Political Sapphire

So Much for Judicial Temperament

2007-10-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

You had to know that Uncle Thomas was waiting for the day when he could finally tell a version of his story of the Anita Hill fiasco where he wasn't under oath and wasn't under the scrutiny of the media watching his every move, facial tic and breath to make sure that he was telling the truth.

Well, today's the day.

And, neither being under oath nor able to be compelled to be put under oath, what a tale Justice Clarence apparently tells. According to him, not only was Anita Hill a terrible lawyer and incompetent, but anyone who agreed with her was a terrible EEOC employee too. We expected that. Here's the unexpected part: according to Justice Thomas, Anita Hill's accusation that he was a porno freak and harasser was ludicrous and Uncle Thomas was "one of the least likely candidates imaginable" for the charge of sexual harassment because....wait for it.....he'd purportedly made clear a desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities and women.

This is the type of astute logical reasoning that has made reading Supreme Court decisions penned by Clarence Thomas especially painful for lawyers the past 15 years. If anyone can explain why insisting on a diverse work environment (assuming that this is his true feelings) means that a person can't be a stank ho getting off on porn and chasing skirts at the same time, I'll buy you a cookie.

(It will have to await another diary my discussion of what appears to be Justice Thomas trying to again "put his Black on," since this "I'm for advancement of the historically oppressed" narrative of his is now the second recent reference I'm aware of -- the first being his lengthy diatribe in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 in which he partially garbs himself in his long-discarded Black Nationalist past and tries to evoke the ghost of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall as justification to eviscerate Brown v. Board of Education with a backhanded argument that, basically, Black people can't trust white people to ensure our equality, so we should stop trying to demand that the law ensure it - no, I'm not joking go read it yourself!).
Set aside the Anita Hill story, since 16 years later none of us are going to change our minds about it based on anything written this late in the game (I believed her then, and believed her now; David Brock's memoir admitting that Anita Hill was demonized and viciously attacked solely for the purpose of advancing Republican aspirations of putting a Black face on conservativism on the high court was merely icing on the cake for me.) Isn't the real issue, for those of us who despite all its flaws respect and value the rule of law that a sitting judge has no business making public statements of a political nature or making intemperate statements about individuals? I thought - but maybe I'm wrong - that this type of behavior was antithetical to the idea of "judicial temperament", i.e. cool and dispassionate perspective remaining above the fray in the interests of justice.

I'm sorry, but I don't consider publishing an attack on a former employee while still sitting on the bench of the highest court in the land to be "above the fray." I consider it -- 16 years after the fact -- yet another piece of evidence of the bitterness and anger that others have reported possesses and obsesses Justice Clarence Thomas to his soul. It's just another piece of evidence that he can't just let go and move on, even having won the battle to be confirmed (even if his elevation to the Supreme Court is one of the low points of American racial history, part of the Bush Sr./Reagan strategy of using self-hating Negroes as the mouthpieces to reverse the civil rights legacy furthered by Justice Thurgood Marshall.) What is surprising is that despite having emerged utterly victorious in his fight to be elevated to the Supreme Court, the reputation of what all agreed was a good lawyer trashed in the process, Justice Thomas is now 16 years later carrying around what I like to refer to as an "OJ" grudge: a soul-eating, soul-destroying rage that belies all balance and passage of time, a rage that has no rational relationship to the alleged "harm" that was caused. As was written in the Washington Post a few years ago, when it comes to his confirmation, Justice Thomas is a man with a long, long, vengeance memory:

Thomas retains a special animus for certain civil rights activists and liberal interest groups such as People for the American Way, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Alliance for Justice. He blames them, in large part, for the damage done to his reputation. "These people are mad because I'm in Thurgood Marshall's seat," he told one visitor.

A Thomas friend who talks frequently with the justice said Thomas keeps a list in his head of who was for and against him during his confirmation hearings. "It hurt him a lot, I'll tell you," said this friend, who would speak only if not named to preserve his relationship. "And he's still bitter."

OK that's some scary shit, that a man on the highest court in the land still carries in his heart an "enemies list" from 13 years earlier. Are we going to make him recuse himself if and when these individuals and groups come before the High Court, as we would with any lower court judge? I've seen no evidence that this has ever happened, with Justice Thomas. We couldn't even get Scalia recused when the bias issues were far more patent.

Sure, some will call Justice Thomas' new book what he calls it - just his "memoir" or "autobiography", necessarily setting forth his views on a variety of subjects as part of talking about his life. And, yes, everyone expected it to be written at some point; getting to sell a book is sort of one of the perks of the job, as it is with all high-powered jobs (I'm reading Alan Greenspan's at the moment.) But at the moment I'm racking my brain to remember any judge who did so while he was still on the bench deciding cases. What is it about Clarence Thomas' situation that his renewed attack on Anita Hill -- his version of it, anyway -- had to be told now?

(Is he going to retire? Lord, I don't think I can afford to hope that much.)

Black Out: Jena Six National Day of Action!!!!

2007-09-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

(I have not been posting my recent work here because my new home is at Maat's Feather, but realize that there are still some folks coming here to read me rather than the new site, so as enticement, I'm cross-posting this here!)

In another karmic twist, today's Inspiration from Edward Brooke -- who cautioned us all as Black folks that you do what you have to do -- is a good entry point into the purpose of this short diary reminder.

Today is the Jena Six National Day of Action, aka Blackout Day. A day of spiritual solidarity for those of us who could not answer Color of Change's call to travel to Jena today with the thousands who have taken busses, planes and cars -- in the old school way -- to make their way Down South to Jena, Louisiana and make their voices heard in person.

So today we are all are asked to take action and show our colors in solidarity with the Jena Six and the thousands of demonstrators -- students, grownups and folks of all stripes -- who have made their way down to Jena, Louisiana today to be march through the streets of town and be heard about racist injustice.

Today was to have been the continued criminal sentencing date of Mychal Bell, the first of the children convicted in the Jena Six case. Instead, Mychal Bell remains in jail despite the Third Circuit Court of Appeals of Louisiana and his original trial court throwing out his charges. No charges are pending against him now, mind you, but LaSalle Parish DA Reed Walters insists that Bell -- who cannot make bail and has been rotting in jail for over a year now, longer than he'd have likely been sentenced to had he been tried as a juvenile as he was supposed to have been -- remain there until the DA's appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court runs.

Yet that racist asshole still insists that his purposeful overcharging of the Jena Six had to do with race.

But today is not a day of complaint - today is a day of action. So take action in all of the following ways, in solidarity:

Wear Black!!: Not only is Black beautiful, Black is back, baby. Let them see a living example today of my tagline for this site: Black is the new Black.

Reach Out!!: I continue to be amazed how few people know this travesty of justice is occurring, even at my law firm where we are now helping (as many others have also now stepped up) to try and right this thing. So tell this story of modern day nooses, racist law enforcement and of Black children being railroaded simply for finally getting "sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Step Up!!: If you have not yet joined the nearly quarter million people who have signed the Color of Change petition demanding that all charges against the Jena Six be dismissed by DA Reed Walters, aka the Nouveaux Bull Connor, and that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco use all her office's power to intervene, do it!!. The link is here: Petition to Free the Jena Six

Be Heard!!: Call and e-mail and write letters to all the players in this travesty with the power to stop this thing: Louisiana Governor Blanco, Senators Mary Landrieu and Bobby Vitter, LaSalle Parish officials, including but not limited to the lamented Mr. Reed Walters himself. Make your voice heard.

Dig Deep!!: Mychal Bell remains in jail for one reason, and only one reason: poverty prevents him from posting the bond necessary to be free pending any new juvenile proceeding (if Reed Walters really has the balls to re-file). Mr. "End Your Lives with the Stroke of a Pen" Reed Walters set Bell's bail at $80,000, requiring a significant bond deposit to free him. The other families have begged and borrowed to free their children and provide them a defense - some have had to pay for private bar legal assistance despite out of state pro bono counsel being able to lend a hand to now reduce some costs -- and are hanging on by a thin thread. So even if you've got only $5 (and you know you do - did you stop at Starbucks this morning?) send it to the families, to let them know they are not alone.

(Hey, if even David Bowie -- one of my favorite rockers! -- can step up and dig deep to do his part, the rest of us have NO excuse)

Reach Out!!: To the boys themselves. Hillary Clinton rightfully called what is going on in Jena a "teaching moment." It is, for all of us. But it especially is for the six young men -- children -- who are caught up in the middle of this thing. Please ma'am, please sir, won't you take a moment to send a postcard, or note, to them (particularly Mychal Bell, who remains in jail) to let them know that you care?

Separate, we are powerful. Together, we are unstoppable.

And we are ALL tired of being sick and tired, where white supremacy exercised through racially disparate justice against Black folks are concerned.

And, In Today's Mortgage Meltdown News: Investor Blame and Black Neighborhood Destruction

2007-09-07T20:46:00.000-07:00

Numbers about 1Q and 2Q 2007 foreclosure activity (BEFORE the markets started melting down in July and August, mind you) were released by the Mortgage Bankers' Association Wednesday. They should frighten anyone who understands anything about the impact of foreclosure activity on not only home values, but on overall access to credit -- the engine that that everyone admits has been fueling Dubbya's so-called "robust economy" in a country where many contend that consumer spending represents 2/3 of the GDP.

They are frightening because, as of the end of June, 2007, in addition to the 0.65% of mortgages in the foreclosure process, 5.12% of the mortgages which were not in foreclosure were "delinquent", i.e. the mortgage payments were at least 30 days behind.

That means that, right now, 1 in every 20 home mortgages in the United States is behind and, thus, at potential risk.

1 in 20.

Driving that figure is the devilish detail that everyone from the government to the mainstream media keeps clinging to like a life preserver without grasping the horrific big picture of "1 in 20": the percentage of subprime loans that are currently delinquent, which right now is at 14.82%. That number is huge, but I can see folks out there shrugging since, after all, these were the folks who "really couldn't afford" a home. (I can literally see them, having read the litany of "its their own fault" many times whenever prescient folks tried to blog about this crisis, both before it happened and now.)

Even if we assume that myth about "it's their own fault" is true for the subprime borrowers for the sake of argument, setting aside all the urban legends about who gets placed in subprime loans and why that underlie such a conclusion, how does one explain the fact that right now 2.73% of prime mortgages -- 1 in every 36 -- are delinquent right now, too? (Up from 2.54% at the beginning of the year.)

I know how I explain it. I explain it by looking yet again at the source of the problem which the Fed and Wall Street and frankly most folks left and right keep wanting to avoid blaming: the investment markets.

And the more I look, the angrier I get.
What makes me the angriest is that the market-makers and the feds know the truth about why this situation has occurred, yet the media keeps trying to blame it all on "subprime borrowers" (with the implication that these folks are where the irresponsibility originated.) Yet as FRB Chairman Ben Bernacke quite candidly admitted in May:

Whereas once most lenders held mortgages on their books until the loans were repaid, regulatory changes and other developments have permitted lenders to more easily sell mortgages to financial intermediaries, who in turn pool mortgages and sell the cash flows as structured securities. The growth of the secondary market has thus given mortgage lenders greater access to the capital markets, lowered transaction costs, and spread risk more broadly, thereby increasing the supply of mortgage credit to all types of households.

These factors laid the groundwork for an expansion of higher-risk mortgage lending over the past fifteen years or so. . .

The practices of some mortgage originators have also contributed to the problems in the subprime sector. As the underlying pace of mortgage originations began to slow, but with investor demand for securities with high yields still strong, some lenders evidently loosened underwriting standards. So-called risk-layering--combining weak borrower credit histories with other risk factors, such as incomplete income documentation or very high cumulative loan-to-value ratios--became more common. These looser standards were likely an important source of the pronounced rise in "early payment defaults"--defaults occurring within a few months of origination--among subprime ARMs, especially those originated in 2006.

Although the development of the secondary market has had great benefits for mortgage-market participants, as I noted earlier, in this episode the practice of selling mortgages to investors may have contributed to the weakening of underwriting standards. . . In addition, incentive structures that tied originator revenue to the number of loans closed made increasing loan volume, rather than ensuring quality, the objective of some lenders. . . . Intense competition for subprime mortgage business--in part the result of the excess capacity in the lending industry . . .may also have led to a weakening of standards. In sum, some misalignment of incentives, together with a highly competitive lending environment and, perhaps, the fact that industry experience with subprime mortgage lending is relatively short, likely compromised the quality of underwriting.

The accuracy of much of the information on which the underwriting was based is also open to question. Mortgage applications with little documentation were vulnerable to misrepresentation or overestimation of repayment capacity by both lenders and borrowers. . .Some borrowers may have been misled about the feasibility of paying back their mortgages, and others may simply have not understood the sometimes complex terms of the contracts they signed.

Despite this candor in the ivory tower about the huge role that investment strategies in the securities markets played in the current meltdown, both the MSM and pundits perhaps well-meaning but truly ignorant about what was happening continue to trumpet the false notion that homeowners were the ones primarily irresponsible, instead of victimized by a greed-fueled money-making engine -- the secondary mortgage-backed securities market -- that cast its fishing line far and wide, with increasingly attractive bait (the "American Dream" of homeownership, already seductive as a cultural narrative but tarted up with a predatory readiness on the part of lenders to originate mortgages with high debt-to-income ratios, high debt-to-value ratios, zero-interest and negatively amortizing notes, and reduced credit and income worthiness scrutiny; whatever it took to close and thus provide more mortgage paper for reinvestment in the secondary market) for the primary purpose of increasing the pool of mortgages available for sale in the secondary market, where it is all about money, and nothing but money. Excess money, which can thus be played with -- something that most families in our country today know nothing about, since they have been in a negative-savings posture now for nearly three years. Something that had not happened since the Great Depression.

I know that there are those who might be asking why I spend so much time discussing financial/mortgage issues and what it could possibly have to do with Black people. My reason is obvious, although it seems not too many Black bloggers are writing about it: the borrowers disproportionately forced into the subprime market, with the often-resulting predatory mortgage underwriting, lending and servicing practices that arose to sustain the feeding of investment paper to the secondary markets were disproportionately Black homeowners The Center for Responsible Lending confirmed in 2004 and has reconfirmed several times since what those of us on the ground already knew: African-American homes (and neighborhoods!) are at risk. Over 50% of all African-Americans, and 42% of Latino borrowers, who got mortgages were shoveled into subprime loans, quite often regardless of income level or creditworthiness.

It is that market/credit discrimination which led to situations such as that which existed in New Orleans, where at the time of Katrina, 26% of all homeowners held subprime mortgages and, today, 50% of the mortgages held by African-Americans are subprime. The servicers of those mortgages were not exactly sympathetic when Katrina hit, requiring the intervention and public shaming of public interest groups such as ACORN before they would offer the same forbearance terms that were automatically offered to the borrowers of prime loans. Even then, forbearance came with all sorts of fun "exploding time bombs" built in, such as a homeowner being required to make the payments deferred during the forbearance period all at once to avoid foreclosure, amongst others.

(Now you know another reason why so many Katrina displacees can't Return Home. A reason that has gotten almost NO media attention.)

But it isn't just New Orleans, a formerly majority-Black city missed by a natural hurricane only to now find itself at risk of being eaten away by a financial one in a couple of years as all those 2/28s and 3/27s start resetting. Other Black majority cities are too on the cusp of the Eve of Destruction thanks to the mortgage crisis, too. Just as we were historically shut out of the credit and mortgage markets due to discriminatory investment practices, let in comparatively recently only through investor greed, we are now being shut out again and our non-white majority communities face disproportionate risk of being decimated by the current mortgage debacle.

Our cities, like the 82% Black city of Detroit, Michigan.

Our suburbs, like the 51% Black city of Cleveland, Ohio.

Our newest regional giants, like the 61% Black city of Atlanta, Georgia.

And our Black urban enclaves, like the approximately 80% Black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuvesant/East New York and the 72% Black neighborhood of Jamaica/Hollis in New York City, New York.

Beginning to see a trend, yet?

I have always believed that at least one reason that most folks didn't care about well-known predatory lending and mortgage servicing practices involved race, and the fact that heretofore, many of the victims associated publicly by the MSM with mortgage problems were non-white, most often Black. In light of that, a more cynical, heartless, person than I am would be grateful that at least now the problem has gotten so bad that white folks too are beginning to suffer, since it was only when that started happening that folks finally started talking about legislative solutions to try and ensure that "mainstream" homeowners, having been hooked and reeled into the system by the promise of the "American Dream" for motives that had little to do with altruism and everything to do with the greed and excess of the investor and servicer classes, do not suffer from this crisis -- whose making has been largely ignoreda and pooh-poohed for a long time.

So what's a person to do? What's a neighborhood to do, when you have stories such as that which ran in Wednesday's NY Times called Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town? (Yes, it sure as hell can.)

I don't have all the solutions, or even some of the solutions. But I do know that the worst possible thing is for the credit markets to shut out everyone but perfect borrowers with perfect-sized Fannie and Freddie guaranty-eligible loans right now, which is being increasingly reported. With discrimination still running rampant in the credit markets already, such a contraction is the LAST thing that Black and Latino homeowners and their neighborhoods in crisis need. All that a return to traditional underwriting in the midst of this crisis does is ensure that most of the victims of this crisis, particularly those of color, will have no fair chance at escape.

And the cynical suspicious person in me wonders how long it will be before all these neighborhoods will be gentrified, homes formerly raising Black children in security now belonging to enterprising folks who just happen to have disposible income (which is not something that most families of color have, or anyone else too much these days) and jump on a "good deal", the bones of the formerly non-white communities being decimated by foreclosure picked clean as if they had been had at by vultures, after they die. Since they are, inarguably, dying.

(No, for the record, I am NOT objective about this issue.)

Blogging for Justice: Free the Jena Six

2007-08-31T01:40:00.000-07:00

(This is going up here a day after I posted this on Maat's Feather on the Day of Blogging for Justice for the Jena Six. Feel free to come over for discussion!).

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This diary is part of the Afrospear campaign (the call for which was made by Bro. D. Yobachi Boswell - hat tip to him!) to raise our voices against the travesty of justice being played out in the case of six teenagers known as the Jena Six. Why this campaign? Well, the Afrospear press release today makes it plain:

The Afrosphere Jena 6 Coalition "ask that the mainstream traditional media step forward and discharge their duty to provide coverage of this vitally important event to their viewers and readers and act as "the fourth institution" of governmental "checks and balance" that constitutional framers intended the press to be."

I regret only that this diary is coming late in the designated day, a victim of 48-hours of work-crisis I won't bore the reader with.

When I was in law school, my first-year moot court assignment was about free speech, and high school students. The central issue in our mock case was whether a 1952 Supreme Court case that evaluated the right to free-speech against the Fourteenth Amendment rights of Black folks to live free from public expressions of racial hatred and white supremacy -- Beauharnais v. Illinois -- was still good law that would govern racially-based speech. In Beauharnais, a white man was convicted under an Illinois libel statute making it a crime to exhibit in any public place any publication which "portray[ed] depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens, of any race, color, creed or religion" or which "expose[d] the citizens of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy."

Mr. Beauharnais was convicted because he was handing out what the Beauharnais court quaintly called "anti-Negro literature" on the streets of Chicago. (I'll let y'all click the link to the case and read some of it for yourself; then tell me if it sounds all that much different than Ron Paul or Michael Richards, 55 years later.)

Justice Frankfurter, writing for a bitterly divided majority, relied on the 1942 case which enunciated the fighting words exception to the First Amendment, Chaplinsky v. United States to conclude that the Illinois statute under which Beauharnais was charged was constitutional, well within the police power of the State to keep the peace following centuries of slavery and white supremacy. Justice Black, writing the lead minority opinion in Beauharnais (despite having been part of the unanimous ruling in Chaplinsky where race was not an issue, claimed that the First Amendment was virtually inviolate, such that speech inciting race hatred, like that advanced by Mr. Beauharnais in Chicago, was protected under it without regard to asserted countervailing rights, such as those arising under the Fourteenth Amendment, which were not equally absolute. And, as a portend of today's High Court reasoning in a variety of contexts involving race, we were told that this was for our own good. Justice Black's eloquent dissent in Beauharnais ended by warning "minorities" that, in essence, we should be careful what we ask for (the right to be free from public assault on our characters and dignity) because we may get it:

If there be minority groups who hail this holding as their victory, they might consider the possible relevancy of this ancient remark:

"Another such victory and I am undone."

Ultimately, because that's what our professors made plain was the "only right answer", those of us who were eager 1L's being exposed to modern Constitutional law in the area of race readily, even if sadly, concluded that Beauharnais was no longer good law, having been impliedly if not expressly overruled by Sullivan v. New York Times. Yet I wonder from time to time whether our High Court's accidental or purposeful retreat from the interpretations of the First Amendment which balanced free speech against the societal injury of racial fighting words and concluded that the societal harm from certain speech was so severe as to justify public (although not private) censorship -- as affirmed forth in Beauharnais and its predecessor case, Chaplinsky -- is directly correlated with this country's shift, beginning in 1953 with Brown v. Board of Education from an overtly-white supremacist nation to a covert one, as Blacks and whites in this country came more and more into constant contact with each other over the objections of most whites. With the result that white supremacy was forced under ground by the law which, as set forth in Beauharnais, (which was fatally undermined by Sullivan v. NY Times but has never been expressly overruled by the Supreme Court, much the way that Brown v. Board of Education just was by Parents Involved v. Seattle School Dist. #1), criminalized attacking the character of people of color through "free speech" in public.

I wonder because had Beauharnais in particular not been effectively overruled ot make way for "absolute" First Amendment rights -- rights that the story of the Jena Six should confirm even for the staunchest racial utopianist tare not rights that all races enjoy equally on the ground in America -- perhaps the "racial free speech" act that began the saga which ended with the criminal case of the Jena Six would have never been necessary. Or, even if it had been, it certainly might have been nipped in the bud as soon as one of the country's most ancient symbols of racial terror was hung from a tree in Jena, Louisiana last September, 2006.

On the assumption that a reader seeing this diary might not have actually heard of the Jena Six (since that's what I was told last time I wrote about this case a month ago), here's my synopsis of the facts as they are known today following the trial and conviction of the first of the Jena Six, Mychal Bell:

In September, 2006, a black student at Jena High School asked school administrators whether he could sit under the "white tree," a shade tree on school grounds that had historically been used only by white students in the largely-segregated town of Jena, Louisiana. After hearing that he could sit wherever they wanted, he did.

The next morning, he and the other Black students of Jena High School were greeted with three nooses hanging from the "white tree." -- in the school colors, I guess to make them more noticeable.

Following an investigation, Jena High's principal identified the responsible parties - three of the school's white students. To his credit, he recommended expulsion. He was overruled, however, by the School Superintendent, who imposed only a three-day suspension as punishment. Trying to justify this to the media later, this paragon of academic virtue said that the act was not a threat to anyone; instead it was just a simple case of happy teenage foolishness: "Adolescents play pranks."

Spoken as only a true redneck of the South could speak, about a symbol of racial violence that is as well known in Jena, Louisiana as it is everywhere South (and many places North!) of the Mason-Dixon line.

Naturally, the Black community got a bit upset. Parents started trying to identify who to complain to. The Black students of Jena High went a different route. They (apparently spontaneously) reached into the wellspring of political action that has served justice well for millenia:

They decided to collectively protest by ALL sitting under the white tree at the same time.

Anywhere other than America, the point would likely have been proven by that act. But we're not talking about anywhere. We are talking about a small Louisiana town (that is nonetheless the largest town in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana.) A town whose population of just under 3,000 is 85% white, with only 350 Black residents in its borders. A town that still refers to its single Black school board member as "colored" and that has a town barber who seems to find it a point of honor that he has never cut a Black man's hair.

In light of this, the official reaction to this collective political action by our young Black youth in Jena (which puts me in mind of that great understatement from "Stand by Me" spoken by one of the few white castmembers: "It appears that [the] students have assembled in an exercise of their First Amendment rights.") was not entirely unpredictable, especially in America today. Jena High's administration called a mandatory student assembly. LaSalle Parish's DA, Reed Walters, accompanied by 10 fine representatives of LaSalle Parish law enforcement, came to address the students. Students contend that the DA threatened the protesting Black students with retribution if they didn't stop making a fuss about the noose incident. He reportedly also said to these young men and women the words that were portends of the nightmare that the Jena Six now face:

I can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen.

After this assembly, and the DA's "laying down the law" students were reportedly put on lock down for the rest of the school week.

Despite this "mandatory cooling off" at Jena High, things remained tense throughout the fall, reportedly calmed only by the fact that it was football season -- which is a big deal in the South, no matter what race you are.

Yet on the night of November 30, 2006, someone set fire to the main academic building of Jena High School. Nobody knows who did it, to this day.
It doesn't matter, I guess, since the next night, Friday December 1, 2006, a Jena High black student named Robert Bailey Jr. accepted an invitation to a party held at an establishment normally frequented only by whites in Jena. Upon his arrival, he was punched in the face, knocked down, and jumped by several white youth who were present. Of this gang of thugs, only one student was (subsequently, and much later) identified. Instead of facing what Robert Bailey Jr. now faces -- which is up to 80 years in prison -- this upstanding young white citizen was given probation, and asked to apologize.

The next day, a white man who may, or may not, have been at the party the night before got into a verbal fight with three Black teenagers, including Robert Bailey, Jr. at the Gotta Go convenience store outside Jena. At some point, the white guy pullled out a shotgun from his vehicle and brandished it at the Black kids. Their response was to wrestle it from him, and run away with it (no doubt to ensure they would not be buckshotted as they fled). They called the police, and reported the incident.

They were subsequently arrested and charged with theft of the shotgun. (No charges were filed against the white man who brandished it at them.)

On December 4, 2006 - Monday -- back at school at Jena High, a white student named Justin Barker, allegedly began taunting Black students, including Robert Bailey, Jr.. He called them niggers repeatedly and expressing support for the white students who hung the nooses and beat up Bailey.

(Justin Barker's mama obviously has not taught him the fine Southern arts of minding your own business and knowing when to shut-the-hell-up. Equally obviously, she *did* teach him the fine Southern art of feeling entitled to break the law just because he is a privileged white male kid who is afraid of a butt wuppin' by uppity darkies. I say this because young master Barker this May decided to bring a loaded hunting rifle onto the Jena High school grounds with 13 rounds in it, I guess since he knew that Mychael Bell was about to go to trial.

This criminal act is, of course, something that in our post-Columbine era -- where young students are arrested for writing fiction stories in class even hinting of possible school violence -- you'd have thought would have landed Justin Barker under the jailhouse. Yet LaSalle Parish law enforcement clearly decided that this was just another case of "adolescents play pranks" since after Justin Barker was quite belatedly arrested, he was promptly released on only $5,000 bail. Juxtapose this outcome with Mychal Bell's bail of $90,000 for getting into a school fight - if you dare risk your head exploding.)

This was the proverbial camel-breaking straw, I guess, for the young Black male students of Jena High School who witnessed it. Justin Barker was apparently knocked out cold with a single punch, and while he was down, allegedly kicked by several black students. He was up and about by the time the police and ambulance arrived. After being scanned, treatened and released at the hospital, he attended his school's ring party that same evening. He reportedly had to spend the next week on Tylenol.

Would that the Jena Six had it so good. For their headache, six black Jena students -- Robert Bailey Jr. (17), Mychal Bell (16 - charged as an adult), Carwin Jones (18), Theo Shaw (17), Bryant Purvis (17), and an unidentified 15-year old were each arrested and charged with second-degree attempted murder because of their alleged involvement in the beat-down of Justin Barker. Their bail amounts ranged from a low of $70,000 to a high of $138,000 (for Robert Bailey, Jr.) Most remained in jail for months until their poverty-stricken families could post bond. Mychal Bell and Carwin Shaw have never left jail - neither of their families could afford to bail them out.

The Jena Six were all expelled from Jena High School, their academic careers now officially over.

While there was a great deal of pressure for the students to plead guilty, Mychal Bell (represented by a white public defender) refused to plead guilty to a felony. This prompted the DA to immediately reduce the charges on the morning of trial to second degree aggravated battery (in Louisiana, battery with a dangerous weapon.)

I know you're asking: what dangerous weapon?

Mychal Bell's tennis shoes, with which his feet were shod when he allegedly kicked Justin Barker.

(I will one day write a diary about how I feel as an attorney knowing that in the State of Louisiana, there are *multiple* cases actually concluding that sneakers are a dangerous weapon.)

Mychal Bell's fate was swift, and once again, predictable -- since his public defender put on no witnesses on his behalf, whereas the DA put on 17 witnesses -- all white, including young master Barker. Trial was held before a white judge, and an all-white jury selected from an all-white venire, on which sat two friends of the DA, a white witness' relative, and several friends of witnesses for the prosecution. Mychal Bell's parents could not attend the trial to support their son, excluded by the rule that normally excludes trial witnesses to avoid tainting their testimony -- yet Justin Barker was permitted to attend, despite his also being a witness governed by that rule. A gag order was even placed on Bell's parents, preventing them from letting the world know that their son was on trial for an aggravated felony only for racial reasons. At trial, 11 white students, 3 white teachers and 2 white school nurses gave varying testimony about whether Mychal Bell did, or did not, do anything to Justin Barker. Justin Barker admitted he did not know whether Mychal Bell even touched him.

But this is Jena, Louisiana. So after only 3 hours of deliberation, Mychal Bell was convicted on July 28, 2007 of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit it. He is scheduled to be sentenced on September 20, 2007. He faces a maximum sentence of 22 years in prison.

The remaining members of the Jena Six have not yet stood trial. They all still face charges of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit attempted murder, their charges having not been reduced by the LaSalle Parish DA.

The first time I blogged about the Jena Six, in a diary called The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree it was shortly after I first heard that Mychal Bell, a young Black man in high school -- with a promising athletic future, status on the school honor roll -- and what I have now learned is a a minor juvenile record, for getting into fights and vandalism (something that my own son faced as a teenager, his temper having once been inconsistent with a zero-tolerance world) -- had been convicted by an all-white jury of aggravated assault on one of his white peers, such that he faced up to 22 years in prison for what under normal circumstances would have been deemed a high school fight justifying, at best, his suspension and, perhaps a juvenile court referral.

But the circumtances of Jena are not "normal circumstances".

Not normal, unless you view the circumstances that have led to six young men -- all children, in my eyes -- facing what is now between 22 and 80 years in prison for a high school fight as normal through the gauzy lens of racial history in America, in which Blacks have always had to confront the "fighting words" aspect of America's love of Free Speech - but have almost always been punished severely for reacting, as the Supreme Court in both Chaplinsky and Beauharnais recognized, as normal human beings would react to fighting words - by fighting white racist speech with their bodies, the only power that usually they have to stop it. To know the facts of the story in Jena, Louisiana as they relate to the Jena Six is to experience an evocative, frustating, memory -- perhaps a collective memory -- of what we thought was a different time when we could neither fight in self-defense to save our own manhood and womanhood or protest peacefully against it without meaningful risk of life. The memory of a time they said was done now, in our colorblind, post-Dr. King society: when public terrorist threats against Black folks for simply exercising their God given rights was not an uncommon thing.

(And for those self-serving racist naysayers out there like the LaSalle Parish School Superintendent, make no mistake, hanging nooses was a terrorist threat -- the threat of lynching at the hands of whites -- and it is that terrorist threat that was the genesis and remains at the root of the poisonous tree of racist injustice known as case of the Jena Six. For what other American symbol (other than the white sheet and hood of the Ku Klux Klan) is more recognizable to Black folks born and raised in America as the harbinger of the end of Black lives for exercising their rights -- it was once called "being uppity" -- than the hangsman's noose?

I thought we learned all those lessons -- about long ago.

Yet Jena Louisiana obviously continues not to learn its lessons. This is evident when their white supermajority -- 85% of the town -- has spent more time complaining that they are being unfairly branded as the collective racists they are than about the unfairness of what they almost all also admit was a schoolhouse fight that should not land someone in jail for 22 years. This was evident when on Tuesday, nine children -- children who have a right to free speech, or did before the Supreme Court's decision in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case -- were suspended on Tuesday from Jena High School for were advised that wearing their tee shirts advocating to "Free the Jena Six" were "disruptive." Wearing tee shirts in a school that has no dress code.

It seems that the good white citizens of Jena, Louisiana have not yet learned what justice really means outcomes which are just, not just the procedural appearance of a courtroom show called "justice." True justice does not waste time trying to sweep injustice under the rug, or deflect from injustice, as Louisiana is desperately now trying to do by doing something of questionable legality: releasing information about Mychal Bell's juvenile record to the media, in response to what is an increasing hue and cry against the injustice of the Jena Six case. This retributive, self-serving and quite likely illegal act on the part of LaSalle Parish is clearly, along with most things Jena these days, is a travesty of justice.

The travesty of justice in Jena, Louisiana is the old evocative story I mentioned above: The story in which Justice in America for Black folks is, increasingly again, Just Us, when it comes to the criminal law.

It is likely to always be so, here in America.

Unless we fight.

Since I am not an advocate of kicking ass and taking no prisoners as a method of social change, except rhetorically, unless one has truly has no other options, all that is left is for folks like me -- mothers like me of young Black men -- to tell the story and spread it far and wide. Tell it so that it is never forgotten and it is front and center. Until justice, which like the symbol of my blog, Maat's Feather, is done grounded in truth.

But if we don't tell the story, protest this injustice, nobody will.

Since the mainstream media does not care about these young Black men in Jena - go check out how few stories they have written, even today, about the resurgence of sanctioned Jim Crow misconduct in American law enforcement that is evinced by this story.

Since Governor Kathleen Blanco (D) of Louisiana, who has the power to instantly stop the railroading of these children doesn't care -- go check out the form letters she sent us all when we wrote to beg her to intervene.

We won't even mention Bobby Jindal or Emperor George W. Bush.

They don't care in Louisiana about the lives of young Black children. They don't care that whites are again from an early age free to taunt and levy psychic -- and PHYSICAL -- threats and injuries at Black children. Don't believe me? Then ask yourself this question:

Why is it that we know the names of ALL of the young Black men that allegedly did wrong in Jena, Louisiana (except for the one that the law expressly prohibits the press or anyone else from naming due to his age), yet we know NONE of the names of the several white youths who committed the acts of harassment, terrorist threats, threatened and actual violence which created the racial tinderbox that ultimately exploded in a loss of patience -- the final moment of "sick and tired of being sick and tired", for which the Jena Six's lives are now being thrown away, legally, before they have all even become old enough to vote? Not ONE of these white hooligans names has ever been printed in the press that one can find on the Internet.

Not one of the names is publicly known -- even the allies of the Jena Six have not printed them. Except for one - Justin Barker, the so-called victim of the Jena Six. This is not accidental, even if it's not conscious. It's merely a continuation of the same unconscious white supremacy that makes sure that when a Black person commits a crime, his race is announced to the world, but never mentioned when a criminal is white. It's because their young white lives, even though they have all done dirty and there has never been any dispute about that, are perceived as still having future value despite their bad acts -- not just in Jena, Louisiana, but everywhere. So, unconsciously or consciously, they are allowed protection of their future reputations despite their being the catalysts in this travesty of justice. In contrast, the Black youth who were involved and who were demonstrably the responders, not the instigators, are obviously seen as having no future worth protecting. If they were, then why are they all facing sentences that guarantee they will finish growing up behind the walls of a hellish Louisiana prison, and if they are given the maximums, will likely die there as well?

Yet they don't care anywhere else either. Because the travesty of justice that is occuring in Jena, Louisiana in connection with six of our Black youth is happening all over America now, in increasingly frequent travesties of justice small and large that are collectively condemning our young Black men's futures before they've even had a chance to become legal men. There was a quote in one of the first articles I ever read about the Jena Six that makes it plain what time it is for us in light of that:

You better get out of your houses. You better come out and defend your children - because they are incarcerating them by the thousands. Jena's not the beginning, but Jena has crossed the line. Justice is not right when you put on the wrong charges and then convict. I believe in justice. I believe in the point of law. I believe in accepting the punishment if I'm guilty. If I'm guilty, convict me and punish me, but if I'm innocent, no justice.

I believe in those things too, and have since long before I ever took my oath as an attorney all these many years ago. Which is why I'm glad that we have had today to blog for justice for the Jena Six - our youth, being snatched away from us by the injustice of ongoing white supremacy in America and its handmaiden, prosecutorial discretion in the hands of racist whites.

But, since when it comes to the Jena Six, neither the media nor the politicians stumping for our votes seem to care much (including, except as a member of the collective Congressional Black Caucus since I cannot find any public statement he has yet made about the Jena Six despite being the only Black man running for President at this time -- Senator Barack Obama /sigh.)

So it's up to us to care, since they are OUR children, that our young men are being railroaded into figurative death -- their youth being potentially stripped away from them, merely for a youthful loss of temper that those much older probably would have had long before young master Justin Barker got the ass-whuppin his racist mouth had coming to it.

Here's the call to action: those of you who believe in justice -- those for who the words of Dr. King about the nature of justice and his wise counsel that where injustice is concerned, what affects one, affects all -- those of you in solidarity, raise your mouses. Raise your virtual pens. Beauharnais v. Illinois may no longer be considered good law, but some words are still fighting words.

So let's fight.

Since we cannot and should not in a just world need to use our fists, let's fight through our blogs. But don't stop there. Fight through our letters and phone calls and through taking our bodies to the streets in protest if we have to, to save these young men's lives from the travesty of justice unfolding in Jena.

Blog for justice today, and tomorrow and until we as Black people actually see it as something more than a one-off whenever whites accuse us of committing crimes against them. Justice for the Jena Six, whose finally getting sick and tired of being sick and tired have them now facing between 22 and 80 years in prison for a schoolyard brawl. Justice the New Jersey 4, young Black women who like the Jena Six had no criminal records yet who are now serving between 3 and 11 years in prison merely for defending themselves against a gender-based physical attack on them grounded in their status as lesbians -- despite videotape proving they acted in self-defense against, not as instigators of, violence. Blog for justice for the survivors of Katrina who rang bells in the Big Easy yesterday on the Second Anniversary to both honor the souls of the dead and to warn future generations that the tide may still one day rise against us - unless we are ever vigilant.

And after you're done blogging, please take the time to read the words of those other Afrospear members who have taken up the cause of justice through their blogs today for the Jena 6, and follow their links to action:

Wayne Hicks @ Electronic Village

D. Yobachi Boswell @ Black Perspective

Daz Wilson @ Ultraviolet Underground

Francis Holland @ Afrosphere Bloggers Association

Jim D. Walton @ Black in Business

6. Cooper @ Wonderland or Not

7. Yolonda @Ebony Mommy

8. Vanessa Byers @ Vanessa: Unplugged

9. Sincere @ http://sincere-thoug...

10. Pia @ Courting Destiny

11. Adrianne George @ Black Women in Europe

12. Eddie Griffin @ Eddie Griffin BASG

13. PB @ Savant Writer

14. Tom Autopref @The Small Business Weekly

15. Dave J. @Wandering in Ether

16. B. Medusa @ Mnemosyne

17. Shawn Williams @Dallas South Blog

18. Deidra @Black and Missing but Not Forgotten

19. AAPP @ African American Political Pundit & African-American Opinion

20. Invisible Woman @Invisible Cinema

21. Plez @PlezWorld

22. Mahogony Diva @ Mahogany Diva

23. Saba @ Greasy Guide

24. Out of the Jungle

Alberto Gonzales - Latest Rat to Abandon the Ship

2007-08-27T06:16:00.000-07:00

One of the fun things about being a crack-of-dawn person (even today, on my birthday) is that sometimes you get greeted with news that can't help but make you grin from ear to ear.

The resignation of the disgrace with a law license known as the (now former) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is one of them.

The most telling part of the New York Times' article is that "Bush accepted [the resignation] begrudgingly."

This tells me that despite his apparent willingness to perjure himself before Congress; despite glad endorsement of torture; despite his cold-blooded justification of spying on Americans (and everyone else too); despite his zealous pursuit of the federal death penalty even over the concerns of his own prosecutors; and despite his willingess to trash the government careers of good lawyers solely because they did not follow his Party's party line, Gonzales hadn't yet completely lost his sense of personal survival.

Perhaps like Karl Rove, his resignation over the objections of George Bush is clearly the act of a man who saw that he'd better get while the getting is good. (Not that this absolves him from perjury but knowing the historical temperament of Congress, they are less likely to pursue him if he's gone.) Gonzales' former master President George W. Bush may still be drunk on the elixir he quaffs as So-Called Leader of the Free World, but Gonzales apparently hadn't forgotten that big ass bullseye painted across his forehead while they were drinking their asses off, and decided that he'd better get sober before he ended up in the drunk tank.

(Although I think they call that federal prison......)

A lot of folks are going to lament today that the Democratic Party didn't "get" Gonzales and be angry. I am not angry. Since I am not about retribution, I am about saving the country from its descent into a rogue state. So the more of these anti-American architects and masters of George Bush's fascist-in-training government pick up and leave, the greater the chance we might actually get our country back.

I won't even spend time talking about the shame and disgrace that Alberto Gonzales is as a person of color who was given so much blessing given his humble origins as the son of migrant workers, only to have chosen to use it to do evil in the world for the benefit of the white and the wealthy instead of those from whence he came, such that despite all of his awards from various minority Bar Associations, he ends his government career with his name forever remembered as a giant blot on this nation's fundamental principles of justice under the law. I'll let someone else far more eloquent have at that one.

The Rich Get Richer. The Poor? Maybe Homeless

2007-08-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Something that not too many folks are talking about in connection with the mortgage and market shakeouts is the divergent impact of this problem on communities, depending on the demographics.

At present, there still appears to be no meaningful harm to the upper end of the housing market in terms of either devaluation or a flattening sales curve. For the wealthy, real estate business (as opposed to mortgage-backed securities investment, anyhow!) appears to still be booming. Inventories in some of the more "upscale" (almost all white and Asian) places to live in the Bay Area are just around 30 days - which means that sales are beyond brisk.

While there is a temporary panic over the fact that jumbo loan financing (that which exceeds $417,000, the maximum loan amount that can be guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddic Mac) shut completely down two Fridays ago and thus, high end folks had to pony up even more money for closing home deals, the word on the street is that this was only temporary and now business is inching upward again already (no doubt because those who can come up with more cash are doing so.)

Would that the working and middle class had it so good. With plummeting values and sales non-existent, with some "not upscale" communities (like east and south San Jose, where there are lots and lots of Brown people) now faced with more than a 1 year inventory of homes up for sale, things are grim and California is facing the highest levels of foreclosure activity it has seen in a decade.

At the same time that prices for housing continue to go up - but only if you want to buy in the "right neighborhoods."

In other words, the rich continue to make each other richer, through their homes - median prices continue to rise for them, even as they plummet for those whose only real asset was the equity in their homes. It at times feels like well-off folks (not to mention the equity purchasers and foreclosure rescuers, for whom RealtyTrac conitnues to be valuable) are presently having an orgy, that they are driving prices up at the same time they know how bad it is out there for more modest homeowners whose struggle to become homeowners far more closely reflects the original meaning of the "American Dream" than the new money which followed the post-Reagan era of personal greed.
The frightening proof in the pudding about what we face here in California as a result of the "mortgage liquidity crisis" is seen in the number of trustee's deeds recorded - after homes were actually sold on the auction block, the ultimate failure of lending that historically both borrowers and lenders have done everything possible to avoid, such that they heretofore were a comparatively rare occurrence in life.

Not anymore.

The percentage increase in the most devastating event to occur in a homeowner's life -- one's home being sold at public trustee's sale -- in those California counties which house huge numbers of the poor/working/lower middle-class population in of our state -- particularly in the rural/farmworker counties -- in just one year should bring any decent person close to tears:

San Bernadino County: 986.9% increase

Contra Costa County: 1,154.8%

San Luis Obispo County: 1,200%

Stanislaus County: 1,350%

Monterey County: 1,825%

Yuba County: 2,000%

Kern County: 2,032%

El Dorado County: 2,125%

Merced County: 3,328.6%

Yolo County: 10,200%

(Source: DataQuick)

That the state's bottom line of trustee's sales is "only" 799.2% more than it was a year ago in light of the numbers I've listed above is something for celebration, only if you're in one of the neighborhoods whose average pulled the listed numbers down to "only" 799.2%.

This is occurring all over the country and while this diary won't post all the data, it isn't hard to find, and confirm. For those skeptics -- almost all employed by the real estate sales industry at this point -- who insist insanely that all this shakeout of low-income communities is either (a) just a fluke given the high cost of California housing or (b) a natural correction in the marketplace -- I urge them to review ALL of Dataquick's market reports that are publicly available as a starting place:

For Portland, Oregon (21% fewer homes sold, but at a 2.6% higher price);

Seattle, Washington (23% decrease in home sales yet prices rose 7.6%)

Miami, Florida (33.3% decrease in sales yet prices rose 5.1%)

Honolulu, Hawaii (in most expensive zip codes, price per square foot rose between 3.7 and 115.2% yet fell in less costly neighborhoods)

Nashville, Tennessee (sales decreased up to 11.8% in most expensive neighborhoods yet prices rose up to 13.3%)

Chicago, Illinois (many exclusive residential areas, such as Lake Forest, Hinsdale, Kenilworth, Glencoe, Oak Park, River Forest, Winnetka and Western Springs, saw sales decrease as much as 39.4% yet prices increase up to 34.3%)

Sure, there were a few communities going in a slightly different direction, where prices were actually going down a tiny bit, but it is (a) tiny and (b) they are all markets which boomed as people fled the central urban areas in the past 10 years -- in search of affordable home ownership:

Denver, Colorado (16.3% increase in sales with 3.3% decrease in price)

Las Vegas, Nevada (43.8% decrease in sales, 3.7% decrease in price)

Phoenix, Arizona (32.8% decrease in sales, 5.4% decrease in price)

Oh well, no point talking too much about the obvious.

Especially since I didn't write this diary to talk about homeowners.

What prompted this diary was not the ongoing crisis in the news about housing. What prompted this diary was this week's effort to help my young son, a hard worker but just starting out, find an apartment for himself, his lady, and their baby who is coming in January. Because of the sticky wicket of pregnancy discrimination against his woman (another diary in and of itself), my son is currently the sole support for his family. He makes $21,000 per year. After taxes, he will bring home around $19,000 of that, since you can't avoid social security and disability taxes no matter what you do.

In the Bay Area, other than living in dangerous neighborhoods or dilapidated housing (and I know what they are, living in the 'Hood myself, so my standards are not the traditional bougie standards) this week I could find no 2-bedroom rental unit on the market for less than $1,350 per month. $16,200 per year.

(Subsidized housing, you say? Not even - our local county has not had any available Section 8 vouchers since 2001 and their waiting list is, yet again, closed; now nearly every county in the Bay Area is in the same position. )

Fortunately for my son, I can and will obviously be helping his new family with serious financial subsidies, even if it won't be easy for any of us since my income is not All That. But it is better than them being in the streets; that they at least won't have to face Yet even when his partner returns to work after the baby in 6 months or so, even between the two of them they will make just barely enough to afford the cheapest unit for their new family which is available right now here in the Bay Area.

That gave me serious pause, but not as much pause as the next question that popped into my mind, which was this:

What is the rental market going to be like in in six months to a year, after the country is fully engaged in the *practical* fallout of the mortgage meltdown crisis? What will rental housing markets look like after hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of families are forced to move when they are evicted following foreclosure?

It is that question which caused me to almost stop breathing.

Obviously, folks have to live somewhere when they lose their homes and, just as obviously they will be renters (nobody is going to allow their home to be foreclosed if they have any ability to avoid it; since they won't be homeowners again for at least 2-5 years simply because of the credit impact of the foreclosure).

But where?

Superficially, at least, one can take some comfort in the 9.6% rental vacancy rate nationally. But only cuperficially. But if you scratch that number, two things become clear. First, in urban markets, the vacancy rate is nowhere near 9.6% - it's been less than 4% for years.

Second, most of the existing rental housing vacancies are higher priced rentals. One-third (1/3) of all rentals in the United States cost more than $800 per month. As housing is considered affordable only if it costs less than 25%-30% of gross income or using the most free-market friendly percentages30% of net income, an $800/month rental unit is affordable only to a family who grosses $3200 a month - $37,000 per year.

Before you say "Big Deal, that's not that bad" remember that the median family income in the United States as of the last publicly released data set (2005) was $46,242 per year. And that median family income continues to decrease as it has since the dot-com bust, especially for lower income workers. As of 2005, nearly 1/2 of all US households reported earned income of less than $30,000; 2/3 reported less than income of $50,000. Of the 111 million households in the United States at that time, 42.5 million (38%) of them had total household income of less than $35,000 per year in 2005, despite the "average/mean" income in the United States exceeding $62,000 at that time.

What does this all mean? Well, it means if nothing else that in 2005, rentals at an $800 rent level were unaffordable to a large number of families.

But it also means that in urban erntal markets, where folks would have signed over their firstborn for a rental at $800 a month two years ago, since many rents were multiples of $800 in price at even that time, most working folks can't really afford to both have a nuclear family and keep a decent roof over their heads. Take a look at the Bay Area as an example:

Bay Area Housing Affordability Data

This was the case all over the country in 2005.

Don't believe me? Well take a look at this map, created with the last-reported national data. . The "lower income colors" predominate all but small financial oasises (oases?) nationwide:

The third thing that one needs to remember is that (according to the reports linked above) nearly 50% of multifamily housing units (apartments, the only thing that's affordable in urban markets) stayed on the market less than 60 days. This meant that it was rented as soon as availability was announced, practically.

In other words, there has historically been nowhere near enough affordable rental housing for who needed it, when they needed it.

But that was in 2005. Before the bottom fell out of the mortgage markets and credit markets, and folks started losing their homes.

You can probably all guess where this is going.

Things are going to get very very ugly.

Because at some point, those homeowners who are being now wiped out (and wiped out they will be, for they will expend everything to try and save their homes) and will be in direct competition for rental housing with those who are lifetime renters, already competing in a expensive rental housing market that has lately required 2-3 minimum wage jobs to keep a decent roof over their heads.

We all know what that means. As is always the case in "free markets", those who have more to spend on rental housing will begin to displace those who have less to spend. Since, in a free market in which there are many renters, few "affordable" units, and almost no governmental controls on landlord pricing or landlord evictions, landlords can afford to "pick and choose" who to rent to. And why would a landlord take or keep a tenant that only just makes the rent payment, who could be late at any moment if they lose their job, when the landlord is now being solicited by families that have more income (even if not enough to be homeowners?) Why would any landlord not do what has been the tried and true method to success in the residential real estate rentals market: rent to the highest bidders with the "best" credit ratings and the most disposible income?

(After all, it's not like we have a right to ask those fortunate enough to earn property to actually *choose* to make less profit off of it for the good of society, or anything socialist/communist like that. This is America, damnit.)

Since we know the past, we know the future, once former homeowners start flooding the rental marketplace again. The poor, with nowhere else to go, because God isn't presently building any more land and the land that was previously built already is built to capacity, will be outmaneuvered, and thus out of the few secure and decent places to live that are available to them. In numbers that nobody knows yet - but will likely rival the dot-com boom, where in places like the Bay Area working folks slept in barns and in cars and in shifts on other people's floors, because there was simply no housing available at all that they could afford to rent.

But who cares about the working poor?

After all, if even before the mortgage crisis hit, many poor renters were still already largely being left out, and across the country decent safe sanitary and affordable housing continued to be out of reach for many working folks, there is no question that as the mortgage crisis continues, the poor will become the transient, the discarded, the homeless, in a free market that encourages property owners to maximize their profits.

The housing crisis dialogue has so far been solely at the owner and investor levels, and Lord knows there is plenty to talk about and to fear at those level, where long-standing working class neighborhoods and communities -- many of color -- are standing on a rug that is slowly being pulled out at one end with everyone standing on it listing and on the verge of toppling. But the analysis can't stop there, because all those millions of homeowners who are facing possible displaement have to have somewhere to go when they don't have homes anymore. And the only place they can go already doesn't do its job of housing working folks at a price most can handle.

Those who are seeing and trying to cope with this crisis know this, which is why after a couple of weeks of watching the financial markets masturbate their players with billions of dollars to keep each other standing, all while those markets are pulling up access to credit faster than a moldy carpet -- and thus guaranteeing that millions will be in crisis when their mortgages reset, are speaking up just a little bit louder about the bottom line:

If this crisis is to be solved, it is the homeowners who must be saved. And fuck the banks, hedge funds, lenders and brokers, unless they are coming to the table to sacrifice of some of their previosuly windfall level profits to make it happen.

Yes, things are so devastating that, at least here in California, non-profits from all sectors, financial to legal, have banded together (which is the Ghostbusters' equivalent of dogs and cats living together; trust me) and called for a six-month moratorium on *all* foreclosures in California until solutions are found. This call was first made in May, when the recorded defaults (the first step in the California foreclosure process) were at around 54,000 for all of 2007.

How time flies in the blink of an eye: With 179,559 new foreclosures being initiated in the United States in the month of July, 2007, California managed to contribute 39,000 foreclosures (72% of the previous annualized total) to that total in a single month.

I'll end with a rant, one that I have been dedicated to for the past 26 years and continue to believe to the depths of my soul:

Decent, Safe, Sanitary and Affordable Housing is not a commodity.

Decent, Safe, Sanitary and Affordable Housing is a Human Right!

Even if you're not a homeowner or investor.

In the Presence of Giants

2007-08-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning, after a bleary-eyed drive up to the City of Berkeley, CA following a night with Lewis Black at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall (in which he advocated for the election of Santa Claus rather than yet another same-old same-old politician labeled Democrat or Republican, or, at a minimum, forcing whoever won to wear the red suit as a unifying force for the country) I began my work day to the sounds of the drums first approaching, and ultimately being played to the heavens by the Youth as they danced into Zellerbach Hall. The conga, the snare, the timbale, of varying rhythm melody yet all nonetheless in harmony with the same, insistent calls. (Polyrhythmic music, as they some it in today's newfangled music labeling language. We used to say "The Drums", knowing exactly what that meant.)

The Drums, as a Call to Action.

And as my body responded -- couldn't help but respond, though Lord Knows that part of me that is bougie TRIED to stay in her auditorium seat along with most of the other "professionals"! -- for 20 minutes of that musical Call to Action, as the bodies of virtually every Black person in the room (and a few whites as well) responded because it is impossible not to respond if you HEAR the drums, I knew I was going to spend the day in the presence of giants.

When was the last time you were at a professional conference that started that way?

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the 4th Annual CraigsList Boot Camp here at Berkeley. The Boot Camp is a one-day training and networking event for non-profit volunteers, employees, and leadership. Having been done in the Bay Area for the past four years, the Boot Camp is now expanding, traveling to other cities, to replicate the synergy that happens when you take thousands of people all separately dedicated to Doing Good in the World and put them all together.

But, as someone said yesterday, the Bay Area is the incubator. The proving ground, for political Calls to Action.

A Call to Action that need not -- should not -- be limited to the non-profit world.

I could write about all the inspiration and practical wisdom I absorbed (and shared in my totally limited way) about Doing Good in the World through non-profit action, including the wry wisdom shared by Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, the central web portal for volunteerism and non-profit community action these days. But as will become clear below, I'm not going to do that.

I can't ignore, however, the fierce luncheon keynote by sister Aimee Allison. It was not just inspiring to those committed to non-profits and the work they do, on the ground in the grassroots (even ringers like me who work for the Man while redistributing as many of his assets as I can through pro bono). Her call to action was *revolutionary*. She pretty much indeed called for revolution even as she did not literally say "revolt!". Revolution against the system, revolution against the boundaries that cause non-profit leaders and organizations to feel they have to "play the game" confusing many of the folks in the audience with her bluntness, revolution against the mindset that one has to sell out one's values and beliefs just to chase the Man's money. Revolution against the war and what it is doing to the youth in Iraq and here at home. Revolution against failure, in light of what is happening to our country in the era of Emperor George W. Bush and the coming descent into economic, if not actual, madness of our country.

And, yes revolution against the mindset that real, political, revolution requires activists to put their energies always towards being "in politics" instead of making the equally activist choice to spend energy and commitment and time locally, doing small good works to create the change we wish to see. Each one, reach one.

(Not bad from a woman who ran for office in Oakland on the Green Party ticket, the Democratic Party choosing to go with the same old, same old broken promises Democratic incumbent, knowing that it would change absolutely nothing for the poor in Oakland and not caring -- because that's how party politics is played.)

Normally I'm sluggish at professional conferences after lunch. Not yesterday.

My only disappointment from the experience is that there were only 50 or 60 or so brothers and sisters to hear Ms. Allison -- or the Drums -- out of an audience of nearly 2,000 in Zellerbach Auditorium yesterday to hear her.

I returned home with a wallet stuffed to the gills with business cards from activists in the non-profit world, because I made a point of meeting as many brothers and sisters going Good Works as I could (as well as dozens of others) . Networking, they call it in the professional world. To be inspired, to offer my firm's legal help to their organizations to those who expressed a need, to simply feel renewed in their presence. And I was renewed. I met brothers who are helping those who have paid their debt to society get reconnected when they are out, leveraging foundation resources to help folks pay their restitution and get jobs and reconnect with the positive aspects of their children and families. I met sisters who were working to try and unite gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and heterosexual brothers and sisters in the common struggle to attack HIV/AIDS in our youth. I met both brothers and sisters whose sole non-profit mission is to inspire youth teaching *them* how to be activists in the grassroots; training them and teaching them to pick up the torch and raise it high.

At the end, I walked out with three energizing principles of non-profit activism laid down at the beginning of the day by the Executive Director of CraigsList Foundation, Darian Rodriguez-Heyman, still playing in my head, along with the drums that never stopped punctuating them all day long:

Pick Big Problems to Bring Into Your Life

Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate

Less is More

I could spend hours writing about how each of these mental slogans resonated with me personally. But that is not necessary - because the important thing is that these simple prescriptions are apt for activism, period, not just in the non-profit world. They are just valid for those of us who blog politically, as they are for those who are in the grassroots.

Perhaps they are even more necessary for Leftist activism than even in the non-profit world, given how much drama, infighting and ego politics plague too many blogs on the Left, these days, lessening the effectiveness of them all and almost destroying some of them. Politics and political blogging is plagued, just as much of the non-profit sector on the Left is, with Drama (with a capital "D"), infighting and ego politics. Things that, no matter how Evil we call our right wing opponents, are far less distracting to them in terms of actualizing their goals than they are to us who are on The Left.

I could write lots more but I am trying to start actually applying wisdom so I am going to try really hard to apply the "less is more" prescription to my blogging. Since lots of folks say that my diaries are Too Long (and thus, as a DailyKOS commenter once said to me having not actually read the diary he was commenting about without actually reading the diary at issue, "nobody is going to read this.")That outcome defeats the purpose of my writing, which is to communicate and inspire and reach out to others who are all fighting the same causes, even if in different ways or with a different emphasis.

So, instead of my usual wordy tactics, I'll just issue a simple call to action to bloggers: get out into the grassroots. Take your activism into our communities, not just to the self-selected Internet which has passion but lacks too often a sense of what it is like to work collaboratively with real people. Quoting the most famous campaign of that infamous sweatshop-enabling athletic shoe company, Nike:

Just Do It.

RIP, Nana Baffour Amankwatia II (Asa G. Hilliard III)

2007-08-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

©Georgia State University

There are names that instantly put me on the Wayback Machine. Back to when I was a young college student, far away from home and for the first time really thinking through who I was and what I believed independently from my family's identity and family's beliefs.

Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard III, reported to have passed at the age of 73 a few days ago in Egypt (possibly from malaria) during the annual ASCAC Conference, is one of those names.

The teachings of Asa Hilliard are some of the foundational pillars of who I am today and my approach to Black issues and Black people. For Dr. Hilliard first exposed me to the idea of Pan-Africanism. Afrocentrism. But far more importantly, Asa Hilliard did not just expose me to these ideas: he then taught me how these concepts mattered, and why they mattered, within the field I thought then would be my career, clinical psychology treating African-American patients.

Not to mention that it was Asa Hilliard who first taught me -- along with other young Black scholars at Stanford in the late 1970's and early 1980's -- about Ma'at.

Asa Hilliard's biography is way too long and impressive for me to accurately cover it all in one diary, so you can find it here. I can only summarize it briefly.

In the field of educational psychology, Dr. Hillard's work was responsible for elimination of mandatory IQ testing of Black children in San Francisco, as he was the first researcher who showed the cultural biases inherent in the examinations, biases that, when children performed poorly because of them, permanently limited the life chances of youth, particularly those Black youth who but for the testing would be identified as "gifted" through other educational measurements.

His dedication to improving the life chances and self-esteem of Black children through education was complete, leading him to co-found the National Black Child Development Institute in 1970, while newly resident at San Francisco State.

In later years, Asa Hilliard argued forcefully for the elimination of all standardized IQ testing, contending that the well-known findings of inherent bias and inaccuracy of IQ testing for students of color were simply evidence of a tracking system that fails in everyone to measure what it claims to measure. He continued to argue for educational psychology's return to models developed to test malleable intelligence as a means of avoiding what he believed was the inherently destructive and limiting messaging of standardized IQ testing on children. This was true even as he believed in a quality public education for children; Dr. Hilliard was an opponent of the charter schools movement, recognizing the racist original motivations of that movement, and urging Black parents in particular not to allow the public schools to be destroyed by those who impetus for creating the movement were grounded in Black inferiority. Instead, he argued that the failure of public education -- even in Black-led school districts -- was fundamentally a failure of will through the denial of resources to do whatever it took to educate children, regardless of socioeconomic status, and that this, and that this -- NOT the poverty of the students -- was where much of the problem with education lay when it came to the underperformance of Black poor children and, indeed, all poor children, in the public schools.

You'd have thought that Dr. Hilliard, being quite busy challenging long-standing orthodoxies in the field of educational psychology that had harmed children's educational progress, would have been too busy to develop an alternative speciality.

You'd have been wrong.

From early in his career, Dr. Hilliard became a profilic researcher and writer about Africa, and Ancient Egypt -- Kemet -- in particular. It was ultimately his pursuit of knowledge in this field that led to his departure from his tenured position at San Francisco State - where he'd served for 18 years, including as Chair of the Education department - to Africa itself, where he lived for several years including in Liberia before returning to accept a tenured position at Georgia State University as Professor of Urban Education.

Each year, he along with other Afrocentric scholars of the Association for the Study of Classic African Civilizations, which Dr. Hilliard helped found, would have their annual conference in Egypt, which would usually conducted on the banks of the Nile itself by Dr. Hilliard and others. The theme of this year's conference, which was as much a spiritual journey as professional conference, was Raising Ma'at to the Height of Heaven, is poignant to me, since it was during this year's conference that the severity of Dr. Hilliard's fatal illness became apparent, and passed several days later, just before his birthday.

I was fortunate enough to have sat in several guest lectures of Asa Hilliard's at Stanford as a psychology student, and to visit his classroom several times while he was a professor at San Francisco State University in educational psychology. The first time I heard him lecture was when he presented his visually assisted lecture, Free Your Mind: Return to the Source, (which later became a television show but, back then in 1978, it was a slide show) an adventure in primary source images of Egypt and ancient African civilizations. What I remember most about Dr. Hilliard's teaching was the simplicity of his thesis as it related to the education of Black children, and their psychological well-being. His central argument, which was that it was necessary to a non-Eurocentric focus on history for the development of self-esteem, and to reconnect children affirmatively with a past, a culture, that we still mimicked today in bits and pieces, by teaching them the greatness of our civilizations in Africa, particular Egypt, which he rightfully pointed out the west has been trying to label to make a non-Black country pretty much forever, given its historical greatness. Everything he said made sense (especially the Egypt part, since when I was growing up we were taught in elementary school that Egypt wasn't even in Africa - and they even showed us a bogus map at least once that I personally remember to prove it.)

What made Dr. Hilliard's teaching forceful and engaging pedagogy for me as a college student was that rather than polemic, Dr. Hilliard insisted to all of us that our mission was not to take what he said as the gospel about Ancient African cultures, the Blackness of Egypt and ancient cultures in the East that we pretend were not influenced by Africa and the attempt to eradicate all visual trace of the nexus between them, the ongoing preservation of aspects of ancient belief systems such as Ma'at from Africa in our culture and their suitability as theoretical foundations for treatment modalities when treating Black people, particularly children. Instead, Dr. Hilliard almost constantly punctuated everything he did and said to us with the admonition to go do the research ourselves, to learn it for ourselves - but that, unlike most folks, we must always always use primary source material for our study.

That is a rule I still try to live by, today. Even as I am no longer pan-African, but an Afrocentric multiculturalist, in my approach today. Even though I am now a lawyer, not a psychologist as planned (or teacher, as Dr. Hilliard once told me I should strongly consider instead during one of the two face-to-face conversations we had, way back in the day, at a mutual friend's home.)

Suffice it to say that while his conclusions about what some of that primary source material meant continue to be a subject of legitimate scholarly debate today, and always likely will be, Dr. Hilliard's insistence upon primary source materials as it related to all things African, including forensic research intended to be used to develop teaching methods for African American children, made him not only unquestionably a solid and honest researcher -- but an expert, in the fields of both psychology and ancient African history.

To say that he lived his life without controversy would be a lie, in the sense that as one of the earliest educators in the field of Pan-African studies, he has always had many fierce mainstream critics (some, but not that many, still attack Dr. Hilliard's work not on the grounds that his theories about education, psychology or the nexus between each and African educational and spiritual methods were unsound, but indirectly, making arguments about scholarly failings in other Afrocentric works such as Stolen Legacy to delegitimize the entire field and everyone working in it.) Given that for some, attacking Afrocentric scholarship has become their life's work, since they are paid handily for it, that's to be expected.

He never let it detract him from the work. And for those who knew Dr. Hilliard, that was to be expected, too. Because he knew how important the work was, for us all, and that our very survival as a people depended on it. This was his way of thinking, and it's hard to argue with it since it makes So. Much. Sense:

No matter where Africans are-on the continent or in the diaspora-our condition is the same. We are on the bottom and descending. The "maafa" [Kiswahili term for "disaster" or "terrible occurrence"] continues to take its toll. We are unconscious, unorganized, unfocused, and lost from our purpose. Our strongest visible leadership is in hot pursuit of minimal narrow goals like 'integration,' 'civil rights,' 'jobs,' 'voter registration,' etc. We seek minimal adjustment and temporary comfort by assimilating to whatever the political, economic and cultural order may be, even when that order is itself in chaos, or driven by values that are anti-African. . . .

When we "dream," we often do not dream original dreams; we merely seek relief from pain. As a result, the dream does not encompass a meaningful plan or strategy which is connected to mobilization. . . .

We do not know who we are, cannot explain how we got here, and have no sense of our destiny beyond mere survival. Most of us hope to hitch a ride on someone else's wagon with no thought whatsoever as to where that wagon may be going. We have no destination of our own. Ask our leadership, ask our women, men or children on the street what our agenda is. Ask them what plans Africans have and what we want to build for ourselves within the next five, ten, twenty-five, seventy-five or one-hundred years? We are so used to having others make long-term plans for us that the idea of our own five-year plan is petrifying to us.

I know that those those like me who were blessed to have ever spent a day learning in rapture and awe of his intellect, your thorough scholarship, and his fierce dedication to the cause of education and psychological health for Black youth, send blessings and thanks to the maker for him, now that he is going Home, having started his journey by passing from this life in the place that all who knew Asa Hilliard understood he loved more than any other - the ancient and beautiful land known as Kemet (Egypt).

For the sparks he lit in generations of students of African descent, like me, all over the world, through his candid words and fierce scholarship in furtherance of the cause of Black people, we can not only give thanks, but commit to keep carrying his very heavy torch and using it to light up the diaspora.

So, Rest in Peace, Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III. Rest in Peace, Nana Baffour Amankwatia II, so named by the Ghanaian village that honored you by renaming. If there was any man living today who I know spent his life in the glad tidings of hard service to the truth, for the benefit of his people, yet still was able to face the scales of Ma'at with his heart truly lighter than her feather, it was you.

The "Silver Lining" of Newark and Black/Latino Conflict

2007-08-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

If I believe the papers, the murders last week of three promising Black youths in Newark (and the attempted murder of a 4th) have come with a silver lining: the community of Newark is, at least for now, united, various factions all setting aside the political differences with everyone from Mayor Cory Booker - who is facing a recall effort from disillusioned constituents. To reports of arch-rival gang members agreeing to (at least for now) lay down their weapons. All have come together, apparently, in grief and commitment to Do Better, going forward.

Glad tidings at one important level.

Yet I am torn. I am torn because of the mixed messages about the value of our people, our youth, depending on whether they are seen as "doing the right thing" or "being a bad seed".

On the one hand, it seems clear that the members of the Newark community have been "shocked" into the welcome understanding that, despite their differences, they are a community. Thus, when violence comes after one, it comes after all. The attack is on everyone.

On the other hand, I grieve -- I cringe -- reading that somehow, overnight, that with the murders of these college-bound children, the Newark community has found unity that only days ago it utterly lacked.

IMO, that sense of community should not be affected by the fact that the attack was on "the best and brightest", especially when the victims are the youth. Or -- and this is the part about which I know reasonable minds will disagree -- even when the perpetrators are.

Perhaps some of that unity would have been well-spent on the children who allegedly murdered them beforehand. Or well-spent in the future, as the community heals itself.

But why does it take the senseless death of our "good kids" to accomplish a sense of unity and family in our communities? Are we without meaning to sending the message that "bad kids" deserve to die -- and thus, because they are "less deserving", it is just "same old same old" when they are murdered? Are the only legitimate "victims" in a situation like this those that did not succumb to "badness"?

It seems to me, from where I sit in my 'hood, that so many kids who are victimizers are also themselves victims from an early age: victims of poverty, victims of confused messaging, victims of an "I got mine, get yours" culture, victims of a society that will spend billions in tax dollars to punish them but almost nothing to support and nurture them growing up, victims simply of folks not feeling that they were a priority, when it came from everything from time to taxes.

Take the kids who are reported to have been in the majority of the killing group in the Newark playground last week, for example.

I do not know much about the murderers arrested in connection with the Newark slayings - so far, there isn't much written about them, other than that they were Latino gangbangers or wannas affiliated with (or claiming, even if not formally jumped into) MS-13.

(Those who have any meaningful experience in the 'Hood understand, I bet, that there is a likely correlation between the suspects signing MS-13, and the fact that the college students were not just murdered, but executed. No matter how much the mainstream media believes politicians and law enforcement who insisting that "we don't know" that the Newark murderers were really gangbangers and that it seems like it "was just a robbery."

Here's my educated guess, as someone who once was solicited to join a gang - New York's La Familia, open to me then only because I had a Puerto Rican sweetie - 3 decades ago: The young victims were picked by what all agree was a "gang" to fulfill what they perceived as a precondition of formally entering into "family." Maybe it was indeed the Mara Salvatrucha, which like the Bloods and Crips and Sureños and Nortenos and all the other modern versions of "gang", usually demands blood for blood; demands the murder of innocents to show the ultimate loyalty to "family".

Stranger blood, when you can get it.

It's sad when one can look back with nostalgia on the days where gang initiation was simply a matter of getting your butt whupped. Not that I ever experienced it, because I declined my one invitation and, back in the day, you could actually do that and live.)

But either way, I grieve for the children involved here. I grieve for their mothers. And fathers. Both those children who were murdered and those who did the murdering.

How can we not grieve for a 15 year old who has thrown his life away when it's reported that even as he went out to commit madness with his "crew", he was perceived by people as being forced to accompany them, because he was in tears? Is a child like that really "bad" -- so bad that we are given no pause by the fact that his life has now ended figuratively as he was taking literal life? According to the news, 1/2 of the suspects in the Newark murder were younger than the people they killed.

That has to make you sleep worse at night.

(I do not know what to make of the ringleader who fired the first shots, and apparently also managed to squeeze in shaking down terrified residents and raping a 5-year old in his spare time, all at the ripe old age 28. I know that it was not that long ago that 28 seemed old, to me. Mature. Now, nearly 18 years past that point myself, it seems just barely out of childhood. Perhaps because it's not that much older than my eldest child.)

The second reason that I have mixed feelings is not about childhood, but about the fact that Newark's new found community unity does not yet appear to confront that in Newark and elsewhere, cultures are colliding. I admit that this story of apparently random murder of "good kids" in Newark (which already rocked me very hard coming right on the heels of the Chauncey Bailey murder) rocked me to the core when I learned of the ethnic identity of the assailants. Because this story is getting too familiar for those who keep up with news in urban areas out here in California.

There are some Latino folks out there who are killing Black folks. Because they are Black.

This phenomena, which most argue is Mexican-Mafia prison culture spilling out into the streets, has been one of those ugly "keep under the rug" secrets about the members of two downtrodden communities colliding in Los Angeles for several years now. And, for want of a better term, one of them negotiating space and neighborhood primacy through violence. Some have referred to it as "ethnic cleansing", this upsurge of Latino murderers purposefully targeting African-American victims. It certainly gives one pause, especially when one realizes that in LA, the pressure cooker for this type of heinousness at the moment -- police are telling Black folks not to go certain places -- Canoga Park, most recently -- else they place their lives at risk, that's how out of hand it's gotten.

I don't know yet that it's ethnic cleansing, and agree with those who say that the phrase is now being deliberately misused by white supremacists to further their own anti-immigrant agendas. On the other hand, what do you call it when folks of one ethnicity are targeting strangers for random violence based on their Black skin, as cannot be denied is an increasing phenomena? If even the Southern Poverty Law Center -- which has made a mission out of following what it deems hate crimes -- is concerned, the rest of us need to be as well. Those who claim that this is nothing more than "gangs killing gangs" are ignoring, accidentally or otherwise, that some of the victims have nothing to do with gangs, (such as the 14-year old girl Cheryl Griffin murdered in January, or the homeless brother killed in Highland Park.) Even if any victims of these targeted hits do have gang-affiliations, that fact does not obviate the truth if any of them were also marked for death based on their race.

Or does it, in a world where we unite as a community over the death of "good kids" but seem not to care much about the ongoing death of "bad" ones?

I am given pause by the fact that those trying to put the lid on the "ethnic cleansing" narrative are spending so much time dismissing it all on the grounds that "it's just gang members."

So, one has to ask: in light of the execution-style manner in which the four youths in Newark were killed by what all agree was a Latino gang (whether or not it is MS-13; that's totally secondary) over what the police want us to believe is a simple robbery, is the jockeying for position that is infecting LA now spreading to other urban centers cities where Blacks and Latinos share not only their downtrodden conditions vis a vis the man, but living boundaries as well?

Damn, I certainly hope not.

For the record, I don't see what is going on in LA as "ethnic cleansing" so much as jockeying for position using the same anti-Black mindset as has historically plagued new arrivals to our American shores - this time around aided by the lethality of freely-available guns. Jockeying done by entire generations who have learned both that in America, the bottom of the heap continues to be Black folks (Native Americans excepted; everyone continues to forget them) *and* that when one has no real prospects in life, power is most often wielded most effectively from the business end of a gun.

The same impetus that causes ignorant Black folks to target victims for crime based on assuming they are illegal immigrants, based solely on their visual Latino ethnicity.

It seems to me that of all the aspects of long-delayed community unity now evidencing themselves in Newark, we need to encourage another dimension of unity from in this horrific crime that unites Blacks and Latinos -- in a good way -- through the common fact that no matter what the motives, it is our youth ("good kids" and "bad kids") whose lives are swirling down the drain.

Do we even have any common purpose, Blacks and Latinos in America? I always believed we did, even though I do not agree that the common purpose needs to be furthered through turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, which no serious researcher now disputes adversely impacts unskilled and low-skilled African-American workers no matter how much well-meaning white liberals insist differently without citing any evidence and by ascribing -- backhandedly -- to racist shibboleths regarding the inferior work habits of Black folks. I think one could discuss the answer to that question "What is our common purpose" all day long, and have a million views emerge. And we probably need to do just that.

But it seems to me that one common purpose is self-evident and is a true basis for unity no matter what else is going on with economic competition. All competition for jobs and power and status in America aside, and there's lots of it right now, Blacks and Latinos still both clearly have the common purpose of seeing our not-white children grow up, thrive and survive in a racist society.

I hope everyone can agree that our youth killing each other is not exactly the way we're going to get there.

Social Science Permission for the Segregated Residential Status Quo

2007-08-12T22:05:00.000-07:00

(As a major hat tip, if you ever want to find news affecting Black folks that evades folks like me who are always burning the candle at both ends, you cannot do much better on the 'Net than Prometheus6. His page is a must-read for me whenever I can.)

I'm thanking P6 because but for him it would likely been a while before I found the article he linked from the Boston Globe about the latest research findings from Hah-vad:

Diversity is bad for communities.

(At least, in the short- and medium-run)

Whether purposeful or simply fortuitous social science timing (I assume the latter), it didn't take long for someone to announce empirical data to psychically reinforce the emotional message of the Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved with Community Schools vs. Seattle School Dist. #1 that segregated schooling resulting from white flight/white residential segregation was not a problem for which a legal remedy should exist. That someone is Robert Putnam of the Saguaro Seminar, Harvard's think tank on civic engagement. And now, sure enough, we have empirical evidence suggesting that indeed neighborhood homogeneity -- including racially segregated neighborhoods -- has real benefits and diverse neighborhoods come with a real down side. Specifically, according to the research the down side of diversity is that mixed/diverse communities are characterized, according to Putnam's research with all of the following indications of social ill:

Reduced levels of voting

Reduced volunteerism

Reduced charitable giving

Reduced levels of neighborly trust

Increased television watching!

One has to give Putnam credit as a studiously honest researcher. Reading between the lines (because he never says why he chose to do the study but the repeated focus throughout on immigration policy and heavy citation to researchers whose work is in the area of immigration belies an original agenda) it appears that Putnam set out to prove that the diversity created by mass immigration was a net benefit to communities. Then, when his data came in showing the opposite of his null hypothesis, instead of freaking, he published anyway, admitting that he is seeking to have peer review provide criticism for his new hypothesis that diversity reduces "social capital" in the short- and medium term in all United States communities he sampled.

That takes guts.

(He also appears to have hammered away testing the robustness of his data before taking a position when it first appeared inconsistent with both his hypothesis and his "common sense". That doesn't happen much anymore and it's very nice to see.)

Putnam also gets major credit as a researcher for realizing that the reasons for the phenemona he observed -- what he calls "hunkering down" in diverse communities, accompanied by a reduction and/or lack of either engagement with, of trust between, diverse neighbors -- may be for very different reasons depending on whose behavior you are looking at and when in time you are looking at it. He is especially honest when he notes that that immigrants are not immune to these phenomena (even as he tries to give them a pass on anti-Black sentiment, consistent with most immigrants who deal with the question; no surprise there) and that issues relating to African-Americans may well have their genesis in white supremacy/historical discrimination as much as anything else. Even though the purpose of Putnam's research, and this publication, was clearly NOT to answer the question "Why?" so much as identify the phenomena he saw.

(Of course, nobody ever asks "Why" when it comes to interracial relations in America. It's too loaded a question in a country busy trying to elect a Black man president (or at least one who is 1/2 Black, since so many of his non-Black supporters keep bringing up his white mama) so they can, finally -- where dealing with structural institutionalized racism and white supremacy is concerned -- sing "Free at last, free at last - racism is officially dead we are free at last".)

All snark aside, reading the actual white paper (which I encourage everyone to do by clicking this link) Putnam clearly realizes that his data raise a number of questions about American social policy as it has been advanced by liberals over the past 45 years, but none so clearly as the idea of diversity and integration providing an immediate benefit for Americans and America as a whole. Putnam seems almost afraid of talking about this too much, perhaps because it violates orthodoxy for those on the left spectrum of politics. Yet it is clear that he is also afraid of his unexpected findings being misused by evil people for evil, hateful purposes, such as undoing the clock on racial progress. The tension between both feelings is, IMO, what leads to the most quotable quote in the entire white paper:

It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity. It would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conservatism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both feasible and desirable.

Given the number of times that Putnam emphasizes points for which he cannot cite empirical support yet outside of the work place (such as his claim that nearly 1/2 of folks now worship in integrated churches, particularly evangelical metachurches; and his suggestion that historically immigrants didn't *really* take on hatred of Blacks as a condition of "becoming white"; it was just a coincidence - obviously he has not read much of the rhetoric of the times) it seems evident that he still wants to believes that in the long-term, diversity is a net benefit, a social good. And he cites longitudinal work done in other countries to highlight this, perhaps knowing that at present, he can cite no American data to support the claim.

I think it's fair to say that most well-meaning folks share his hope and his view about the future, when it comes to diversity in our country.

But I'm not sure it matters much. We all know that, in keeping with the rule "Make hay while the sun shines" that Putnam's work is going to bring joy to the hearts of both hard core white supremacists and guilty white liberals (who were most of the ones that engaged in white flight out of the Northeastern cities) all over America.

Given that we now know that the death knell of civic engagement (at least in the short-term and medium-term horizon; nobody has said when the long-term benefits will start kicking in) is trying to live next to folks not like you, it's apparent that the Supreme Court had the ultimate right of it when it disavowed any compelling state interest in integrated education and has fully embraced the idea of grave harm in compulsory integration when one is faced with residential segregation in white-flight communities.

The science says so.

Thus, with this study collectively whites (and wanna's; increasingly in this country some non-white immigrants treat Blacks no better than the descendants of Europeans do, to the point where they are also engaging in anti-Black employment discrimination, and occasionally outright anti-Black violence) now effectively have permission to continue doing something that they have been doing ever since the Warren Court's jurisprudence started undoing de jure segregation in the 1950's -- make sure that they live away from more than a handful of Black folks. While now being able to actually cite reasons that have nothing to do with the usual "code" for "I don't want to live near too many Black people".

It's for the good of the community, you see.

So, since we have no idea when all the long-term benefits of diverse neighborhoods will start kicking in, it seems to me that we must come to grips with the fact that what we thought was doing the right thing in trying to integrate may in fact be diametrically opposed to the right thing.

At the neighborhood level, anyhow.

But.....Setting aside legitimate fears that the reactions to this study will be the same as they were to the 1960's Moynihan paper contendng basically that Black folks' problems all came them being trapped in a "tangle of pathology" pretty much from birth and that -- with deteriorating conditions for most Black folks today -- we'll soon be in yet another era in which "Blacks' only problem is their inferiority" becomes the public justification for ongoing racism, I think the Putnam study nonetheless has a silver lining for the advocates of diversity.

For example, even though it does not itself study this particular subject, after a brief review of the literature Putnam does does offer one extremely positive conclusion about diversity:

There is scientific consensus that in the most intellectually-stimulated workplaces, diversity is a must to achieve the best professional solutions.

In other words, it seems clear that the best thing for American businesses and the workplace is precisely the opposite of what is going on right now and historically, where race-based employment discrimination has been relatively unabated. There is increasingly no remedy for such discrimination, because the standard of proof under existing law is increasingly unfavorable to worker claims of covert discrimination --with a small death knell coming in the Supreme Court's most recent narrowing of the jurisdictional period for wage discrimination in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire. With fewer and fewer cases being resolved through either of the two federal agencies responsible: the almost-crippled-since-2001 EEOC (private employment/contracting) or OFCCP (for federal government employment/contracting), which presently has an estimated 50,000 case backlog, one can only hope to fall on a larger social good to make the case that we should keep fighting to diversify the workplace.

This, it seems to me, give us here in America that larger social good and presents an excellent opportunity for a win-win situation.

I'm willing to move forward with new ideas instead of relying on the old ones that are clearly failing Black folks, largely across the board, and have only driven white racism underground and into the subconscious rather than eradicate it from American hearts. Anything for a change. Boldness is, it seems to me, required.

So, therefore, for what it is worth I hereby officially assuage all white folk henceforth of any guilt they might have quietly felt because they turned tail and ran to the politically and racially homogeneous suburbs from whatever neighborhoods Black folks moved into at more density than the average raisin in a bowl of vanilla ice cream the minute we reached the raisin tipping point (statistically, something between 5 and 20% of the population.) They are from this moment free from any obligation to let us live next door, go to their schools or hang out at their social gatherings (even though their college students seem hell bent on making sure we attend their parties -- at least in spirit!)

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be willing to make a deal: white folks will ensure that the majority of Black folks who are educated and play by the rules can finally get decent jobs at fair pay across the board (finally!) commensurate with their skills and ability despite the obstacles for Blacks still firmly embedded in Corporate America when it comes to breaking the glass ceiling into positions of power and authority, such that law abiding Black job applicants get treated worse than white criminals, and without regard to little things like whether we have Black sounding names. In exchange, Black folks will continue to live in racially-segregated neighborhoods with each other and eschew henceforth worrying about whether white students are in our schools, or worrying about having to come together to do things like stump during election time for our favorite candidate or collect funds for the local library. And we'll all be a lot better off, because we'll all be apparently watching way less TV. In other words, we're one big happy family during the day when folks are taking care of business and getting things done, and at night nobody will ever again have to worry that someone not like them will be observed through the peephole knocking on the door needing to borrow a cup of sugar at the end of the work day.

For those households like mine in which multiple races live in the same home, we get our pick about where to live, simply because we got it going on like that.)

I can't think of too many Black folks that would turn that type of proposal down, can you?

RIP and Thank You, Oliver Hill

2007-08-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

(Hat tip and props to Lilith who posted this comprehensive honoraria of Oliver Hill's life when the first news broke; I'm now posting the draft I had to abandon because work called, as always!)

Oliver White Hill, the last of the titans who brought the original desegregation cases consolidated in the now-moribund Brown v. Board of Education passed this week, at the age of 100.

Oliver W. Hill is not one of those names that most folks think of when they think of Brown. The late Justice Thurgood Marshall is usually who folks remember. Occasionally, they remember the master strategist Charles Hamilton Houston who mentored Justice Marshall, as well.
Yet Oliver Hill was bringing desegregation cases just as long as Justice Marshall, having been in the same Howard Law School Class - the Class of 1933.

Beginning in the 1930's, from his home state of Virginia, Oliver W. Hill was fighting the good fight, to provide busing for Black students to access better schools, funding for Black school facilities and texts that were equal to that received by whites, you name it. Yet most would contend that his highest and best work was in taking the case that begame his contribution to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS. Hill's case, Davis v. Prince Edward County was ultimately one of the four consolidated separate but equal cases addressed by the Supreme Court's decision Brown v. Board of Education holding segregated schools to be inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional.

For those who study the civil rights movement, Hill's name is recognized, quietly, as one of the original heroes when it came to desegregation litigation in the US, being awarded with the Springarn Medal award in 2005, for example, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999. Oliver Hill remained a practicing lawyer advocating for civil rights and civil liberties until he was 90, even after he became wheelchair bound, and lost his sight. Rumor has it that although Hill had gotten frail over his passing years, he could still recall the cases he brought as if they were the day before. (That's a Big Deal, to me. I know I don't have that much game, and I'm only 1/2 way to 90.....God bless that type of commitment.)

But a household name he is not.

I'm not sure he ever wanted or needed to be. If you look at Oliver Hill's most prominent case, the Davis case, you see many parallels between how he practiced law and the clients he practiced law for. I see the synergies because the Davis stemmed from the actions of another hero(ine) of the civil rights movement --whose name is often forgotten today -- a young teenager named Barbara Johns.

In 1951, Barbara Johns was a 16 year old who was sick and tired of being sick and tired of the degraded physical conditions, lack of funding and lack of college-oriented course offerings at her Black high school, Moton High School, compared to the white high school in her town, Farmville, Virginia. After black parents tried and failed repeatedly to persuade the county to equalize funding and facilities, young Ms. Johns took matters into her own hands. Showing strategic skills that some of our US military generals could probably learn from, she organized and led a strike of 450 high school students which lasted for weeks.

This strike caught the attention of the NAACP, and Oliver Hill, and (with the students' permission that their case could seek to obtain integrated schools, not just equal funding) led to Hill's filing the Davis case. As history confirms, they lost, with the Virginia courts embracing segregation so long as there was equality - all the way to the US Supreme Court, which reversed all over courts in its holding that segregated education was inherently unequal.

Yet when it was over, Barbara Johns did not hit the lecture circuit, end up on television, or gain any prominence. Neither did Oliver Hill. Both kept working at what they did best, what they had fought for from the beginning. And, so, just as Barbara Johns died in 1991 a small town librarian, Oliver White Hill passed as a well-regarded, yet still in the trenches rather than in the spotlight, Virginia lawyer. Neither of them having ever apparently sought the limelight and fame that their bravery and willingness to attack the status quo on behalf of Black folks would have given them a right to.

Especially after Prince Edward County, furious over what began as Barbara Johns and 116 other student plaintiffs going to the Courthouse with Oliver Hill as their NAACP lawyer and ended with a commandment from the US Supreme Court to desegregate and a series of court decisions shutting down all of Virginia's facile attempts to avoid that, shut down its entire public school system for five years in a collective act of racist defiance aka "massive resistance" rather than comply with Brown -- an act that Prince Edward County apologized for only four years ago and for which reparations in the form of scholarships were provided -- but only after advocated fiercely by a guilty, private white citizen for depriving more than 1,000 Black children the free and appropriate education to which they were entitled.

Oliver Hill remained in the trenches in Virginia that entire time, continuing to fight to desegregate schools, work and other places where racism limited life chances for Blacks in Virginia. His role in the national movement towards desergregation largely unknown today, except to those who followed.

Despite him not being known to everyone, Oliver W. Hill was nonetheless a central figure in our legal history as a people here in the United States struggling for equality in the 20th Century, and we should honor his memory. Reasonable minds can and do differ on whether desegregation efforts were truly worth the sacrifices, especially now that Brown as precedent has been gutted using its very own words in that twisted, facile display of right-wing reasoning engaged in by the Roberts Court in Parents Involved with Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. #1. But there's something to be said for the view held by Oliver Hill, who once contended: without Brown as the philosophical foundation, Dr. King's subsequent work likely would not have stood a chance. That may very well be the truth.

A nice way to honor Oliver White Hill, if you are so inclined, would be to donate to the Oliver Hill Foundation, formed in 2000 to support young law students who wish to work furthering the causes of civil rights and civil liberties through law. Or, check out Hill's autobiography, The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education (available through the Foundation). We need to support institutions of this type -- owned and managed by those with the most at stake -- which funnel cash and support to those up and comings who will have to carry on the work, but might need a little help, in the field of law.

Two Black Institutions, and One Black Future, Murdered in One Hit

2007-08-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

(Photo © Oakland Post, Archives)

On Thursday, the news was abuzz from the moment I got in my car, heading to work. A Black community hero had been gunned down right here in the Bay Area. Shot in broad daylight by a masked gunman while walking to his job at 7:30 AM. His name was Chauncey Bailey, Editor in Chief for the African-American newspaper in Oakland, the Oakland Post. News Director for SoulBeat, the East Bay public-broadcast television program aimed at Black folks.

(Photo ©Trace3, Flickr.com (2007))

On Friday, the news was abuzz from the moment I got in my car, heading to work. There was a hardcore police raid going on in Oakland, which had cordoned off San Pablo Avenue, one of two major thoroughfares. At the time I was listening) to the radio, 15 out of 19 people had been arrested on warrants for kidnapping, murder and other heinous crimes. This was the news about the raid on The Your Black Muslim Bakery, a fixture in the Oakland community for four decades, having been opened during the heyday of Black Power by a man who called himself "Dr. Yusuf Bey", a member of the original Nation of Islam under the Hon. Elijah Muhammad.

It was only hours later the KGO folks came out and said straight what they'd been hinting in their usual sensationalist coverage all morning: these two events were related.

And so it was. Because, yesterday, we learned that a 19-year old named Devaughndray Broussard -- a baby younger than 2 of my children, and a handyman at the Your Black Muslim Bakery -- had confessed to murdering Chauncey Bailey, because he was being "good soldier" of the Your Black Muslim Bakery.

(Photo ©Oakland Tribune (2007))

So with just a couple of shotgun blasts, two community institutions and yet another tiny piece of our people's future went to their literal and figurative death.

When Chauncey Bailey was taken out early Thursday morning, in a broad daylight hit, nobody knew why, although if you knew anything about Oakland you knew that Chauncey Bailey had pissed off a lot of people in his decades as a reporter: gangbangers, government officials, corrupt folks generally, you name it. He was Old School Black and by all accounts a reporter fiercely dedicated to getting the news to the Black community despite several adversities, professionally and personally (although he was engaged to be married). I personally first heard of Bailey in around 2002, when I was really beginning to focus my professional attention almost exclusively on subprime mortgage lending and the systematic targeting of predatory mortgages, predatory mortgage servicing, and predatory mortgage brokering on African-American homeowners, especially here in the Bay Area. Chauncey Bailey wrote repeatedly about subprime lending and the grassroots efforts by community organizations, like ACORN to help communities like Oakland that were targeted for these bogus loans loans long, long before the MSM started finally caring six months ago when mortgage companies started failing en masse and financial giants like Bear Stearns were melting down from their aggressive willingness to securitize subprime and Alt-A mortgage backed securities, including through sales to hedge funds.

(As a totally unrelated aside, can I get a "Poor Baby!" for the recent troubles of Bear Stearns, parent company of EMC Mortgage Company, rumored to be one of the worst predatory mortgage servicers according to those who keep track of complaints and lawsuits, to the point where even those in the federal government whose theoretical job it is to look into this type of stuff (Federal Trade Commission) actually had to pay at least some attention? No? Well, OK then =))

When the story of Chauncey Bailey's murder first broke, nobody knew exactly why Bailey had been killed, or by whom, but it was shocking, to say the least, though - because Bailey commanded such respect as a reporter, even from those folks whose feet he'd previously held to the fire. Besides, reporters don't usually get killed in the line of duty (except in places like Iraq), right?

Well, maybe they do. Even worse, maybe they do by people who you'd think, from their history, were on the same side as them.

As appears to be the case with the murder of the pro-Black Chauncey Bailey, at the hands of a "good soldier" for the pro-Black Your Black Muslim Bakery.

The story of the Your Black Muslim Bakery's descent into madness from its glory days is depressing, indeed. Founded by Yusuf Bay, Sr. and moved to Oakland in 1971, the Your Black Muslim Bakery was initially a neighborhood bakery selling the usual bean pies, carrot cakes and other Muslim foods. Its founder said that he was trying to serve as a positive influence and role model to Black people, encouraging our entrepreneurial spirit and the ideals of self-reliance. Thus, Bey, through the Bakery, did all the things that Black-empowerment oriented people at the time tried to do. Fed people. Sponsored community education classes, including in particular religious classes associated with the Nation of Islam. Stuff like that.

One thing that it also did was take in young brothers coming from the prisons having paid their debts to society, and gave them housing they could afford and jobs when no one else would. Those who did well, and raised themselves up, were apparently ultimately permitted to take on the family surname, "Bey". And a number of young men over the years did.

The Your Black Muslim Bakery grew over time into a financial empire, with more than a dozen businesses and various contracts, including with the Oakland Airport. The Bey family, biological and non-, ultimately controlled a multimillion dollar enterprise that nonetheless served as a community institution in the East Bay at the same time. Its actions and reputation was beloved by much of the grassroots in Oakland.

Yet over time, there developed a dark reputation associated with the bakery and, in particular, some of the men who made up the Bey clan. Rumors of assault, kidnapping, and other scurrilous behavior circulated. All hell started breaking loose in 2003, when Yusuf Bay, Sr. was accused of having molested and raped four young women over a period of 20 years, having fathered several of their children.

I know those of us who know our history will realize that this type of scandalous behavior with young impressionable girls sounds depressingly familiar.

Bey, Sr. was facing trial for charges relating to one of them when he died following complications for colon cancer surgery in October 2003. Bey, Sr.'s death appears to have been the beginning of the end for the Your Black Muslim Bakery as a legitimate community institution. (Indeed, today there is still a "Coming Soon!" notice on the page of the bakery's website intended for his obituary, 4 years after Bey, Sr.'s death.) Within four months after Bey, Sr.'s death, his named-successor and CEO of the Your Black Muslim Bakery businesses, Waajid Bey, disappeared and was later found buried in the Oakland Hills, murdered. Antar Bey, Yusuf Sr.'s son, was gunned down in what was deemed an attempted carjacking, a few months later. That led to 19-year old Yusuf Bey, IV becoming the heir to the business empire created as a vehicle of Black empowerment.

Perhaps because at 19 most people don't know anything about business, the organization's downward spiral accelerated at that point. In late 2005, Yusuf IV decided that he'd personally had enough with liquor sales in the Black community - a sentiment many would agree with. So he reportedly led a bunch of equally young and foolish folks into several immigrant-owned liquor stores in Oakland and proceeded to trash them if he found out that the owners were Muslims, saying that drinking was against Islam. Bey IV managing to get himself caught on videotape in the process and, thus, arrested and charged with vandalism and hate crimes (because of the religious targeting) to boot. Not satisfied, a few months later he allegedly tried to run a bouncer over with his car after being ejected from a nightclub/strip joint, and ended up charged with attempted murder.

Obviously, this type of youthful exuberance left young Yusuf Bey IV too busy to actually run the business. It therefore makes perfect sense that he ran it into the ground, such that last year, the bakery ended up in Chapter 11, staving off its creditors. (Unfortunately, because the bakery reportedly wasn't forthcoming in bankruptcy with its books, that case was involuntarily converted to Chapter 7 recently.) Meaning that, even before the nightmare of Thursday and Friday, the bakery, and its glorious legacy, was truly finished.

Chauncey Bailey was working on a story about the Your Muslim Bakery when he was murdered. Speaking truth to power, and carrying on the earlier tradition of the East Bay Express in exposing the ugly and criminal side of the Bey empire. Just as he'd done regularly where corruption was concerned.

This time, it cost Chauncey Bailey his life. At the hands of his own people, who claimed to be serving the same community he was serving, for the same stated reasons: love of, and service to, the Black community.

And it is that depressing, painful, fact that caused me to spend my entire Sunday researching and writing this admittedly-long piece.

I have to ask: Has the wanton devaluation of life and community that has routinely been dismissed as "ghetto" and the result of a "dysfunctional underclass" now become so entrenched that it will now reach out to claim our most venerable institutions and beloved voices? Are we witnessing the cooptation of instruments of Black power, for the same twisted purposes -- silencing our most important voices speaking truth to power, out of nothing more than ego and greed -- as we accused the Man of having? And will it again lead to the utter devaluation and delegitimization of our community institutions which, at least in part, did try to do some good even if the flawed human beings in charge of them also did some evil?

If that happens, what happens to our people's hope?

It hurts to ask questions like this about why Chauncey Bailey's life ended on Thursday morning. Why the Bakery now stands as a symbol of Oakland's shame instead of its Black pride. It really does. But despite I think we who love Black people simply have to ask questions like that.

Because if we do not, ghosts of Malcolm X's assassination 42 years ago, also at the hands of folks who had peripheral association with the Nation of Islam, following what they thought was the lead of Minister Farrakhan (who admitted his rhetoric saying that Malcolm basically "deserved to die" for publicly criticizing Elijah Muhammad for hypocrisy -- also with young girls/women -- and breaking off the Nation created the climate which ultimately led to Malcolm's X's death) may raise up yet again to slay Black folks coming together as a pragmatic solution to our problems, yet again.

For the record, the thuggish-ruggish rogues posing as members of the Nation of Islam by dressing like members of the Nation claim that they are not in fact affiliated with the real Nation of Islam led by Minister Farrakhan, and the Nation says the same thing. They say they are, instead, Black Muslims.

I've been alive 46 years and lived in various hoods the entire time. Somebody please tell me what the difference is, if you're not like me and willing to give up hours at a time just to make sure you know who is who?

Anyhow, everyone says the Nation and "Black Muslims" have nothing to do with each other, and I pray that's true. I need it to be true even as I have real disagreements with the Nation of Islam's beliefs, belief in ridiculous science-defying fantasies such as Yacub's Tale at the top of the list. But to date, I have never heard of the Nation of Islam being associated with hating and violence and brutality on anyone, all white folks' baseless and guilty projections whenever they think about the Fruit of Islam and potential violence notwithstanding. Never.

Except once: in connection with the alleged conspiracy to assassinate Malcolm X by members of the Nation of Islam, all who I suspect *thought* they were doing the right thing by ending the life of someone they perceived brought "dishonor" to the Nation.

Is the Bey crew going to claim the same thing? Chauncey Bailey was certainly not Malcolm X, after all. He was a reporter, and a media man. Yet he was also a staunch believer in serving the underserved community with news, from a Black perspective and, in his local Oakland way, a hero and visionary. So in that sense, he was indeed very much like our beloved El Hajj Malik al Shabazz: a needed voice for our community who was willing to work hard out of love for our people.

And yet Chauncey Bailey has now fallen at the hands of a young man who apparently had struggled long and hard, finding a "family" at the Your Black Muslim Bakery. A young man who, as so many youth do today, let his sense of absolute loyalties to the organization he felt had lifted him up get in the way of that common sense which says you don't go killing folks just because they say something you don't like, following a leader (Yusuf Bey, IV) of the same generation who, apparently, doesn't realize the difference between self-defense and violent thuggery when it comes to making an otherwise perfectly-legitimate political point about the ongoing exploitation of, and harm to, Black communities through the liquor store industry. A young man raised under the gang-mentality ethos, making it all about your crew, right or wrong, who said he was just "being a good soldier" when he killed Chauncey Bailey on Thursday. A young man who was, thus, willing to murder someone old enough to be his father in cold blood on the street trying to save "face" for those persons who he had embraced, because they had first embraced him.

History hasn't exactly repeated itself, but the parallels shouldn't be ignored, either.

I'm going to end with a personal rant, and plea, knowing that precious few will see it but it will make me feel better nonetheless. It has to do with all these newfangled "Black Power" organizations that don't emerge with their own identities, but vamp on the glorious institutions of our collective past.

This posing of young brothers behind the identities of legitimately-established Black Power organizations in order to now claim to speak for Black folks PISSES ME OFF. We have these folks associated with the Your Black Muslim Bakery, who claim they are "Black Muslims" but not part of the Nation of Islam. Yet they purposefully dress just like members of the Nation, to the point where if you could have copyrighted the trademark suit and bowtie back in the 1940's, the Nation could now sue these folks for trademark infringement. And we have the so-called "New Black Panther Party", reportedly founded by Nation of Islam reject the late Khalid Abdul Muhammad, an organization so scandalous in its hatred and ignorance that the Huey P. Newton Foundation, heir to the father of the REAL Black Panther Party, felt compelled to call the New Black Panther Party out publicly as posers and deem their beliefs antithetical to the values and beliefs of the Black Panther Party.

In other words, the youth have utterly, completely, misread the messages of the Old School revolutionaries, and appear to be torn schizophrenically between a genuine desire to help Black people and the the New School cultural values they were born and raised in, where rage and selfishness and pettiness are allowed to cause them to do and say Stupid Simplistic Shit. Stupid Simplistic Shit that sets the cause of all of us back.

(Case in point - what sane pro-Black organization would actually unconditionally *support* "No Snitching" when it is clearly resulting in the escalation of unsolved murders of Black women, men and children all over this country and people feeling imprisoned in their homes out of fear by thugs? Answer: None - yet the "New Black Panther Party" does, just so they can "stick it to the man" aka the cops. See NBPP Platform Point #7.)

These "new school" organizations, by failing to establish their legitimacy and through their tomfoolery, run the risk of delegitimizing for the larger society Black folks legitimate claims to freedom with their anger and rage and acting out as opposed to work and sacrifice and education of our communities. Because they don't have no sense.

Senate Democrats Choke on Bush's Brass Cojones - AGAIN

2007-08-04T08:50:00.000-07:00

From the moment I heard yesterday that George Bush had decreed "No vacation if you don't pass a covert wiretapping bill I will sign" I knew how it would go down. Odds were better than 75% that there would be a brief public theatre of outrage, followed by quick capitulation by enough Democrats to ensure that Bush got exactly what he demanded and folks would still be on time for their "recess parties".

And, sure enough, that's exactly how it went down in the Senate, which voted to approve the Republican covert spying bill by a vote of 60-32 thanks to the help of 16 Democrats.

Not even a serious kerfluffle: it was over before I got home from work.

So, as predicted, thanks to Democrats we have from the Senate express reauthorization of Bush's originally-covert wiretapping program, an evil assault on the Constitution adeptly renamed to assuage the ignorant, as all anti-citizen programs implemented by the Bush Administration have been:

I give Bush, much as I despise the man, credit for one thing: he has balls of steel. He knew that on the question of covert wiretapping, he had neither the support of the courts nor the American people. And everyone else knew that Bush needed Congress to sign off on the program because -- even when writing in secret as the FISA court has been -- his DOJ has gotten pimpslapped hard over the wiretapping program at least a few times by the courts now, starting with the fiery decision issued by the Honorable Anna Taylor Diggs last August (a sister's sister, show her some love.) Yet, as most good hustlers do when they are backed into a wall, Bush took a public position as if he was packing political AK-47's in both hands loaded with something more than blanks in them and simply demanded that Congress give him Americans' figurative privacy wallet.

And, having never learned to tell a real gun from a toy pistol, 16 Democratic senators peed on themselves, and handed it over.

Sure the authorization (it's not just a reauthorization, since the measure passed yesterday gives Bush even *more* than he wanted, according to the ACLU and Senator Russ Feingold) is only for six months. But does anyone think that any meaningful testicular or uterine growth is going to happen for the 16 Senate Democrats who folded on this thing in six months - when we are closer to the general election and it will appear even more "risky" politically?

I've not been elected to Dog Catcher, but let me tell you how *I* would have handled Bush's tantrum yesterday, in light of the political reality that they could not block Bush's veto of any bill they wanted, but still had the majority of the votes in the Senate:

I'd have let him breathe the exhaust in my car as I was speeding away to my vacation. And I might - if my spare hand were not busy enjoying a highly unhealthy post-orgasm cigarette - have flipped him the bird out my driver's side window on the way down the road.

After all, what exactly was Bush going to do if the Democratic members of the Senate just called him on his bluff to "make them" keep working? What could he have done? Have legislators arrested since they disobeyed his command to "Stay till you give me what I want?"

From where I sit, the only possible "worst thing" that could have come from the Democrats just saying "See Ya!" when Bush pretended that he had the power to make them stay in session was provoke a Constitutional Crisis. But we already have of those anyway with the Executive Branch thumbing its nose at valid Congressional subpoenas, so another isn't really all that special. Given this, what did Democrats really have to lose by not just saying to Emperor Bush: "Bring it, baby!"? Absolutely nothing.

But they had everything to gain. Starting with the credibility they've been losing in a torrent of poll anger with Congress since January. After all, if the Democrats that folks returned to Congress last year for the primary purpose of getting a handle on things -- starting with the War on Terror -- keep asking "How High" just because a fascist-in-training President with a 24% approval rating for his handling of the "War on Terror" yells "Jump", all while kvetching that their legs hurt because they keep landing on the Constitution, what real good to us - or anyone else - are they as a political party?

Obviously, I'm not the only American who feels "not much." I mean, if Bush's 24% approval rating is poor, and poor it is, what do you call a 3% approval rating for Congress' handling of the war?

I know what I call it.

I call it the Democratic Party working day and night to put itself back in the minority in both houses in 2008, that's what. Starting with their repeatedly doing chickenshit things like giving into the tantrums thrown by the toddler currently occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just because they want to go on vacation.

My Second Home @ Maat's Feather

2007-08-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Has been a long time in thought, almost as long in deed, and finally has got enough sheetrock up on it for me to invite company over.

So this tiny post is to announce the launch today of a new, Afrocentric, community blog space, Maat's Feather, and to invite those interested in Black voices and Black dialogue on all things political and non- to come set a spell. This new blog is not intended to replace Political Sapphire; I'll still be posting essays here, same as always, hopefully more than I have in the past year. But essays written alone don't spur thought or thought testing. Only dialogue does, with those of like mind, and not-so-like mind. And I hope that's what takes place there, over time. I hope that in creating a place where that can happen, it will happen. We need it to happen.

Because IMO, Black folks are running out of time to renew our dialogue with each other. A dialogue with others is simply not enough.

The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

2007-08-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted at my new Afrocentric community blog, Maat's Feather and other sites)

"Can I sit under the white tree?"

"Let me smoke with you white boys."

What do these two statements have in common?

In law there is a doctrine of criminal law that we all learn in first year, called the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. The doctrine provides that evidence seized through a violation of constitutional rights is so fundamentally tainted that it cannot be the foundation of a prosecution. In other words, the fruit may be beautiful and juicy and perfect - yet it is still rotten to the core, because from the root to the branch it is poisoned with evil.

Such is the case with the tree, literally and figuratively, from which six young brothers lives hang in the balance.

And it all started with a high school student's request to sit under the "white tree" in Jena, Louisiana last September.

What is most notable about this story is how utterly disinterested the mainstream media has been, by and large. Here are some additional links to get you quickly up to speed:

Young Black Males the Target of Small Town Racism

Jim Crow Injustice in Jena, Louisiana

6 Teens Facing 80-100 Years Without Parole

A Troubling Song of the South

In other words, six young black men -- children, really -- are on trial for various degrees of assault/attempted murder on a white boy whose ego may have been wounded but whose physical injuries were comparatively minor, following their finally getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. The first, Mychael Bell, has already been convicted of deadly assault and faces 22 years in prison.

By a white judge, trial by an all-white jury filled with all-white witnesses (other than the defendant, of course) brought by a white prosecutor who made clear where he stood from day one when he warned the Black students of Jena who exercised their First Amendment right of protest from the get-go that

I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.

If that's not poisoned fruit, I don't know what is.

To me, the white tree in Jena is the poisoned tree I learned about in law school, literally, even though search and seizure is not the issue. It may grow majestically still but it is evil from its root to its branch. And the fruit of that poisoned tree is the legal system's systematic extermination of six young black lives who were merely standing up for their dignity and lost their patience when the grownups failed to do their duty. The fruit of the poisoned tree is the empowerment of the skinheads in training whose idea of a joke was hanging from the tree one of the most hated, terrorist symbols of this country's history where Black people are concerned after Black children merely did what they had an absolute right to do: sit under what I bet 95% of the folks down in Jena -- white OR black -- when asked would agree is God's tree.

But the poisoned fruit that is waiting to be grown is the subliminal reinforcement of a message that, at least in theory, folks keep insisting was stamped out decades ago: the message that to style yourself as the equal of whites who don't see you that way, such that you complain about your rights, is a potentially-fatal mistake.

This is not the first time that this message has been recently sent, from where I sit. Indeed, this message never really completely disappeared. But I think it's fair to say that it has been increasing, and accelerating, as we again enter an era in which folks don't have too much compunction about letting their anti-Black show - publicly.

For those not persuaded that the tide has turned, and not in a good way, here's a brief recap the last decade of our collective trip down memory lane. Just in the last decade, we've seen the quiet return of two things that used to be a daily occurrence where Black folks are concerned:

Use of Terrorist Symbols:

The dogs are back.

The "Whites Only" signs are back.

The nooses are back too. Damned . . .Near . . .Everywhere.

The church burning is back.

The suspicious house arson is too.

I might say we were still OK since no one has yet reported seeing the ghostly sight of the Night Riders again, but then I remember what P.E. cautioned a while ago now:

Now you can't see who is in cahoots

'Cause the KKK is wearing three-piece suits.

Excessive Force Against Black Suspects

Sean Bell? Dead

Amadou Diallo? Dead.

Kathryn Johnston? Dead at 92.

Alberta Spruill? Scared Dead.

Timmy Thomas and Michael Carpenter? Both Dead (plus 13 others in Cincinatti in the past decade).

Cory Maye? Dead Man Walking.

Didn't we supposedly get past all this back in the day (1960's?) Does anyone even notice, or are we too focused on the gettin' day to day to care?

Well, I have noticed, and it's not in a good way. We need to do something. Or else, the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this diary may become painfully obvious to us all:

Each, having been spoken by someone reaching out across races in good faith, represented the beginning of the end, literally or figuratively, of that Black person's life.

That's a history we damned sure don't need to repeat. The hundreds that protested in Jena, Louisiana yesterday are a start. But we need our collective voices heard, loudly and insistently, that what happened to Mychael Bell will not happen to the other 5. There are many who are now trying to make it right, including the ACLU and law firms like mine who are stepping up to make plain we WANT to partner pro bono to try and both undo the harm to the young Mr. Bell's life *and* collaborate with local defense lawyers to make sure it is not repeated 5 more times. No matter how many all white juries they try and come up with down there in Jena.

Money couldn't hurt, either: the majority of these children either couldn't make bail at all last year, or their families had to go to the bottom of the barrel to find money, and it took a while. Every little bit helps.

If you're lacking cash or plane tickets, you still have the power of the pen, so use it. Tell the story. Write to politicians up and down the Louisiana food chain -- after all, they are out there now trying to persuade folks to vote for them, in both parties. Demand that they take care of our kids who have been wronged in this case -- and yes, they are OUR kids, whenever this happens, even when we think they did wrong. It's now or never, IMO. And, if you can, mobilize to support these children, as folks are trying to do.

Because if society doesn't take care of Black folks when we are harassed because of our race *and* feels free to punish us severely when we try to take care of the problem ourselves, what options remain but a return to the Good Old Days? Remember, if there is one thing the case of the Jena 6 should tell us, it is that they don't have to literally hang us from the tree anymore to lynch us just as dead or figuratively dying.

NAACP 98th Annual Convention

2007-07-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

For those who have any interest, the NAACP Convention is being broadcast live and Memorex via streaming at the following site:

NAACP 98th National Convention.

The theme of this year's convention is a message that just about all Black folks should be able to sign onto:

Power Beyond Measure

A lot of it is same old same old and I could write many essays about my disappointments in the approach of the national leadership of the NAACP on a number of issues. (The selection of Michael Chertoff as keynote speaker for this year's convention being amongst them.) Yet I dutifully renew my annual membership each year, out of hope, because the individual grassroots local members and chapters do manage to accomplish great things in the grassroots. For example, local leaders like the young brother from Pittsburgh who during the Youth Leadership plenary this morning is reminding us of the old folks' wisdom about how to reach and engage the grassroots that a lot of us ossified old folks who have political power and status keep forgetting:

People want to know how much you care, before they care how much you know.

Amen to that. These young activists (from Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Houston, Detroit, and other cities) are kicking ass and taking no prisoners. And making it plain that it is time for us to "bury the expectation that America will ever address [our] needs better than we can do it ourselves." It's a great way to start a morning, in a country where as one of the youth speaking this morning noted, more than 70% of adult Black males in urban areas today fall into one of two categories: unemployed, or under criminal justice supervision.

Despite my issues with the NAACP (funerals for words are just stupid, and the percentage of corporate sponsors of the convention who have long-established histories, including in case precedent, of racial discrimination in employment against Black workers is shocking) it at present remains the most established vehicle for Black activists to mobilize and be heard. So I highly recommend the Convention for all those who want to know what Black people who are not on TV all the time actually think and feel.

(I am particularly interested in the Republican Candidates forum tomorrow -- moderated by Soledad O'Brien and Russ Mitchell. That ought to be good. Or at least entertaining. ;))

Rewinding the Warren Court

2007-07-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering how long it would be before someone in the mainstream called a spade a spade, where this year's Supreme Court term is concerned. Finally, this morning, the New York Times almost hits the mark, in its editorial Justice Denied.

It draws the nexus between this Court's decisions this year and the dismantling of Warren Court jurisprudence, particularly as it relates to the rights of the oppressed:

At the end of its first full term, Chief Justice John Roberts’s court is emerging as the Warren court’s mirror image.

Am I the only person who recalls what Justice Alito explained were his reasons for deciding that his passion in life lie in law instead of some other career where he could not do much as much damage? In deciding in 1985 to apply for a job with the Reagan administration? Because he disagreed with "Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause and reapportionment?" (Emphasis mine.) I can't be, yet so far nobody in either the mainstream media nor the Democratic Party leadership appears to have brought that up. The closest we have come is today's Times editorial. Which strikes me as just a bit too little, too late.

This term, Justice Samuel Alito joined with his Chief Justice, John Roberts, to finally give meaningful voice to that disagreement in ways that would be (or should be) horrifying to decent people:

Criminal Procedure: Dismissal of a habeas corpus appeal filed timely under the trial judge's stated deadline - which was misstated by the judge through no fault of the inmate's - Bowles v. Russell, eviscerating the "unique circumstances" doctrine -- developed to address this exact type of inherent unfairness to litigants (when they rely on a judge who has screwed up)-- as first enunciated by the Warren Court in Harris Truck Lines, Inc. v. Cherry Meat Packers (1962).

Establishment Clause:: Private citizens have no standing to challenge the government's allocation of funds to faith-based social service organizations which advocate religion to the exclusion of atheism, in Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc., neutering (through the same disingenuous reinterpretation of precedents that led to last week's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle Sch. Dist. #1) the Warren Court's decision in Flast v. Cohen (1968), which gave taxpayers standing in federal court to challenge federal appropriations which violate the Establishment Clause.

Reapportionment:: We don't yet have a decision with Alito's name on it yet, but there's no hurry because of course Chief Justice Roberts took care of this for him already, when he ruled with the majority last year that the Texas redistricting plan which re-drew boundaries mid-decade solely to secure Republican majorities was not, despite all appearances, an impermissible political gerrymander depriving Democratic voters in Texas -- a state with an undisputed history of vote dilution vis a vis African-Americans (who vote around 90% Democratic) -- of the one-man, one-vote representation first articulated as a constitutional right in the Warren Court's Baker v. Carr (1962), in last year's League of United Latin Citizens (LULAC) v. Perry (a consolidated case involving multiple challenges to the 2003 Texas redistricting plan).

[I guess we are supposed to find comfort in the fact that Latinos, whose voting patterns have historically collectively mirrored non-Hispanic white voting patterns, such that party-affiliation changes in a particular election are issue-dependent, had their rights violated in a single district. Unlike the Black voters in Dallas/Tarrant Counties whose claims were decidedly and forcefully rejected in LULAC despite the same claim of racial vote dilution (with a far clearer showing of intent than existed in the other cases) effectively destroying the largest Black-majority voting district in the state on the grounds that it wasn't really a Black majority district that was being gutted, it was a Democratic district and thus, fair game for partisan gerrymandering.]

We don't even need to discuss the bonus cases which claim to be upholding Warren Court precedents but in fact undermine them significantly, such as last week's Parents Involved claiming to be affirming the "spirit" of Brown v. Board of Education. Such as KSR International v. Teleflex, which is completely off the radar of most people since it involves the boring little subject of patent law, but which twists the intent of the Warren Court's attempt to establish uniformity in examiner decisions on the question of "nonobviousness" (a requirement to obtain a patent when an invention appears to be based in a modification to an earlier idea) by gutting the obviousness test actually created and used by the US Patent Office and its examiners for decades following the Warren Court's decision in Graham v. John Deere of Kansas City (1966)to avoid considering unfair things (such as market share, etc.) unrelated to the actual invention in determining patentability, dramatically increasing the power of large businesses holding patents to shut down innovation by claiming that ideas that build upon theirs are "obvious" and, thus, unpatentable. (OK, OK, we don't have to count this since it was 9-0, not 5-4 - but the decision still continues to send ripples through the patent bar because nobody expected the breadth of the reasoning and complete undermining of the status quo that the language of the decision wrought).

And, of course, we have his siding with the gender discriminating employer and writing the majority opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and the reverse-race-discrimination whining plaintiffs in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 last week, which I am willing to bet he also wanted to write the majority decision on but ended up deferring to Chief Justice Roberts, who wanted to secure his judicial legacy of reverse clock-winding, too. Also two issues - gender and race discrimination -- that are about the little gal/guy versus the right of white males to share the spoils of life, be it good schools/power/money/status/employment with whomever they please. And yes, I blame Samuel Alito, and his elevation. Just because Justice Alito didn't specifically mention "discrimination" or "integration" in his list of issues on which he disagreed strongly with Warren Court jurisprudence doesn't mean that he was in favor of decisions in that area. His own lower court decisions in areas implicating both race and gender roles, made that crystal clear, as a variety of commentators tried to shout from the rooftops last year during the Alito confirmation process.

In other words, this Supreme Court's mission has now been crystalized with Alito's appointment, and is clear to anyone actually paying attention: systematically, and as thoroughly as possible, undo the Warren Court's protection of "the little guy" at the expense of those who already hold power. Yet until today's editorial, nobody appears to have holistically looked this issue outside of all of the legal scholars and attorneys who write about these things. Certainly nobody in the mainstream media has mentioned this angle.

Maybe it's because if they did, it would again beg the question from us all of why our Democratic Party leaders did not heed the fierce and panicked calls to filibuster this man, now Justice Samuel Alito, in whose elevation many many MANY people -- including the New York Times last year -- saw the undoing of those things that made our America fair and just for all, not just for the wealthy and white. Why they lectured us about civility rather than realize just what was at stake - the consolidation of all three branches of government into a single, unified source of power over the average America, beholden to the idea that things were better way back when.

Whatever the case, the Warren Court has been referred to as "the first Supreme Court in American history to champion the legal position of the underdog and the outsider in American society". It's clear that if left up to Justice Roberts' court, it will be the last, something that Justice Samuel A. Alito warned us all through his 1985 job application to the Reagan Administration was his very motivation for pursuing the field of law (instead of something more harmless, like marine biology), and our Democratic politicians didn't heed.

UPDATE: Kudos to counsellor Ben Masel who reminded me that I'd missed an important one: the Roberts Court's whack up on the side of the head of high school students' right to free speech in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case, Morse v. Frederick, which undermined the fundamental principle of student political free speech rights (albeit limited compared to adult free speech rights) first enunciated by the Warren Court in Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), based on reasoning (which unfortunately seems to have been adopted at least in part even by the dissenters) to the effect that where children are concerned, viewpoint restrictions -- normally a major constitutional no-no where free speech is concerned, even for children -- are now apparently OK. Thanks for the reminder Ben!

To Elizabeth Eckford, the Little Rock Nine, Linda Brown, Nikki & Nettie Hunt

2007-07-02T07:29:00.002-07:00

Dear Elizabeth:

Dear Thelma. Dear Gloria. Dear Jefferson. Dear Melba, and Terrence. Dear Ernest, Carlotta and Minnijean. (Dear Daisy, too. Since but for you the Nine would not have made it.)

And I mustn’t ever, ever, forgot Dear Linda, whose father made a name for her by going to court to secure a decent education for her and her little sister Cheryl.

Dear Nettie and Nikki too, just because:

I’m so sorry.

No doubt you have like perhaps Black person -- indeed, every right thinking person -- in America been particularly reflective since Thursday at around 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. But where those of us who are strangers to the moment in time that was the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring segregated education inherently unequal on May 18, 1954 have the luxury (created by the gauzy lens of history) of reflecting on this past week's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. #1, which declared that voluntary integration plans were inherently discriminatory against white students who could not have their choice of schools , you lived in the moment. Brown, and all that it signified to you for your individual educational goals at the time it was decided, was your moment in history.

And this week, you heard the highest court in the land say that despite 53 years of jurisprudence confirming that our national understanding of Brown's meaning -- that separate education is inherently unequal -- it really meant something else all along.

I suspect that you, like most, were surprised that Brown itself was at stake in Parents Involved and Meredith, and that it fell in all but name only. I admit that I was not. I wasn’t sure I believed it, when the decision actually came out; but I had the benefit of hearing quite early on -- as some of my friends were amici -- that the school districts received an extremely hostile reception at oral argument and, thus, knew which way the wind was likely to blow with this Court. But the official questions presented to the Supreme Court by the litigants in Parents Involved (and the case which was consolidated with it, Meredith v. Jefferson Cty. Board of Schools) made clear that it was the very concept of racial segregation that was again at issue, and that the Court must decide whether such segregation was constitutionally protected so long as it was the result of the government, but private citizen conduct (in housing choices) instead. That was not the advance billing either case was given, of course, but a simple glance at the Questions Presented themselves belie any other interpretation.

This is what happens when a nation is not paying attention, I guess. And probably explains why even though the most significant Supreme Court decision in the last 50 years has laid down for its final descent into death with what seems nary a whimper, let alone a heartfelt national hue and cry. Right now, there is an almost conspiratorial silence. The editorials have been tentative, and almost all of the few that have spoken at all, have refrained from rage, focusing instead on the ephemeral hope of an opinion by Justice Kennedy that has less precedential weight than the paper his clerks printed it out on. The blogs are almost silent - a single day in which there was notice, then it was back to political business as usual. It's as if nobody knows quite what to say. Perhaps it is because nobody really believed it would happen, the ending of Brown as viable precedent on the question of what racial equality in America really demands from us.

But I know what to say. Which is "I'm sorry." On behalf of our country. It would have been one thing for the Court to have decided that Brown was incorrectly decided 53 years ago. It is decidedly another for the Court to say that Brown was decided to protect the rights of white folks who made clear that the last concern they had on this earth was whether any child might be harmed by segregation if they couldn't have their way. Or their parents' way (since, of course, it is the parents and not the children who are the true actors in our nation's education dramas when it comes to race.)

Yet that is precisely what the Court did say, in so many (nearly 100 pages of) words. So I’m sorry. I'm sorry not just because you might feel that your courage facing the amoral expression of white segregationist fury just for trying to get an education was all for nothing. But I'm also sorry because despite your having fought the good fight for all of us, all of us must now confront the meaning, such as it is, in this week’s Supreme Court decision eviscerating the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education -- cynically through the words of Brown itself in Parents Involved.

I'm also sorry because in the end, when Parents Involved was decided on Thursday you were all instantly reduced to pawns in an unrealistic integrationist dream that finally died at age of 53, stabbed fatally through the heart by the families of (1) a little boy in Louisville, Kentucky whose mother thought his entire childhood would be ruined if he had to ride the school bus for 45 minutes a day for a single school year – until new school assignments were made in first grade – even though she enrolled him in school months too late for him to have the space available in his normally-assigned school close to home; and (2) an already-academically successful white teen in Seattle, Washington whose mother was convinced that his mild ADD and dyslexia diagnoses were so disadvantaging that he simply must overcompensate by taking a a spot in a distinguished biotechnology program to make up for it.

So in the end, your moral conviction allowed you to be played, as we were all played, into believing that somehow, the very example of your bravery and pride and dignity would permanently change the soul of a white nation, transforming it from the oasis of anti-Black hate it has been for 400 years into a nation where we would all sit and stand side by side with you, and your cultural heirs, in the classrooms of this nation where our citizens and citizenship are shaped (which we all know is the true purpose of education (as Eleanor Roosevelt said the Archbishop of York once told a group of headmasters.) I'm especially sorry for that.

If all that I wanted to say to you was "I'm sorry", I could have done that in far less words, no doubt. But that's not all I wanted to say to you, and the memories of your faces through your time of struggle and, ultimately, peaceful joy at what you thought was finally America doing right by us as Black people. What I wanted to say to you is that the old folks' saying that "Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining" is something we should remember. I wanted to share that good news with you, and let you know that no matter what anyone says, or thinks, or writes about the loss of Brown v. Board of Education and the end of that era, your original dreams as Black citizens of this country, and what you really fought for in Brown and in integrating Central High School (and as a mother explaining to her 3 1/2 year old baby on the steps of the Supreme Court that she was finally free, in the case of you, Nettie), did not die this week, no matter how disquieting the loss of Brown may feel (as it does to me; as if I am naked, or on a bad high, or perhaps a bit of both somehow....) In many ways, all of your hopes and dreams and our hopes and dreams as Black people were actually reborn from their death in Parents Involved-- like the Phoenix. They were given new life, in many ways, in the emotionally cleansing rhetorical fire that was Justice John Roberts' ugly manipulation and misuse of history and historical intent of the Fourteenth Amendment - and Brown itself to roll back the hands of time in Parents Involved. We could see them because, at long last, the rose-colored glasses were knocked off the nation's face. Particularly those we as Black people were wearing, individually and collectively. At least, I certainly hope so.

Since, of course, your fight was never about integration.

Please don't get mad at me for wasting your time telling you you all what you already know, which is that the point of Brown, and the goals of the attorneys like the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, and his mentor Charles Hamilton Houston, who systematically brought the desegregation cases before the courts over a more than a decade, piecing together precedents like a well-crafted quilt until they culminated in the facts and jurisprudence faced by the Supreme Court Brown, was never about anyone's desire for integration with white folks. Your , and their, actions were, instead, to further your personal and our collective goals as Black people seeking educational fairness and equality from the nation we built with our slave labor, not the nation's need to sing Kumbaya and pretend that its hundreds' year racist legacy as our slavemasters, oppressors and internal colonizers was actually behind us with no hard work at all. (This country's majority eschews the hard work of anti-racism, as I'm sure you well know. Indeed, they are so convinced that they are almost there at the promised land of "Racism is Over" that many have thrown their heart and soul into trying to elect a Black man (or 1/2 black - some folks are testy about calling him Black since he's mixed) President -- even as they do not deny that part of his appeal may be to guilt ridden and guilt fatigued white voters who will feel that, if he wins, he has "proven" that racism is dead in America.

Go figure. If only it was that easy, right? Oh well, at least they aren't trying to run Uncle Clarence, Lawn Jockey for the Right>

(who suddenly, in Parents Involved suggested in concurrence that was just trying to help by voting to reinterpret Brown; indeed, he articulated as close to Black nationalist concerns as he has come in decades -- most people don't remember, but I know that you do -- arguing that it was not in our people's best interest to rely on those pesky and unconstitutional desegregation commands to protect our collective rights or to eschew going to our own separate schools as we did quite successfully in our history, and that we should take care of our own needs instead of trusting white people not to up and change their minds again about wanting to be with us in school or anywhere else for that matter.)

Certainly, Elizabeth and Nettie and Ernest and Linda and all, you goals were clear to you, at least (not that you encouraged any misunderstanding in the last 53 years about them - as I said, you, or at least your images, were played). Elizabeth, we knew – we always knew – that our asking you to suffer was not just so you could walk down the streets just to pick up on all that white goodness that would supposedly make you Free, White and 21 (except with beautiful brown skin and a hell of a taste in sunglasses.) We knew there was very little goodness to be had, not unless THEY felt like it. Hell – YOU knew. You knew WHY it mattered. Indeed you knew the ONLY reason it mattered, which we in shaming your memory for the last 53 years chasing white liberal pipe dreams and revisionist interpretations of history forgot:

Even though we were a working-class family I'd always been told that I ought to, should, and would go to college. And, in a segregated environment I knew that ... what was available to white students was more than, and better than what was available in a Negro school.

See, the dual school system, was never, it was separate, but it was never equal.

In other words, there were no “I Have a Dream” rose-colored glasses of racial brotherhood steeling you against the hate that came your way when you went to Central High. That was not even the issue. It was not the issue for Melba, either. Instead the prize your eyes were keeping on was clear – at least before revisionist history got done with y’all:

But there has been lots of misunderstanding about why we went to Central High School. Let me be clear: We didn't go to Central to "integrate." We didn't go to Central to sit beside white people, as if they had some magic dust or something. I would not risk my life to sit next to white people. No, no, no, no. . . . Let's get real here. Integration is just a lightly concocted word for "share the wealth"; access to the pie; getting a slice of the American dream. Equal opportunity. We understood Rhodes scholarships, new equipment, wanting to lead better lives. The nine of us went to Central because we wanted to share in that. We also wanted to go to the best colleges, get the best jobs. We risked our lives for access to opportunity, to jobs. We had no illusions that sitting next to white people would lead to better lives.

Even Linda and Cheryl knew that, and acknowledge it even though it was their family's fight that paved the way for you to take that infamous, brutal, violent trip to your first day of school at Central High in Little Rock.

None of the other Little Rock Nine have claimed anything else motivated them, either.

So, you suffered, because it was worth it to you to have a fair shot that your Black skin would have otherwise denied you. And we suffered with you. But only you suffered as only the warrior suffers. Even though you were weary – and prayed to just be a normal person as Melba once prayed in her diaries:

Please God, let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes, I just need to be a girl.

Yet despite your own personal struggle to further your personal goals, and your parents' goals, you and especially your images and your struggles were hijacked and used as American propaganda - starting with its own citizens. They became the tool through which America filled a pressing need -- and it was not to see you obtain an equal education. Instead, depending on your viewpoint, Brown and your fight for a decent education (1) fulfilled the political need for the United States to defuse the increasing international identification of the US as a hypocrite and racial colonialist power by its World War II and Cold War enemies because of its fierce insistence on racial segregation, as the US tacitly admitted in its amicus brief filed in Brown, or (b) reinforced white supremacist thinking in the 1950s, which could not accept someone else actually coming first in terms of priorities and which was prepared to tear the nation apart if it didn't get its way on this issue.

Because you see, it is really they who are the victims of integration and racism.

Didn't you know? Just ask your friend, and former foul-mouthed tormentor (as shown above) Hazel Bryan Massery.

I know, I know – Hazel Massery said she was sorry, for cussing you. I know she’s the only one that ever did. And I know she’s your friend now. But she should have been sorry. She should have had her foul mouth slapped where she stood, as your mama would have almost certainly done yours had the situation been reversed. I hope the image of what she admitted was a mindless unthinking hate captured in pictures haunts her until the day she dies. I know you said you don’t hate her. I do. As I hate all that type. All those that expect us to feel sorry for them when they are forced by the law to do the right thing by us collectively that they were not persuaded to do by any sense of fairness or obligation as a white citizen still benefitting handsomely each and every day from the invisible knapsack of white privilege. And, adding insult to injury, always expect us to forgive them that they can’t just once let our needs come before one of theirs. All that type of folk. That type like Hazel Massery, who expects forgiveness because she was "just a kid" and her visibly violent diatribe in your direction was just her "[going] with the crowd" since she "wasn't really" following you while she yelling and hating on you. Those like James Eison who (unlike your friend Hazel) to this day refuses to apologize for what went on at Central High – who insists that he is the victim, just as much as you were, because he has lived his life being considered a bad person for what he did when you came to Central High. He claims that desegregation “hurt and scared” him, even though he and his friends walked out of school and masturbated their young injured white manhood by burning a nigger in effigy just because you were going to be at his white school now. That type, the type who insists that, of course, today they’d NEVER say those terrible things. Do those terrible things. Today.

Yet none of them other than Hazel have ever stepped forward to say "I'm Sorry." Which tells you all you need to know about what they consider to be most important - their need not to feel guilty.

But it's not just the ones who tormented you, and the other Little Rock Nine, and Linda Brown. It's those like Cheryl Hopwood, who could handle (since she never bitched about it and her lawyers and the courts didn’t either) that 140 white students were admitted into the University of Texas Law School with grades and test scores worse than hers, but could not handle that 63 Black and Latino students were, too. Woe betide Ms. Hopwood, wounded beyond belief at the very idea that any darkies like us could secure a place at University of Texas Law School before SHE did (unless another white person with lesser qualifications wanted it; that appeared to have been perfectly OK with both her and the Supreme Court.) That the Black and Latino students who were admitted ahead of her were from elite undergraduate institutions and Ms. Hopwood's application lost points under the school’s scoring rubric because she’d gone to community college before transferring to graduate a state school? It did not matter, not to the Court. Any racial consideration in dividing the spoils of access to law school education was wrong if it left any possibility that she had to sacrifice by going to her second choice school (not that she actually proved that she had sacrificed anything, since the courts never did ask her to explain why she should win in light of those 140 other white folks, and the media didn’t either.) Hopwood never did grant an interview to explain her own views, but everyone who spoke for her made a point of highlighting that she was just misunderstood – and she definitely wasn’t a racist: all she was trying to ensure by bringing the case destroying (temporarily) affirmative action in higher education was fairness. She was herself just another victim of racism. Just like you.

And the Courts loved her, at least until another white victim, Jennifer Gratz, came along and then another, Barbara Grutter. Although Barbara Grutter wisely keeps her counsel on concepts like historical discrimination and how it might legitimately affect a school's duty in connection with admissions, young Jennifer (who sued when she was waitlisted at the University of Michigan) suffers no such modesty. Indeed, she wants everyone to know that she too was hurt over affirmative action - except that her pain is more over the harm we supposedly suffered than anything for herself:

I think it's a shame that the university looks at minority students and basically tells them that they are inferior and need these points to be accepted.

So, it really wasn’t Jennifer that felt the Blacks who might have been admitted to University of Michigan with "lesser statistics" ahead of her were inferior (begs the question of why she sued, doesn't it Elizabeth?) -- it was the school, because it didn't admit her in their place unconditionally solely because of her "better statistics." And Jennifer wants us to know that the hurt she feels for us is very real, grounded in real injury:

Gratz: Had I been on Ann Arbor campus, I would have had the opportunity to interview and possibly internship or receive jobs with companies around the country and even possibly around the world. It’s very difficult to say exactly how people are harmed by this, only we know that our lives would be different had we had a fair chance and that opportunity.

That’s mighty white of her, don’t you think, Elizabeth? Saying that she doesn’t know how "people" are hurt, but she just knows that "they" are? At least Barbara Grutter doesn't say much. But then again, she's really no better than Ms. Gratz, despite her comparative silence. After all, 16 whites with inferior point totals to Barbara Grutter's were admitted to University of Michigan Law School her year but the mere possibility that her spot might have gone to an “unqualified” Black or Latino wounded her enough to drive her straight to the courthouse. It just was not fair, because we're supposed to be "colorblind". It, no doubt, hurt, to learn that the world wasn't. Indeed, she was so hurt that after losing at the Supreme Court, she ultimately successfully joined forces with Jennifer Gratz to campaign for Proposition 2's constitutional amendment eliminating all affirmative action in the state of Michigan, just to ensure that no poor white woman (or man either, for that matter) will feel such hurt being asked to step aside to level the playing field for a Black person ever, ever, again.

(Of course, both Grutter and Gratz were so hurt that they also advocated for Amendment 2 despite the “acceptable gender discrimination exception” – something that I’m sure their sisters who had to sue for jobs in the police and fire departments for decades understood completely.)

I hate that type, the Hopwoods and the Grutters and Gratz's and the type that went to court in Parents Involved and Meredith. I hate that type because it is that type – the ones that believe that their minor inconveniences and discomforts that might accrue to accomodating our need for a fair shake, and our people's need, are of equal constitutional and moral value to our hundreds’ year struggle for equality in the country we built – that led to Thursday’s decision. I hate them because it is this type that ultimately persuaded the courts to backpedal almost immediately from the promise of Brown, in a way that the Stormfronts and John Birchers and KKKers never could, their obvious insane race hatred and history of racial violence leaving a stench a mile wide around any possible claim that their fierce opposition to race-conscious strategies to remedy historical discrimination are all really just about the dream of "being judged by the content of one's character."

But I wasn't writing you to talk about those folks. I was writing to you talking about Brown.

As I said above, with the pressures of the Cold War and America's ascension, it could not be seen as a hypocrite on the issue of tyranny, and the international rhetoric was clear that it was vulnerable politically in that sense. Thus, segregation became "un-American", through the vehicle of a 9-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And remained so until, at least, until Thursday, June 28, 2007.

The problem was, and always has been, that segregation isn't really un-American. On the contrary, it's as American as apple pie, and nothing in Brown changed that. At least not in real life, where we and the other hundreds of millions are born, live, eat, play pray, and die. Each day the majority in this country continues to prove its basic agreement with George Wallace's insistent battle cry for America: Segregation Today....Segregation Tomorrow.....Segregation Forever!

They just don't like to talk about it. And definitely not to actually do anything about it. Unless it doesn't cost them anything, that is.

Which is why, early on, many learned people tried to warn us not to put too much stake in Brown and, indeed, some considered it a distraction from the larger goals of our equality because Brown itself could not legislate what really needed to be changed: the hearts, mind and morality of those in the majority, when it came down to truly sharing the fruits of America with their former slave class.

There was an old joke that says "some people go under water as a dry devil and come up a wet devil." The water did nothing to change the soul. The same rang true for white racists who had maintained a racist system of segregated schools. Brown vs. Board of Education did nothing to change their hearts or souls. One day they were openly segregated racists, and the day after Brown vs. Board of Education, they were, theoretically, integrated racists, and they spent their days and nights trying to figure ways to maintain the basis of racism and white superiority in America. Today that work has developed things like vouchers to help maintain segregated schools at the expense of public schools.

The purpose of Brown vs. Board of Education was very simple. Black America knew that the best educational resources were allocated and placed in the schools where the white kids were. To get these resources for Black kids we needed to get the Black kids into those better equipped schools.

Today nothing has changed.

Similarly, Clayborne Carson, (my Freshman English professor and archivist of the King Papers) said upon the 50th anniversary of Brown:

Few African Americans would wish to return to the pre-Brown world of legally enforced segregation, but in the half century since 1954, only a minority of Americans has experienced the promised land of truly integrated public education. By the mid-1960s, with dual school systems still in place in many areas of the Deep South, and with de facto segregation a recognized reality in urban areas, the limitations of Brown had become evident to many of those who had spearheaded previous civil rights struggles. . . By the late 1960s, growing numbers of black leaders had concluded that improvement of black schools should take priority over school desegregation. In 1967, shortly before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders warned that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one white, one black—separate and unequal," Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged the need to refocus attention, at least in the short run, on "schools in ghetto areas." He also insisted that "the drive for immediate improvements in segregated schools should not retard progress toward integrated education later." Even veterans of the NAACP's legal campaign had second thoughts. "Brown has little practical relevance to central city blacks," Constance Baker Motley commented in 1974. "Its psychological and legal relevance has already had its effect.

So it was not to hard for me to conclude (or others just as observant) that Parents Involved was truly the end of Brown v. Board of Education. It was the end because Parents Involved (and the companion Meredith case, at long last gave legal sanction to George Wallace's lifelong dream (at least until he miraculously converted into a member of the Rainbow Coalition on his death bed and called his Black manservant his best friend) that his constitutional rights as a white person included the right to stay the hell away from us and the right to have his wants come ahead of our asserted needs. Certainly, nobody rational concluded that the Court was actually affirming anti-segregation principles - indeed quite a few folks are wracking their brains trying to figure out how one cures racial segregation without actually considering race. For example, I’m not too keen on the legacy of the South, and definitely not Texas (which gave us the gag gift that keeps on giving, Dubbya), especially when it comes to racial issues, but I find it hard not to agree with these sage words editorialized Friday in the Houston Chronicle:

In equating the efforts of school districts in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to diversify their classrooms with the Jim Crow racist systems of the old South, the court has miscast those trying to right historic wrongs in the role of those who created the injustices. . . For the court's majority to claim that it is following the spirit of the Brown decision in invalidating the Seattle and Louisville plans — and hundreds of others across the nation — is to mistake the cure for the disease. Just as race was taken into account in ordering the desegregation of the nation's schools that had deprived so many children of equal rights, so it remains one of a number of factors educators must consider in doing their best to prevent that sorry history from ever repeating itself.

It's enough to make your head hurt.

But, it has been no secret, at least not to lawyers working in the area of race and the law, that Brown was not only dying as it no longer served its purposes (which had little or nothing to do with ensuring our equality), but that it's very language could ultimately would be one of the mechanisms used to enshrine de facto segregation. Alan Freeman tried to warn us, as early as 1978 post-Bakke, in his seminal work Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Anti-Discrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine, 62 Minn. L. Rev. 1049 (1978) (an article that, strangely, despite its citation thousands of times by legal scholars in the last 29 years it is impossible to find excerpts and quotes from on the Internet *and* impossible to find the full piece on either Lexis and Westlaw as well; thank God I still have my copy from Advanced Con Law). He tried to show us, using language from the precedents themselves, that the Supreme Court’s legacy of anti-discrimination cases was to be systematically moving the courts in the direction of securing, not eliminating, racial discrimination as a hallmark of jurisprudence, under the presumption of legal "colorblindness" unless someone could be clearly deemed to be "at fault" for a racially disparate outcome; what Professor Freeman referred to as the law enshrining the "the perpetrator perspective" on discrimination into law, instead of the more empathic perspective necessary to actually protect its victims.

Although this note to you, Minnejean and Ernest and Linda and Sadie and Elizabeth, is a note of apology, and not an explication of the legal analysis that leads me to such a grim conclusion (I only have 10,000 words, after all) anyone who has studied the anti-discrimination jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, and each of the decisions that are at the core of it (from Brown I and Brown II to Sweatt to Fullilove to Bakke, to Adarand, Croson, Swann, Wygant, Milligan and McLauren, Freeman and Grutter) reaches that grim conclusion nonetheless. Thus, we owe thanks to the late Professor Freeman who called the ultimate endgame of cases like Brown -- 37 years ago - when he said that the law's concern with the perpetrator perspective when it came to race would effectively guarantee that racism would continue. And tried to tell us why, in advance.

As another of those law professors who tried to warn us that Brown was dying, if not already dead, and tell us why long before this past Thursday, Professor Derrick Bell also deserves our special thanks. Frankly, had I not read his works over the years since I started studying law, I might be feeling the same confusion as my DAH (who upon hearing the news Thursday that Brown had been dealt a fatal blow kept asking “Why would they [the Court] even feel the need to do that?” Yes, Elizabeth, they knew about Brown all the way Down Under.) But the words of Derrick Bell’s about Brown in Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform comforted me on Thursday, and reassured me through the sense of disorientation and confusion that I felt, even knowing in advance with virtual certainty what was going to happen when the Supreme Court finally spoke. They consoled me because they helped me understand how Brown, like the beliefs of Dr. King, had been coopted and repackaged and sold to the masses after the fact as something far more palatable to whites and powerful in terms of anti-racist struggle than it ever was allowed to actually be in real life:

Deserved or not, this nation has managed to find a place in its pantheon of heroes for Brown v. Board of Education, a decision which promised much and of which, I am convinced, the Supreme Court expected much. I have tried to explain here why I believe it fell so far short of its goals. In that I am aided by the Rev. Peter Gomes, minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard University. Gomes wrote about Martin Luther King, Jr. in terms that apply equally to the Brown decision:
In death he was able to the claim the loyalty denied him in life, for it is far easier to honor the dead than to follow the living, and so we take the dead to our bosoms, for there they can no longer do any harm; and we can translate a living, breathing, both noble and fallible human being into a heroic impotence, satisfying our need to both admire and be protected from something larger than ourselves.

Gomes's words give meaning to the event described at the beginning of this book, when, at a Yale University commencement, applause followed the reminder that the Brown decision would soon be fifty years old. It was a dramatic instance of how readily this society assimilates the myriad manifestations of black protest and achievement. In that process, the continuing devastation of racial discrimination is minimized, even ignored, while we in the civil rights movement who gained some renown as we labored to end those injustices are conveniently converted into cultural reinforcements of the racial status quo. We become irrefutable proof that black people can make it in America through work and sacrifice.

Work and sacrifice, as important as they are, have never been sufficient to gain blacks more than grudging acceptance as individuals. They seldom enjoy the presumption of regularity, the sense that they belong or are competent, which whites may take for granted. Of course, at some point on the ladder of achievement, blacks are no longer deemed black by those whites who know them. We are told point-blank that we are “different.” Sadly, but understandably, there are black people who view such statements as compliments.

The psychic damage done by unofficial long-term exclusion is impossible to measure. None of us are immune, not even those whose fight to end racism or try hard to understand, describe and record it. Boston College law professor Anthony Farley, who views the quest for racial equality as an almost romantic longing for acceptance, writes:
Everybody at some level believes in it. It’s a deeply seductive image. The image that all we want, as oppressed people, is an image of our masters finally loving us and recognizing our humanity. It is this image that keeps prostitutes with their pimps, the colonized with their colonizers, and battered women with their batterers. Everybody dreams of one day being safe.

There is no place safer for us than in education. As your mamas told you, and my mama told me, and all the Black mamas and daddies I know told their youth, education was a must, because education was the one thing that "they" (and we know who "they" are/were) could never take away from you. I never really understood what it meant until about 10 years ago, when I started learning about our people's efforts to become educated when folks actually were trying to take it from us.

And there, my dear Elizabeth, Nettie, Thelma, Gloria, Minnijean and Nikki, and all the brothers, too, is the good news I was telling you about. The good news lies in your own original reasons for struggle - and our people's renewed eyes on THAT prize. The good news is that we have never needed integration to secure our children's education or flower their extraordinary gifts. Instead, the history before Brown was quite remarkable: left to our own education, we educated ourselves. And we did it WELL. Indeed, it has been recognized for more than 100 years that our greatest achievements in education came largely from us doing it for ourselves. Perhaps it was because, in the end, of the intractible nature of white supremacy in America itself, and its impact on the souls of Black folk when we left our training and education to those in the majority. After all, as the Father of Black History wrote nearly 75 years ago:

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

Carter G. Woodson, Miseducation of the Negro (1933)

Similarly, W.E.B. Dubois was one of the earliest who asserted that we can and must educate ourselves, in his 1902 editorial On the Training of Black Men:

. . . . [W]hen turning our eyes from the temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race . . . The tendency is here born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character than bread- winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational efforts to aid the Negro. . . . Soothly we have been told that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs but a little thought to prove. . . [T]he mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher. The white teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common school system. . . . But they faced, as all men since them have faced, that central paradox of the South, the social separation of the races. . . . Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two separate worlds. . . [and] the separation is so thorough and deep, that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything like that sympathetic and effective group training and leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of '68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and trade schools were impractical before the establishment of a common school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.

In the end, now, it is those of us who followed in your brave footsteps – sometimes by choice, sometimes at the insistence of parents who simply would accept nothing less from us than the best – to carry the work forward again of securing a quality education for our youth despite the ten steps back towards Plessy which the disingenuous reasoning and rhetorical parth the Roberts Court in Parents Involved has taken. But the truly good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. The formula to help our children succeed despite a hostile, racist world has been there waiting us to find it again since we abandoned it for the promise of integration in 1954:

Teach them ourselves. In our own schools.

Some of us have been calling for this approach for years, in both scholarly article and public manifesto, and renewed the calls during the 50th anniversary of Brown just a few years ago to be about education first, being with white folks later (if ever:)

We will use this hundredth anniversary of Plessy to re-examine and recommit to ending inequality in our schools by any just means necessary. If integration can be achieved in the process, all well and good. However, the focus must be on quality and equality, not on the mere physical presence of both races in one school building.

And so, for at least the last ten years, schools and techniques specifically designed to teach our children as Black people have slowly re-emerged from their dormancy in the 1970's and 1980's and are taking hold in our communities. They are as far flung as the diaspora is within the United States. Some are Afrocentric. Some are religious. Some are collaborations of homeschooling parents. Yet all have one purpose: to provide our children with the quality education that integrated education has failed to provide in a country where, in many areas, resegregation of both students and teachers is a fact of life. Separate schools, and unequal.

Yet now, we no longer have the promise of Brown and the methods of integration to attack them. So in many ways, we have come full circle. And must begin work again, to educate our own because it is clear that nobody else will. And maybe, this time, if we keep at it until the job is done, we will no longer have to hear the racist tropes and lies about the educability of our children, and the reasons that they do not succeed in education, that were proven wrong nearly 150 years ago yet by the thousands of Freedman’s Schools

and proven wrong again 40 years ago by the Freedom Schools

And no doubt proven wrong again by the newest incarnations, such as the new generation of Freedom Schools today. Take a look at what these schools are doing. These are the future Black leaders that will prove them wrong, yet again:

It is in watching and hearing their joy at learning, when so often all we see and hear is that our children are alienated from learning, that we as Black people should know that everything that has been said since our children’s deteriorating progress in education began post Brown that you know that each and everything theory advanced by whites (liberal *and* conservative) and their right-wing Black collaborators, to explain our children's dying thirst for academic achievement is just flat out wrong, and that any and all solutions that presupposed that there was something wrong with us that kept us from succeeding will be summarily dismissed and become historical dinosaurs in the way that Brown is now destined to become. Perhaps this time, we will shut once and for all the tropes and myths about our people’s intellect and ability to succeed that have gotten in our way – since we still have to be twice as good to get ½ as far – that underlie educational policy today, most of which continue to be uttered by the most well-meaning folks and towards which education has thrown billions has been thrown with almost nothing thrown at those who already knew the way to teach black children. Bullshit myths and slogans and superficial understandings which folks have insisted upon as the reason our children have lost academic ground or are treading water:

Black culture causes parents not to care about their children’s education. Bullshit.

Black culture is “anti-intellectual”. Bullshit.

Black youth believe that trying to get an education is “acting white.” Bullshit.
Bullshit.. And even more Bullshit Hell, even the rabidly conservative Hoover Institute confirmed it was largely Bullshit – except in integrated schools. (And, most egregiously, bullshit initially advanced by an immigrant Black researcher who let his immigrant experiences detract him from the job of looking below the superficial surface of anecdotal statements before taking advancing such a racist hypothesis about a uniquely-Black-American cultural phenomena which he neither experienced as a child or, clearly, bothered to actually interview anybody other than kids about in depth, and being currently spouted as gospel by the only Black man running for president.)

The scary part is that, when it comes to this good news, there is actually a bonus item: on the question of education, going back to our old approach (we'll do it our damned selves) may well finally bridge the communication gap between Black liberals and Black conservatives. Since on the question of our quest for educational equality and opportunity, they appear to be in agreement with the more progressive of us that integration was not the point, is not the point, and shouldn't ever be the point of Brown v. Board of Education.

For example, as I hate to admit it because I don’t agree with most of Juan Williams’ apologist op-ed in Friday's New York Times upon the death knell to Brown, (I suspect some of you wouldn’t agree either) he did make one valid point with which we can all agree:

In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hyper-segregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.

Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?

His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

It is now clear that they have all the choice in the world, now. (Except, of course, the choice to keep their existing race based voluntary desegregation programs, whether or not there is a poor white cherub who complains or not. Justice Roberts and his Court made plain on June 28, 2007, that they have no choice at all.)

Similarly, one of my least favorite Black persons on earth is Thomas Sowell. I had the displeasure of personally discussing race matters with once. But only once, thank God. I’m sure he would not remember me (not that he likely remembers all that many black Stanford students period, having being ensconced in the white ivory tower known as HooTow for so long). He’s made a career out of reinforcing for whites in their deep seated need to be absolved from responsibility for any problems faced by Black people. That being said, however, even a broken clock can be right twice a day and, thus, Sowell was right to point to the history of all-Black education in America (Black schools run by Black people to teach Black children) and the law of unintended consequences, - specifically, the fact that upon Brown’s decision to integrate us all on the theory that without integration Black children were doomed, nobody gave a thought to what it would mean to our already existing, already successful, albeit segregated, Black schools and the impact on our children’s educational prospects long-term if they disappeared.

Hell, even Uncle Thomas, for once, pretends to actually care about Black people, in his concurrence in Parents Involved, which rightfully points out in his concurrence (remember what I said about that twice a day correct clock) that the Seattle school district who was defending Parents Involved nonetheless has within it an Afrocentric K-8 school that is producing far more successful Black students, gradewise, than at its average schools. (Of course, Justice Thomas then goes on to gleefully try and wrap himself in the philosophical mantle of late Justice Marshall when it comes to the “Colorblind Constitution”, but that doesn't worry me too much. I figure he has to go to sleep sometime and I know that Thurgood Marshall’s ghost is going to be gunning for him given the disingenuousness of this particular claim.)

Of course, there will always be the naysayers, most sponsored financially by neocon racist think tanks, who get paid to vent their emotional angst about the idea that Black folks’ present collective situation might actually be due to something other than our own dysfunction, “anger” and “culture of poverty”, particularly when Black folks come up with something on their own, and particularly with an Afrocentric perspective that did not first receive the majority’s imprimatur of approval.

But what else is new? Hannah Arendt spoke perhaps most eloquently for them all nearly 50 years ago, post-Brown, in her Reflections on Little Rock, 1957-1959 (1959), in which she claimed that she was only thinking of your hurt feelings and your best interests upon seeing your pictures, Elizabeth, when she asserted an absolute right of free association in America, starting with most critically the freedom *not* to associate, and expressed her solidarity with folks who opposed integration and Brown. Like your former tormenter, later friend, Hazel Massery.

Perhaps Arendt was right (however brutally stated her position was, or however self-serving those arguments were when being advanced by a white woman in 1958): For America, at least, maybe the very survival of the Republic, of the nation, really does demand that it protect the white right Not to associate (even though Arendt claimed it was a right everyone had, Hannah Arendt had not yet evaluated what that really meant in a society where Black survival depends on interacting with whites for just about everything.) It seems, anyhow, not an unfair reading of Thursday's decision, at least in the context of education.

At least, that's what it means so long as we never, ever admit to the truth about our country's racist feelings, ever again. Except in coded words and coded behavior which we all recognize for what it is today, but one day we will forget the origins of. Code which neither the law nor the courts will ever acknowledge for what it really is.

Since as it has not once acknowledged it directly since Brown first became law and the white backlash began 53 years ago.

For that, I'm sorriest of all. Your sacrifices and your parents' belief that all would be well if only you held your head up high while fighting for that in which you believed should not have come to mean, in any one's mind, that your struggles were to ensure protect the right for whites to decide how and when they will interact with us in the educational arena. And yet, in the words of Chief Justice Roberts, that's indeed what Brown v. Board of Education, and thus, the struggle for integrated schools, really stood for. Except that Justice Roberts and four others said that Brown was the struggle for "a colorblind society" in which race could never be taken into account - even to further good, instead of its historic evil.

So, ever in your debt, and knowing that your heads are still held high, even if after Thursday it is likely that you, like millions of us, are no longer even inadvertent slaves to the national delusion of brotherhood through integration (since, after all, you only wanted the equal education to which you were absolutely entitled as American citizens), thank you for fighting, nonetheless. It's up to the rest of us, now, to determine what your legacy will really mean. Once and for all.

Finally, as one of the greatest educators of our people, starting with our women, and one of my personal heroines (despite her idolization of Booker T. Washington), Mary McLeod Bethune, wrote:

If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

The drums of Africa beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single negro boy or girl lacking the opportunity to prove his or her worth.

You had the courage. The tenacity. You stood firmly like rocks at a time when it was clear that those others felt you had no worth, and no value worth educating at a level equal to theirs. Now that we have been told that the national experiment began with our courage will again fade to the urgency of the needs of those who have always believed that their wants were more important than our needs, I pray that we will again find a way to do for our day what you did for yours.

Brown v. Board of Education is dead. Long live Brown.

Always Expect the Expected

2007-06-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

(I don't normally do driveby blogging, but in this case I'll make an exception.)

In keeping with the rule to always expect the expected, America's highest court has just decided, by the 5-4 vote that everyone predicted once Samuel Alito was appointed to the Court, that to allow school districts to voluntarily adopt and implement racial desegregation plans for their students discriminates against little white boys and girls in violation of the Constitution. Thus, as of today, a white child's right to a racially segregated education to match his parents' choice to live in segregated neighborhoods in the states of Washington and Kentucky (and everywhere else) is again secure.

It only took 53 years.

Brown v. Board of Education is dead. (Even though the words "overruled" were apparently studiously avoided in the Roberts' opinion - oh well, at least Uncle Clarence didn't author it.) Long live Brown.

The details I will have to write about at some point but must go to work now and since I haven't yet read the actual decision. On the other hand, since my law firm was counsel for one of the amici trying to save the voluntary desegregation plans, I know what the arguments were. I also knew how they were received. So I can't say that I'm surprised. I'm not.

I'm not even depressed really. I'm at this point curious. Curious what our people are going to do now, that the last great legal myth about where we stand in this country as Americans vis a vis the white majority has been scrubbed away. This decision portends much for us, in terms of where we stand in this country. Particularly in light of other current events making clear that the idea that we and our people's needs are an irrelevant footnote. But there is much to think about, before writing too much. So I will read first, then comment more later (if work gives me the bandwidth, anyhow.)

(BTW, thank you, Alan Freeman (RIP) and Derrick Bell for teaching, as constitutional scholars who truly cared about anti-discrimination in fact and just not the appearance of it, law students the truth about the true legal significance of Brown -- and it wasn't that Black children had any constitutional right to an integrated education that outweighed what whites wanted for their children, despite Footnote 11 -- to those of us who actually wanted to understand it, instead of just believe in it as a beautiful cultural myth. It makes today's decision just a little less a slap in the face, expected or not.)

R.I.P. Steve Gilliard

2007-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Many folks were public fans of one of the early African-American lights of Blogtopia (thank you, Skippy): Steve Gilliard.

I was largely a private one.

Yet there is still a hole in my heart, upon reading the news today that Steve Gilliard has passed at the young age of 41.

I never had the opportunity to meet Steve. Or even engage in an e-mail dialogue with him that was longer than a single pass. I was not a YearlyKOS denizen, nor did I participate in his personal blogging "circle".

Yet I watched, and read, The News Blog, for years. With real, abiding respect.

I suspect there will be a lot of folks who will write commentary about how strong a blogger Steve was from his earliest days at DailyKOS, which I largely missed. And much more commentary about how "nobody" knew reading his work that he was Black.

But I always knew. As did most other Black bloggers.

That, in addition to an extraordinary economy in writing, was the beauty of Steve Gilliard. He was able to write about any and all subjects political and still kick ass when it came to sports writing. His pieces were overbrimmed with wit and cutting insightfulness. He was neither held slave to brevity nor a whore for slavish detail -- the words he wrote always seemed Just Enough to Make it Plain. And when a subject got him riled, and the Right Wing regularly did that, Steve was fearless. It's hard not to enjoy and look up to and revel in someone who wrote like that. I know that I certainly did.

But I also envied how he walked that fine line for so long yet never managed to let anyone think that he was a sell-out just because he was "in". That's probably not a big deal to most of his fans, but that's a big deal to me. In my three years on the 'Net, I have seen over and over through a variety of dust-ups that a major condition which the Left blogosphere imposes on Black bloggers as a prerequisite for acceptance is that we can't really be "Black"; i.e. cannot state our perspective and attribute it to actually having lived lives as Black people in this world, a state that no matter how utopian your outlook is presently different than it is for "the default", i.e. white people. And certainly not loudly. Indeed, the ready use of the trope that "nobody knows your color on the Internet" by white liberals routinely, even if unwittingly, sends a very real message to many Black bloggers new and aspiring (as it did to me, at first) that our true perspectives are simply not welcome. That the uniqueness of a third eye perspective, or voice may indeed be a strike against us, particularly if our perspectives don't line up with the orthodoxy that passes for progressive thought on the 'Net these days. It's the ultimate message, which bluntly most of us already get in the real world anyway: if you want survive, and succeed, you must be prepared to be absorbed into a Black-less Borg and become "the default". You aren't really Black, anymore. Or at least, you'd better pretend you're not.

Steve himself knew that, and made plain what he felt about it:

But there's something more pernicious than that. The assumption many people make is that I'm a white man. Now, people have done this in other cases, but in this case it's well, pretty fucking stupid.

What white progressive or liberal would feel free enough to make fun of a black man by putting him in blackface? No one. I can't imagine one doing so. Just the art alone would indicate I wasn't worried about being seen as racist, and hint, hint, I might be black.

But why do people assume I'm white? Because many people simply cannot imagine a black man blogging, much less expressing his opinions on a range of topics. It isn't what they are trained to think. Sports, ok, but politics, nope. It amuses me some days, but it does get other people in trouble

(From Tim Kaine is a Coward, 10/27/05)

At some point, it became crystal clear more than just folks like me that Steve Gilliard was, in fact, a proud Black blogger. Because Steve himself made it plain. It did not, contrary to all fears, narrow his focus, compartmentalize his discussion of issues, cramp his style or stifle his writing. Nothing changed. Including those times when he talked about sports. I don't think he wrote more about issues affecting Black people uniquely or disproportionately, given that The News Blog was intended to be just that: blogging about the news, which affects everyone. Rather, I got the feeling that it was more that Steve began to suffer fools less and less as a Black person the more and more he blogged, in sort of a "don't let all this power and status and rep on the 'Net fool you" kind of way.

There are exceptions, of course and, as more and more Black bloggers follow this path, the old trope about colorlessness on the Internet weighs less and less. Certainly, that has been the case for some from the very beginning, with folks such as Oliver Willis, and Pam in Durham and Liza Sabater, all Old School Bloggers who were into second wave blogging long before I ever started. But there are more and more new school bloggers on the Left, too, who are Black. And there are now few who t mind saying so, from the get go. From me looking back at it, at least part of this is because Steve himself figuratively threw down from an overtly Black perspective more and more, both in terms of subject matter and rhetoric, his well-deserved stellar reputation, built up over years of excellence, making it easier and easier for him to do so.

But of course I did not know him. I therefore don't know his motivations, thoughts or feelings. Except as he left them behind for the world to share.

I know that I, as a nascent Black blogger who this year has been too busy for her own blog, but who has been working on developing a collective platform for Black bloggers to meet and dialogue in fits and starts, deeply appreciated Steve's speaking with his Black man's voice. There are too many Black men already silenced as Black men as it is just trying to make it. Whether he wrote about "Black issues" was not important to me - we can't write about those all the time, if for no other reason than it is impossible to define those in any way that all Black folks will agree about. What was important is that the longer he blogged, he seemed to let his more and more of who he was come through in his writing. That necessarily included the Black perspective, that Black soul part of who he was.

He definitely became more and more of a hero, a voice that IMO Black bloggers should look up to, the longer he wrote. I feel that way because the more and more Steve Gilliard wrote, the more and more he pissed the hell out of Black Republicans. And pissed off clueless white liberals. Both, by telling them the truth -- as a Black man.

(IMO, that's how you know you're doing God's work as a Black progressive.)

The last two years were banner years in terms of Steve getting attacked by the clueless right *and* clueless left, from Steve Sailer on down. Until his sudden collapse earlier this year, which has now claimed him despite all hopes for months, he was truly giving meaning to the term "He Got Game."

Here are a couple of my favorite pieces by Steve, pulled out totally at random, just because:

How to Survive Silicon Alley

Steve Gilliard: Web Writer and Damned Proud of It! (Interview on Net Slaves)

Why Blacks Don't Vote Republican

Gollums Among Us

My Reply to Robert George

39.95 + (subtitled Should I Just Give Up and Let Bloomberg Win?. . .)

Tim Kaine is a Coward

About Meeting Clinton

You Have Shamed Us

Why Do Families Call on Sharpton?

A 41-year old soul is not an old soul, yet Steve had only 41 years in this life before he went on to the next one. I'm sure there's a News Blog waiting with his name and face on it. And I wish I'd gotten to know him, in this life. I'm sure he would have had real wisdom to pass on

To Steve's mother, Jen, and his family, and his friends: I am sorry for your loss, and pray for you all in your life transition.

To Steve: Rest in peace. Thank You, Brother, for doing your part to pave the way.

Oliver Gets it 1/2 Right

2007-02-22T08:02:00.000-08:00

Too much work, too much travel, so little time to blog. But I wanted to be sure to highlight yesterday's post by Oliver Willis on the intersection between the Black Church and Democratic Politics from yesterday: The Old Hotness.

The money quote from it, to me, is this one:

Who is the American leader, in all of our history, who was most impactful at conjoining his religious beliefs and political action? It's not Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell or any of the agents of intolerance on the right. It's Martin Luther King. That is, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. I often imagine King and other leaders before and since in the black church (yes, including Sharpton and Jackson) saying "I've got your religious left right here".

I think its great so many groups popped up espousing progressive religion, but I fear too many of them are in the mold of trying to appeal to conservative evangelicals - mostly southerners - who would vote for Satan before they would vote for a Democrat (I take pride in the fact that the bulk of haters vote GOP). Instead of liberals going to the existing religious left who pioneered political action and faith decades ago and saying "guide us", people created brand new organizations that too often ain't fooling anybody (If I hear anyone else say "we have values too" or any other empty platitude I'll go postal) and aren't - ironically - preaching to anyone.

The black churches of America aren't as fashionable and sexy perhaps as these other new organizations, but they've been there, they've done the homework, and they've produced tangible results we see every day in our lives as Americans. If they die out or fade away as a political force, the Democratic party and liberalism is doomed. Ignoring them and what they've done is a travesty.

Oliver is certainly correct in asserting what I think he is saying: the pre-existing, highly successful model, of the religious political left (for want of a better term) is Black people, and the Black church. And yet, when it comes to the new dialogue of reaching out to liberal and progressive people of faith, people are creating new models instead of embracing and following the lead of the one that both already exists and has delivered electoral success to the Democratic Party over and over and over again.

Unfortunately, Oliver takes that central premise and makes some assumptions that I think miss the point of the debate that started, I guess, when Jim Wallis called out Markos (who then acted as if he didn't get it, as Markos often does in the middle of controversy generated by his words IMO, and let others front for him instead of him speaking for himself) over about the fact that oftentimes, on DailyKOS in particular but more generally on left-wing sites, there is active verbal disdain and insult levied at religion and those who hold religious belief.

Where Bro. Oliver gets it wrong is in allowing himself to fall victim to a common deflection technique I've seen on the left where religion (and other controversial subjects in which the mirror is held up to itself) is concerned: he sets up a strawman and then knocks it down when he says:

And yes, the idea of these mythical Democrats who persecute the religious that nobody can ever name stinks to high heaven).

The strawman is the idea that anyone has ever accused folks on the left of "persecuting" the religious. I follow religious discussions pretty closely on most of the left-wing sites, and nobody has ever made that accusation. Thus, Oliver's dismissal of the accusation is dismissing a phantom that he and others who are uncomfortable with confronting the problem of folks hating on religious folks on left-wing sites head-on simply made up. Nobody is claiming any movement, or any organized effort, to "persecute the religious."

What the complaint is, and always has been, is that too many on the left who despise religion for their own personal reasons -- and I'm using the word despise quite deliberately, because every time this issue comes up I'm accused of capping on atheists and while the group I'm referring to often refers to itself as atheists most atheists were raised right and do not engage in the juvenile behavior that is generating so much complaint on the left from religious people -- have been encouraged, rewarded with mojo on sites that hand it out, and not called to task for insulting the very intelligence and ability to think and reason of those who call themselves religious, even allies on the left. When words like "irrational" and "unable to reason" and "deluded" and "psychosis" regularly find themselves in a dialogue between supposed adults about religion over and over again, only someone who is either (a) an ostrich or (b) self-serving or (c) a liar can fail to see the injury and deliberate harm. And none of this harm is excused by the fact that folks are fighting the same political fight. It also isn't excused by the fact that someone feels hurt about what the Catholic Church did or did not do to them or someone they love, the fact that their families may have psychically injured them while claiming to be religious or even that God does not intervene to prevent individual or global human suffering -- all reasons that I have seen written by folks who not only disclaim belief in religion (a non-issue) but can't just stop there, but instead go to the well of insult.

Oliver Willis, presumably knowing some Black religious folks, knows that our people wouldn't put up with that shit, in our churches or in our political movements, and would drop-kick someone with both barrels of the Lord (metaphorically) for one reason and one reason only: no matter what folks believe personally, coming in with such talk is inherently *disrespectful* to the majority of our people and our church communities which have proven their political worth. It is only in the white-dominated blogosphere that it is even tolerated, based on my experience. Maybe it's the perception of critical mass, maybe it's the sense that in their real lives they are frustrated having to conform to the social rules of etiquette when talking about religion, who knows. Whatever the reason, the left too often empowers folks who believe that their disdain of religion makes them superior intellects, reasoners and thinkers and that they therefore have license to ignore social convention when making their arguments.

By writing the above, Oliver essentially gives this type of person and this type of behavior a pass even as he rightfully seems to highlight that the blogosphere routinely ignores Black religious political movements when assessing and deciding upon strategic approaches to reaching "the religious left."

The other place where Oliver gets it 1/2 wrong is by assuming that

I think its great so many groups popped up espousing progressive religion, but I fear too many of them are in the mold of trying to appeal to conservative evangelicals - mostly southerners - who would vote for Satan before they would vote for a Democrat (I take pride in the fact that the bulk of haters vote GOP).

As a regular reader, even if not participant, in one of the sites he links to (Street Prophets) this fear has no merit. It is an as-yet statistically untested assumption that "conservative evangelicals" would vote for Satan before a Democrat. It may be a "truth" on the left, but there is no actual evidence of it. But more importantly, such a statement undermines Oliver's own thesis: It is inarguable by anyone who spends any time in Black churches that these same churches that Oliver rightfully points out have routinely brought political success to the Democratic Party ARE "conservative evangelical churches." They are evangelical in the traditional meaning of the term: they see their role as spreading the Good News. They are definitely "conservative" - you will not find a lot of emotional support for things that those of us on the left believe are issues the black church SHOULD support, the equal human worth of gays and lesbians at the top of the list IMO. Many lifelong Black churchgoers abhor abortion rights, for example -- indeed, the majority of African-Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in most if not all circumstances, even as Black folks disproportionately access the abortion right. They have reached a quiet consensus that it is a necessary evil. Acceptance of Premarital sex, particuarly amongst minors? They may accept the reality of it -- and indeed, when the babies come, as they often do, they embrace them and the mother, for religious reasons, but you'd be hard pressed to find any Black "conservative evangelical churches" that don't regularly make the immorality of it a topic for Sunday service Gay marriage? Nope. Patriarchy? You just don't want to know. You don't get much more "conservative" or "evangelical" than most Black churches - Especially in the South.

So Oliver's worry, such as it is, furthers the very thing that he is complaining about: ignoring the role of Black churches and Black churchgoers, by equating them to what (I think) he is really complaining about: white right-wing fundamentalists who claim to be acting out of religious belief. Those are not the same thing. I agree that anyone wasting his time on that group thinking that coalition can exist with it will see that group vote for Satan before a Democrat. But that group is a tiny minority of "conservative evangelical churches", and any argument that advocates less emphasis on trying to sway "conservative evangelical voters" necessarily gives them far more importance in the political process than they deserve.

The real skill will come in the left again learning how to discern the differences, and to work with religion as a tool for progressive political change, not merely against it as a coopted (by those who wouldn't know God if he showed up on their lawns with business cards) tool of progressive political harm.

I'm not Going to Make any Friends

2007-02-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

and will probably lose some as well, over what I am going to say, since the current fashion is that something is wrong with you if you are not up in arms feeling like sexist wrongness has victimized Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen. (And it is important to note that IMO this entire thing is about Amanda's writing, and only tangentially about Melissa's writing, based on both what folks are officially whinging about in this dust-up and what I know reading each for years at Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister. From my perspective as a reader, these women advocate in different voices even though they are fighting a common cause, so it is actually troubling to me that they are being lumped together by both sides in the discussion of what may well go down in history referred to as the Edwards’ Bloggers vs. Catholic League Controversy. Indeed, there is no common conclusion that one can draw about their respective writings -- not even the ones that led to this mess -- other than both are women and both are feminist.)

Despite the fact that I like friends, I am nonetheless going to put my view out there, and take the risk yet again that my different take on the predominant dogma might actually make some long-term sense now that heads are a bit cooler. I do so for the same reasons that the Amanda's and Melissa's and many others do: as a person committed to women, and women's equality, even if I see both theory and method about some key issues quite differently than most of my sisters on the left. And I expect it to be dismissed, but I'm tired of silencing myself as I have done for months now just out of fear of being dismissed. It won't be the first time: I am used to having my different voice as a woman dismissed on the left. For example, I was told once that I must not be a woman women merely because I pushed back at DailyKOS against the dominant feminist narrative that most women are victimized by unintended pregnancy following the choice to be sexual, so I guess what I am about to say will again reinforce in simple minds that I am anti- feminist. But at least I will still have bell hooks and other womanists for company......

I genuinely do not understand the argument that these women resigning from their posts -- whether voluntarily as they claim or under pressure as increasing numbers are speculating without a piss-pot worth of actual evidence -- is a reflection of John Edwards caving to anti-feminism or the patriarchy, as has been the rather consistent theme ever since Mr. Cowshit for Brains Donohoe had his say about what he found netsurfing Amanda and Melissa’s online writings. This entire thing appears to me to be nothing more than the same-old, same-old politics. Politics that could have just as equally nailed men in their employment for having said something that was off-the-cuff to one, intended audience that would one day be heard in another, less self-selected one. The business of Politics as Usual.

In other words, none of it -- except in the unconscious mind of the original speaker, Mr. Donohue himself, who appears to have made a career of going after women, and the hue and cry that others have raised about it – seems to have anything to do with feminism.

Hear me out before ranting, at least.

Let's get the easy part out of the way: William Donohue is a dick. A sexist dick. One who uses the veil of his asserted "Catholic League" (all 350K of them, the best evidence of how little energy what he had to say should have received from anyone since worldwide there apparently are nearly 1.1 billion Catholics, more than 65 million of them in the United States alone) to legitimize his neanderthal ways of thinking. Little ladies, indeed.

Second, I realize that religion and religious thinking is held in extremely low regard in virtually all of the "in-places" to be on the leftist internet. Particularly when it comes to religious thinking about things like birth control and abortion. The Catholic Church seems to get more than an average share of that low regard. Some deserved, but some over the top and reflecting a general resentment of religious teachings that don't leave people feeling completely validated for choosing to self-actualize in directions inconsistent with religious teachings. That's OK - I've accepted that general disdain and resentment as part of the territory even as I find it rather juvenile. And intellectually I understand where it comes from, although at times it seems to me to reach levels of histrionics that are a mystery to me since religion is, IMO, historically proven as much a source of societal good as societal evil such that dissing it and its adherents with the overbroad language too often used in leftist political discourse leaves many potential tools for change on the table at a time when those who truly are fighting for a better world for women and everyone else need all we can get.

But what really matters is that, for the purposes of political strategy, the religious-disdain left is deluding itself about its own importance if it does not accept, however difficult, the reality that such views are held by a tiny minority of potential voters. Thus, any leftist political candidate is a fool if he lets that minority of disdain be the deciding factor in how to react to anything. Anyone who doesn’t accept this – whether or not they like it, and I’m not advocating that anyone like it – is simply refusing to see the political landscape for what it really is at present. No matter how much folks believe it should change (and I am one of those that does believe it.)

In this case, Mr. Numbnuts Donohue used Amanda and Melissa's own words against them, counting on the fact that the overwhelming majority of folks in this country are religious and even if they don't agree with a particular teaching of a particular church -- even if they vehemently disagree with a particular teaching -- also were raised right and learned early on to tread lightly when dissing someone else's religion. Out of politeness, if nothing else. It's a politeness that seems deeply resented on the left, as evidenced by the sheer number of dust-ups that devolve into accusations of "delusional" and "irrational" beliefs as if calling someone either of those things just because they are religious is supposed to actually make them true.

And Donohue's gambit worked, up to a point. He counted on the left’s fear of a backlash from millions of religious Americans – including Catholics -- who are not crazy-as-a-bedbug folks like himself but who nonetheless vote to give actual power to his attempted power play. However, that fear, which I believe is both largely unconscious and underlies a lot of the vitriolic language (intended or inadvertent) used by too-many non-religious bloggers to discuss religious views on issues like birth control, abortion and unborn children, in which morality is implicated for most Americans to the same degree as women’s agency/independence/power or control, would not have done it alone. After all, all fear requires a target, a source of emotion. And the left wing blogosphere, having happily gone about for years treating itself as an echo-chamber in which folks could in a free-wheeling fashion and say whatever they wanted to without too much real life consequence even as it also jockeyed and positioned for, and ultimately obtained, real power, gave it to them. It is inarguable that had huge swaths of the leftwing blogosphere NOT had its now-years-long history of bloggers going to the global religious insult well because of their upset over the beliefs of a tiny minority, when nothing being argued required such rhetoric to make them, there would have been no opening for Mr. "I Had to Silence [Mara Vanderslice] Donohue" to have belly-crawled through. Had that history not been there to find, this entire episode would have been the kerfluffle that it really should have been.

But it was, and folks just have to deal with that. Hopefully, they will learn from it. For many reasons, most having to do with the fact that the star lights of the leftwing blogosphere seem to want to be real players at the halls of power in this country. And only an idiot doesn't know what the rules of the game are, where politics are concerned.

Now, having said that, it is inarguable that Donohue’s gambit worked only a little bit.

I believe that it was "only a little" is because, contrary to what others asserted, I believe that John Edwards -- himself an admittedly religious man who I suspect was as taken aback by reading some of the metaphorical things Amanda wrote – analogizing the Holy Spirit to “hot white sticky semen” and the Catholic Church's position on birth control being solely to guarantee itself more "tithing Catholics" as I was when I read them -- did the right thing in letting it be publicly known that he himself did not approve of what they had said, that he took them at their word about their good faith and lack of intent to insult either Catholics or religious people across the board (the subject of the "I didn't mean to" defense in a variety of political contexts is the subject of a very long diary I'll probably never have time to write) and then said the matter was squashed. These women were still welcome in his campaign, in the roles for which he'd hired them. And the controversy was Done. Finished. Catholic League or no Catholic League. Sexist pig Donohue or no sexist pig Donohue.

(We will set aside -- but only for now -- the larger question of why John Edwards or anyone is hiring anyone without doing a background check. There was nothing that Donohue used as a weapon that was non-public; this is not the equivalent of anyone accusing Amanda or Melissa of saying something in a private setting, which would have raised very serious questions for me. This entire event related to what both women had done as internet journalists. It really should have come as a surprise to no one that exercise of one's free speech right always runs the risk of a cost in the private marketplace of employment-- and for those truly sheltered people who *didn't* know that, I hope they have learned that lesson because unless one is self-employed one cannot survive. Our society has come to a virtual consensus that all employment is at will, meaning in plain English at the immediate whim of one’s employer. Do I think it's morally right? 95% of the time, no, and I don't think it would have been right in this case, either, had either woman been terminated because of what they wrote on their blogs. But it is nonetheless reality, and a community that claims to be grounded in reality is well advised to either accept this reality or fight to try to change it (the latter being my personal preference, but of seeming disinterest to most on the left, along with most issues affecting working and poor people.) If we do try and change it, however, a corollary truth is that we have to be prepared for it to change not just for political friends, but political enemies as well.)

To the little bit it did work, I have to ask: how did it work any differently for Amanda and Melissa than it would have for a man in their position with similarly public views that might not play too well in Peoria, an Armando or a Gottleib, for example? Nobody has explained that, and until that is explained, there is no evidence that gender had anything to do with this other than out of the mouth of the original speaker -- and as I've already discussed, that little man represents absolutely nobody.

How is the public use of Amanda's own words to pressure her to silence herself her any different than the use of Jeff Gannon's rent-a-boy photos to silence him? Is it inherently different because he was raising the perspective of "the enemy" in a way that neither Amanda or Melissa was? If you believe that, then I would argue that this type of thinking inherently leaves us weak and, ultimately, ineffective politically when it comes to communicating with the vast majority of potential voters. Either people are accountable for what they say or do, or they are not. But we cannot have it both ways - we cannot use these same types of tools – blog phishing, quoting out of context, and hyperbole about the relationship between words written in passion and real feelings and beliefs -- as a weapon and refuse to let go when speakers come forward and say "I didn't mean it that way" as an excuse only when it furthers our cause. It doesn't resonate with most people for a simple reason: it's transparently hypocritical.

Unfortunately, I do think that feminist ideals took a small blow from this episode, but not from the source everyone is blaming.

To me, they took the body blow when Amanda and Melissa did not believe enough in their own right to now put it behind them, and do the important work they were hired to do, after each had done IMO the right thing by apologizing for having inadvertently insulted religious people who did them no harm in their passionate writing. Neither of these women are shrinking violets. To the contrary they are champions for their take on feminism and respected if not beloved by many, as evidenced by how many responded to the call when they came under attack. They are held in extraordinarily high esteem and regard - and rightfully so, even though often times they say things that merely reinforce my sense of a huge perspective divide between how IME most middle- and upper-class white women think about sexism and feminism and resultant priorities, and how IME most Black women think about them. There is no question that they were qualified to do what they were hired to do and deserved the chance to do it.

Yet they folded – voluntarily in both Amanda’s and Melissa’s case. At least in part because of the perception that they would harm John Edwards' candidacy by remaining. A perception that they have, I would submit, only because of they are victim to the same patriarchal thinking about what our role is as women professionals that men are: in particular, the over-developed sense that women are responsible for both managing and stabilizing "communication" and "relationship" even if it comes at the expense of utterly unnecessary personal sacrifice. That sense that for women, we can never be completely "cleaned" of our inadvertent missteps so it's better not to harm others -- including other women -- by insisting on being judged by the same standards as men in the workplace. The standards that, for men's professional lives, often let them fuck up, say "mea culpa" and then demand that it truly be put in the past. We all know the experiences when men have been put under the microscope for saying things in front of one audience that were perceived as injudicious, or even offensive, in front of another. Have you seen any of them turn tail and run the minute that backlash against their words began? Hell no- they fought for their jobs, they fought for the right to be seen holistically, not just as moments in time which every human being has. They took their lumps, and even when it was clear that they were not qualified to be dog catcher they had to be run out on a rail for things that dwarf the things Amanda and Melissa had written. And, at some point, if the professional talent is there, the dialogue shifts from "OMG did you hear what he said/did" to one of "He's paid enough, leave him alone."

That process was shortcircuited when Amanda and Melissa quit.

And that bothers me, because their employer did have their back. Both women had been publicly affirmed by John Edwards, even if their personal opinions about religion had been publicly rejected, yet they did not use that power to hold the line. They made the personal, individual, choice, to quit. (Those who believe that somehow Edwards was wrong to express dismay about what they actually said do exist, but IMO that’s only because they themselves see nothing wrong with what was said and lack empathy for why others might not be sanguine about it yet not also be slaves to the patriarchy. Amanda and Melissa took it upon themselves to bear the weight of what people might think about John Edwards merely because they worked for him, a weight that I see no evidence of John Edwards actually asking them to bear. (I set aside all the conspiracy theories about how they were "forced" to resign; I have seen no evidence that either Amanda or Melissa is a liar, and I have enough respect for both to believe that either would spell it out plain if they felt shoved out by John Edwards. Just because it is more comforting to believe differently doesn't make truth.) They could have ridden this out, particularly once the blogosphere rose to surround and embrace and defend them. After all, memory in politics and media is only as long as the next thing that someone can throw up on the wall and make stick. This thing would have blown over quickly, I predict – but for the hue and cry that made this moment out to be a litmus test for all women bloggers on the left rather than what it it was, which was the ramblings of a petty man who speaks for virtually no one, that Edwards shot down by refusing to fire them.

And thus without meaning to reinforced the societal, sexist, patriarchal message that where women in power are concerned, we should volunteer to sacrifice ourselves professionally to "larger goals" even when we're not asked to do it, in a way that men in power rarely are asked to do and are certainly not expected to do. Each unwittingly reinforced the idea of women volunteering to be sacrificial lambs in the professional arena.

The very thing that most folks who championed their cause claimed they were being made into by Mr. “I Can’t Even Claim Most Catholics Agree With Me” Donohue’s calling them out.

It is my view that neither woman should have quit, and I say that as someone who was offended by some of Amanda's past writing (but not by Melissa's, which had a fundamentally different tone to it.) I took their apology at their word, and that was the end of it for me, a person who is not a Catholic and certainly not a member of the teensy-weensy Catholic League, but still a religious person who has routinely recoiled at the unthinking way that people on the left disrespect others in a blanket fashion when they write about religious issues which they don't like, ignoring the very individualism (i.e. that it is individual religious voters, not a faceless mass of “Christofascists” who are so tiny a fucking minority of both voters and self-professed religious people in this country that we should stop validating and empowering them by making them out to be the boogeyman that everyone should be worried about all the time, rather than the more than 100,000,000 religious people who are actually….religious and who while they may not give out kudos and congratulations for all behavior or thinking that feminists on the left hold near and dear (including things like elective abortion), are willing to at least Let Go and Let God on these same issues, and through their votes provide support even if not agreement or approval if they are not assumed guilty by association with the same Right Wing Religious Noise Machine that we make sure gets heard through our own over-focus on their bullshit.

But who do you blame for that? Mr. Donohue, who played his political hand? Mr. Edwards, who both appeared to remain true to his personal principles and true to these women at the same time? Amanda and Melissa for having given up? Or society itself for having created a political climate where these types of distracting things even can happen in political campaigning because of the words of someone who represents -- if we take his puffery seriously, and I don't -- exactly 3% of the folks who titularly share his faith? We are, I would argue, getting angry about the wrong things.

Here's what I am angry about, as a womanist (figuring I have cotninued to forfeit the title "feminist".) I'm angry that we as women continue to want to have it both ways: we want the power to silence our enemies for injudicious statements when they further our chosen dogma yet want to cry victim of sexism when the same tactics are used on our allies. If there is one thing I have learned, however, it is that we cannot have it both ways. That's not rocket science. If we are seeking a new paradigm, and I think everyone that loves women is whether we call a particular issue "feminist" or not, then we have to start from the proposition that there is no quarter, no matter what our personal beliefs, and that if we are acting on principle we have to be prepared to defend our principles. Starting with the principle that Amanda can write what she chooses to write and is woman enough to stand strong when what she has written is criticized for it, whether one thinks she should be or not, OUTSIDE of the echo chamber that is the left-wing blogosphere.

Because it is only outside that echo chamber that real change will be made.

I feel bad for Amanda and Melissa, that they have now chosen not to stay around and do the jobs they were hired to do when everything was squashed. Having high regard for their work, I know they would have excelled at it just as they excel at blogging their perspectives. But I do not feel bad for them because I believe that they were told to "shut their pie hole" because they were women by anyone who actually mattered. The only person who sent that message clearly *shouldn’t have* mattered to anyone who doesn't let foolishness distract them, and the persons who do actually matter (the Edwards’ campaign or other candidates) didn't say it. They didn't even imply it outside of the realm of "I don't agree with what you say, and reject how you say it, when it comes to what you expressed about Catholic religion." -- a particular heat in the kitchen that any savvy blogger better be able to handle, and that both Amanda and Melissa have shown they *could* have handled - if they chose too. Heat that would have been levied at them if they were both men, in this context.

I am happy, however, that Amanda and, in her less sarcastic way, Melissa, have decided to use this learning experience to continue to fight their fight, and am confident that in the end they will have served their cause more than in the jobs they have given up. I have nothing but love for that, in keeping with a core principle of Black feminism: we as women are powerful beyond belief, so don't you ever give that power away. Indeed, as of this morning following a wingnut denial-of-service attack, Amanda’s back again with both gloves off. Since of course no matter what I think of what they say when they are on a roll, I’d fight to the death for their right to say it – despite what I suspect would be deep disdain for my particular views on issues involving women which they hold held near and dear to their hearts. We may not see either the theory or methods of feminism the same way most of the time, and most of the time we don’t, but in that they are All Woman.

Excuse My Technical Difficulties

2006-11-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

But for about a week, I have been wracking my puny brain trying to figure out why only my 3 most recent posts - and none of the left side of my blog - were showing. I could see them only by clicking through what was visible and getting lucky. After days of my hair falling out, and just as I was about to fire off a nasty letter to Blogger, I decided to check the "Help Community" and lo and behold, Blogger was spared.

I forgot to close two "span=fullpost" tags in 2 separate posts.

Note to self: Remain Calm. All is Well.

This is the type of stuff that explains why I need to stick to law - no way can I ever get a handle on the type of attention to minute detail that HTML coding seem sto require, let alone memorizing all The Rules. Heck, I had to do a google search to even make the accents properly in this morning's post about thee French election.

For those who were looking for articles or wondering why I have written only 3 posts on the blog that anyone can find, my apologies. They are back now. =) I really need to try and find cash to pay the youngest Sulky Teen to help me with this stuff. I'm totally, utterly clueless.

But at least my favorite new associates found out at 6:00:001 today (the nanosecond that their repeated F5 didn't just say "Results will be available in X minutes") that they passed the CA Bar! Go you two!! (You know who you are.)

Reason #623 Why Knee-Jerk American "Feminists" Don't Get It

2006-11-17T05:46:00.000-08:00

Ségolène Royal

To be fair to my sisters, in this case it's really most Americans don't get it, period, regardless of gender.

The results of yesterday's Socialist Party balloting in France, where Ségolène Royal took 60% of the party vote as their presidential candidate, seem to contain two lessons that Americans can take to the bank about world politics today. Especially about feminism on the political world stage.

Lesson #1: Don't be afraid to run, and run hard, on populist ideas. Royal won her party's nomination on an unabashedly populist/grassroots platform that would make a 1960's radical proud, at a time when France is confronting enormous strife as a result of tensions within its diverse population and there is enormous cultural pressure to "crack down" on the diverse youth. Guaranteed Health Care. Subsidies. Affordable Housing. Virtual town halls and Citizen Juries. Ideas all of which have been described by her political opponents as "naive", "too liberal", "inexperienced".

Ideas which, apparently, got her more than 60% of her party's vote despite what some suggest are really fairly middle-of-the-road political views -- some even conservative -- when you scratch her surface.

And at least for now, it is predicted that Royal will run neck-and-neck in next year's general Presidental elections in France with that conservative powerhouse and rhetorical juggeranut, Nicolas Sarkozy. If I was Mme. Royal, I'd have only two words for Mr. Sarkozy in light of yesterday's balloting:

Bring It.

Lesson #2: If a woman gains power in part through her appearance and femininity, it's not necessarily evidence of the return of the patriarchy.

That lesson could definitely be learned by the hardcore American "feminists" running around talking about politics and insisting that their way is the only way to true feminist power in the world. I know this morning that at least a few must be struggling to wrap their brains around how it is possible that this type of female politician - who purposefully recreated herself from what was described as "geeky" into unabashedly feminine, public-bikini-strutting mother of four kids who in 25 years hasn't felt it necessary to marry their father, the head of her political party (someone who in delightful irony might well be her political rival someday) - appears now poised to join Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Angela Merkel, Michelle Bachelet and even Wu Yi in furtherance of what appears to be increasing world momentum to turn the reins of state over to not just women, but non-mainstream, visually-feminine women. Women who made it on their own with no political coattails to ride on (from both the left and the right in their respective countries, as their political landscape doesn't line up neatly with American notions of politics. Few people, for example, would readily associate the words "feminist" or "progressive" with Chancellor Merkel, although you'd be hard-pressed to consider both Presidents Johnson-Sirleaf and Bachelet as anything but.)

(In pitiful contrast, here in America we still have feminists claiming to be politically-savvy wasting precious time hand-wringing over whether someone they don't even know uses the word "bitch-slap" or whinging that the sex-positive arm of Third Wave Feminism or the religious/faith-based arm of the much-heraleded Fourth Wave of Feminism are somehow "dangerous" to women or "anti-feminist".)

Anyone who doesn't realize that Royal's life choices and willingness to play on her gender as a reason to elect her or even as a factor to be considered affirmatively would be FATAL to any American female politician is in steep denial where American misogyny is concerned. Just compare Ms. Royal and her rhetoric to that of any of the women *our* country is willing to tolerate -- I've yet to see acceptance -- having some modicum of power. Nancy Pelosi couldn't wake anyone up with a frying pan and a drum; we know she has a husband but all we ever see is her grandchildren - she's permitted to be nothing other than a matron. Hillary Clinton is a devout Methodist mother who installed a kitchen in the White House to feed her family breakfast, is in church every Sunday and other than a dye job has never indicated any nod to feminine vanity; and the single biggest beef against her in "heartland" continues to be has always been that she had the audacity and the nerve while Big Dawg was president to actually have -- and SPEAK -- her own mind about *his* job. Not to mention that other than the African-American women, you'd be hard pressed to find any serious female politician in America who does not feel compelled to be seen everday only in the most unglamous, ungendered haircut, the most unflattering make-up job and severe, sexless, boring-ass clothes imaginable. Dianne Feinstein? (Oh Lord, where do I start?) And Laura Bush, our first lady? Two words:

Stepford Wife.

All one has to do is remember the reaction when Cynthia McKinney, one of the most consistently anti-war leftists -- and an unapologetic womanist -- this country has ever seen, abandoned "the uniform" for more feminine clothing and one of our people's natural -- and quite popular -- do's:

Even on the left, this was brought up as evidence that she was "a ghetto slut" unfit for public office. Feminists in this country certainly didn't stand up all that hard for Cynthia when she was being run out on a rail either in 2002 or 2006 by men who by comparison politically were Old Guard conservative, perhaps because Cynthia McKinney never made sexism the sole explanation of what was happening to her politically (which IME usually pisses off white knee-jerk feminists, who seem to never grok the idea of intersectionality and why feminism cannot take an "only sexism all the time" or "sexism as the worst of oppressions" approach to global women's liberation because that approach nullifies the life-experience of the majority of the world's women: women of color.)

Finally, while senator Barbara Boxer tries to push the envelope from time to time in terms of her appearance, her politics are already considered "too radical" by most folks it's hard to know whether it makes any difference in her case.

My point in all this is that women who are politically involved here in America, especially our traditional feminist movements -- are still trying to play politics -- the "man's game" -- using men's rules, instead of our own. We dress like them. Our rhetoric sounds like them. And our issues are still articulated with reference to "them" (the abortion debate continues to be waged with the subliminal message that women are victims, always, if they are pregnant when they don't want to me, about as disempowering as you can get IMO). Unlike women all over the world that do not worry about the niceties of language or "professional dress" or sounding like men.

I think watching how far that type of female politician abroad has risen in terms of politcal power - even in countries that we know still have really serious problems with institutional patriarchy and misogyny -- is a possible road-map for success here in America where women and politics are concerned. It's food for thought, anyway.

I am not a denizen of French politics but will definitely be keeping my eye on Mme. Royal and this particular contest. Because any woman running for political office that dismisses her detractors by reminding the Male Old Guard that "“I hear that Gazelles run faster than elephants” is indeed All Woman, and All That.

(One caveat: I do hope she rethinks her opposition to same sex marriages, the one thing that disappointed me as I spent this morning learning more about her after reading the Times. Any woman that has bucked the system by playing the system can surely see that these types of arbitrary discriminations have no place in a genuinely populist society.)

RIP, Ed Bradley

2006-11-10T05:28:00.000-08:00

There aren't many of our TV news icons left, now. When I say "our", I mean those pioneering Black Journalists who for decades carried the water of being "the only", knowing the special responsibility to "represent" that fell to each of them that often felt as much a tiring burden as it was a uniquely rewarding duty. Max Robinson, founder of the National Association of Black Journalists, fierce advocate for our people in journalism and brother to the equally fierce advocate Randall Robinson is gone. Faith Fancher, the quiet yet equally insistent face of San Francisco journalistic sisterhood, is gone. Carl T. Rowan, the man on the radio whose mellifluous voice I heard day after day speaking truth to power and whose words he was never afraid to have in the Amsterdam News even as he was walking the halls of power in Washington DC -- and who I will always revere for calling the truth about Ronald Reagan being a racist -- gone.

Now God has called home their foil, their balance, the face of African-American news journalism known the world over: Ed Bradley. Called him home at the young age of 65.

I remember when Ed Bradley came to 60 Minutes to replace Dan Rather, having already been the first Black White House correspondent and therefore already All That. I remember the fro, thinking how Soul Train it looked next to Mr. Middle Americas, Morley Safer and Mike Wallace. I remember folks not taking to him much at first - after all, Rather's shoes as the "in-depth story man" were pretty big and nobody expected a successor to make their own mark in the spot. Yet Ed Bradley - smooth as silk even as he was a piercing interviewer - did so, and did so quickly. And I became a weekly 60 Minutes addict, for many years, just to watch him. I never had a desire to be a journalist, but if I had wanted that, I would have wanted to be just like him. Piercing. Mellow. Able to get his subjects to open up and talk: Can anyone say that there was *ever* a more informative, HUMAN, interview than his with Timothy McVeigh as he sat on death row for the Oklahoma city bombing? A more revering, pride-filling interview than with the now-disabled Greatest, Muhammed Ali? Was there any other reporter who could have shielded Michael Jackson from looking like a complete clown as he whinged like a 2 year old about being manhandled when arrested for alleged child molestation? Can anyone ever doubt that he earned all 20 of his Emmys for television journalism?

No, they can't.

I did not have an opportunity to see one of Ed Bradley's last stories - with most of those involved in the Duke Rape Scandal. But, apparently, it was that interview that made clear to the world not that Ed Bradley still had the right stuff as an interviewer -- nobody doubted that he did -- but that he was gravely ill. I wish I had heard. I wish I had known. I would have liked to curl up, one last Sunday, to see him. To see that hard-hitting, yet always quiet, back-and-forth, his earring remaining a giant "Fuck You" to conservative imagery. You can tell the type of reach and power he had with viewers by things like the fact that I learned of Bradley's passing because my immigrant Aussie husband - who has not watched a Sunday news program in the 3 years that he has been in the United States -- sent me the news article from The Australian.

You see, he too knew Ed Bradley. From all the way on the other side of the world, even though he's white and therefore almost certainly did not see Ed Bradley as anything more than a great reporter, since he knew nothing about what it meant to be a Black journalist in America at the time that Ed Bradley was making -- and keeping -- his mark. That makes perfect sense - Ed Bradley, earring-wearing, stylin' and profilin' hard hitting journalist, just had it going on like that. He was great at what he did, and did for all of us while being great. He carried the water, and never spilled a drop as far as any of us could see.

His close friend -- and another one of my Black Journalism heroines - Charlayne Hunter-Gault probably summed it up best yesterday:

I think people might want to characterize him as a trailblazer for black journalists. . .I think he’d be proud of that. But I think Ed was a trailblazer for good journalism. Period.

He sure was.

Rest in peace, Ed Bradley. I will miss your Sundays.