children’s college education, and can also be passed down from generation to generation. In fact, the intergenerational transfer of wealth is one of the reasons why racial wealth gaps from policies long ago have become entrenched. [...]

Wealth and income are related, but they are not the same. Income refers to the amount of money received by an individual or household during a specific period of time, such as a month or year. It usually comes in the form of earnings or wages from a job, but can take other forms as well such as interest on savings or investment accounts, Social Security, transitional assistance (welfare payments), pension benefits, or child support. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Typical types of assets include money in checking accounts, stocks or bonds, real estate, and businesses owned. Typical types of debts include home mortgages, credit card debt, and student loans.

So how did we get to the five dollar figure? Page seven of the report explains “While white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61% of their white male counterparts), the median wealth for women of color is only $5.” A more complete answer is revealed in Insight’s wealth of charts discussing the gaps:

Since there is so much data (the full report is well worth a read, but clocks in at 28 pages) we will discuss small sections of the report and related issues over the next week.

The topics covered will include: the wealth gap (with and without vehicles); how marriage* impacts wealth building (and how stereotypes and fear mongering about single black women ignore the larger issues at play); parenthood and wealth building; differences in financial starting points and class mobility; a discussion of types of assets acquired by women of color; the rising levels of debt; Asian American and Native American women’s wealth, and barriers to understanding the full scope of the problem; issues of data collection and minority participation in the census; prior institutional factors contributing to the wealth gap for women of color; the “wealth escalator”; government assistance and its impact on wealth building; retirement; subprime home loans and the mortgage crisis, particularly as it relates to Latinas; citizenship and immigration status and how that impacts wealth building; cultural expectations of women; policy recommendations to end the wealth gap; and non governmental/community based solutions.

Tomorrow: Looking at The Wealth Gap

*There is no data included about queer POC. We will discuss this a bit more when we discuss the limitations of data, but the discussions of marriage and wealth building for POC provides an interesting element to the discussions surrounding same sex marriage rights.

For a review of Part 1, click here

No way around it: Latino In America was a failure.

At the very least, Thursday’s conclusion, “Chasing The Dream,” seemed equal parts melodrama and bait-and-switch, with the broadcast component weakened by a lack of questions that undercut even its’ more compelling segments.

For instance, in the report on the murder of Luis Mendoza, we got an overview of events in Shenandoah, Penn., leading up to the crime, and of the area’s history with several immigrant populations, but when one individual reported he felt he was being intimidated because of his speaking to CNN, we got no follow-up with local authorities. When it was mentioned that one of the four defendants – who were acquitted of hate-crime accusations – testified the cops told them to get their stories straight, we got no follow-up.

In another major mis-step, the incident was not placed in any sort of context – at least on-air. You had to venture to the series’ website (or look it up yourself) to get this kind of information:

FBI statistics show that anti-Latino crimes are on the rise. There were 595 anti-Latino crimes in 2007, up almost 40 percent from the 426 crimes in 2003; the Latino population in America grew only 14 percent during that time.
In December, Ecuadorean Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhañay died after he was beaten with a baseball bat in Brooklyn, New York.
One month earlier, a group of seven teenagers with a history of harassing Latinos went out looking for “Mexicans to f— up” and fatally stabbed Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue, New York.
FBI figures from 2007 show that anti-Latino attacks account for about 8 percent of all hate crimes. About 35 percent of hate crimes were directed at blacks, 16 percent at homosexuals and 13 percent at Jews.
But experts say hate crimes in general are underreported. States are not required to report those figures to the FBI.

Surely including at least some of this information would have been a better use of our viewing time than Soledad O’Brien amiably chatting up the guy starting up his own “Save Shenandoah” group.

A similar lack of layering plagued the story of “Marta,” the undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. To find her mother, only to find herself having to accuse her mom of neglect in order to stay in America. Marta’s story is woven with that of the Cuban “Pedro Pans,” which include Sen. Mel Martínez (R-FL). Never mind that Marta (pictured above) isn’t even Cuban. But, again, you had to go to the website to get more relevant information:

[Marta's] case is typical of the 7,211 children known to have entered the United States illegally in 2008 by themselves, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which runs the shelters where the children are detained. Children come searching for family members or a way out of poverty with little understanding of the legal ramifications they face.

And how does Martínez feel about a system that forces children to seek their own legal representation in these matters? Well, you had to watch Anderson Cooper to figure it out, I guess, because O’Brien seemingly never asked.

Other segments just seemed disjointed: the segment on Pico Rivera veered from covering its’ evolution into a “Latino Mayberry” (a rather condescending term) to a law enforcement crackdown against gang and tagging activity to the city’s Scared Straight-esque P.R.I.D.E program to following yet another at-risk teen trying to navigate through it. And in the middle of all this, seemingly staple-gunned onto the narrative, was a visit with a local car club. And all this was before we learned that the city’s otherwise sympathetic mayor, Gracie Gallegos, had to resign for allegedly cashing bad checks. What, exactly, was the lesson to be learned from this? There wasn’t even an online companion to this story to look to for an overall point.

The series’ final segment seemed to focus on the financial disadvantage of a naturalized immigrant who doesn’t speak English; not only would his story have fit in more tightly among those featured in “The Garcías,” but it was shoe-horned against an Anglo baseball instructor who successfully boosts his camp’s enrollments by hiring and recruiting Latino staff and students; and a very successful immigrant couple. In the end we learn that the guy’s girlfriend is pregnant and he failed his Sheriff Department entrance exam again.

And that’s where the series wraps up. Is this how the network wants to attract more Latino viewership? Based on these utterly depressing four hours, I can just imagine the slogan: CNN: ¡No se puede!

During the campaign season, lots of folks were critical of candidate Obama for not speaking out more vocally about issues that pertain to the African American community. Many saw his race-neutral style as one that largely skirted his ethnicity, and focused perhaps too much on catering to “mainstream America”. In the end, all this panned out. Obama pulled 95% of the black vote, which sounds ultra-impressive, but is more or less in line with what most Democrats running for President have received.

Anyways, Barry is in office now, and going about the bid’ness of saving the world, yet many are still holding his feet to the flame on these “black issues” and exactly what he’s going to do about them.

President Barack Obama should specifically address disparities in black unemployment, foreclosures, education and health care, the National Urban League says in its annual “State of Black America” report.

Despite the progress represented by the election of the first black U.S. president, blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed, three times as likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated, says the report, which was being released Wednesday by the civil rights organization.

Obama has said that the way for government to help minorities is by improving things like education, employment and health care for all Americans.

But “we have to be more specific,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the 99-year-old Urban League.

“The issue is not only (blacks) doing better, but in closing these persistent gaps in statistics in this country,” Morial told The Associated Press. “Our index shows that the gap in African-American status is about 71 percent that of white Americans. We will not rest until that number is at 100, and there is no gap.”

I suppose I get Morial’s point here. A black President should be more compassionate about Black folks than perhaps, well, a white guy, which is what every President prior to Obama was. As head of the Urban League, an organization that actually does grassroots level community work (unlike, say, the NAACP, whose mission I’m not really sure of), Morial also has the clout to pull such a card.

On the flipside, is there really any such thing as a “black issue”? Aren’t “black issues”, just plain ole “American issues”, albeit on steroids? Seriously, is there anything that genuinely qualifies as a uniquely “black issue”?

The achievement gap exists between black and white students, true. But it also exists between White and Asian students. Perhaps most alarmingly, the achievement gap persists amongst girls and boys of all races and ethnicities.

Unemployment always hits the black community hard, but when it’s raining on the whole country, the fact that your shirt’s been soaked a few minutes longer isn’t gonna win you much extra sympathy.

Crime is universal. Folks get offed errywhere. Sure, it happens a bit more frequently in places with high concentrations of poverty, but murders are hardly an exclusively black province. I don’t need to tell you about drugs.

A lot of black folks took a bath via predatory loans that lead to the collapse of the housing market, but only 6% of such risky loans were given to minorities as a whole. A sh*tload of white folks are in shelters right now too.

Many diseases hit blacks at staggering rates, but few of them are exclusively “black” problems. Hypertension is an American problem. As much as I hate the vocoder and the way it’s destroyed black music, it too, is an American problem.

So, with all that said, what exactly is a “Black Problem”?

Question: Is there such a thing as a “uniquely black issue” or are Black America’s issues just America’s issues, times 20?

Urban League asks Obama to address black issues [AP]