Terry came to us after 12 years as a community organizer, primarily working for Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, an organization known for building a multiracial constituency capable of changing local and state policy. In the 1990s and 00s, he headed up our education equity program, bringing a racial justice lens to many issues. After some 10 years as the director of our Leadership Action Network, he has moved into a new role as Thought Leadership and Practice Specialist, where he thinks all the time about how to turn all the ideas that flow through this organization, and the larger movement, into useful tools and innovative strategies. He brings a wealth of experience in organizing, research, campaigns and training to any team he joins.
But Colorlines readers may be most familiar with Terry's voice from some of his previous writings that we have occasionally featured, such as "How to be a Racial Justice Hero on MLK Day and All Year Long," where he provides practical tips for making positive change, and "White Dad, Black Son and Raising Kids in a 'Colorblind' World" where he reflects on the realities of cross racial adoption from his perspective as the single, adoptive father of an African-American son.
With Movement Notes, Terry will be sharing experience and insight with articles about what is happening in the movement for racial justice. He has the great benefit of being in touch with people who are working in places that we don't generally imagine as hotbeds of racial justice activity, but turn out to be just that. He'll allow me to contribute occasionally, but he will carry this space in ways that I never could. You might wonder why I would turn over such a space to a white man. The answer is, because I trust him, because he is grounded by colleagues of color, and because we need ever more good examples of white men who contribute helpfully to the advancement of racial justice.
Terry will start writing this month.
]]>On May 1, the day that most of the world celebrates workers, thousands of immigrants across the United States will march for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, having made it an annual tradition of showing immigrant power. It is a day that, if we chose to, we could acknowledge the ways in which workers across the world are struggling to migrate as freely as corporations do.
I remembered Salas' story last weekend as I was watching "Who is Dayani Cristal?," a new film by Marc Silver* and Gael Garcia Bernal. Silver had started working with the Tucson Medical Examiner's office to document the search for bodies of migrants in the Arizona desert. The ME's office keeps remains often for several years, working with Mexican and Central American governments to identify as many as possible. On his first day of filming, Silver was witness to the recovery of a man's body with a tattoo that said "Dayani Cristal."
The film follows two storylines in tandem. The first is the ME's office efforts to solve the mystery of this man's identity, and the return of his body to his family. The second is the tracking of Bernal's re-creation of the migrant's journey through Central America and Mexico to get to the United States.The bearer of the tattoo turns out to be a Honduran migrant named Dilcy Yohan Sandres Martinez , who had his daughter's name tattooed. Through interviews with Martinez's wife, brother and father, we learn that he was a small farmer of corn and beans, just like Apolinar Salas.
Martinez had been thinking of leaving Honduras for some time, but when his son was diagnosed with leukemia his decision was set. "I have to go. It's the only way," he told his wife. He'd crossed the border and been deported at least once before (this is the fact that eventually enabled the ME's office to identify him). Through Bernal's eyes, we trace his journey. This part of the film is a little discomfiting, as the New York Times put it. Bernal is so famous throughout Latin America that it's hard to imagine all the migrants he travels with not knowing him, and the contrast between his persona and the hard realities of a journey that ended in Martinez's death can cause a bit of a psychic break for the viewer. For example, while he rides The Beast - the train that cuts through Mexico with dozens of migrants on the roofs struggling not to fall under the wheels - he notes the danger, but emphasizes the beauty of the landscape and the brotherhood of shared watermelon and pineapple. We are ever aware that this is not Bernal's life, even as we want to give him credit for immersing himself in the experience.
Nonetheless, the facts of the crossing become clear. It has become increasingly dangerous. Just about the same time that NAFTA passed, the Clinton Administration also instituted tougher border controls, cutting off with layers of fences the safer crossings in Texas and California, which forced determined migrants to enter the punishing Arizona desert instead. Before 2000, the Pima County ME's office had collected fewer than 20 bodies annually. Since 2001, the yearly count reached 200. Some of the most moving portions of the film come from interviews with Martinez's companions on that trip. He began to get really sick from dehydration and heat, having trouble walking. They stuck by him, each taking an arm to help him walk. Finally, when he couldn't even stand up, he told them to leave him, that he was going to die, and that they should look after themselves. They covered him with a light jacket, left him with some water, and kept going with thoughts of their own families driving them.
This is the thing that is so frustrating about our immigration policy debate. We hold it as though it is domestic policy only, as though it has no relationship to U.S. foreign policy and global economic behavior. The Bush Administration signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005. While CAFTA has some more labor protections than NAFTA did, it did the same essential thing - subsidized U.S. food producers, shifted the Honduran economy toward manufacturing for export, and generated lots of unemployment replaced only partially by low-wage factory work.
It is possible to talk about immigration in the full context, but doing so would require a real hard look at the behavior of U.S. and multinational corporations. That full discussion might alienate some of the business interests who have thrown down support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, because it would bring a level of scrutiny to their own global operations that might surface practices that are, if not illegal, difficult to swallow, like the union-busting that took place at Alcoa plants in Mexico and Central America.
As long as this is what the U.S. is generating in Latin America, migrants are going to do whatever it takes to get across the border and support their families. It will not matter how many people die, how difficult it is to be undocumented, or how painful it is to be separated from one's family. Knowing the greater dangers of crossing now, Apolinar Salas knows that he has been lucky. He made it across the border at a safer time, and one of his employers sponsored him for a green card in the early 2000s. But if he was in Mexico, assessing the wisdom of getting on The Beast, the question would be the same as it ever was: do I need to go for the survival of self and family? "I did it out of necessity then. If I needed to do it out of necessity again, I would do it," he said.
*Post has been updated since publication
]]>In this video, we revisit 10 victories from 2013. If you'd like to help us work toward more wins in 2014, here's one easy way to help.
]]>Look forward. Turn what has been done into a better path.
~ Wilma Mankiller
Organizations, just like people, grow into themselves over time. Here at the Applied Research Center, we are at a moment of becoming so fully ourselves that we decided to change our name to reflect our mission and strategy most accurately.
From now on, we will be known as Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation. Ta da!
We chose this name because it speaks so clearly to the reason we exist. I love it personally for many reasons. It allows us to put race forward as a legitimate category of analysis and debate in the face of endless pressure to shut up about that already. Putting race forward to acknowledge and address the ways in which communities of color are still marginalized, abandoned and exploited is critical to solving our national problems.
And, whatever positive change is possible, we need to race toward it. Not amble, saunter or duck walk. We need to run, because this project is urgent. Each day that passes represents terrible real-life consequences. Another thousand kids who go to school hungry. Another dozen teens shot by police. Another hundred thousand unable to keep the home their families worked so hard to acquire.
When we founded this organization more than 30 years ago, our strategy was to equip community groups with the analytic tools to address race in their work. But as we worked across the country on matters like welfare, education and immigration reform, we understood something important about today's struggle against racial discrimination.
Our so-called leaders--from left, right and center--have shut down discussion of racial issues by pushing colorblindness (conservatives) or universalism (liberals) as the real solutions to the problems faced by communities of color. Increasingly, our staff and board had to make one point in particular.
We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name. We have to be explicit about race if we want to solve economic, political and social problems for everybody, rather than just for the people who qualify as "universal" in this country. Our work helps people solve problems in the most sophisticated and effective ways possible.
Our new tagline--The Center for Racial Justice Innovation--speaks to our role and history. Our founder, Gary Delgado, set us up to be nimble and deep, and set a great example for us with his own creativity. Innovation is something that happens at the edges of the establishment, and it is key to keeping the racial justice movement alive for as long as it is required.
Change is constant. Our job is to keep coming up with better ways to harness our resources to make meaningful change now. Naming innovation as our central function keeps us on our toes.
We've designed many creative advances over the years. We made popular education a regular part of community organizing, think tank programming and culture. We built Colorlines, a multiracial news outlet that focuses on race in all parts of life and that reaches millions. We got the Associated Press and dozens of other news outlets to drop the i-word, which many people said was a fool's errand. We crafted legislative report cards on racial equity that have shifted the politics of a dozen states. We conceived of ourselves as a one-stop shop for racial justice, which has turned out to be something many people want.
Organizations are the sum of all the people they include. I thank the many who have built this organization--all of the staff and board over the past 30-plus years, and all of our funders who have supported the quality work we've produced over the years.
And you, our community, the readers, viewers, listeners and commenters; the organizers, writers, scholars, students, public administrators, elected officials; and so many others who have sustained us with your engagement, feedback and money.
The renaming of the Applied Research Center into Race Forward is grounded in our deepest commitments. We know our nation can and must have a racially equitable future. We're not afraid to say so, and not afraid to make it so. We hope you will join us in that project.
]]>We are definitely at the brink of something. I hope that it is a racial justice movement, one that builds on the legacy of civil rights while bringing crucial new elements to our political and social lives. We have a chance to explore fundamental questions like the nature of racism, what to do with the variety of racial hierarchies across the country, and how to craft a vision big enough to hold together communities who are constantly pitted against one another.
Using the racial justice frame allows us to fight off the seductive, corrupt appeal of colorblindness, which currently makes it difficult to talk about even racial diversity, much less the real prize of racial equity. Such language also allows us to move beyond the current limitations in civil rights law to imagine a host of new policies and practices in public and private spaces, while we also upgrade existing civil rights laws at all levels of government. Finally, the modern movement has to be fully multiracial, as multiracial as the country itself. The number and variety of communities of color will continue to grow. If all of our communities stake out ground on race, rather than on a set of proxies, we will more likely be able to stick together when any one of us is accused of race baiting.
The Need for Plain Speech
We cannot solve a problem that no one is willing to name, and the biggest obstacle facing Americans today is that, in the main, we don't want to talk about race, much less about racism. Our societal silence makes room for inventive new forms of discrimination, while it blocks our efforts to change rules that disadvantage people of color. Unless we say what we mean, we cannot redefine how racism works or drive the debate toward equity.
Americans define racism as individual, overt and intentional. But modern forms of racial discrimination are often unintentional, systemic and hidden. The tropes and images of the civil rights era reinforce the old definition. People taking on new forms constantly look for our own Bull Connor to make the case. We can find these kinds of figures. But there's inevitably debate about whether they truly hit the Bull Connor standard, as we can see in popular defenses of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Gov. Rick Scott. Politicians, employers and public administrators have all learned to use codes for the groups they target.
The notion that all racism is intentional and overt is a fundamental building block of the false solution of colorblindness.
The obsession with examining the intentions of individual actors in order to legitimize the existence of racism undermines efforts to achieve justice. This is because the discussion of racism in the U.S. is devoid of any mention of history, power or policy. The person who notices racial disparities in health care, for example, is vilified for so-called race baiting, while someone like Rep. Steve King is virtually unchallenged when he puts up a sign referring to the State Children's Health Insurance Program as "Socialized, Clintonesque, Hillary Care for Illegals and Their Children." Hey, he didn't say Latino illegals, so that's not racist.
Fifteen years of brain research have revealed that ignoring racial difference is impossible, and that most human beings are unconscious of their biases. Thus getting people to acknowledge and change their biases voluntarily is often very difficult, and if it does happen, is insufficient to address the institutional problem.
Even people who don't dismiss the need for race talk entirely often have the wrong end goal in mind. They encourage respect for diversity, or multiculturalism. Those are both good things. But neither one is the same thing as justice. It is entirely possible to have a diverse community, city or workplace that is marked by inequity. In restaurants I've worked in and observed, the white workers in the dining room get along perfectly well with black and Latino workers confined to the kitchen and dishroom, but they are not in an equitable situation. In being explicit about working on racial justice, our modern movement has a chance to push past the diversity goal and define justice.
Justice and Rights Aren't the Same
Justice can include civil rights laws, but civil rights laws don't always include justice. The difference between the two is suggested for me in that old school precursor to jokes, "There oughta be a law." There ought to be lots of laws and we won't get them unless we recognize the limits of the laws we have now in relation to justice.
Here is NOLO Press's plain language definition of civil rights.
Rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, the 13th and 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights include civil liberties (such as the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion), as well as due process, the right to vote, equal and fair treatment by law enforcement and the courts, and the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of a democratic society, such as equal access to public schools, recreation, transportation, public facilities, and housing.
"Civil" refers largely to political rights, but communities of color need change in economics and culture, too, the kind of change that hasn't yet been encoded in the law. People of color should be able to see ourselves on television and in movies as something other than villains far more often than we do now, but there is no law that calls this a "right." Food justice would mean that people could get access to fresh produce at reasonable prices within a short distance from their homes, yet no law punishes grocery store chains for abandoning poor neighborhoods of color. But laws and other structures could be crafted to change these arrangements that too many people currently accept as "just the way it is." In fact, over time, the kinds of rules and regulations that once supported cultural rights, such as the fairness doctrine in communications law, have been steadily gutted by the same deregulation that created Fox News.
People should not be subjected to exploitation on the job, but labor laws, including those against discrimination that are in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, don't get us anywhere near workplace justice. After New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse examined the comment threads from his reporting on the growing fast food workers strikes, he was moved to tweet that he'd never seen such lack of sympathy for workers. Research by Topos reveals that most Americans do not think of crappy jobs as exploitive jobs. They think "entry level" jobs are meant to pay little, and they put all the responsibility for improvement on the workers themselves, in the form of further education to get a better job. That sentiment was borne out again and again in Greenhouse's comment thread. The fact that people of color, especially black people, are heavily concentrated in the fast food industry strikes me as the trigger for that kind of easy victim blaming.
The language of justice simply gives us more options for articulating what fairness looks like than does the language of civil rights. Only a big, broad vision will be exciting enough to mobilize Americans for the hard thinking and action required to meet our upcoming challenges. The country's changing demographics are at the top of the challenge list for me.
Going Multiracial
When the March on Washington took place in 1963, there was also organizing among Latino, indigenous and Asian communities. These communities were often inspired by and related to the movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South, and they had their own forms of exploitation and discrimination to confront. The exploitive Bracero Program, which recruited Mexican guest workers for farmwork, had to be ended, and so did its brutal aftermath, Operation Wetback, which deported those same workers when they dared to overstay. The effects of Japanese American internment had to be addressed, and American Indians were trying to protect families from having their kids stolen right through the 1970s.
Connections surely existed between these groups during the 1960's, and they cannot be minimized. I know, however, that those ties were not nearly as strong as they need to be today.
My own experience as an immigrant, racial justice organizer has convinced me that building a container that can hold all the experiences different people of color have with racial hierarchy is critically important to prevent further loss of civil rights victories--even more so if we are to expand those victories. The vast changes in our national demographics are largely due to one of the benefits of the civil rights era: the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the policy that enabled my people, Indians, to enter the U.S. in significant numbers. Yet many Indian immigrants and their descendants are all too eager to distance themselves from that very same movement, accepting a role as the "solution" to the "problem" of black insurgence. My friend Vijay Prashad has written beautifully about this phenomenon in
I say this as an immigrant who has spent countless hours arguing with other immigrants and refugees who refuse to acknowledge our place in a racial hierarchy, and to take that into account as we fight for our own freedom. It has taken a long time, for example, for immigrant rights marches to stop featuring Latinos and Asians holding signs saying "we are not criminals," implicitly distancing themselves from the people who are stereotypically cast in the role of "criminal." And, no, I do not mean white men in suits committing financial crimes. If the immigrant rights movement had embraced racial justice from the beginning, we would have had far fewer debates about whether the "innocence" or "exceptional" frames would save us, and we would have been more able to ward off efforts to pit native-born black people against the immigrant rights agenda.
We can and must get to the place where we all see ourselves as one movement, rather than as a collection of movements working in solidarity with one another. It's a subtle shift, but one that would serve us well. Being one movement doesn't mean we have to lose the specificity of our experiences and solutions, but it does mean that we can engage in a level of joint analysis, planning and action that would make the most of each community's assets. I can tell you, the leaders and foot soldiers of a single movement talk to each other far more often than do the leaders and foot soldiers of allied movements.
The seminal event we commemorate this week was a march for "jobs and freedom," not a march for civil rights. We can assert collective strength and unity toward those goals with analysis that is explicit about race, campaigns that fight for economic and cultural as well as political change, and organizing that is grounded in a multiracial constituency.
A few months before the 1963 march, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." There is a modern expression of this most fundamentally moral concept, and inserting that idea into the body politic is our own generation's responsibility.
]]>Simultaneously, we reached out to Kal Penn to express our disappointment and concern over his tweets. We started a conversation that resulted in his endorsing this statement. Penn has also agreed to engage in a process of dialogue, learning, engagement and action on racial profiling and stop and frisk policies with the institutions and communities working on this issue, including Colorlines and SAALT. You'll find Penn's brief statement at the bottom of ours.
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This week, news of actor Kal Penn's tweets apparently supporting the NYPD's stop and frisk program has generated a debate about which we -- South Asian activists, scholars, writers, artists and lawyers--have strong opinions. In his follow-up yesterday, Penn asks: "As people of color is this [stop and frisk program] effective? Does it have merit? How do we make our own communities of color safer?"
Our unequivocal answers to these questions are: no, no and not with stop and frisk.
Stopping, interrogating, detaining or searching people based on characteristics such as their actual or perceived race, national origin, immigration status or religion is racial profiling. In a democracy, there has to be a reason to stop and search someone. Being a person of color isn't a good enough reason.
Stop and frisk sounds so benign yet it covers up the violent humiliation experienced by hundreds of thousands of young black and brown men annually. Beneath the numbers is the human impact of this sort of policing. It involves being thrown to the ground face down. It involves cops dumping your belongings on the street while they taunt you with predictions that you'll never amount to anything. It involves having this happen to you a dozen times before you're 16 years old, and continuing into your adulthood. This sort of police enforcement not only hurts the individual, but also entire communities whose members are treated as "others" and automatically deemed unwelcome suspects in their own neighborhoods.
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, New Yorkers, predominantly blacks and Latinos, have been stopped and interrogated on the street by police more than 4 million times since 2002, and nine out of 10 of those stopped have been completely innocent. Facts cited by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in the Floyd v. City of New York case, which was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, include that between 2004 and 2009, cops searched 2.28 million people for weapons, and that 2.25 million of them (98.5 percent) had none. Out of 4.4 million stops, only 6 percent led to an arrest, which means that cops were wrong 16 times more often than they were right.
These numbers confirm that there is absolutely no evidence that stop and frisk reduces crime. New York City's crime rate had started falling before stop and frisk was ever instituted, and cities and states across the country have also reduced crime rates without using such an unconstitutional and destructive practice.
The negative racial impact and ineffectiveness of stop and frisk would be reason enough to oppose it. And, South Asian communities have an additional stake in this debate.
Especially since September 11, South Asians are routinely targeted as would-be terrorists in many settings. Plenty of people say that South Asians, Sikhs and Muslims commit more terrorist acts to justify that profiling. South Asians have endured harassment at airports and at the border, interrogations and detentions by immigration authorities in the name of national security, and surveillance of Muslim Students Associations, mosques, and restaurants. In fact, the NYPD is facing lawsuits for their surveillance of Muslim communities.
A recent report by South Asian American organizations in New York City and nationally reveals the deep impact of racial and religious profiling on South Asian New Yorkers, many of whom are young, working class people who struggle with being singled out by authorities, including the NYPD. Indeed, plenty of young South Asians themselves have been victims of stop and frisk policies--in both terrorism and non-terrorism related contexts--even in schools.
We urge South Asians to join the growing multiracial movement to bring stop and frisk practices, as well as other policies that criminalize and target communities of color, in New York City and across our country to a speedy end.
(Affiliations are provided for identification purposes only.)
Rinku Sen, President of the Applied Research Center, publisher of Colorlines
Deepa Iyer, Executive Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)
Seema Agnani, Executive Director, Chhaya CDC
Chitra Aiyar, Board Member, Andolan - Organizing South Asian Workers
Chandra S. Bhatnagar, American Civil Liberties Union
Shahid Buttar, Executive Director, Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Mallika Dutt, Executive Director, Breakthrough
Ami Gandhi, Executive Director, South Asian American Policy & Research Institute (SAAPRI)
Vanita Gupta, Deputy Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Sameera Hafiz, Policy Director, Rights Working Group
Aziz Huq
Chaumtoli Huq, Academic/Law@theMargins
Anil Kalhan, Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Pramila Jayapal, Distinguished Taconic Fellow, Center for Community Change
Saru Jayaraman, Co Director, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
Anil Kalhan, Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
Subhash Kateel, Radio Show Host, Let's Talk About It!
Farhana Khera
Kalpana Krishnamurthy, Policy Director Forward Together
Manju Kulkarni, Executive Director, South Asian Network (SAN)
Vijay Iyer, Musician
Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha)
Monami Maulik, Executive Director, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM)
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Vijay Prashad, Author, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, and Karma of Brown Folk
Naheed Qureshi
Luna Ranjit, Executive Director, Adhikaar
Hina Shamsi, Director, National Security Project, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Amardeep Singh, Co-Founder and Director of Programs, Sikh Coalition
Sivagami Subbaraman, Director, LGBTQ Resource Center, Georgetown University
Manar Waheed, Policy Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)
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From Kal Penn: "I support the statement from South Asian community leaders on the impact of racial profiling. I have and still do oppose racial profiling in any form. I want to thank SAALT and the Applied Research Center for reaching out and starting to educate and dialogue with me about these issues. I plan on being in regular contact with these great community leaders and allies around the issue of racial profiling, and to dialogue with and engage others about it. It's important for all our communities to be educated, informed and mobilized."
]]>Our legal frameworks are based on punishing explicit racism. Yet the not-explicit kind, what is known among social psychologists as "implicit bias," also undergirds the punishing policies that make young black men so vulnerable to deadly forms of discrimination. That reality creates a challenge, because it's much easier to condemn obvious racism than the kind that expresses itself in, say, Juror B37's statement that Zimmerman could credibly assume Trayvon Martin was "trying to do something bad in the neighborhood." Implicit bias is the reason why.
In the best-selling book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman describes the brain as having two parts, which he calls Systems 1 and 2. System 1 is lightning fast, intuitive and overconfident. It makes many, many judgements, often based on false assumptions. System 1 selectively pulls facts and images to justify those judgements, totally unaware that it is doing so. System 2, however, is slow, methodical, and much less confident, and it only kicks under real pressure.
System 1 is willing to give George Zimmerman's snap judgements about Trayvon the benefit of the doubt. To make your System 2 kick in and ask, for example, "Do I really need to clutch my bag/call the police/pull out my gun because a black man is walking toward me?" requires a decision, a desire to push System 1 aside. The good news of the Pew poll is it suggests that at least 30 percent of the nation's white people have moved beyond their System 1s and engaged their System 2s. Several hundred of them are represented in the Tumblr We Are Not Trayvon.
What happens in System 1 with regard to race is called implicit bias, which Maya Wiley, president of the Center for Social Inclusion, did a great job of explaining on "Up with Steve Kornacki." Implicit bias is the way that social psychologists refer to the phenomenon by which we are unaware of our prejudices. Our judgments about people don't qualify as prejudices because our brains are happy enough to have a coherent story about "those people." They're happy to linger in System 1. Social psychologists at Harvard University, University of Virginia and University of Washington created the implicit bias test online to enable people to see their biases at work in a series of rapid-fire judgments driven by images of white and black people.
The combination of implicit bias and power gives explicit racists a lot of cover, through rules and arrangements that don't need to be explicitly racist to get massive support. The entire Zimmerman trial was influenced by just these sorts of actions--from the initial botching of the crime scene, to the disturbing admissions of Juror B37 in her CNN interview, to the adoption of Florida's so-called "stand your ground" law in the first place. This combination--conscious racists who know not to use the n-word, unconscious racists who can't recognize bias without the n-word, and policymakers who can easily deny racist intention--affects every issue. This is why it is so hard, for instance, to establish that Texas Gov. Rick Perry's voter suppression policies were designed to target African Americans and Latinos, or that drug sentencing laws need a major overhaul.
Our inadequate civil rights laws make no provision for unconscious bias. The Civil Rights Act blocks practices and policies that have a racist impact, even if intention can't be proven. But in truth, it is nearly impossible to win a civil rights case in which racist intention isn't fairly obvious. Saru Jayaraman, a researcher and organizer who deals with employment discrimination in the restaurant industry, told me once that she can always get a lawyer to file wage theft lawsuits, but finds it much more difficult when the issue involves segregating workers of color in back of the house jobs.
So if people are unaware of their biases, how can we hold them accountable? How can we grow that 30 percent of white people dissatisfied with the status quo? It seems to me that we have to get their System 2s to kick in.
In an essay about "Fruitvale Station," Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday suggests that white Americans' reluctance to claim their privilege doesn't make it any less real:
As mortified as some white people may be at the suggestion that we've enjoyed career advancement at someone else's expense, we need to acknowledge that one can benefit from privilege even if it isn't explicitly claimed. Indeed, perhaps the ultimate marker of privilege is not having to be conscious of it.
That's System 2 thinking.
At the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines, we try to achieve this by focusing on impact rather than intention, because most people aren't conscious enough of their bias for it to qualify as intentional. We talk about racism this way because it lowers the heat level and makes it possible to have an actual conversation, sometimes even to really solve a problem. Lowering the heat level is about getting past white defensiveness, and it does enable people to engage constructively.
I worry sometimes that this framework lets conscious racists off the hook. Still, if it disrupts the coherence of biased stories, if it causes people to wonder whether their good intentions actually translate into fairness, if it gets some folks to stop a minute so that their System 2s can kick in, then it seems like a keeper. This concept of impact rather than intention is the next thing we need to establish in both politics and culture, in both school boards and Hollywood studios.
At last year's Facing Race conference, I gave a talk in which I said I was after changing the course of human evolution itself. If the human brain has evolved to enable other good things--cooperation, innovation, analysis--then I don't see why it can't evolve past its biases, too. The Zimmerman verdict showed me just how grandiose I was being in that moment, and yet, I am reluctant to give up my vision. It may take millions of years to get there, but we can do our part by addressing the way racism really works, be it in pop culture or the halls of Congress, for as long as we are on this Earth.
]]>--Rinku Sen
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Make Demands, Try the System
George Zimmerman will go on trial today for the murder of Trayvon Martin. But let's be clear, within the defense's opening arguments, for many who follow the trial--which will be televised!--it will be Trayvon Martin who will be on trial.
He in fact already is. On May 23, the Orlando Sentinel offered the following news:
New evidence in Zimmerman case: Trayvon texted about fighting, smoking marijuana about a week before he was killed.
The evidence that George Zimmerman's attorneys have uncovered on Trayvon Martin's cell phone paints a troubling picture of the Miami Gardens teenager: He sent text messages about being a fighter, smoking marijuana and being ordered to move out of his home by his mother.
And photos from that phone offer more of the same: healthy green plants--what appear to be marijuana--growing in pots and a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun.
So here we go again with a script deep in the white American psyche: the impossibility of Black innocence.
My first experience with the horror of racism was the murder of Emmett Till in 1955; he was only a year older than me when he died. It was alleged that Till, a 14-year-old Chicago black boy visiting Mississippi for the summer, did not know his place and whistled at a white woman in a store. That evening the husband of the woman and his friend came to the house of Emmett's grandfather, kidnapped Emmett, beat him beyond recognition, and then drowned his body. When his mutilated body was found, Emmett's Mother, Mamie Till, insisted that his casket be left open because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." The images shocked the black community and attracted great anger and sympathy from anti-racist people all over the world.
And yet, for some, the debate focused on whether Emmett had or hadn't made any flirtatious advances toward a southern white woman--with many believing that if so, he had brought his murder on himself.
When I worked in the Newark Community Union Project in 1966-1968 in the city's black south and central wards, we worked on many community issues including police brutality. In each case we worked to identify the facts of the story and document the specifics of the brutality. I still remember George Richardson, a militant black political figure explaining to us his views on the realities of police brutality cases as if it was yesterday. You know, Eric, in these police brutality cases, we are always looking for the perfect black victim, the completely "innocent" black man, but he doesn't exist. In our ideal case, a white cop beats or shoots a black man and it turns out it was a black doctor walking down the street doing absolutely nothing when a white cop comes up to him and beats him badly. But that is never the way it is. The guy usually is poor or working class, has a criminal record, he was drinking, he talked back to the cop, he ran a traffic sign, he shoplifted, he 'resisted arrest', he yelled at the cop, he raised his hand whether in self-defense or even to fight back. But that has nothing to do with the fact that he was beaten half to death for being black. In every case, the black man is on trial, guilty until proven innocent and you what, for most of these folks, even our hypothetical black doctor could never be innocent enough. Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black manchild leaving a gated community and shot down in cold blood was as close in reality to that hypothetical black doctor as one can imagine, but it did not save him from an early grave.
So now, in this important test case, it's essential that the civil rights movement and organizers in communities of color put the system on trial--for this trial is not about George Zimmerman alone, but also about how a system that sanctioned the murder of an un-armed black teenager until mass national and international pressure forced a trial. We have to win the argument that there are no extenuating circumstances in the stalking and murder of unarmed black men, and while we are there, we have to win the argument that a pen, or a knife, or a shopping cart, or a parked car or "something that looked like a gun" are not lethal weapons at 15 feet, and that lethal force is not an option.
Every time someone raises any questions about Trayvon, and we can be assured that as the trial goes on, the character assassination of Trayvon Martin will escalate, we have to counter with the most radical and structural demands on the system possible, to shift the therms of the debate and put the system on trial. This tactic--what's been called "counter-hegemonic demand development"--was the great contribution of the civil rights movement and is rooted in Frederick Douglass' advice: Power accedes to nothing without a demand.
We have to roll back all the stop and frisk laws, all the "hold your ground laws," all the "war on drugs" laws, the endless web of laws that have put one million black people in prison and millions more in probation and parole. We have to demand President Obama enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act and use his statutory power to withhold federal funds from any agency using those funds in a racially discriminatory manner--from Los Angeles to Chicago, from New York to Houston and everywhere else in between. We need to demand the social welfare state, not the police state--1,000 more buses, 1,000 more teachers, 1,000 more nurses, 1,000 fewer police. When we say Trayvon Martin did not die in vain, we have to fight for the maximum program that his life and his death and his innocence deserve.
Eric Mann, a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, United Auto Workers and Students for a Democratic Society, and is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. He is the host of KPFK's Pacifica Voices from the Frontlines and the author of "Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer." He can be reached at eric@voicesfromfrontlines.com.
]]>Struck with a rush of bad luck so common in the lives of poor people, Singh ends up moving his family secretly into the home of one of his clients for the winter months, when the Vineyard is largely abandoned. When intruders enter the house and Singh goes on the run, a conspiracy of global proportions begins to emerge. Singh also happens to be an ex-soldier in the Indian Army, and the book pivots between Kashmir, the site of Singh's last battle, and Massachusetts, the site of his current one.
I asked Ahmad some questions about how he wrote the book.
Your protagonist is an undocumented Sikh immigrant who is an ex-soldier. What were some of the factors that led you to this character? What effect do you hope he will have on your readers?
The day after 9/11, I went into my local grocery store in Cambridge, Mass. The cashiers were all elderly Sikh men, and one of them had put an American flag sticker on the front of his turban. He was clearly frightened about what had happened and afraid of a backlash. That incident stayed in my mind when I began to conceptualize "The Caretaker."
I wanted to write a fast-paced story, yes, but I also wanted to explore what it felt like to be an immigrant in post 9/11 America: simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. I chose a Sikh protagonist--Ranjit Singh--because with his turban and full beard, he is unmistakably different, and becomes a lighting rod for all sorts of hidden currents in American society.
I also wanted my protagonist to be a capable man, a man of honor, so I made him a highly principled soldier. He now has to survive as an undocumented immigrant in America, which set up all sorts of conflicts for his code of honor. Plus, Sikhs have a long martial history, and have always served in the Indian Army. So my decision was rooted in actual history.
For readers who are immigrants, I hope they will recognize in Ranjit some of their own experience. For other readers, I wanted to go beyond the shell of foreignness and otherness, and let them experience being in Ranjit's skin. With any luck, the next time they see a Sikh or a Mexican laborer sweating while trimming hedges, their reaction will be tempered by empathy.
You locate the story in Martha's Vineyard--largely among its wealthy African American residents--and Kashmir. What do these two places have in common, or not for you?
Clearly, the exclusive resort island of Martha's Vineyard doesn't have much in common with a battleground high up on glacier in Kashmir. Yet, in Ranjit's mind the two places coexist: his past life in India is always running through his mind as he goes about his everyday tasks on the Vineyard. This experience--of mentally being in two places at once--is something that all immigrants experience.
For example, today is a scorching hot day in Washington, D.C., and as I walked to my local coffee shop, the shimmer of sunlight and the smells of the city reminded me of my hometown of Kolkata. And there are times when I'm visiting Kolkata and feel homesick for summer barbeques in America. My two worlds only come together in fiction, which can span different places and times and give them a coherence that is missing from the messiness of real life.
In many ways, your book is a political thriller, but the politics run second to the thrills. What was your process for negotiating the politics and the story?
That gets at something larger about the value of fiction.
I've heard "The Caretaker" called a "literary thriller," an "immigrant thriller" and a "political thriller." I think these labels are all attempts at communicating that the book has more value than "just fiction." ("Just fiction" being, in people's minds, a story fabricated purely for entertainment.)
And yet, stories are complete worlds that can resonate with us in a deep way.
For example, take my coffee shop in Washington, D.C. It's within walking distance of the White House, the Capitol, and Embassy Row. Sitting here and writing, I overhear diplomats talking about the situation in Rwanda, student interns discussing office politics on the Hill; there is a livery car chauffeur who has great stories to tell about the senators he drives.
I could try writing something about the White House or the Capitol, but I don't really have access to those worlds, and neither do most readers. But I could write a story about this coffee shop, and the characters who hang out here. Readers might relate to it in an intimate way, and learn about the way that politics saturate Washington, D.C.
"The Caretaker" hopes to create a compelling fictional world that draws readers in. And as they accompany Ranjit Singh on his adventures, I hope they also gain some insights into what it feels like to be a brown-skinned, bearded man in post 9/11 America. For me, that immediate, visceral connection is where the magic of fiction resides.
]]>Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror
Just keep going. No feeling is final
It's easier to follow this advice when it's beauty we're talking about. No one wants to let terror happen to them, yet it throws itself into our lives and threatens to shove aside our better selves. The Boston Marathon, an event that was dedicated to the victims of Newtown, became a site of terror at the very place that it should have generated a triumphant feeling instead. Terror is also present today in Arab, South Asian and Muslim communities that fear the aftermath of this particular brand of horror.
When I heard about Boston, I wanted to push it away. I'm so exhausted from the cycle of sorrow, panic, defense and more sorrow that every incident of mass violence evokes in our national consciousness. There is beauty there, in the heroic actions of people who tried to take care of others, but I was too tired even for those stories. I didn't want to let any of it happen to me.
But there's no getting around it. The likelihood of some good emerging is strongest if we allow ourselves to live in this moment for all that it offers. The likelihood of not taking a wrong collective turn is strongest if we live with the grief long enough, deeply enough, to really feel it. The likelihood of uniting ourselves as members of the same community is strongest if we let that compassion extend to all those who will feel the ripple effects of this attack for long months and years, if we hold in our hearts both the victims and those who will be accused of causing their pain. Our only hope for pulling ourselves back together is to name the cycle and change its pattern.
Here's what has to happen after such an attack. First, we have to take care of the people who have been hurt; they will feel this trauma for the rest of their lives. Then we have to protect the people who may suffer collateral loss from retaliation by vigilantes. The Twitter feed Yes You're Racist was very busy last night retweeting accusations and threats against Muslims and Arabs.
Then we have to resist attempts to use the incident to rationalize war, restriction of civil liberties, and who knows what else American politicians will come up with. As Seth Freed Wessler reported earlier today, the meaning Congress made out of 9/11 was to vilify all immigrants as potential terrorists, derailing all promising movement toward comprehensive immigration reform for a dozen years. This would be a terrible moment to repeat that failure.
I'm exhausted from doing this again and again, but it has to be done until the day that we all believe and act on the notion that every human life is precious, not to be destroyed for any reason. Not for any reason. That day wasn't yesterday, and it probably won't be tomorrow. But I have to believe that it is possible. We have to keep going, keep living, keep caring for each other. We are not gods, only humans, but we can follow this advice from whatever spirit guides us. For me, it's the spirit of humanity itself that might be telling me, via Rilke:
]]>You, sent out beyond your recall
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term "illegal immigrant" or the use of "illegal" to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that "illegal" should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally...
Change is a part of AP Style because the English language is constantly evolving, enriched by new words, phrases and uses. Our goal always is to use the most precise and accurate words so that the meaning is clear to any reader anywhere.
The change reflects new practice in newsrooms across the nation, where editors have been replacing the word when they run AP stories on immigration.
This decision is a victory for immigrant communities. We took a word that has been normalized by anti-immigrant forces and revealed it as unfit to print because it is both inaccurate and dehumanizing. We started Drop the I-Word in 2010 because we could see the harm that it was doing to our readers and community. In the early days, many people told us it didn't matter, that the policy was all-important. But the word itself has blocked any reasonable discussion of policy issues, and we have been unable to move forward as a nation while its use has remained common.
The AP's new guidance is also a victory for journalists, who strive daily to be accurate and honest with their readers. News people have nothing if not our ability to dig underneath the labels, as the AP says, that provide convenient categories for complex people and problems. When communities also experience those categories as demeaning of their humanity, we have failed at our jobs. The AP just gave us a little more clarity about how to avoid that. They'd like to hear our reactions, so send them a little note.
For years, immigration restrictionists have been stopping all discussion cold with "what about illegal don't you understand?" Well, we did understand--that the word hid severe problems in the policy, that it has been applied selectively to people of color (undocumented, green-card holding, and citizens alike), and that it fuels hateful action.
People have lost their lives behind this word. Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadoran immigrant was stabbed to death in a Patchogue, N.Y. parking lot* by men yelling that he was a "f__ illegal." That state of affairs could not be allowed to continue and thousands of people just like you took a stand to bring it to an end.
[INVESTIGATION: HOW THE RIGHT MADE RACISM SOUND FAIR--AND CHANGED IMMIGRATION POLITICS]
This campaign is inspired and instructed by historic and contemporary struggles over language. The civil rights movement made us stop saying "colored" and worse. The women's movement changed newspaper standards to use "Ms." The LGBT community and GLAAD got "homosexual" replaced with gay and lesbian. And most recently, the disability rights community has been pressing us all to stop using the r-word.
Ours is not the first generation to debate the i-word. In the 1980s, the "No Human Being is Illegal" campaign, which was named by Nobel prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and led by immigrants through the Sanctuary movement, helped humanize immigrants and mobilize support for the 1986 reform. Wiesel's phrase has been the unofficial tagline for many people supporting this campaign.
Many people contributed to this moment. It would take pages to name them all, but you can see the early adopters here. The tireless staff of the Applied Research Center and Colorlines.com, especially Coordinator Monica Novoa, has lost sleep over this campaign. Roberto Lovato provided critical encouragement and was key to the early campaign strategy.
Before us, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists called for journalists to reevaluate use of the term and the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities challenged local outlets, including the Boston Globe, to make the change. Presente.org and the National Hispanic Media Coalition were stellar partners and Jose Antonio Vargas drove the project home with his impassioned plea to journalists last fall. Linguists, journalists, attorneys and public officials made it clear that they could not use the word in good conscience.
There's more coming. The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, who notes her own conversion to dropping the word but has nothing to do with their style guide, writes that a robust discussion is going on at the Times, but they aren't likely to make such a sweeping change. Perhaps we could offer a broom? Conservatives like John McCain have pledged not to drop the word, but it's only a matter of time now before even his own people recognize the last gasp of a dying strategy to divide American communities.
Finally, thanks to the ARC and Colorlines community for your relentless attention to this question of language. Your stories of what it's like to live under the shadow of that word, your tweets, your petitions, your voices made all the difference. Immigrants, myself included, have had a bit of our humanity restored today, and we are most grateful.
*This article originally stated that Marcelo Lucero was killed in Brooklyn. It has been corrected.
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Writing from the perspective of a restaurant diner, in Behind the Kitchen Door, Jayaraman translates the great research ROC United has done, including the largest ever survey of restaurant workers nationwide. She tells the often-heartbreaking stories of workers who give everything they have to their workplaces, only to encounter wage theft, untreated on-the-job injuries, and rigid racial and gender hierarchies that prevent them from advancing within the largest private sector industry in our country.
We meet Daniel, a Latino runner at Del Posto, a four-star restaurant in New York City, who was told repeatedly that he could not be a server because he didn't "communicate well," even as he watched white European men with incomprehensible accents get the best jobs in the house. We meet Alicia, a pastry chef who chronicled being called "little girl" by one chef, and a long record of unaddressed sexual harassment by another. We read about Woong and Nikki, who worked with swine flu and conjunctivitis, respectively, because their wages were too low for them to take time off without paid sick days.
Most importantly, Jayaraman's book brings together two ends of an industry -- diners who want to eat ethically, and workers who want to be able to feed their own families. She explains some basic things, like why tipping is critical to workers whose federal minimum wage is only $2.13 per hour, how it happens that prep cooks, servers and runners are forced to go to work sick, and the mechanisms by which racial and gender discrimination is allowed to run rampant. You can watch her explain some of these issues during an appearance on CNN last week.
Jayaraman's goal is to redefine the "foodie" identity, making it include as much concern about the people who put your food on the table as it does about whether the food was locally sourced or organically grown. In his foreword, Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, writes, "The abuses endured by American farmworkers, meatpacking workers and restaurant employees violates even the most watered-down definition of 'sustainability.' Our food system now treats millions of workers like disposable commodities... When people ask what are the most important changes that we could make to our food system right away, I reply: Enforce the nation's labor laws and increase the minimum wage."
This week, ROC United will be asking Congress to make the most basic change, to raise the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which has been stuck at its current rate for some 22 years as a result of relentless lobbying by the National Restaurant Association. Please buy the book this week, on Valentine's Day if you can, to help these workers leap into the public consciousness as they carry out actions in Washington this week.
The book's website includes an invitation to join the Welcome Table, ROC United's new effort to organize diners as successfully as it has workers. In addition to joining, you can download the national Diners' Guide that will help you determine the best places to eat from a labor standpoint and what to do if you eat elsewhere and don't like what you see. You can also watch beautiful profiles of workers created by Louverture Films, the company that is also developing a fictionalized film version of The Accidental American. Jayaraman is starting a 13-city book tour that includes Detroit, Los Angeles and Chicago. Before you eat in another restaurant, you want to read this book and join this movement. If you love food, and if you love people, help to ensure the sustainability of both by reading and sharing Behind the Kitchen Door.
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The campaign collected thousands of letters last year, and already has 8,000 pledges this year. Organizers want 10,000 letters altogether. The president appears now to be alarmed that his legacy on immigration might end up being "the most deportingest president in history," and he does not like that. He can drop the label by moving immigration reform, and he can also drop it by, well, just not deporting people. Let's get the kids to tell him what he already knows. Apparently, he needs the push. These letters, like every other time POTUS hears from us on immigration, do and will make a difference. So help our kids take on a piece of really important civic duty this weekend and send their letters in.
At the end of September, I went on a Women's Learning Tour to Tijuana with We Belong Together. I met a woman named Esther who had been deported after being stopped at a "papers please" traffic checkpoint, leaving her 14-year-old daughter Eliza behind. Eliza is now 19 and working with kids in Southern California to collect these letters. Esther and the other women we met confirmed that the nation's current policy isn't focused on violent felons, but rather on moms and dads who have been in U.S. a long time, sometimes decades, and who have gone back and forth to take care of family and to work.
About half of those deported are parents. As I write this post, Seth Freed Wessler is in North Carolina, awaiting the outcome in the family court hearing of Felipe Montes, who was deported in 2010 and threatened with the permanent loss of his kids. ICE allowed Montes to return with a humanitarian parole for the hearing. Child Protective Services has reversed its earlier position to say that "reunification" is now the plan, but the final word is the judge's, and we hope that is a positive word that comes in time for Thanksgiving. It's not always going to be like this, and you can help make sure that Obama's second term starts out right.
This post has been updated since publication.
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