School's Out (Of Whack)

I've mentioned from time to time the re-opened school de-segregation case in the parish where I've lived for the past two years. I'm still neck-deep in this effort and considering that the original court order in the case was issued in 1979, I'm not anticipating a major shift any time soon. Apparently, the gears of the Courts (even the Federal Courts) in Louisiana grind slooooowly indeed.

I certainly don't want to run the risk of putting my two cents so far out there as to compromise the best interests of the case, which is why I don't discuss it more often. And besides, there's a continually updated website that gets half a million hits a month, so it's not necessary for me to chime in. But there's an issue that's been unfolding of late that I think has more general applicability and that's what this post is about.

What you need to know about the case to understand what I'm going to write is that the defense (the parish school board and its appointed administrators) have drafted a plan that will supposedly de-segregate the schools enough to satisfy the Court's order. It should be obvious to even the unpracticed eye that anybody who unapologetically maintains a system demonstrated to damage the psyches of children (of whatever skin tone) for more than thirty years after they were ordered by a Court to change their ways is NOT going down without a fight. And fight they have.

First of all, they've drafted a plan so full of bells and whistles even an expert might miss the many ways the "new" is really old. For one thing, The Plan is heavily imbued with "magnet schools" that we are encouraged to believe will pull little White children from all over the parish to avail themselves of these special opportunities. Skip the fact that magnet schools have not been demonstrated to de-segregate schools successfully anywhere else. Skip the fact that they built into The Plan conditional acceptance criteria such as that those who qualify for free or reduced lunches (many, if not most, of the children of color) will be last on the list for inclusion in the magnet schools or precluded from entrance at all. And skip that, in any case, magnet schools still lock in a dual system that marks some children as worthy of "better" and some as worthy of "less," a designation that has always been made graphically clear to African-Americans of every age for five hundred years to the present in every area of our society.

And then, of course, my personal favorite aspect of this unmistakeable boondoggle is the simple fact that they have caaaarefully left "certain" schools either untouched or even Whiter than they were before (as if that would be explainable in any type of reasonable terms). One of these schools, already 94% White would actually become 97% White under The Plan...! And apparently, we're expected not to notice that this is the case when -- ostensibly -- the whole point of this debacle is to de-segregate. the. schools. Their excuse: that by law a "de-segregation plan" doesn't actually have to de-segregate ALL the schools or in this case, the schools where the little kiddies' Whiteness is already being most protected intact.

The Court, as might be expected, has asked both sides to consider what a "settlement" of the case would look like, which sounded to me like, "How little would you be willing to accept and still call it enough?" I, needless to say, wrote "Justice?" on my legal pad and the lawyer scribbled back, "That's why there are Appellate Courts." But why, after thirty years -- and fully fifty-five years after Brown v. the Board of Education -- should we be discussing "settlement" at all? In a just society, the men and women who've unapologetically maintained a racist system of relegating Black children to inferior schools to make sure they eventually "prove" their own inferiority belong in jail! I'm just saying is all.

Anyway, none of this, odious as it may be, is the real topic of this post. It is rather that the plaintiffs (who are lobbying to see implemented a fairer system of education) have somehow gotten off on a jag of pressing the Court to make comprehensive, state-of-the-art vocational schools part of The Plan. Now, on the surface, this would seem to be a no-brainer. Why not have vocational schools for all those students who, for whatever reason, "choose" not to go to college? (And the stats, of course, document that few of the youth in our parish opt to do the latter.) What bothers me about this, however, is that I see only too clearly how this can be used by the jerks who put this racist system in place back in the covered wagon days to keep Black youth (and even poor White youth) from taking the only track guaranteed to offer them a decent life in the future.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not invested in the idea that everybody wants to go to college. For example, I didn't. Or at least I didn't have a vision for myself that included college once it was made clear to me that I wouldn't get "one red cent" for college because "women are for sex and cooking." (I kid you not. In those words.) It took me twenty years to get over than one. And even then, I didn't enroll because I wanted to. I enrolled because it became apparent to me that I wouldn't be able to get a job good enough to support two children without a college degree of some kind. And that was in 1986.

The fact is that the United States has a number of values on which it operates as a society. One is White Supremacy, of course. And one, as I just explained, involves the Patriarchy. But another is a practice sociologists call "credentialism," which means requiring formal educational "credentials" for better jobs. And believe you me, they're not talking about high school diplomas or vocational school certificates any more.

When my father graduated with his Bachelor's Degree in the 1950's, it really meant something because people could still get a good job with a high school diploma. Hell, I myself filled great, highly responsible positions in my twenties and early thirties as only a high school grad. But during the 1980's, when we went from being a manufacturing economy to being a service-oriented economy, things changed. Not only did you need a college degree to get a "decent" job, but those jobs didn't even pay enough to cover the bills even if you did have a degree. It didn't have anything to do with what you learned in school. It had to do with that little piece of paper. And today, the process is not moving toward vocational schools. It's moving toward Master's degrees.

I tell my students -- many of whom are struggling as the first college students ever in their families, many of whom are holding down full-time jobs while going to college, a ridiculous number of whom already got shellshocked in Iraq two or three times so they could go to college -- that they're not wrong. They don't have to want to do this. They need to do it. And when I tell my African-American students that Black men are four times more likely to be unemployed than White men at every educational level, I tell them that this just makes their college degree that much more crucial.

Not very pretty, is it?

And yes, it's possible for people to make a living wage with some trades. But that doesn't mean that a certificate from a vocational school is automatically going to put you in those jobs, assuming those jobs remain in place. At ten per cent unemployment -- and rising -- why do we think that there are any magic answers? The bulk of the tracks in vocational training do not provide a living wage in a country where a full-time, minimum wage job will bring in a whopping $237 a week after taxes. And that's assuming that the jobs don't fall to technological advancements or go to people with college degrees who are going to become "over-qualified," but increasingly desperate as the economy gets worse.

But if a well-organized and fully entrenched team of White racists recognize anything, it's how to play both ends against the middle and get what you wanted in the first place. So they're gonna jump on this vocational school bandwagon like, well, White on rice. And when the dust settles, thousands upon thousands of young people -- most particularly African-American -- will be "tracked" into vocational programs with promises that they'll be easier and faster and get them good money and that college isn't probably "for" them, anyway. (I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard a young man or woman of color say this to me since I arrived in Louisiana. White kids don't say it. Now, why is that?)

Am I trying to push college on a bunch of underprepared children with no self-esteem and horrific work ethics and no vision for themselves or their futures? Well, what do you think? I have to teach these kids. I watch some of them crash and burn (educationally, psychologically, emotionally, and sometimes even physically). I watch some hang by their fingers somehow course after course. And I spend literally more time in my office trying to keep individual students from falling through the gates of hell than I do in the classroom. So what is my point?

That -- and I really want to break into capital letters here -- a LOT more children would opt for and be successful in college if they were prepared in schools that gave them a solid basic education. They don't need bells and whistles. They don't need gimmicks. They need teachers who give a shit about them, who believe in them, who are NOT themselves racist (especially without knowing it). They need admininstrators who are educators themselves, highly trained in the challenges that have developed because of their lack in the past and committed to spending money on quality education for all children rather than on inflated salaries for administrators, and who hold teachers responsible, not for front-loading to a standardized exam, but for turning children into learners. Believe me, this is NOT the stretch we're told it is by the racist Powers-That-Be.

Maybe we do need a community college level vocational school or two in this parish to pick up the slack for the thousands of Black and poor White young people who can barely read (though we'll still have to teach them that, I assume). But the answer to our greater dilemma -- institutionalized oppression in the name of racism -- will not be addressed and eradicated in this way. And giving the parish school board a get-out-of-jail-free card is NOT my idea of a law suit well won.

77% of the White people over 25 in this parish have a high school diploma (which is something like the national average), while only 55% of the Black residents over 25 are high school graduates. Poor White kids aside, because this is, after all, a racial de-segregation case, suggesting that Black kids "need" vocational schools because they don't "want" to go to college is just one more verse in the same old racist school song.

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NOTE: Last night, after writing this post, I was talking with Albert "Shaka" Woodfox (one of the Angola 3) on the telephone and before I even got into what my post was about, he volunteered: "The two primary tactics defendants use in trying to avoid school de-segregation are, first of all, vocational schools and then, magnet schools." Why am I not surprised?

Black on Black and Brown

This video of an African-American woman named Pat Washington speaking truth at the U.S.-Mexican border has been languishing among my YouTube favorites for a year now. I accept that I'm busy, but really, I'm not THAT busy. Enough already. It's old, but it's righteous.

Enjoy.

The Mountain Comes to Muhammad

Yesterday, I spent the day with Albert "Shaka""Cinque" Woodfox, one of the Angola 3. It took me two hours for one reason or another to make the journey from my front door to the front reception desk at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola where he's been in solitary confinement for thirty-seven years. It wasn’t supposed to take that long, but half of the trip was on a country two-lane road and the construction and farming vehicles were out in force.

I was deep, deep in the prison abolition movement in this country in the early 1970's and I’ve been inside more than a few prisons during that time and since. But it never gets easy. I listened to an audio book -- a detective thriller -- while I drove because otherwise I would have made the entire trip with my stomach full of butterflies and my back teeth clenched and I didn’t want to throw away so frivolously the energy I would need to last the day. We’ve been writing and talking on the telephone for four months now, since I wrote to tell him that the student sociology club I advise threw him a birthday party when he turned 62 on February 19th.

It was a small gesture. We showed “The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation” and ate a cake that read “Happy birthday, Cinque.” That’s the name he took for himself along the way after his comrades had already taken to calling him Shaka. I'd seen him called Cinque on the internet and that’s what his long-time supporters in New York City called him, too, when I met with them, but he signed his letters Shaka. So I wrote and asked him -- with some trepidation, I’ll admit now -- “Albert/Shaka/Cinque, just how many of you are there in that cell?” And he laughed and I was glad because I wanted him to be rational. I couldn’t believe that he would be, but I wanted it.

I became aware of the Angola 3 more than a year ago when Color of Change sent out a call for support because the Louisiana House Judiciary Committee was talking about reviewing the case. I jumped on the bandwagon: blogging, signing petitions, contacting the governor’s office -- the standard drill. Then, in July, Shaka's conviction was overturned. I posted a YouTube video of Richie Havens at Woodstock singing about Freedom. But he wasn’t released. And in October, another hearing didn’t release him either. And the state says it will appeal the Court’s decision anyway regardless. And Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell says he'll handle the case personally because Shaka's the most dangerous man in the world. And Amnesty International says that Shaka and Herman Wallace may have done more time in solitary confinement than anyone ever.

So we asked for a special visit and rather unexpectedly got permission. I hadn’t bothered to prepare myself emotionally for this possibility because I didn’t believe it would be allowed to happen. Even after it was approved, I didn’t believe it would happen. And all the way up there, I still did not believe I was actually going to see him. Back in the day, I sometimes drove four or five hundred miles only to have a visit be denied at the last minute, so I had no illusions. I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t happen because he's him or because I’m me, but I wasn’t even excited because I didn’t want the crash at the gate when they gave me the word. I ate half of a muffin I had brought and drank most of a bottle of water on the last leg of the trip so my blood sugar wouldn’t dip and add to the likelihood of my losing my cool when they gave me the news.

They let me park without problem. Even that surprised me, I was so convinced that this was all a cruel joke. I went into the reception area, feeling new-girl-conspicuous, and after being instructed to stand in a booth that blew my hair around, I stumbled through the process at the counter. They asked for Shaka's prison number, which I guessed wrong and then right, receiving a broad grin from the woman behind the desk, as if I had just scored well on a pop quiz, the reward for which would be a visit with the matching prisoner. Then, without comment, she handed me a form reading “special visit -- non-contact,” and I was patted down, divested of my lip gloss, sent through a metal detector, and escorted across the street to the close custody building.

Waiting in the office to be further processed and taken upstairs, I watched an African-American woman officer eating watermelon while a boom box blared, “God’s got somebody for you!” The officer didn’t seem to be listening to the program, so I gathered it was like really loud background music, but I couldn’t help noticing that lying next to the boom box was a magazine wrapped in plastic, featuring a Black woman on the cover grinning back over her shoulder while her scantily clad derriere glistened with sweat. I tried not to look over-attentive, but honestly, it was a pretty surreal scene.

Guards came and went, bantering lightly with each other. And eventually I was taken upstairs and deposited in a cheerless room with seven cubicle spaces in front of seven thick screens and there was only one folding chair anywhere to be seen. I claimed it immediately, though ultimately I left at the end of the day, priding myself on having not sat in it for even one minute. Each cubicle had a stainless steel shelf on either side of the screen. I assume this was to rest your elbows or your food on while you were visiting, but it was obvious that sitting in the chair would put the shelf at approximately chin height, leaving the visit to be conducted between two talking heads. So Shaka and I either stood or perched on the steel shelves, barely inches apart despite the best efforts of the Powers-That-Be.

It was a good thirty to forty minutes between the time I pulled up in the parking lot and the moment Shaka entered the tiny room on the other side of the screen. He came through the door in hand cuffs and leg irons and after the cuffs (only) were removed and the door behind him closed soundly, he grinned and slapped his palms flat against the metal mesh and I responded by matching his palms with my own. And it was on.

Five hours and forty minutes later, the guard opened the door on my side of the room and said simply, “All right, ma’am. That’s it.” And after replacing our palms on the screen once more, we turned and walked away without looking back. And the visit was behind us. I had just met a bona fide hero, a man who shakes his head woefully over the responsibility that accompanies receiving twenty-five letters a day, a man who buys other prisoners underwear or shower shoes when they no longer have resources or connections to do so themselves, a man who teaches other men to read through the bars of his six by eight foot cell while rivulets of sweat run down his face onto the letter he’s trying to answer, the most dangerous man in the world.

I know that the “bona fide hero” line is going to make him wince. He's probably as humble as anyone I’ve ever met. “I don’t see myself as others see me,” he says. And I’m sure not. Nevertheless, the letters remind him daily how he appears to the rest of the world. They reach out to him in respect and love, feeding his spirit, holding up a mirror in front of a man who has done thirty-seven years in solitary confinement for being a Black Panther, populating the universe he has created in the iron house he calls home.

He works out six days a week, lives on French fries (not a great idea for a man on heavy-duty medications for hypertension), and prefers to wear sweatshirts when he's out of his cell. He speaks with the richest Black Louisiana accent I’ve heard yet in the two years since I moved here. And his conversations move easily from describing how the GOP should have handled Sarah Palin to advising on the best way to deal with being deposed by a lawyer to discussing a Sister Souljah book with the skill of a trained reviewer. He is equally adept at sharing deeply reflective personal insights or snapping unpredicted jokes. And his class analysis is absolutely elegant. He marveled at our spirited dialogue -- between a prisoner and a professor -- but I assured him that he was driving the conversation; I was hanging on for dear life just to keep up.

When I once asked him how he's maintained his sanity, he replied simply, "It is what it is." And that's what being rooted in stone cold reality looks like. That's what willingness to keep hoping looks like when there's been absolute proof that there is no reason to hope. That's why Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace have visitors from all over the world and endless letters and telephone calls, why the world has beaten a path to their cells, why I spent the day at the Louisiana State Prison yesterday, and why Shaka and Hooks will come out of the hell holes in which they are presently trapped to walk as free men on the face of the Earth that has sustained them in their most desperate hours.

I wrote Shaka at one point that the reason the Attorney General called him the most dangerous man in the world is that if Shaka had adequately communicated at any point that he was ready to disavow Black self-determination and accept White Supremacy as appropriate and reasonable, he would have been released. But he did not. Consequently, he -- and Wallace -- have, for all practical purposes, made a daily decision to do thirty-seven years in solitary confinement voluntarily. That gives them the power and this frightens the be-jeezus out of White men like Attorney General Caldwell and Warden Cain, who still believe that there is only one kind of power -- brute force. Scared or not scared, however, Caldwell and Cain have already lost the battle because they are recognized far and wide as the misguided monsters they are and they will carry the knowledge and the repercussions of the evil they are perpetrating even as I write to their woebegotten, isolated graves.

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For more information on the case, you might want to check out National Public Radio's series, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

And The Students Become The Teacher

It's been a tough week or so. I didn't get nearly enough sleep for one thing. And there's been rather a lot of drama related to the re-opened school de-segregation case as folks on our side have been head-butting senselessly. I just love when that happens. Not.

At least I finally finished my statement for the court on the effects of internalized oppression on children of color "educated" in the segregated school system in this parish. Then, I spent all day Tuesday watching the melodrama that is the court itself. On Wednesday, I started teaching a new course. And after class, while discussing Robert King's book on his life as one of the Angola 3 with a young man I had loaned it to, another young Black man I've been working with over the past eighteen months dropped by to invite me to a spoken word event he was performing in that night.

Now, understand that this man was not doing spoken word when we met. And he has struggled with his unfolding. But two months ago, he found his voice and he wanted to show me. So I went. And not only did he bring the house down, but he did it reflecting my teaching back to me. He took our conversations and turned them into an war cry about what Black people in the United States are up against today. He covered poverty and education and parenting and prison. (My favorite line was "Prison is Fort Knox and Black men are the gold...")

By the time he was finished, I was undone. And then the M.C. took the mic and told the beautiful young African-American audience that he wanted them all to give me props for what I had done to develop my student's mind so he could bring his poetry to the world.

And there I sat -- old, White, exhausted and grinning -- grateful to have the opportunity to be of service, grateful to be changing the world by feeding its children, grateful to be embraced and understood and appreciated for what is utter joy to me.

When he came into my office Thursday to give me the back story -- he's known as Giraffe on the spoken word circuit and if you pay attention, I suspect you'll come across him at some point sooner than later -- he turned me onto Sunni Patterson, another fine young African-American spoken word poet from New Orleans. So even though I don't have time or energy right this minute to make up for my lack of blogging lately, I'm posting this video as an offer of apology.


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NOTE: The graphic featured at the top of this post was skanked from the blog of another former student of mine, Omar, who left to write for and be the lead singer for Molotov Compromise. Omar has a new solo cd out, too, which you can check out (and buy) on his blog and his MySpace site.

Quirky Black Girls! Yes-sir-eee!

M.dot's done it again. Already this morning, she introduced me to some folks and a space I've added to my blog roll. I wanted to reprint their Manifesta in electric purple, but that turned out not to be an option on Blogger. I'm posting it anyway -- with a warning. Don't read this if you ain't ready to do feel the music. 'Cause it'll getcha. Right where you live.

Here's to the quirky Black girl. Let her know today how much you dig her.

"The Quirky Black Girl Manifesta

"Because Audre Lorde looks different in every picture ever taken of her. Because Octavia Butler didn't care. Because Erykah Badu is a patternmaster. Because Macy Gray pimped it and Janelle Monáe was ready.

"Resolved. Quirky black girls wake up ready to wear a tattered society new on our bodies, to hold fragments of art, culture and trend in our hands like weapons against conformity, to walk on cracks instead of breaking our backs to fit in the mold.

"We're here, We're Quirky, Get used to it!.... Quirky Black girls don't march to the beat of our own drum; we hop, skip, dance, and move to rhythms that are all our own. We make our own drums out of empty lunchboxes, full imaginations and number 3 pencils.

"Quirky Black girls are not quirky because they like white shit; rather they understand that because they like it, it is not the sole province of whiteness.

"Quirky black girls are the answer to the promise that black means everything, birthing and burning a new world every time.

"Sound it out. Quirky, like queer and key, different and priceless, turning and open. Black, not be lack but black one word shot off the tongue like blap, bam, black. Girl, like the curl in a hand turning towards itself to snap, write, hold or emphasize. Quirky. Black. Girl. You see us. Act like you know.

"We demand that our audiences say 'yes-sir-eee' if they agree and we answer our own question 'What good do your words do, if they don't understand you?' by speaking anyway, even if our words are 'bruised and misunderstood.'

"Quirky black girls are hot!

"Whether you're ready to see it or not.

"Quirky means rejecting a particular type of 'value,' a certain unreadiness for consumption and subsumption in an economy of black heterocapital. This means that Quirky Black Girls act independently of dominant social norms or standards of beauty. So fierce that others may not be able to appreciate us just yet.

"No matter what age we are, we hold onto that girlhood drive for adventure, love for friends, independent spirit, wacky sense of humor, and hope for the future.

"Quirky Black Girls resist boxes in favor of over lapping circles with permeable membranes that allow them to ebb and flow through their multiple identities.

"Quirky Black Girls - Embrace the quirky!"

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The photo above is a self-portrait of LaVonna Varnado, one of the quirkiest Black women in my current world.

Black Boys: I Am Sean Bell

I just watched this on M.dot's blog, Model Minority.

Last week, I received my "I am Albert Woodfox" t-shirt.

Where does it end? When does it all end?

Where and when can we ALL just live out our lives in peace?

Poverty = Violence

On Thursday, as I prepared to leave my home for the five hour drive to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where I was committed to participate in a public hearing on poverty in Lambert yesterday, I found the following comment on my post about the last visit I made to the Delta:

"When I found out about this article, I just had to read & respond to it. I am a resident of Lambert,Ms. I too have lived there all of my life. I attended the public schools there. When you live in an rural area such as Lambert, you don't have many choices. You either apply yourself in school and go on to further your education or you CHOOSE to be content with your life and surroundings. I chose the first.

"There are MANY who chose to better themselves. My friends and neighbors are teachers, nurses, law enforcement officers, highway patrolmen, lawyers, dentists, doctors, school administrators, casino workers, grocery store workers, farm attendants, you name it. I say all of this because WE ALL CAME FROM THE SAME PLACE.

"Yes, Lambert is the, 'City of Hope.' But you must have the drive within to want a better life. I can say this because I see the good and the bad in my community everyday. Lambert does not have a grocery store, doctor's office or a general merchandise store. We do have access to all of the before mentioned. We have 5 housing complexes, all with central heating and air. Everyone who qualifies for a program called Mis-State, which will pay electricity, gas and qualify you for food-stamp assistance. No one has to or should live in the conditions that family lives in. I do believe on helping the community. Yes we should take care of the elderly, children and those who cannot do for themselves.

"I do not think that our community should have to be responsibe for able-bodied, young adults. I am a young adult. I attended the Quitman County Schools. I could have dropped out and hung in the streets but that wasn't an option in my household. As with a lot of households, my sibling and I had to graduate from high school and attend college. My mom always told us that she wanted her children to have more education than her. My mom has her Master's in Education. I am working on my Master's in Nursing. I am a firm beliver that you shape how you want your life, no matter the circumstances. I am from a single-parent household. My mom taught school during the day and went to college at night. I have friends who became pregnant while in highschool. That didn't deter them from graduating and going on to college.

"There are families that have received new free homes and end up losing the homes because they borrowed money against the home or they never pay the property tax. There is a lot of good going on in Lambert. We are a small community and we try to take care of the truly needy. There are families who went thru the proper channels to receive new homes. There are many programs out there for those who truly want help." -- DownHomeDiva

I appreciate your taking time to share your perspective, Diva, and I congratulate you on your professional success. Actually, I wrote this response to your comment while in Lambert and just wasn't able to post it until now, and I did see that parts of Lambert are as lovely as any other community I might visit.

The point is not that there's poverty in Lambert or even that some people are particularly poverty-stricken -- for whatever reason. And certainly, I would not suggest that we should just hand out free houses or free cars or free anything necessarily. I was in Lambert yesterday because of the way poverty has been institutionalized in our country -- and not just in Lambert -- to disproportionately shut many poor people and, most particularly, poor people of color out of the loop of financial well-being and economic development entirely.

Is it possible for an African-American brought up in a single-parent home to earn a Master's Degree in nursing? Absolutely! Frederick Douglass was born a slave, after all. I myself -- though admittedly not African-American -- spent five years on welfare in my thirties and now I teach college. One of the reasons I became a sociologist is that I celebrate the indefatigueable human spirit. To paraphrase Maya Angelou's poem, "We rise. Like dust. We rise."

Nevertheless, Martin Luther King, Jr., understood when he kicked off the first Poor People's Campaign in Marks (just a few miles from Lambert) in 1968, that poverty is violence and that, while it is always true that some will "make it" somehow, the majority of those in truly abject poverty have difficulty doing so and the causes are known. It's hard, for one thing, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when somebody stole your shoes. This country became the rich nation it is on the free labor of African people who received no acknowledgement and no financial benefits from that labor during or after it was appropriated. Just because it was never paid doesn't mean the debt doesn't matter. Only a couple of decades ago, cotton field workers in the Delta were still making $80 for working an 80-hour week. What kind of life could be built on that kind of foundation?

Another reason people sometimes get stuck is that they don't have immediate role models. It cannot be underestimated the power that relationships with successful individuals has on children. Conversely, the power of being surrounded by people whose lives are a testimony to their discouragment, depression, and hopelessness is at least equally powerful, if not more so. When I was told by my father, for example, at eighteen years of age that "women are for sex and cooking," it would not have affected me nearly so much if I had known one woman personally who had broken through that barrier. As it was, it took me twenty years to get over the infection that statement imbedded in my psyche.

You mention growing up in a single-parent household, but you also mention that your mother was a teacher while you were still a child. What if she had been a former sharecropper -- now unemployed -- who had to drop out of school at thirteen to eat? Do you imagine you would still be earning your Master's Degree? Statistical data tells us that the single greatest predictor of how far a child will go in school is how far their parents went. That doesn't mean it's impossible to go beyond, just that the odds are against the child who has to scale uncharted territory.

Yet another nail in the coffin of persistent poverty is the expectation of others. In a country where the default position is White Supremacy, children of color from coast to coast routinely meet reduced expectations in school and otherwise. It's a matter of public record that the effects of this over time are damning to the developing souls of children. And I would argue that along with the genocide of the indigenous people of this continent and the continuing travesty of Black men languishing in the bellies of this nation's prisons and jails without cause, what is being perpetrated against children of color under this U.S. system will send the decision-makers in this nation to hell if there's any justice in this universe at all.

This is why Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the first Poor People's Campaign in 1968 and why Antoinette Harrell and Ines Soto-Palmarin co-founded Gathering of Hearts and called for yesterday's poverty tour and public hearing. They're not saying people need more free stuff. They're saying we shouldn't keep operating as if money is more important than life. They're saying that we can't morally defend prioritizing war over job development. They're saying we need to remember that all children have an inalienable right to adequate nutrition, safety, medical attention, and education. And they are saying that, without a vision, the people perish.

You and your immediate neighbors may have jobs and homes and vehicles, but when 30,000 textile factory jobs left Mississippi and were not replaced in the 1990's a lot of people became long-term unemployed. Not to mention the fact that, while your mother was able to supplement your education, the Mississippi schools in general are statistically the worst in the nation. These are things government officials can address. Unfortunately, they're so committed to putting money in corporate pockets -- and their own --they claim not to have anything left to meet these other challenges.

Nobody's criticizing your hometown, Diva. We -- just like MLK before us -- are simply saying that the citizens of the United States should be able to expect a reasonable quality of life, no matter whether they're Black or White, male or female, from Michigan or Mississippi. Everyone's all in a lather about the formerly middle class (and above) White folks who are having trouble meeting the mortgage payments on their quarter of a million dollar houses now because the job market's gone belly up. Gathering of Hearts is just trying to remind us that there are people in America who were already poor before last year. They were at the bottom of the ladder before and being ignored. Now, with the new economic developments, there's every possibility that they'll go from being ignored to being forgotten completely.

I live in a parish in Louisiana where 60% of the public schools are still segregated. Some people drive their kids all the way from Mississippi every day to attend these segregated schools and the ones that are racially identifiable as White look like palaces compared to the ones that are racially identifiable as Black. African-American men are four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men at every educational level. African-American life expectancy is shorter. African-American babies are more likely to be born with low birth weight. And European-American families hold on average eleven times the wealth of African-American families. Sociologists call the practice of holding people responsible for attacks against them "blaming the victim." Even victims of attack have power -- especially in numbers. But that doesn't make the attack deserved.

What I describe is only the tip of the iceberg and it all suits well a system that is calculated to keep the most of the best for people that look like me and relegate African-Americans to whatever's left over. Then, when someone like you, Diva, makes it out from under anyway, those with the power to define point at you and say, "See. Black people have the same opportunities as White people. If they aren't doing well, it's their own fault." And they've said it so long and repeated it so often, they've convinced even you that it's true.

R.I.P., Koko Taylor

Though I first got to know, respect and love African-Americans in the prison movement during the 1970's, I didn't discover the Black community until my bi-racial daughter was born in 1981. Black folks taught me that it was okay to party and okay to be a strong, unapologetic woman. This was heady stuff, indeed, considering that I was raised being told that dancing was a sin (though I danced anyway, needless to say) and that women were created to kowtow to men (something I rebelled against to the point of insurrection).

Koko Taylor -- Queen of the Blues, who not only won a Grammy and multiple other important distinctions in her life, but managed to win the Blues Music Award a mind-blowing 24 times and who was still performing last month at the age of 80 -- passed over on Wednesday, but she won't be forgotten. Rest in peace, Koko. Thanks for showing the rest of us how it's done.

After watching the video above, shot at a Canadian concert in 1978, check out this one of Koko (in the red dress, of course) getting down with Ruth Brown, Irma Thomas and B.B. King. Don't miss Koko leaving the stage at the end of the song with her skirt jacked up to her 65-year-old hips. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Poor People's Campaign 2009 on 6/19

Photo by Walter C. Black, Sr.

As you may recall, I was fortunate enough to attend one of Antoinette Harrell's poverty tours in February. The one I went on involved the Mississippi Delta region near Marks, where Martin Luther King, Jr., kicked off his Mule Train for the first Poor People's Campaign in 1968. It was a life-changing experience. Even my post about it generated attention from a wide range of readers, including, for example, a producer from Al Jazeera in Washington, D.C.

Harrell co-founded, with Boston city planner Ines Soto-Palmarin, an organization they call "Gathering of Hearts" and on Friday, June 19th, Gathering of Hearts will host an all-day event in Lambert, Mississippi, intended to raise national awareness of the condition of the people who still live there in much the same type of financial crisis that drew Martin Luther King's attention in the first place.

King's original focus, of course, was racial inequality and in the mid-1960's, he was riding a huge wave of public support on that issue. Then, on April 4, 1967, King delivered a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam” at New York City’s Riverside Church. It outlined, as only King could, exactly how he had come to feel about the war in Vietnam and about the government’s practice of allocating funds to the military “with alacrity and generosity” while turning to the poor with “hostility,” divvying out poverty funds with “miserliness.” Those that agreed with his stance were thrilled, but there were many who turned a jaundiced eye on his foray into a much less clear-cut political arena not seen as directly related to de-segregation issues.

Determined to address this major root cause of inequality and pain in the nation, King moved shortly into talking – loudly and eloquently – about the many abjectly poverty-stricken in the U.S., whether African-American or not. Soon, he was including Latinos, Native Americans, and even poor Whites from the Appalachian mountains in his discussions about what was wrong in America and what needed to be done about it. He had never left them out entirely, but now he spoke not as a Black leader of Black people, but as an American leader of poor people. And there are those who believe that this is what cost him his life.

Soon, King and the other founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Council were deep in discussions planning a Poor People's Campaign that would give a voice to a “multicultural army of the poor.” Senator and Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy instructed Marion Wright (now Edelman) to tell Dr. King to bring the poor to Washington, to make them visible. And King answered the call.

By the time he and the other SCLC leaders reached Memphis in April of 1968 to support a strike by the sanitation workers for better conditions and the right to unionize, the decision had already been made to take a mule train from Marks, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C., to demand a Poor People’s Bill of Rights. King called the Campaign the “second phase” of the civil rights movement and massive government jobs programs, affordable housing, and a guaranteed annual income for the poor were only the beginning of what was going to be presented as non-negotiable expectations. The Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.” But the day after King arrived in Memphis, he was shot and killed, insuring that he would never see the Poor People's Campaign become a reality.

Photo by Laura Jones

Undaunted, the multicultural army King had enlisted gathered and made the trek to Washington in May, where 50,000 marchers established a shanty town they named Resurrection City. With 2000 to 5000 residents, Resurrection City had a sewer system, health care, schools and even a mayor, the Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy. Each day began with a demonstration at the Department of Agriculture and then various groups would descend on the office of their primary interest. At night, musicians would entertain. Jimmy Collier sang. Peter, Paul and Mary showed up. Even Pete Seeger made an appearance.

But an almost incredible amount of rain soon turned the City into a mud hole of soggy despair that no musician could brighten. And by the time government bulldozers rolled into the camp on June 24th, many, if not all, of the residents were doubtless relieved, though broken-hearted that the Poor People's Campaign, valiant effort that it was, had joined the one who conceived it as only a historical note.

Nevertheless, one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s many memorable quotes is: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it always bends toward justice.” And so it is, that, 41 years after the first Poor People's Campaign, Gathering of Hearts has stepped up to the plate to re-awaken history by calling for a new commitment by a new Presidential administration to the old problem of poverty – even deep, deep poverty – in the United States.

The new Poor People's Campaign will begin with a poverty tour from 9:00 a.m. until noon on Friday, June 19th. Anyone who wants to participate should meet before 9:00 a.m. at the Quitman County Elementary School on Highway 3 South in Lambert, Mississippi. A Public Hearing at that same school from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. will feature speakers such as the Rev. Dr. Al Sampson (one of the planners of the original Poor People's Campaign); long-time organizer Dr. John Perkins of the John M. Perkins Foundation; Snoop Dogg's father, Vernell Varnado; and Nation of Islam Student Minister Ava Muhammad. For more information about the poverty tour or the afternoon press conference event, call 985-229-8001.

The Southern Christian Leadership Council has organized an SCLC fundraiser breakfast and a Poor People's Campaign march in Jackson, Mississippi, for the following day, Saturday, June 20th. For more information about these events, call 404-522-1420.

Pitts: You Don't Really Know Me

The following was written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., of the Miami Herald. I virtually never post anything in its entirety, but this is extraordinary. Leonard Pitts is a highly respected columnist who happens to be African-American. This is his take on White people who always seem to blame a Black man when they want to create a believable villain:

"I am your scapegoat. I am your boogeyman. Brown-skinned, kinky-haired, black man, me.

"So I was not surprised (it was just another day at the office) last week when a white woman from suburban Philadelphia called police from her cellphone, claiming she had been locked in the trunk of a Cadillac by two black men. Nor was I shocked (it was just another day in the life) when police said Bonnie Sweeten was actually holed up in a luxury hotel at Walt Disney World, and there never was a kidnapping, much less by two black men.

"I'm your scapegoat. I'm your boogeyman. So I'm used to these things.

"In fact, they happen often. Happened just a few months ago when that John McCain campaign worker said she was robbed by a burly black man who carved a 'B' into her face . . . as in 'Barack,' get it? Turned out she carved the letter herself, then blamed a black man. Just as Charles Stuart did when he killed his wife in 1989. Just as Tanya Dacri did when she dismembered her 7-week-old son that same year. Just as Susan Smith did when she rolled her car, her two boys inside, into a lake in 1994.

"University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown, author of The Color of Crime, has documented 92 such incidents between 1987 and 2006. She cautions that white men are sometimes victims of racial hoaxes: witness the cases of Tawana Brawley and the Duke lacrosse team.

"But she says the overwhelming majority of the time -- 67 percent, to be exact -- it is the other way around: white liars blaming black men for things that did not happen. Russell-Brown is particularly intrigued that Sweeten identified her supposed kidnappers as driving a Cadillac. That fits a pattern, she says. 'When it's someone white alleging they've been harmed by someone African American, there are these fantastic racially laden stereotypes that are used. Whether it's dreadlocks, or smell, or big and burly. This fits right in, the Cadillac.'

"Naturally. Because I'm your scapegoat, your boogeyman. Cadillac drivin', pimp-walkin', white woman-lustin', me.

"I am the shape and size and sound of your fears. You know me on sight, know me before you know my name, know me before I even stick out my hand and say Hi. You know I have no feelings beyond your perception of me, no thought beyond what you impute to me, no purpose beyond your fear of me. I live in the shadow of your consciousness, do not exist outside of you.

"But can you imagine if I did? Boy, can you imagine the ache and anger if I did?

"It's a good thing I don't, a good thing I am only what I am: scapegoat, boogeyman, the car window you roll up, the door you lock, the ATM you avoid, the crime statistics you glance right by because they try to tell you I'm not what you think I am, didn't do what you thought I did.

"Hell, you don't need some researcher's 'statistics' to know about me. We've known each other for years. Dozens of years, hundreds of years. Remember when you denied me a job, then called me a thief? Remember when you blew up my school then called me ignorant? Remember when you killed my father, then complained I was filled with rage?

"No, you're right. There's no point in remembering that. Why should you remember a past that makes you uncomfortable? Why do I even need a past, existing as I do only within the confines of your awareness? All we have -- or need -- is the now. And in the now, Bonnie Sweeten has been exposed and she'll face the law and that's all we can really ask, isn't it? There's no point in digging deeper, no purpose served in wondering why, when she wanted to put a face to a crime, she chose mine.

"We already know. I'm your scapegoat, I'm your boogeyman. And I have no feelings beyond those you give me.

"But can you imagine if I did?"
__________________________________________________________

Leonard Pitts, Jr., can be contacted by email at lpitts@miamiherald.com

The Face of Racism

The last several days, I've been making my blog rounds for the first time in quite a while. I mean, I've dropped in here and there from time to time, but overall, nothing like I used to do. This blogging stuff takes time.

Anyway, the blogs I haunt are about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race," by and large. So, during my rounds, I've been inspired, entertained, informed, and unfortunately, horrified by what I read. And here are a few of the highpoints.

1) Ann at Beautiful, Also Are the Souls of My Black Sisters tipped me to stories about swastikas being burned into the lawn of a family in Merced, California, and a KKK newsletter being left on the porch of a bi-racial family living in Warren, Michigan.

2) Andrew Grant-Thomas at Race Wire wrote about race and poverty and how things cost more in poor neighborhoods, assuming they're available at all.

3) ZNet presented a Tim Wise essay on race and law enforcement, focusing particularly on how White privilege makes marijuana more of an option for White youth than for Black youth in a country that still (supposedly) instructs us all to "just say no."

4) M.dot at Model Minority wrote a blockbuster analysis of the point where hip-hop, capitalism and gender meet. I'm going to give students extra credit for reading this one.

5) Minister Faust at The Bro-Log talks about what he calls "blood chocolate" by introducing Carol Off's new book on the topic.

6) The Villager at Electronic Village posts a letter written by Ben Jealous, the national President of the NAACP, after he visited Troy Davis, an innocent man who's being threatened with eminent execution even as I write. Apparently, the mass media is clamoring to meet with Davis, but the Powers-That-Be are blocking any access to him that might wind up making them look like the criminals they are.

7) Over at the Huffington Post, Ann Medlock writes about the oil companies killing kids in Nigeria.

8) The award-winning editorial team at Sanctuary presents a statement on the travesty that occurred in the court when the murderers of Luis Ramirez were acquitted.

9) The newest edition to my blog rounds was RiPPa at The Intersection of Madness and Reality, whose writing reminds me of DNA when he was at Two Sense or maybe The Field Negro. RiPPa posted about Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were murdered and the KKK, according to a former mayor, was made up of a bunch of guys who were just doing their best to make the community a better place to live. Uh-huh!

10) And finally, Kai at Zuky did his usual breath-takingly elegant job of de-constructing (and explaining) what drove major world leaders (including Obama) to boycott the U.N. anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, last month (the problem of Whiteness). Quote: "[W]hiteness is not genetic; it's socialized, not inherited; though ironically, whiteness deploys a pseudo-genetic basis in its contempt for The Other. Whiteness is a socio-political construct and a fluid strategic ideology of power which has only existed for the past 5 centuries or so, during the era of racist globalization and colonialism. When I talk about the whiteness problem, I'm not necessarily talking about white people, I'm talking about whiteness. I'm saying that whiteness is a disturbingly unifying thread you can find running through many of the great problems of our time: environmental destruction, the war racket, famine, human migrations, curable yet untreated disease. Attempts to address any of these issues are severely hindered by whiteness; that is, by the existential drive of a global elite, profoundly informed by whiteness, to live in dominion over, rather than harmony with, humanity and nature."

So are we just doomed? Is there nothing to be done about the face of racism and the problem of Whiteness? Well, Kevin over at Slant Truth reminded me that a little serious Old School music can make me believe there's hope.

Jay Smooth on the Racial Crossroads

While I could care less about Asher Roth and his twitter toe-stubbing, I think Jay Smooth has some very crucial things to say in this video about where we are in the process of becoming ever so slightly less racist in this culture. Listen carefully, because Jay comes at you fast. And thanks to Angry Black-White Girl for the heads up on this one.

Cop-on-Cop Crime? Uh...

There's nothing like cutting out the middle man. I've posted a bunch of times about police officers killing "suspects," but this story takes the cake. What happened was:

25-year-old Omar Edwards, a plain clothes police officer working out of a precinct in Harlem, found a guy rummaging through his car when he got off work last night. The would-be thief ran off, of course, and Edwards -- being a cop and all -- whipped out his trusty 9mm as he chased the man down the street.

Enter another police officer in an unmarked car (man-oh-man, they be SNEAKIN' around Harlem, don't they?) and you may have guessed what happened next. Yep. At the sight of a Black man (uh-huh) with a gun running down the street, the police officer still on duty jumped out of his car, squeezed off six rounds and dropped Edwards as he ran, killing him.

I hardly know where to begin. Edwards might still be alive if he hadn't pulled his gun law-enforcement-fast while chasing the guy he caught in his car. And Edwards might still be alive if the apparent police officer praxis/policy/whatever wasn't to shoot first and ask questions later. But the bottom line, I suspect, is that the shooter was White and Edwards, as I already pointed out, was Black.

Nevertheless, as always, the statement that's been released is: "It was unclear if race had any role in the shooting." When, oh, when will they quit pretending to be asleep? Even a chimpanzee can be taught to shoot a gun. One wonders if a trained chimp would use less emotional judgment and less knee-jerk reactions -- and kill fewer people -- than the cops. Especially now that they're killing each other.

Am I Not Human?

It's the 27th again and time to post on human rights with the folks at AfroSpear. And, as a matter of fact, in keeping with another of AfroSpear's recent campaigns, I'm going to take this opportunity to post on Tasering in particular as a human rights violation disproportionately -- though not only -- perpetrated against people of color in situations patently uncalled for. I received an email from the African American Political Pundit recently about a petition AfroSpear has generated to call for a Congressional hearing on the use of these weapons and I most assuredly concur with their concerns.

I've been watching in horror ever since the Taser first hit my radar a decade or so ago. I mean, all we need in this country is more ways to do bodily injury to people and get away with it. (Tasers are legal to carry -- open or concealed -- in 43 states!) But obviously, my main attention has been focused on the fascist way law enforcement officers have tended to use these tools of torture. Even Amnesty International, citing more than 300 deaths by Taser since 2001 (which averages out to about one death per week, by the way), has called for police to severely limit or suspend their use.

And no wonder. Just off the top of my head, I can recall a whole string of cases in less than a year. A 21-year-old last July; a 15-year-old in March; a 16-year-old in April; and even the near misses can do lasting damage, as indicated by the case of a 14-year-old in February. At least one branch of the NAACP is seeking information for an investigation it's doing on excessive use of Tasers. And AfroSpear announced a Day of Blogging for Justice in April, calling death by Taser "pre-trial, extra-judicial execution." In addition, a new blog, Electrocuted While Black, tracks and reports on the issue of Taser use and abuse.

Numbing U.S. citizens to the use of force resulting in "accidental" deaths ought to be reminding us of Nazi Germany, when the population was trained fairly quickly to accept whatever happened to "other people" until it started happening to everybody and it was too late to put on the brakes. Anyone that has done even a cursory exploration of history knows better than to believe the assumption that if you just "keep your nose clean," you don't have to worry about those with the Power-To-Define, including in this case, the police, who get to define these situations and their outcomes in ways that make the question "Am I not human?" moot.

Goodbye, Columbus?

I'm back from New York City now and will be posting my usual human rights piece later today since this is the 27th. But in the meantime, I just had to upload the photo above. It's me (of course) in Central Park...er...waving hello...as it were...to the statue commemorating that brutally violent Euro-centric slaver and child rapist Columbus for "discovering" the Western Hemisphere. Hee hee.

The photo credit for this one goes to my daughter's significant other (the socialist) who had no problem with it. My daughter, on the other hand, loooooong since tired of Mommy's outrageous public behavior, slipped away to a bench while the festivities were occurring.

"Those who are not afraid to die, come to the front."

For those who haven't been reading this blog lately, let me explain first that I'm in New York City right now. And tonight, I went to the Film Forum in Greenwich Village to watch "Burma VJ," an HBO documentary about the underground video bloggers who chronicled the popular uprising in Burma in September of 2007. Three of the monks who led the demonstrations and then had to run for their lives disguised as car salesmen (now that would be a major leap even for the paranoid Burmese military to make) were at the theater for a question-and-answer session after the showing and now I feel like a baby-stepping slacker of a social change agent. A bunch of talk and some occasional action, maybe, but nothing like what they've been doing in an attempt to free their people.

I spent most of the film with my hands up under my chin, unconcerned with what those sitting next to me must have thought. The suspense was chilling, despite the homework I did before leaving Louisiana so I'd have a clue what I was looking at. I mean, I knew the end of the story and yet I was still shallow-breathing through it, almost afraid to blink.

Some of the marching monks were children. Few were very far into their adulthood. And there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, leading the demonstrations in their saffron-colored robes carrying their alms bowls bottom up to symbolize their unwillingness to accept contributions from the military officers who do the dirty work of the junta that has changed Burma's name to Myanmar and crushed its people for forty years. Monks refusing alms in a country where 90 per cent of the people are Buddhist is a major statement of shaming condemnation. And even after the military brutally beat the demonstrators in front of their supporters, killing one monk in the process, the monks came back again and again, forcing the government's hand until more than two hundred monks at one time were dragged bloody out of a single monastery and caused to disappear.

Even after that, monks and students still took to the streets, belligerently ignoring the government's edict that no more than five people could congregate at a time. At one point, when it became apparent that the guns were coming out, a VJ only an arm's length from the action captured the student leaders declaring over a bull horn, "Those who are not afraid to die, come to the front."

All of this is only in the film because incredibly brave and dedicated souls committed themselves to filming the events in a country where people were being shot for having cameras. In fact, more than one of the Burma VJ's were filming when a Japanese photographer was shot to death, sending that single incident out over the airwaves by satellite to the astonishment of a watching world and the horror of the military leaders giving the orders. Which was the whole point of the VJ's actions. They wanted to show the world what the dictatorship in Burma was up to. And show us all they did.

Now that U Pyinya Zawta, U Gawsita, and U Agga have been forced to run for their lives, they worry about their friends back in Burma. They know some of them are imprisoned and being ill treated. They know that some of them are dead (the film shows one monk floating face down in a creek). And they can't get good information to even know which are which. Not only are the monks and students under constant surveillance now, however. The fact is, no one in Burma dares talk about "politics" with anyone else for fear it will get back to the Powers-That-Be. There's no wiggle room. And still they fight.

Most of the Burma VJ's are now in prison or in hiding and no longer in touch with each other. Wildly popular opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for years and is about to be tried in a kangaroo court to move her into prison proper. Nevertheless, "Joshua," the VJ who was in Thailand during the demonstrations in 2007, catching what the other VJ's pitched and forwarding it on to the rest of the world because his cover had already been blown, has walked back over the mountains into Burma to set up another VJ network in preparation for the next revolution.

At the end of the showing, the three monks in attendance politely described their concerns -- two through an interpreter and one in halting, but understandable English -- and asked for help for their fellow Burmese citizens. They want China and Russia to vote as U.N. Security Council members to bring pressure to bear on the military junta in their country. The U.N. talks about how wrong the junta is, but implements nothing to put teeth in their statements. The U.S., too, of course, only talks about democracy in Burma without doing anything to encourage that as a reality. But then, the U.S. has never really had a problem accepting fascist dictatorships. It's the socialist democracies that make our government nuts.

In any case, the three monks, one of whom said later that they pray loving kindness constantly on the military tormentors who hold their country's people in thrall, not surprisingly, chose to close this evening with a prayer, as well:

"May there be no deception of one another;
may loving kindness envelop the world;
and may there be peace on Earth."

Indeed. Indeed.
________________________________________________________

NOTE: The three monks at the film showing have apparently reached President Obama, according to The Huffington Post. Not that the Burmese junta is likely to listen. But still...