Who Are The Real Criminals In The Criminal Injustice System?

In a country that was founded on the principles of capitalism, we are not confused that the bottom line is invariably going to be short term profit. At the end of the day, the question will always be: how much money can be made as quickly as possible? People who trust capitalism as an abstract concept are usually those who are far enough up the food chain that they benefit economically from the arrangement. But that's not what they say.

What they say is, "Well, anybody can get a piece of the pie if they just work hard enough, if they just give it their all, if they'll just quit whining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps." What they ignore is that it doesn't work as well for most of us as it does for the ones at the top -- and it never did.

Historians tell us that before the United States existed, when we were a rag-taggle collection of colonies, approximately 500 White property-holding businessmen in five cities controlled virtually all the economic enterprise (banking, transportation, land, manufacturing, you name it). And that's why they came here. They were tired of having to buck the royalty, the military, and the Church in Europe. They wanted to have the power and to be the power. And they were.

Two hundred years later, it's fascinating to learn -- as we've been forced to do -- that an even smaller percentage of the U.S. population has a lock on the economic well-being now than it did then. Whole books have been written about it. Entire movements have been energized into existence over it. And for those who have doubts, I would recommend reading Rigging the Game: How Inequality is Reproduced in Everyday Life by Michael Schwalbe or watching Park Avenue: Money, Power, and the American Dream, at least to start with.

The criminal injustice system, of course, with all its various aspects, has found its niche in the capitalist arena, as well. In 2010, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union brought out a scathing report on the return of "debtor's prisons." The for-profit bail system and the for-profit pre-trial release system are both shot through with racial disparity, particularly since poverty is so much more likely to hound communities of color.

But the piece de resistance is the private prison industry that is now the most profitable investment on Wall Street. Which is why I'm featuring a video about that particular topic at the head of this post. Enjoy. Or not. Depending on how you feel about it.

And for more on private prisons, up close and undercover, go over to Democracy Now! for Amy Goodman's report on journalist Shane Bauer's four months as a private prison guard.

Conway & Lutalo on Violence and Counter-Violence

Focusing on how White Supremacy as a system uses "law enforcement" to brutalize -- or even kill -- those who resist its power can leave us shaking in our boots. Yet there has always been resistance by Africans, other colonized People of Color, and those who fight for justice alongside the members of those groups. Here Chris Hedges gives us an opportunity to learn from Eddie Conway, former member of the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, and Ojore Lutalo, member of the Black Liberation Army, both of whom have now been released after spending long stints in prison because of their commitment to the people's struggle. They have earned our undivided attention. And we need to know what they have to tell us. Listen up.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "We're Coming To Get Our Check."

This is a short clip that will help you to understand why Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot by an off-duty police officer to stop him from kicking off the Poor People's Campaign. At the time of this speech, the Campaign was gearing up to march poverty-stricken people -- of all skin tones -- across the country and right into Washington. The woman you see after the clip of MLK speaking is Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver adding her two cents worth.

Speaking Truth To Power

Melissa Harris-Perry presented a segment on her television program recently featuring Tianna Gaines-Turner, a young Black woman who testified before a Congressional Committee on the struggle of living in poverty. Folks like Harris-Perry and Congresswoman Barbara Lee -- who are Black women, y'all, in case you still think it can't be done -- use their position and voices to empower others. Here's to speaking truth to power, no matter who you are. And here's to Tianna Gaines-Turner for proving yet again that ordinary humans, given the opportunity to step into the limelight, can shine like stars.

"Shell Shocked"

A couple of months ago, I came across "Shell Shocked", a new documentary about African-American youth who are growing up -- and dying young -- in New Orleans. I checked out the trailer, ordered my copy immediately, and then sat on it for months while I was screwing up the courage to watch it.

I could tell by the trailer it had been well done. And I already knew what to expect since I live 45 miles from New Orleans and have taught literally hundreds of students who commute from there on a daily basis. I spend a good bit of time every semester, in fact, working my butt off to help shell shocked Black youth hang in there another day while they're trying to overcome the effects of their experiences, which are sometimes on-going.

Young men come into my office on a regular basis, shut the door, and weep as they wrestle with their pain and their feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and even terror that, despite their determination and their dreams, they won't live to graduate. Some, as they approach graduation, stress about younger brothers and sisters or come in to grieve the loss of yet another family member or friend.

2011 Role Models #3 & #4: Eduardo da Silva & Leonardo Bento

I thought a while about this one before I decided to post it. One has only to scan the right side of my blog to see that I have a sensitivity to the way police power is all too often used in this country and in the world. When push comes to shove, unless we're talking about serial murderers, my sympathies tend to lie, more often than not, with the underdogs -- and they're usually the ones doing the running rather than the chasing.

Nevertheless, I was moved recently when I saw a New York Times article with the video above about what's been going on the last couple of years in the City of God.

I remembered the location, 15 miles from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, because it was the subject of an award-winning film released in 2002. It was painfully dramatic, but even more dramatic was an hour-long special feature documentary I also watched while I had the DVD. Gripping was not the word for it.

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.

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.

From Heroes to Disappointment

I’ve been focusing for the last few days on men that sound like heroes. Today, unfortunately, I have to write about somebody that has turned out recently to be something of a disappointment. He’s the Rev. Dr. Byron Clay, the brand new Interim President of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), the famous civil rights organization co-founded by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. Ralph Abernathy, among others, in New Orleans in 1957.

Clay, from a Louisiana family of recognized civil rights activists, was named to the National Board of SCLC in 1973 at the age of fifteen, which seems really odd to me somehow, no matter how anointed he appeared to be or what a go-getter he might have been. Anyway, he was named Vice President a year ago and was vaulted into the Interim President position on the 1st of February when Charles Steele, who saved the organization from bankruptcy over the past few years, stepped down.

As a dynamic, relatively young minister who’s been in the upper echelons of the SCLC leadership for more than three decades, Clay had the opportunity to take the newly stabilized organization and run with it, but he has already made a couple of decisions in his six weeks of tenure that probably ought to call into question his ethics, at least, and consequently the appropriateness of his serving further in that capacity.

The way I found out about this situation is that, as you may have read on this blog, I attended during the week-end of February 20-22 a Poverty Tour of the Mississippi Delta organized by Antoinette Harrell. Through her work gathering data on peonage (the process of keeping African-Americans locked into a pattern of abject poverty benefiting White society and which some have called “re-enslavement”), Harrell became known to Mayor Sylvester Reed of Crenshaw, Mississippi, who ultimately appealed to her for more concrete help.

Harrell threw herself immediately into the effort and on July 6th of last year, took her first U-Haul of food and clothing to the Delta. Her fervor energized the sociological student organization I advise to collect more than thirty bags of warm winter clothing to send up in December. And during the process of the collection, I first heard about Gathering of Hearts, the organization that Harrell had co-founded with Ines Soto-Palmarin, a Boston city planner who already had a cadre of others in that area who also wanted to help. The result was the Poverty Tour I mentioned above, with the Boston contingency bringing a whole truckload of clothing and other goods down, joining Harrell et al, National Public Radio journalist Donna Owens, Dr. Ron Walters of the African-American Leadership Institute, myself and a gaggle of students for a whirlwind tour that left us all limp with emotion and a renewed commitment to change.

On that tour, Harrell had arranged for Dr. Walters, herself and me to broadcast for an hour live from a van speeding over rain-soaked highways between small towns in the Delta and it was during that broadcast that the idea for Mule Train, 2009, was born. Harrell suggested it first to the listening audience, but when she handed the mic to Dr. Walters and he agreed, developing the thought still further and still on the air, I remember thinking, “Oh, my God! This is NOT how this is done! We can’t just call for something this huge without a whole bunch of previous planning.” But when Dr. Walters handed the mic to me, I heard myself laying it down just as heavily as they had. Like I said, Antoinette Harrell lights a fire in folks and when she gets rocking, nobody is immune.

She had mentioned to me that the SCLC had been invited to accompany us on that tour, but for whatever reason, they weren’t able to join us at that time. Still, I knew the conversations between Harrell and their national office had already begun. Then, when Byron Clay learned that Harrell’s film, “The Untold Story: Slavery in the 20th Century” was being shown in Selma on March 5th during the commemoration of the famous march there in 1965, he suggested that they meet at that time.


Harrell pitches her idea to Byron Clay and the SCLC

Harrell had an agenda and she was forthright about it. She asked for their support for a Mule Train event to pick up where Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign left off. She wanted to return to Marks, Mississippi -- where the original campaign had started -- and hold a public hearing with the media present to bring attention to the grave condition of the people there. She got the support she sought, though Clay and others on his side of the table wanted to add a demonstration of some type to the public hearing. Harrell didn’t care about that, she said, as long as the focus stayed on the poor people and their plight rather than the organizations leading the parade. They set the date for the event as June 19-21. A short time later, Clay communicated that SCLC was “suggesting” that the demonstration be in Jackson, the state capital, rather than the tiny town of Lambert where the public hearing would take viewers into people’s homes, giving a voice to those this whole thing is all about.

Then, on March 17th, Clay announced "his" vision for a new Poor People's Campaign to the Associated Press, somehow and inexplicably failing to mention Harrell or Gathering of Hearts in any way. Hoping to generate a crowd of 50,000 people, Clay claimed to be “organizing poor people of all colors to form the kind of beloved community that Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about.” Toward that end, he went on, he and the other SCLC staff would shortly be meeting with leaders in Mississippi for a tour of the Delta region.


Harrell and Clay on Gathering of Hearts tour in Mississippi

Actually, the tour was one of Harrell’s making and occurred on March 24th, at which time she asked Clay about why he was not giving Gathering of Hearts its just recognition for the work it had already done and was doing. It was, after all, Harrell who had come up with the idea for Mule Train, 2009, in the first place. He claimed an “oversight” and said he “meant no harm” by it. But the signal had been sent.

Then, later that day in the living room of a young couple whose house I had written about after my visit in February, Interim SCLC President Byron Clay – with the cameras rolling -- committed $10,000 of SCLC money toward a new house for the couple, instructing local ministers to set up a bank account with all due speed to begin receiving the monies.

That was nearly a month ago. And despite the fact that Clay talks differently when appearing with Harrell in front of a camera, there have been no new press releases from SCLC clarifying their partnership with Gathering of Hearts and the newly opened bank account for the young couple’s housing fund is still empty. In fact, SCLC has now begun publicly claiming a learning center Harrell and Soto-Palmarin have been in the process of setting up in Lambert, Mississippi, since February, a project the SCLC has had no part in whatsoever.
And in the meantime, Harrell is continuing to try to work with the organization. She has already conducted another poverty tour for them this month in Louisiana and has several more in the planning stages. Her view is that Clay and the SCLC needs to be educated just like everybody else…or maybe, the way things are playing out, even more than everybody else. For Harrell, it’s never about ego; it’s about the people, which ironically enough, is exactly what Clay says, as well.
“I am always moved when I see people whose lives are stuck in oppressive conditions,” Clay was quoted by the AP as saying. “We are gathering leaders ... to give them an opportunity to see some of the Third World communities in America."

“[The SCLC] can never afford to degenerate to a political or civic organization,” he went on. “The SCLC has the moral track record to bring forth reconciliation. The nation is ready for the SCLC to be restored to its stalwart role.”

The question, I would suggest, given recent events is whether or not Clay is the one to be at the helm while this stalwart role is being restored. On the SCLC national website, a button invites folks to contact Clay by emailing president@sclcnational.org. Perhaps we should let him know we’re paying attention.
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NOTE: The photos above were taken by Walter C. Black, Sr.

Mule Train!

MLK's Mule Train, Poor People's Campaign, 1968

As I wrote last week, I’ve been necessarily distracted of late because of being neck-deep in a personal political drama. Were I able to describe it here, you’d see why I’ve been distracted. And it’s 110% consistent with the topics you’re used to finding on this site. Suffice it to say that I wrote something elsewhere that was effective enough in pushing for social change locally that members of the White power structure tried to get rid of me. But I took a little trip this week-end that pushed my problems to the back burner and right off the stove. Buckle up, folks. This one’s gonna take the varnish off the woodwork.

About a year ago, I met and subsequently blogged about Antoinette Harrell and her work related to what some folks call re-enslavement and Harrell refers to as “peonage.” This week-end, I loaded into a troop of minivans with twenty-one other people and headed for the Mississippi Delta to see for myself. It was quite an education and the only way to do it justice will be to write more than I usually include in one post, maybe considerably more.

To set the stage for you, I’ll first outline the cast of characters Harrell assembled to take her first “Mississippi Delta Poverty Tour.” Harrell, being the typical director, is unapologetically frenetic, high energy, and demanding (almost too demanding sometimes), but when it comes to her passion –- going back to reach out to those who’ve been left behind –- she is meticulous in her planning, ruthless in her follow-through, and utterly committed to making sure her points are made. No one escaped her agenda or its effects. Dr. Ron Walters, eminent professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, scholar, author and Director of the African American Leadership Institute (the star of the show, obviously), even put in a call to the publisher of his next book –- on re-enslavement in the 20th Century –- asking that they hold publication until he can re-write the last chapter, based on what he learned on this trip.

Other players, besides yours truly, included Donna Owens, a firebrand free-lance journalist who was taping for National Public Radio, but who also writes for such print publications as Essence, Esquire, and O; Mae Walls Miller, who was herself trapped in slave-like conditions in Mississippi until 1962; a group of young Puerto Rican activists from Boston led by city planner Ines Soto Palmarin; her Sri Lankan colleague, Easwaran Selvarajah, also with the Boston Redevelopment Authority; a team of community organizers from New Orleans, including H.M.K. Amen, who is not only a lawyer, but the President of the New Orleans Association of Black Social Workers, and her mother, Millie Charles, the elder who crafted the strength-based model social work program at Southern University at New Orleans to train social workers to empower, advocate and transform through social change; a gaggle of high school and college students from Louisiana; and two crack photographers: Walter C. Black, Sr., who trails Antoinette wherever her work takes her, and Shawn Escoffery. Are you feelin’ this thing yet?

Boston City Planner & Gathering of Hearts co-founder Ines Soto Palmarin

The caravan pulled into Clarksdale, Mississippi (yes, the home of the blues) around 2:30 a.m. Friday night after running into Mardi Gras issues earlier in the evening. Antoinette had placed me in a van with Dr. Walters and Donna Owens, so we began a dialogue that consisted at that point primarily of laying groundwork and comparing notes, after I brought them up to speed on what I’ve learned about current life in The Deep South since moving here eighteen months ago. Dr. Walters lives in Washington, D.C., and Owens resides in Baltimore, though my sense is that she’s often on the road. While I was awe-struck –- and appropriately so, I think –- at finding myself paired in intense conversation with Walters, the following day he informed me casually that, after we arrived at the motel in Clarksdale, he found it necessary to write for an hour before he could go to sleep –- even knowing that Harrell would have us hitting the road again at 7:00 a.m. Saturday.

Saturday morning started with some tension over the fact that Mae Walls Miller decided not to leave the motel with the rest of us. She’s an older woman and I assumed that the rough nature of her first two decades of life probably made rising after a long trip and only four hours of sleep difficult at best. She set us straight during the reflections ceremony over dinner Sunday evening, but early Saturday, as Harrell was determined to stay on schedule, not to mention get and keep her ducks in a row, the rest of us wound up climbing into the vans too late to have breakfast. So, edgy with exhaustion and hunger, we headed for Lambert, a community of 1700 people in Quitman County, passing through the “town” of Marks, Mississippi, where Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the original mule train kick-off for his Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

On the way, Walters and Harrell and I did the first of the day’s interviews on Radio Station KSYB, AM 1300, of the Amistad Radio Group out of Shreveport, Louisiana. I would have been frantic with fatigue and the lack of my morning coffee if it hadn’t been that Walters, even older than I am, was so infinitely elegant in his comments –- and I didn’t even know at that point that he’d had even less sleep than me. His intelligent and insightful analyses of racial and economic systems of oppression in this country and what we saw as the day went on drove me to taking notes over and over as he quietly spoke from the front seat and the miles sped by.

Lambert proved to be the prologue to what would come later. We were met by Pastor Gene Price and his wife, Linda, at their Union Grove Missionary Baptist Outreach Ministries food pantry. About sixty or seventy people huddled under and around the old building’s porch in a light drizzle. Some of them had come to get clothing the Boston contingency had gathered with help from students at Harvard University. Some had come to say their piece on the radio. And some had come in the hopes that U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-2nd District of MS) would show up, as he had committed to do.

Antoinette Harrell unloading truck at Outreach Center
Asked how many were descended from sharecroppers, virtually all of them raised their hands.

“I’m not ashamed to tell it,” 78-year-old Lambert native Evelean Heags said to me. “I had to quit school in the ninth grade to go to the fields. I planted cotton, chopped cotton, picked cotton, whatever you could do to cotton, I did it. I worked a plow just like a man. Then I got a job cleaning the credit union and I retired from there. Three of my five children died in tragic circumstances and now I’m helping to raise my great-great-grandchildren.”

Ryalisyah, a beautiful nine-year-old girl with two pony tails sporting Jesus Loves Me barrettes, grinned up at me from the warm spot inside the front of her great-grandmother’s zippered sweatshirt. Asked what she wanted for her great-great-grandchildren, Heags didn’t hesitate.

“I want ‘em to have better than me,” she declared firmly. “First, I want ‘em to get a good education. I worry about that because the teachers here just walk in off the street, looking for a paycheck. And when the children come home needing help with their schoolwork because they’re just being handed papers in school, it hurts when you can’t help ‘em.”

Heags barely took a breath before she continued. “After they get an education, though, they need jobs -– good jobs, paying a good wage, not far away, but near to here.”

This sentiment reflected what others expressed as well there in the early morning hours at the Outreach Center. When I suggested that some folks don’t understand why they don’t just leave the area, which they’d already explained has no doctor, no grocery store, and no jobs, they seemed almost surprised.

“This is my home,” several said in one voice. “This is where I was born and grew up. This is where I’ve always been.”

And I was caused to wonder just how deep their roots go into the cotton fields that still exist, how many generations of their ancestors had been born and died within walking distance of the building where we now stood. I was even caused to remember how, on the continent of Africa, a family might serve a given community in a particular role for not only decades, which we find admirable, but for as much as 700 years, as I once heard about one case.

Bennie Thompson did not attend the event, after all. He sent his aide, Samuel McCray, wearing a blue jean jacket and a wool beanie with an Obama logo on the front, but after several minutes of speaking political-ese into the various videocams and microphones, McCray said something about thanking Ronald Reagan for some policy or program or other. My attempt to smother a laugh didn’t escape Ron Walters, whose face remained implacable with only a hint of raised eyebrows as he turned and caught my eye.

Later, when Donna Owens was taping McCray, I walked up just in time to hear her say, “Let’s cut to the chase…what legislation has Congressman Thompson introduced in recent years that would have helped these people in some meaningful way?”

McCray never flinched. Wearing a tight little smile, he pondered the question for a good moment. “Well…” he began. “Uhhhm…uh…”

His eyes, squinting softly in concentration, looked this way and that, as if he thought a cue card might magically appear any second to save him. Finally, he gave up. “You have to understand,” he said without the chagrin I would have expected under the circumstances, “I’m a field rep…”

Once I got home, I went on-line to explore what had happened to the Garanimals factory that was mentioned that morning in passing. What I found was the connection I didn’t make while in Mississippi, but probably should have.

Garan, Inc., most famous for its Garanimals line of children’s clothing and owned since 2002 by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway division, was incorporated in 1957 and built its factory in Lambert in 1961. In 1964, the Lambert facility was doubled in size. In fact, of Garan’s original eleven factories, seven were in rural Mississippi. By 1985, Garan had expanded to twenty factories, all of them in very poor southern or western states, where the labor force was hungry –- ready and willing to work longer and harder for less.

By 1984, however, Garan had been through some economic changes and had begun to read the writing on the wall. The wave of the future, it was apparent, would be in moving even further south, so they began their migration to Central America ahead of the pack. NAFTA, of course, was signed in 1994, increasing the acceptability of such a move, and in 1995, the Lambert plant was closed. It wasn’t just the Lambert plant, either. In fact, Mississippi had 41,000 textile jobs in 1992. A decade later, 29,500 of those workers were more or less permanently unemployed.

The Mayor of Lambert, Reginald Griffin, is a real piece of work. He’s a big man – tall and hefty – a small town godfather type without, it would seem on the surface, at least, any commitment to need-meeting. Sporting an upscale athletic suit and a NRA ball cap, he was almost a caricature of a small town official in a poverty-stricken community and I kept waiting to see why folks would vote for him. Then it occurred to me. We were not seeing at the Outreach Center the constituents who had voted him in.

Lambert is still surrounded by fully operational cotton fields. The only difference is that the work is now done almost entirely by machines. Sidney Wilhelm’s book Who Needs the Negro?, published originally in 1900, suggested that with labor intensive businesses turning to machines, the African-American worker would be increasingly out of luck. And so they are in Lambert. The workers went straight from the cotton fields to the Garan factories, but as the factories closed down, the former field workers -– now displaced by technology –- entered an even darker period economically than they had known before.

Reginald Griffin is more like the house worker: Black, but lording it over his other brothers, convinced that he’s not like them, imagining, in fact, that he’s an honorary White man because he “deserves” to be. The principal of one of the local schools, Griffin is probably seen as a Black man who has “made it.” And indeed, he has, if you consider “making it” being a fat frog in a very tiny pond where most of the other frogs are nearly starving.

As an “honorary White man,” Griffin has to try harder. He must distance himself -– even in his own mind –- from those who are the struggling and suffering below him. Otherwise, he'll have to admit that the socially-constructed, political notion of ‘race’ marks him just as absolutely as any other African-American in the eyes of those he aspires to join –- or be.

So he not only refers to Lambert as a “City of Hope,” but wasted no time on the air before he began reminding his listeners that when people help themselves, then they will receive the help they ask for. And not, apparently, before, no matter how devastated they have become or how powerless they are to affect the social structures that have devastated them.

Mayor Griffin accompanied our troop to the next stop on the tour, the home of a couple in their twenties and their two young daughters. The family, who we'll call the "Jacksons", live in a house left to them by a grandmother and its condition is beyond deplorable. Unable to pay even the taxes on the property, they have operated for years on the cusp of complete disaster, but when "Bill Jackson", a high school educated man with carpentry skills, lost his job six months ago, they descended into a despair so deep, they cannot see even the tiniest point of light toward which to aim.

The first house we visited, Lambert, MS
Griffin, who did not know we were going to visit this home, unquestionably knew of the house’s existence. In a different location, perhaps, the State would have long ago taken the children, though it’s clear that the couple love their daughters very much and, with the help of relatives, strive to provide a semblance of home even in hell. And hell it is.

The front porch is loose boards criss-crossed over other loose boards, so that approaching the front door is rather like following Indiana Jones into a cave. The living room floor bounces when you walk on it and slants heavily to one side, so we had to make sure we distributed ourselves in a circle to prevent the house from crashing onto its side. Window glass appeared to be catch as catch can. One entire wall and part of the ceiling was covered by plastic and the fuse box lay bear in one corner like an avant garde wall sculpture. There was virtually no protection from the cold and little from rain, I suspect.

Mayor Reginald Griffin (in back) in the "Jackson's" living room

Even so, the ancient carpet was swept, a stuffed animal perched jauntily on the center cushion of a lint-free and mostly unspotted couch, and large brightly colored still lifes covered major portions of two walls. The young couple were gracious, if somewhat embarrassed, hosts, answering questions of their overwhelmed guests. Then, we started taking turns looking into the adjoining room in the middle of the house.

Basically, it was like a dungeon, but not like a dungeon you might see in a movie (my only experience with such places), a real dungeon, complete with almost utter darkness and damp. Every surface in the entire room was black with mold. And, from what I could tell, they must traverse this space to get to any place else in the house. As I lifted the curtain back to look into the room, Shawn Escoffery turned on a camera light at my shoulder. “You’ll need this to see,” he said. And the wan light cast an eerie glow over an image I will live with for the rest of my life. Each of us approached and then turned, visibly rocked to our pins.

Students inside the house
I could barely breathe. My stomach was flipping and, though I tried hard not to burst into tears, I was beginning to cry. Moving back into the drizzle in the front yard so that the students could come in, I found Mayor Griffin standing on the sidewalk. I did not trust myself to speak to him or even to look in his direction for fear I would slap his over-satisfied face. It was only later that I learned he was busy saying things like, “I should have had this place torn down long ago, but I felt sorry for the family” and “Look at that car they have” (an unspectacular little sedan), “they want to live this way.”

I’ll be amazed if he lets the little house stand another month now that people from outside the community have seen it, but Pastor Price and his congregation, who already paid the back taxes and saw to the official delivery of the deed to the couple, will protect the little family. And Antoinette Harrell is waiting in the wings, as well, to see what happens next.

At this point in the process, Harrell finally allowed her motley, exhausted, hungry and horrified crew a quick stop at a fast food joint before dragging us all on down the road to yet another manifestation of the on-going effects of the peculiar institution of slavery in The South.

On route to our next stop, Harrell broke out her cell phone once more and hooked the van to KSYB, poised to broadcast Walters, Harrell and me live for an hour to half million listeners around the world. Needless to say, by now we all had plenty to talk about. As we passed the phone around our tiny circle, we built on each other’s ideas in a seamless albeit extemporaneous presentation.

Dr. Walters started by discussing how money flows, where and to whom, so that those who are shut out to begin with, having no computers, no libraries, and substandard educations, stand on the sidelines of life as we know it, uninvited to participate in community decision-making by insensitive political and social administrative power structures at every level who do not have their best interests at heart. Walters challenged the listeners to consider what they might do to make a difference in the way power and money is distributed and used in the United States.

“There is a $787 billion stimulus package being allocated right now,” he reminded us, “and this money can come into the community, even communities such as the ones we’ve been visiting, but if we don’t act immediately, this moment can pass us by. Lambert, Mississippi, and other communities just like it, need multi-service centers to organize processes and make available funds and other resources to bring them into full parity with the rest of the citizens of the United States. The people we’ve been talking with today are the products of 19th Century, 20th Century, and now 21st Century slavery. As we consider and address the new economic crisis affecting so many in our country today, we must include these who have been left behind.”

“What if we demanded to be heard by our leaders?” Walters continued. “President Barack Obama has established an office to set policies related to poverty. Perhaps we could see this as him saying to the rest of us, ‘Make me do it. Make me do what needs to be done. I am responsible to you and I want to do it, but you have to make me.’ Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., set out from Marks, Mississippi, with a mule train, setting in motion a national Poor Peoples’ Campaign to force Washington to respond to the needs of ordinary Americans. Unfortunately, this important effort was derailed by his untimely death. Perhaps it is time to act on his call.”

I picked up the thread.

“We must remember,” I began, “that European-Americans, what most folks call ‘White people,’ were heavily involved in King’s original Poor Peoples’ Campaign, too. The fact is that poverty, as we are increasingly learning, is not a Black people’s problem. But more importantly perhaps, institutionalized racism is not a Black people’s problem either; it’s a White people’s problem. We have the power to do something about it and until we do, the nation will never fulfill its potential. Worse, until we band together as one citizenry, we will all see our problems as individuals and as a society deepen.”

By the time we wound up the broadcast, Antoinette Harrell was calling for listeners to begin the work of organizing a March on Washington. And as ambitious an undertaking as that would be, riding down the highway in the rain through the Mississippi Delta, processing the experiences of the day, it not only didn’t seem to be an overly dramatic suggestion. It seemed to be a no-brainer.

Pulling into our next community did nothing to change our minds. Anguilla, Mississippi, in Sharkey County, with a population of about 4,000, is not only larger than Lambert, but at first glance, infinitely more prosperous. Still, the “better” houses mask the substantial long-term, bottom-of-the-barrel pocket of poverty Pastor Edward Griffin of Integrity International Ministries guided us to. A man who joined the military and subsequently returned, having seen and been a part of a much larger world outside, but with a heart for the people of the Delta, Griffin is everything his counterpart of the same last name in Lambert is not. He’s knowledgeable, articulate, and a committed community leader. But he’s not the Mayor. The Mayor of Anguilla is White.

Dr. Ron Walters (center) talks with Pastor Edward Griffin (left)
“The last Mayor was a Black woman,” we were told, “but she looked down on [these people], so they elected a White Mayor.” One can only assume the kind of smarmy okey-doke the present Mayor laid before the voters to charm them into giving him the position. We drove by his house literally just around the corner from the broken down porch where we were standing and it was a lovely and large brick home surrounded by a wooden fence and with a tree house in the back much sturdier and more attractive than the family homes we had just left a block away and visible from his yard.

In Anguilla, we toured the home of a single mother and head of household who has been caught for years in an on-going process of off-again/on-again underemployment and lay-offs. She’s been diagnosed with both anxiety and depression and, as is so often the case, the downward spiral of panic, fear, and intergenerational sorrow is evident in every corner of her disheveled home with its decades of ground-in dirt, its ceilings thick with spider webs and mold, and rust brown water splashing out of its faucets.

Asked about her hopes and dreams for her children, young mother gave the stock reply, “Better than what I’ve had.” But they've never known anything different, I thought to myself. How can they find the door to a future they can’t even envision?

Two young men hanging out next to a trailer in Glen Allan, the next community we visited and the smallest one yet, gave at least a partial answer to my question. At twenty, both young men wanted something more. Both had received vocational training at a job training facility in the region, but one had found a job and the other had not. The one employed sported a fresh haircut and newer, cleaner clothes and he’s already enrolled at the Community College, too. The other one, shaggy haired and wearing a seriously tired old t-shirt, seemed stuck.

It didn’t take much to recognize Glen Allan as the slave community of a now long distant plantation era. Tucked between Lake Washington and a cotton field, it has no Mayor and it’s not even incorporated, at least partly because incorporation would bring increased taxation to White property owners who don’t want to be responsible for providing services to the other local residents, most of whom are poverty-stricken and Black. Water and electric bills run high, even very high, because of poor insulation and leaky pipes. And former sharecropper Julius Chaney, Jr., told us that, as rough as the homes look now, they used to be “really bad, but people lived in them, too.” Of course, that was back when Chaney and the others were being paid only $80 for putting in an 80-hour week in the fields.

Antoinette Harrell & Dr. Ron Walters talk with residents of Glen Allan
Limp and somewhat mind-blown by now and still a two-hour drive away from dinner, we stood, nevertheless, in the drizzle that had dogged us all day, talking to yet another group of volunteers, eager to tell us about their worlds –- past and present –- and their hopes, despite all, for the future. In a nutshell, they need jobs. In fact, they assured us that, as hard as field work had been –- and they had all done it –- they would return to the backbreaking labor in a heartbeat to earn a paycheck. Having no prospects elsewhere, little education, few skills, and no money to move, they live in a holding pattern, as it were, waiting for a signal that they have not been forgotten by Divine Providence or a society that has seemingly abandoned them.

It’s no wonder that at our reflection dinner the following afternoon, Mae Walls Miller shared that she hadn’t left her room Saturday because, even after the long trip, she just couldn’t bring herself to make the rounds with us.

“I know you didn’t understand why I wouldn’t go with you yesterday,” she said unapologetically through the microphone, “but I just couldn’t do it. You may not be able to imagine it, but I was even worse off than those folks and I couldn’t let the memories take me back there.”

Later on, when I kissed her cheek the way I do every time I see her, she whispered “I love you” in my ear the way she always does. Every time I think she’s only walking wounded, I re-learn that she’s a consummate teacher for any who will listen. She rode ten hours round trip to make the point that what happened to her as a Black woman in the United States was so horrific she still can’t get too close to those who suffer even similarly.

Still, one child at the Outreach Center in Lambert, a tall eight-year-old boy named Darius, carried the day in my heart. I asked him, “If you could tell the world out there one thing you feel about being an African-American boy, what would you say?”

He considered my question for a second or two, and then, looking up into my face with the smiling eyes of endless possibility, said clearly and distinctly, “I’m proud.”

He’s not ashamed, nor should he be, that his society has let him down. After all, poverty is violence, but it is not the fault of the victim against whom that violence is perpetrated. We need to make sure, however, before he is brought to feel differently about himself, life, his country, and us, that we welcome him into full citizenship in the nation of his birth, the land, as they call it, of the free.
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WANT TO HELP? Pastor Gene Price, who founded the Union Grove Missionary Baptist Outreach Ministries in Lambert, Mississippi, eight years ago, wants to start a boxing club for the boys in that area. If you want to help him and his wife, Linda, with this or any other project, please contact them at 662-326-6085 or 662-292-3294.

TO HEAR AN NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO REPORT ON THIS TRIP: Visit WYPR News in Maryland

TO LISTEN TO A WEBLOG INTERVIEW ABOUT THIS TRIP: Visit Let's Talk Honestly.

NOTE: All photos above except for the one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mule train were taken by Walter C. Black, Sr.

All Suffering Isn't Equal

C. Wright Mills (one of my favorite sociologists, whose work helped me to decide to study power relations and who died young, I like to think, of a combination of frustration and too much alcohol attempting to deal with that frustration) said the study of sociology resides at that nexis where biology meets history and that each of us arrives at conception at that nexis, unable throughout the rest of our whole lives to avoid its effects.

Being born (as I was) in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky situated me geographically and culturally in an area known for its poverty-stricken population BUT to a family that had been filthy rich and locally quite powerful one hundred years before. My father received a bachelor's degree on the G.I. Bill a few years after my birth and my mother had a year of college herself, not to mention being raised by her own mother who was in her youth a school teacher. And they moved away from the mountains soon after my father completed his education.

While our first home had no indoor bathroom until my father put a toilet in a closet, by the time I was in high school, we were living, despite having become a family of seven, in a middle class fashion. Our neighbors were clearly much wealthier than we were, making me feel much of the time slightly embarrassed, like a poor relation, but I rode around with my friends in their cars and enjoyed the generalized privileges of a middle class White girl in northern Illinois.

Now, it's true that I was taught that women are for sex and cooking and I didn't go to college until I was almost forty years old, but when I got ready to go, my middle class up-bringing and "better" high school education gave me a leg up into the non-traditional degree program designed precisely for people just like me. And here I am a couple of decades later, living, if not comfortably or with much "security" by many middle class people's standards, at least adequately most of the time.

I wear "better" clothes from consignment shops and department stores. I drive a ten-year-old car with a fading paint job and a dented rear end, but it's a brand built to last, gets pretty good gas mileage, and manages to look more or less sporty on a good day. I had health insurance for the past year and will have it again in two weeks. I've needed some dental work done for quite some time, but I own two pair of expensive prescription glasses. I can afford to send $150 to Haiti once a month to feed street kids without putting my Christmas vacation plans on hold. And I could choose to spend twenty bucks last night to watch some of my students play football and still go out for a sandwich at a popular yuppy joint afterward, even though it meant running home to balance my checkbook, making a mental note not to pay a small bill until I get paid again.

So?

Well, sometimes I feel as if I make the wrong choices. I chose not to lock into the "right" kind of relationship that would have made it possible for me to send my kids to private schools while I did "volunteer" work or went to law school. I still choose not to prioritize "having" stuff over learning stuff (in a range of ways). And I choose to spend my time trying to make the world better by challenging the way things are, from the outside, not the inside, because I've seen first hand how seductive -- and how distracting -- good cologne and silk pajamas can be, at least for me.

It seemed to me early on, I think, even though I didn't consciously recognize the decision, that it just doesn't work to attack the monster while riding on its back. So I didn't ride. But I sometimes lusted after the trappings or the apparent comfort level of those who did, though I was always, always deeply conflicted about doing so.

I wanted the niceties, but I saw so much suffering. "You can get this," the monster would coo in a velvety voice. "You owe it to yourself." And sometimes I succumbed. And the next thing you know, I'd have done or collected or "enjoyed" one more little perk of the privileged, my soul compromised a little further, my feelings of empathy for those who suffer just the tiniest bit more numb.

Many of those I met and spent time with chastised me for my hanging back from "living life to its fullest" by getting the "gusto" that, after all, everybody wants. My reticence to participate, my discussion of why I don't participate, my description of the effects of our participation in such lifestyles on those who cannot participate irritated those around me and dampened the "fun" of others.

"Lighten up!" I would be told and sometimes I'd try, biting my tongue, eating the food, trying not to remember--just for a few hours--but whether I call it "sociology" or "social activism" or "guilt" or "oppression psychosis" (what Lyford Edwards called it in The Natural History of Revolution), I would eventually rain on my own (and everybody else's parade). No wonder folks take me in short doses. I never let it go. I never give it a rest.

Then, this week, several things came together in a way that reinforced my questions and highlighted my dilemma, if indeed, that's what it is. First of all, a friend sent me one of the most remarkable stories I've ever read and I've been reading it. It's Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. If I thought I was fixated on oppression, Paul Farmer makes me look like a piker. Besides being a book so well written and interesting, the story alone would make it worth reading. Being exposed to Farmer has amped my flame up even higher or maybe what I really mean is "deeper" because it doesn't have me wanting to run around doing more activities. It has me going deep inside myself, examining what is there, that I might play my role more fully and with less ambivilence.

Farmer is ruthless in his constant attack on the system that feeds the haves not only their own share, but the share of the have-nots, as well. A tenured professor in the Harvard med school and a world renowned scientist, Farmer has almost single-handedly sometimes taken on problems that were supposedly unsolveable and virtually by bull will when nothing else would work, solved them -- in South Africa, in Russia, in Peru, and most particularly in the mountains of Haiti. He doesn't just treat starving, poverty-stricken people with AIDS, wildly resistant strains of tuberculosis, and other diseases we never hear about, let alone get, but he does it at least partly by treating sick systems full of individuals who don't understand, don't want to listen, and don't care. And over his shoulder, while never missing a beat, he continually describes and points out how these systems create the diseases, poverty, hunger and pain of his patients while insulating the haves from their inposition.

And one of Farmer's principles, now espoused by his main organization, Partners in Health, is "All suffering isn't equal."

Reading this book this week was having a profound effect on me anyway, but then I visited Professor Zero who routed me to profbwoman over at Oh No a WoC PhD and what with being well into the book on Farmer at the same time, I was overwhelmed with hardcore, thought-provoking new consciousness. Oh, dear. Life was difficult enough before, I mumbled to no one in particular. How was this going to work?

According to Kidder's truly beautifully written account, Farmer, who himself has a whole string of books out and has put almost every bit of money he has ever made for his whole adulthood into helping someone somewhere, once taught a course at Harvard called "Varieties of Human Suffering." "Impolite terms, used intramurally [in Farmer's organization]," writes Kidder, "were meant as philosophical rebukes to the misplaced preoccupations of those who believed in 'identity politics,' in the idea that all members of an oppressed minority were equally oppressed, which all too conveniently obscured the fact that there were real differences in the 'shaftedness,' also sometimes called the 'degrees of hose-edness,' that people of the same race or gender suffered. 'All suffering isn't equal' was an article of the [Partners in Health] faith, generated in reaction to the many times when they had tried to raise money and instead had been offered lectures about the universality of suffering, or simply lines like 'The rich have problems, too.'"

I felt as if I was getting the same message from all sides. And that typically means, I have come to believe, that this is exactly what is happening and further, what is supposed to be happening. So, I listen. Even when, as in this case, I think it's something I already know and -- for the most part -- try to live by.

I haven't got the lesson all sorted out yet. But I invite you to join me in this exploration, if you have the nerve. Go read profbwoman's post. And if you're really serious, get Kidder's book and read that, too. The illusion that as long as some of us are eating, it's gonna be all right is dangerous. A couple of hundred years ago, a writer with a sharp wit once wrote satirically that the rich would probably suggest that we ought to eat the poor. Actually, if we don't get a new attitude, we may, in the end, find the poor eating us, sharing their diseases because we wouldn't share our food and our good fortune. And even here in the good old U.S.A., other repercussions of our own poor decision-making as individuals and as a society appear to some of us to be much more dire and much closer than many might imagine.

I have few current heroes. Dr. Paul Farmer is now one of them. His story and his work prove that a person who looks like me, who grew up with enough to eat, and who got an education, all factors that turn so many of us into self-centered, self-serving iconoclasts, can see the truth and spread the truth and live by the truth. And the truth shall set you free.

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NOTE: On May 28, 2008, Amy Goodman interviewed Dr. Paul Farmer on Democracy Now. Through the wonders of modern technology, I am able to add the interview nine months after I wrote this post.

And the Baton Is Passed

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the fact that, when understood, statistics can only bear out the facts, that is, that they really can't "prove" what is not true, they can only appear to do so. Another difficulty with statistics and, therefore, studies, in general, is how they are interpreted and then presented to others, particularly for use in policy-setting. A case in point is the "Black Males Left Behind" study conducted by Dr. Ronald Mincy, formerly of the Ford Foundation and now a professor of social policy at Columbia University. Dr. Mincy was called to testify on his findings before a Joint Economic Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., this spring and, while I haven't seen a copy of the study report, the way Dr. Mincy was quoted in the media, it sounds as if he's missed some crucial considerations and made some rather typical and even stereotypical assumptions.

Now, on the surface, this would appear to be a silly statement. I mean, who am I to call into question the conclusions of a Ph.D. at Columbia who has clearly put enough work into his project and his career that he has wound up in front of the U.S. Congress, right? But my concerns are fairly simple and straight-forward.

I first started doing this kind of analysis fifteen years ago when I was neck-deep in a dissertation I didn't ultimately finish. The dissertation had to do with the way sociological writings about race can purport to be saying something fresh and even radical, but that the words and sentence structures chosen can actually deliver the same old message anyway. For example, if I write, "There are 365 churches in Cholula, Mexico," the statement reads without particular moral or historical impact. It reads as if the people of Cholula must surely be very religious people, especially if you understand that Cholula is not that big of a city. If, on the other hand, I write, "Spanish conquerors forced the indigenous people of the city to build a Catholic church on the site of each of 365 pyramids present when the Spaniards arrived," the reader is more likely to arrive at an entirely different understanding of the matter.

Dr. Mincy, at least according to the article I read, is making a number of problematic mistakes in interpreting the available data that will lead policy-setters awry, if allowed, in reference to a situation about which he is right to be massively passionate.

Census data is telling us that half of all young African-American men are unemployed and that roughly 30% of them will do time in prison. Further, these same statistics tell us that, of the 40% of African-American men who drop out of high school, 72% are jobless and they are twice as likely to go to prison as their high school graduate counterparts. These statements, as horrible as they sound, border on "ho-hum" for anybody who lives in a low income neighborhood. Driving down the street where I live, it seems as if there are more young Black men standing around every day and with an ever-increasing law enforcement presence accordingly. This is not new news.

So why is Dr. Mincy in Washington? Because of how he's interpreting the data, that's why. In other words, he is saying what the administration, leaders, academics, and social policy pundits want to hear. He's blaming the situation on single parent families, which are primarily headed by women.

"Living with a single mother increases the likelihood of dropping out of school," he is quoted as saying. "The effects of single parenting on dropping out of school are larger, the longer a child is in a single-parent home, and larger for boys than girls."

Let's see if I can write this loudly enough for Dr. Mincy to hear it all the way inside his ivy-covered office at Columbia: "It's not the single-parenting...er...Doc-tor! It's the lack of income!!!" I'd like to see Dr. Mincy raise a child (or several) on the minimum wage -- or less -- in the year 2007 in the U.S.A. All the corroborating statistical data is available for this perspective, as well. Women make about 75 cents on the dollar as compared to men. In fact, if an African-American man can get a job, Census data tells us that he's going to make more, on average, against what White men make, than women do -- even European-American women. Additionally, the single-parent woman who receives anything, averages very little more in child support than $300 per month (not per child, but at all). About a quarter receive nothing. And the unemployment ocean in which Black men are drowning is certainly not helping this much.

Let's make this as clear as possible. If women -- all women, and most particularly all women of color -- were paid a living wage for the work they do and supported with the practical necessities of life (such as affordable housing, transportation, and day care); if all fathers were held fully responsible for their participation in the economic lives of their children -- and helped to accomplish that (regardless of whether or not they are presently "tapping that"); and if all children, and most particularly children of color, were supported with universal physical and mental health care, a fully-funded educational process, and a rich and enriching selection of activities outside of school, then Black men would not be flocking into jail, starting in their early teens. This is NOT -- hear me, now -- a function of their mothers being SINGLE. (He-llo!) If it was, we could just line folks up in two's, marry 'em off, and solve the problem.

Dr. Mincy does throw in the "secondary" issues of bad schools, institutionalized oppression in the form of racism, and the disappearance of millions of jobs as a result of a manufacturing economy that has been steadily shriveling since the 1970's, but ultimately he points to the "experience of welfare reform" as the light at the end of the tunnel. And there we have it: the reason he's the one who's testifying.

When Clinton shoved through his promised decimation of the welfare system in the U.S. on his way out the door, everybody in the field of social service knew the new policies were going to be disastrous in their repercussions. The so-called "principle" sounded good. Women -- who had become "dependent on the system," it was said -- would be "helped" and "encouraged" to get off welfare by having their assistance pulled. It was the equivalent of throwing a five-year-old in a pond and telling her to swim or die. Forget racism (which discriminates against her and has taught her to see herself as incapable and unworthy, in any case). Forget the lack of jobs and the fact that more -- at every level -- are exported daily. Forget the fact that we can afford billions of dollars a month to kill babies all over the world, but we can't afford to feed and educate them in our own communities. And forget that she cannot do anything about any of these things. Just throw her in the water and ignore the cries of the babies hanging on -- for dear life -- around her neck.

So, Dr. Ronald Mincy appears to be the new Dr. William Julius Wilson (the African-American academic who received a major Ford Foundation research grant and became in the early nineties the President of the American Sociological Association for holding that the destruction of the inner city was the fault of middle class African-Americans who moved out). Shame on you, Mincy. Enjoy the rarified atmosphere up there in Washington, but don't ever forget that, when the dust settled on the plantation, regardless of where he was living, even the House-Man was Black.

Hustle and Flow

Back in my thirties, when I was on welfare for five years, before I got my bachelor's degree and my Master's degree and the additional 82 graduate level hours I earned at FSU working toward my Ph.D., when somebody asked me how I was making it, somebody African-American usually, since a European-American wouldn't ask, I used to reply, "I hustle." And they would invariably laugh out loud. Not like they found it funny, but like they found it funny that I would use that word. It seemed as if maybe they thought I wouldn't know how to hustle. Or maybe that a White person wouldn't ever really have to hustle--even a White person on welfare. Or at least that if I was, in fact, somehow "hustling," that they couldn't imagine me using the word appropriately. They laughed as if the word itself sounded funny coming out of my mouth.

But I knew the word. By that time, I had been fully bi-cultural for at least several years and crossing the color line back and forth for more than a decade. I meant "hustle." I was living on barely over $300 per month and a handful of food stamps, after all, and even after I moved into subsidized housing (which was just one part of my hustle, once my friend Esther showed me how to get in), I was endlessly living on the edge. So any given day, I was liable to be "working it" one way or the other. Because I had to. White or not. My kids needed shoes. My son needed money for school projects. There were birthdays and Christmases and Easter baskets. Not to mention laundry to be done and toilet paper and toothpaste to be bought. Three hundred dollars just wasn't gonna do it. So I hustled.

Sometimes, I hustled a man, somebody I was dating who wanted my undivided attention. I didn't think of it as degrading. I just needed to cover all my bases, that's all. The utility company didn't want to hear about my rickety old junker breaking down. Heck! The car itself had been the result of a hustle. And God knows, I needed it, even if the driver's seat was tipped hard to the left as the floor disintegrated underneath it. I had responsibilities just like every other adult, Black or White. And whatever it took within reason, I met them.

It didn't stop when I got off welfare either. For seven years of grad school, I hustled my way through student loans and financial aid and assistantships and summer jobs and endlessly through family and friends and boyfriends and even a husband or two. Even after I left school and went to work full-time, it seemed as if I was always a dollar or two (or more) shy of where I wanted--and often needed--to be. I had teenagers to support and inflation to deal with, of course, as well as the tendency to make an odd choice from time to time. And everybody gets a bad break now and then, such as being laid off from a great job after only six months because of programmatic cut-backs--two days after my druggie son and his girlfriend "had to" move in without jobs themselves. I mean, it was always something.

And for the most part, it still is. Granted, I chose to quit my day-job eighteen months ago to write, a choice that a number of my friends and acquaintances considered crazy. But I'm used to living on a wing and a prayer most of the time anyway and I was just taking a calculated risk, trying to hustle my way into the place I think I really belong, if you catch my drift.

Still, I remember one winter in northern Illinois back in the day going to a Community Action Agency to ask for help with my utility bill. I was crying the blues, I guess, whining about whatever my current struggle was (hustling, hustling) when the European-American woman caseworker on the other side of the desk said abruptly, "Well, at least you're White, so you don't have racism to deal with, too."

I was shocked. Shocked that she would speak to me like that when she was supposed to be a "social worker." Shocked that she would speak to me about how being White makes you special when she was White, too. Shocked, as a matter of fact, that she would talk about Whiteness at all, since only Black folks talked about White folks being White back then. And shocked, I think, that she did this with no apparent emotional investment at all. She was just saying it straight out. It shut down my hustle like a glass of cold water in the face.

Anyway, all this went through my mind a few weeks ago, after I had a conversation with a young African-American student who was telling me about his fledgling business in the entertainment field. He was explaining how it's against the law to post flyers in public, but that the cops will allow them in the Black community if you don't get caught putting them up. So they go out after dark to post advertisements about their next event. They dress in black, in cheap shoes, and without a watch or a wallet or even a jacket, so as not to tempt the local roadboys, who might be out marauding.

"You can't look like you have anything or they'll getcha," he said. "And you can't ride a bike after dark or you'll wind up in a fight. The rule is: if you can't defend what you have, you don't deserve it."

I looked into his eyes, as he matter-of-factly recounted the adventure. "In a capitalist society," he finished, "money is the equalizer." I didn't know if he was talking about himself or the roadboys...or both. And I was busy processing what he and his friends have to do to take their shot at getting a piece of the pie when he added the clencher, the follow-up to the social worker's challenge to me so long ago: "Bein' Black," he said, "is a hustle."

And suddenly, I got it. Why they always laughed when I used the word, I mean.

See, I work hard. Everybody works hard. We really don't have a choice. Even hustling is hard, hard work because you have to stay on top of so many things at once and the pay-off is frequently disproportionately low and sometimes nonexistent. But the difference for this young man and most of the other young Black males in their senior year of college in 2006 in the United States is that, as they pass the major milestone of college graduation, a milestone that regularly puts White youths on the track to success immediately, they're still having to skulk around their neighborhoods in the dark, hedging their bets against an unsure future. Something I've never had to do before. And might well never have to do in my life. Even when I'm on welfare. It's all about options and, while Black may be beautiful ("Say it loud: I'm Black and proud!"), being Black is still a serious hustle.