Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie. Sign held by a Hopi youth at a protest against Peabody in Denver, Colorado.

The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory, early January 2010, when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.  Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing administration—not surprising, when you consider that Peabody’s parent holding company was Bechtel, a defense contractor with strong political ties—a permit that failed to fulfill all administrative requirements.  Groups including the Black Mesa Water Coalition filed a petition in early 2009, charging that prerequisites, such as filing an Environmental Impact Statement, were ignored, thereby making the approved permit invalid.

For many Navajo, life in the past thirty years has been inextricably linked to coal mining.  As a small girl, Enei Begaye, knew to be quiet when visiting her friends’ houses.  Everyone in the small town of Kayenta, Arizona worked in the coal mines, which operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Some worked night shifts, so Begaye and her friends would play quietly to not disturb the sleeping elders.  Most of the population of over 4,900 residents in Kayenta were employed by Peabody Energy and lived in the trailers the company setup for its workers.

As an adult, Begaye, now co-director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown, and devastated and torn apart Navajo and Hopi communities.  Energy demands increased in the late 1970s during the oil crisis and large corporations such as Southern California Edison casted about for other sources of fuel.  When the corporations spied the black gold underfoot the Navajo lands, the energy companies colluded with the U.S. federal government to raise questions about Navajo claim over the lands.  The land was transferred to the Hopis and 12,000 Navajo families were displaced from their ancestral homes.  Uprooted from their homes and traditional ways of subsistence, many Navajo fell into poverty and despair, forced to accept any jobs that came their way, including coal mining.

The Black Mesa Water Coalition and partners in the indigenous environmental justice movement organized to shut down Kayenta’s Black Mesa Coal Mine in 2005.  Apart from the low wages and hazardous working conditions of the mines, the operations polluted the township and surrounding environment.  Judith Nies described the disastrous environmental consequences of the technique, strip mining, of removing coal where “the land has turned gray, all vegetation has disappeared, the air is filled with coal dust, the groundwater is contaminated with toxic runoff, and electric green ponds dot the landscape.”  Sheep that drink from these ponds by noon, she added, die by suppertime.

The coal from Kayenta fed two power plants, the Mojave Generating Station and Navajo Generating Station.  The former, the Mojave Generating Station, provided electricity to Southern California and Las Vegas.  The latter helped to power the irrigation of the urban sprawl extending outwards from Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.  Neither provided electricity for the surrounding communities.  In fact, less than half of Navajo families have electricity or running water on the reservation.

The latest curb on coal mining on Navajo lands is a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation who are still dependent on the low wage jobs the mines provide.  Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents, who lost their mining jobs.  Now, organizers with the Black Mesa Water Coalition see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition for Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally-owned economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.  The Black Mesa Water Coalition and the Navajo Green Jobs campaign won another victory this summer when they successfully lobbied the Navajo Tribal Council to enact green jobs legislation.

The recent judge ruling supports Navajo leadership, not only among tribal nations but also for all of us, in defining the new green way of living.  “We don’t want to create a capitalist system within our tribal society,” explained Begaye.  “We’re in a special position, we’ve got a system that needs to be trashed, an economic system that needs to be gotten rid of.  We need to create a new economy that doesn’t devastate but create and empower our communities to function in a healthy way.”

Photo by the Black Mesa Water Coalition.

Forty years ago, the students of SF State joined in solidarity with the Third World in demanding inclusion in institutions of knowledge.  For too long, the histories of people of color have been deliberately omitted from official narratives.  Stories transmitted through oral tradition within families but never recorded in the texts that lined the libraries of learning.  Languages were a private code, spoken, within the walls of your home, but forgotten when interacting outside in the world.  People of color were the invisible labor, unseen and unheard, which fueled the engines of global capitalism to expand.

The struggle at SF State successfully opened up spaces for the Third World, domestically and globally, in the academy, to represent and record our histories and stories.  This opened the way for applied research and policy organizations to elevate the importance of race and its centrality in socioeconomic issues when advocating for equitable policies and practices.  Groups like the Applied Research Center, inspired by the success of SF State, sought to “race” policies and programs, so that the impact of communities of color were laid explicit.  Narrative frames that concealed race behind a color-blind curtain were thrown open to reveal how they served to reproduce the subordinate status of communities of color.

The Applied Research Center will survey the successes of ethnic studies, both in theory and practice, in a panel Ethnic Studies Beyond the Academy: Theory and Action at the Grassroots this Friday, October 9, 2009 from 11:00am to 1:00pm, in Rosa Parks C, at “Ethnic Studies 40 Years Later: Race, Resistance, and Relevance”, a conference to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Third World students’ strike and the both the birth of ethnic studies as a field and a college at SF State.   This will be an interactive panel, not just two hours of talking heads, where presenters will explore their effect of ethnic studies on their ideas and strategies, as well as the impact applied research has had on the academy.

Presenters will also address alternative frames for research to both move organizing campaigns and influence policymaking in the age of Obama.  They include:

• Gary Delgado, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley and the founder and former Executive Director of the Applied Research Center;
• NTanya Lee, Executive Director of the Coleman Advocates, who began her lifelong commitment to social justice as a Black 13-year old, free lunch kid fighting against Ronald Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” policy, and since then has been a student activist, youth worker, community historian, policy advocate and organizer in the Midwest, East Coast and for the last eight years in San Francisco;
• Yvonne Liu, Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center, who is working on a Green Equity Toolkit currently to ensure that race and gender equity are part of the green economy; and
• Jorge Rivas, Multimedia Associate at the Applied Research Center and alumni of SF State where he majored in Raza Studies and studied the interrelationship of culture, community, and the Internet.

Today, we face both a historic opportunity and challenge.  The global crisis of capitalism places many of our communities, domestically and abroad, in a precarious position.  People of color bear the disproportionate burden of the Great Recession, in all measures of socioeconomic wellbeing.  This nation, built on slave labor and the greatest project of economic imperialism and expansion in the twentieth century, has a Black man for the first time at its helm.  We have a historic opportunity to bring racial inequities to light through research and analysis. Join us for this important discussion.

The concept of community is an ever-shifting one.

It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond just delivering goods or providing services, like the settlement houses that serviced the poor in the late 19th century. Community to Alinsky was based on physical proximity to your neighbors and the goal of community organizing was to build neighborhood, place-based, mega-organization that united various service providers, such as labor unions and churches.

But, the focus was short-sighted, trained on winning a metaphorical stop sign on your block, with campaigns guided by non-ideological and pragmatic goals, divorced of any critique of racism or sexism. This shaped the role of the organizer as an apolitical technocrat, an outside specialist, distinct from the community. Often, the leadership and staff of these bureaucratic organizations were white men, who were capable of working endless hours to get that stop sign installed.

Enter the 1960s and the global struggles of the Third World to shrug off its colonial masters. Radical movements within the U.S., who sought to eradicate poverty and institutional racism domestically, identified common interests with liberation movements abroad. This was the third world within. The same axes of oppression—racism, sexism, and capitalism—operated within communities of color at home. This new sense of community, what the Applied Research Center’s founder Gary Delgado terms as “communities of interest”, led to multiracial formations that tackled a wide variety of issues, beyond a single campaign, and prioritized indigenous leadership by community members so there isn’t a bureaucratic apparatus that mediates political activity between decision-makers and the community. Community leaders are not just members, but also teachers, analysts, as well as actors.

Most importantly, multiracial formations placed race as primary in their political framework for identifying their vision and strategy. Race is historically and socially constructed, but with ongoing material ramifications for people of color. Structural racism is the primary form of oppression in this country that intersects with sexism and capitalist exploitation. The history of racism is embedded in the racist institutions that create conditions of poverty, lack of opportunity, and labor exploitation for communities of color.

Now, post-Obama, a new generation is defining community and its relation to social change. Organizing Upgrade, a collaboration by young organizers involved in multiracial formations, launched today. They define communities of interest based not just on shared oppression, but also on a shared, liberatory vision of what could be. This seems apt, given that we have a Black president in the White House, a former community organizer himself, and for the first time, our desires for our communities are possible.

Join the community of possibilities at OrganizingUpgrade.com

via RaceWire

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.*

The Obama administration enacted the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) back in February, the largest boon to public spending and the safety net since the New Deal, and yet economic conditions are the worst it’s ever been for people of color and single moms. Unemployment is skyrocketing close to double digits, at 9.7% for August 2009. New Census data released recently showed an increase in poverty from 12.5% to 13.2% this past year, meaning an additional 2.6 million persons now live in poverty. Certain groups experience deepened poverty rates more than others, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
• Latinos and Asians had marked increases in their poverty rates, by 1.6 and 1.4 points, respectively.
• Over one third of all Black children and almost one third of all Latino children lived in poverty in 2008.
• Nearly a quarter of all families headed by single moms lived in poverty, or 3.6 million families, in 2008.

Tracking funds from the Recovery Act has proven to be difficult because there is no centralized, authoritative source of where the money is going to and what it’s being used for. Currently, information about ARRA funds are dispersed across the federal recovery.gov website, state stimulus czars, and watchdog groups. Recipients of monies are required to report on their activities and how many jobs they’ve created because of it by October 10. But, information will only slowly trickle out to the public. Even then, there is no requirement for recipients to race or gender their data, so we have no way of knowing how much of the recovery benefits those most impacted: people of color and single moms.

We have been following the recovery and its promise to stimulate the economy while protecting the planet and its peoples through the creation of green jobs. Watch this page on October 13 for the release of our Green Equity Toolkit, ideas and resources for community and labor advocates on how to create equity in the emerging green economy. If we are to follow the directive of ARRA and the subsequent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance to help those most impacted by the recession, then we must make race and gender equity key in our planning and practices around green job creation. The toolkit will help us do that.

Our initial research into recovery allocations in Los Angeles County brings to light some concerns. Los Angeles County, like many in this country, is cleft by a racial wealth divide into two types of cities: poor and rich. Poor cities of the county–half of the residents of the City of Los Angeles are people of color and one in five live in poverty–are receiving a quarter of the recovery dollars per poor person, as compared to rich cities. We designate cities such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills as rich cities in the county, where more than 70% of the population are white and the poverty rate is well below the national average.

This is the worst economic downturn our country has experienced since the recession of the early 1980s and flirting dangerously to parallel the Great Depression of the 1930s. What will our generation remember when we look back at this time? Did we seize the opportunity of the Great Recession to bring about a green transformation to sustain all peoples, especially those most distressed? ARC provides the tools. We must act together to demand equity in the recovery, green or otherwise.

Photo taken by Jacob Ruff at the Mobilization for Climate Justice protest against Chevron in Richmond, California.

* A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Billionaires for Wealthcare toasted the rightwing demonstrators that gathered in DC this past weekend to protest healthcare reform, legislation to stave off climate change, and all attempts to provide a safety net for working families and folks of color.

They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system. We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We’re simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of ‘Change.’ We’ll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to healthcare, if we ain’t broke, why fix it?”

See more at their website.

Philly artist Jasiri X made a music video linking the attack on Van Jones to how black and brown men are systemically discredited, especially when they are speaking truth to power and shaking up the status quo.

via Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner

The green jobs act establishes a Navajo Green Economy Commission and Fund, which can apply for federal and local funds to create green jobs for Navajo youth, as well as sponsor small-scale, green developments that will help to provide needed services to the community.

Nikke is a member of the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah). She is Salt clan born for the Tangle People clan. Her maternal grandparents are of the Big Water clan, and her paternal grandparents are of the Red Bottom clan. She grew up in Gallup, New Mexico.

RaceWire: How do you feel now that the green jobs bill has been passed?

Nikke Alex: I feel really great, even though I’m exhausted. The real work starts now. It’s been 14 months of work to campaign to get the green jobs bill enacted. It feels really great to be at the forefront of the Indian country, to be the first nation to propose green legislation and pass it.

RW: What was the role of Navajo youth in the green jobs campaign?

NA: The campaign was youth-led. The Black Mesa Water Coalition mobilized a lot of young people to come out yesterday to talk with the (Navajo Nation Council) delegates. We wore green shirts and marched to the Council Chambers. We said, “This is for us (the youth). (Older generations) aren’t going to face the harsh effects of climate change. But, we will.” I think youth pushed the delegates to vote for (the green jobs bill). Young people have been involved in the campaign, from start to finish, even writing the legislation.

There’s nothing like this in history. It’s the first time that Navajo youth have come out to the (Navajo Nation) Council. It’s the first time that the Navajo Nation Council’s Speaker has worked on a proactive initiative, rather than reacting and applying band-aids.

RW: Who will get the green jobs created by the act?

NA: We want green jobs for Navajo youth. Right now, unemployment on the reservation is at 44%. There’s nothing for young people. The only ones working are college graduates. There are no jobs. That’s why I’m pushing for the green jobs act because of two reasons: (a) these jobs aren’t coal mining and (b) they’re safe for the Mother Earth. I’m pushing for this, more job creation and development.

Talented, skilled people travel thousands of miles to work. They’re not home to see their family during the week, they only come home on the weekends. A lot of young men go to Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Los Angeles to work in construction or as electricians. Some drive three miles each way, six hours roundtrip, to go to work. A lot of the women also work off the reservation. They work in hotels or as waitresses.

The (green jobs) legislation will help bring back jobs and keep monies in the reservation. Currently, for every dollar made on the reservation, 70-cents gets spent outside. That’s a 70% leakage rate. There’s no economic development in the reservation. There are grocery stores, but they’re not Navajo-owned. One of the main stores is owned by a man who lives in Phoenix.

RW: Are things worse now during the Great Recession for Navajo youth?

NA: It’s always been hard for us. I talked with my grandma recently who lived through the Great Depression. She didn’t realize that there’s a recession right now, because it’s always been this way. Over 40% of Navajo living on the reservation don’t have running water or electricity.

RW: What are the next steps for the Navajo green jobs campaign? And, how can allies help?

NA: Our first steps are to work with the President. He has ten days to sign the legislation, to make it law. (The green jobs bill) was passed by the (Navajo Nation) Council but now we’re mobilizing Navajo youth to get the President to sign it.

For the broader movement, you can help by encouraging the federal government to allocate green job monies to the Indian country.

Across cultures, fairy tales and myths are used to teach children the normative values of a society. Stories follow a similar template: the main character is a child that listeners can identify with. There are fantastical creatures, some good, others evil. There is a moral challenge of some sort, a test of a child’s adherence to values, which may threaten the sanctity of the world in an epic battle of good versus evil. Hansel and Gretel leave home and risk being dinner for a witch. The Little Red Riding Hood learns not to talk to strangers or grandmothers with big teeth. Poor, orphaned Cinderella can marry the prince, as long as the shoe fits.

Harry Potter is no different. But, it’s the values it preaches that begs for a closer look. This is the most popular book and movie series of our times, engaging both children and adults globally, and making J.K. Rowling a very rich lady. I’ve always been struck at how dark its view of childhood is, seen through Harry’s eyes. He is orphaned as a child, his parents killed by an evil wizard who threatens to bring the wizarding world into the Dark Side. His Muggle relatives—a delightful poke at the British bourgeoisie—force Harry to live in a crawl space under the stairs. This is the universal child of all fairy tales: unloved, alone, and neglected, but a true king/princess/wizard/genius hidden within.

Saved by Dumbledore and whisked away to Hogwarts, the world gets more menacing. Portals to the alternative universe are everywhere but hidden to humans. The wizarding world has odd creatures, magicians cloaked in dark shawls whispering incantations, and there’s always an edge of danger mixed in with the fantastical. Even at school, the castle is filled with hidden rooms, mirrors that show truths, memories captured in capsules, portraits that talk back, and staircases that constantly shift like an M. Escher print. The feasts of ice cream, cookies, and cake are grotesque, a childhood fantasy gone terribly wrong, and a stomachache soon to follow. In the forests, at the periphery of the school’s grounds, live giants, centaurs, and shadows of the evil Lord Voldemort.

So, there’s the genre of myths and cautionary tales that Harry Potter falls into. The other is boarding school narrative. These are coming of age stories, usually of an outsider plucked out of her surroundings (colony or poverty), and sent to the center of empire to be schooled to become imperial technocrats. I’m thinking about Gandhi traveling alone to England to study law, uncertain of his English, and ashamed to eat in the dining hall because he didn’t know how to use a knife and fork. What do the aspiring wizards at Hogwarts do upon graduation? I doubt it’s to return to the Muggle world to work as dentists. What order of wizardry are they employed to serve?

A single Chinese time zone is as much a fiction as a single Chinese ethnicity; recently, this truism was illustrated in the blood of Uighur protesters. Noon for Beijing was still seven in the morning for the western province of Xinjiang, the site of recent racially motivated uprisings that started this past weekend, on July 5, 2009.

Though China is often rendered ethnically homogeneous in the West’s narratives, the truth isn’t so simple. 92% of the population is members of the Han race, the dominant group with a monopoly over political and economic resources. But over 120 million citizens identify as members of some other ethnic group, known in China as “minority nationalities,” each with their own cultural practices, histories, and experiences. Some, like the Uighurs and Tibetans to the northwest, practice religious beliefs distinct from the Han. Others, like the Miao in the south and Koreans in the northeast, speak a distinct language. Still others, like the Hui, are indistinguishable from the Han in appearance and dialect, but practice a variation of Islam and trace their ancestry to the Muslim traders who settled in China along the Silk Road.

When Mao trooped through the countryside with his Red Army during the Long March in 1935, he promised the minorities they encountered along the way that a new communist republic would recognize the right of self-determination of ethnic groups. That was soon forgotten when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. One of the first tasks that the nascent People’s Republic of China undertook upon winning the civil war was to classify those living within their borders and create subjects out of them. The CCP sent out teams of social scientists, anthropologists, and statisticians to the far-flung regions of the country to gather data on peoples’ languages, cultural practices, and religious beliefs.

Party bureaucrats sorted through the mass of information brought back. They determined that 56 ethnic groups deserved the official recognition as minority nationalities. This included the Uighurs, nomadic steppe peoples who are Turkic descendants of Chinese Turkestan. Still, over 700,000 peoples are members of ethnic groups not officially recognized by the state. This includes Chinese Jews and Macanese, people of mixed Chinese-Portuguese ancestry in the island of Macau near Hong Kong.

The Uighurs suffered decades of internal colonization at the hands of the dominant ethnic group, the Han, starting from the 1950s onwards. Han migrated to Uighur regions at a rate that increased from 5% in 1940 to 38% in 1990. In popular and academic discourse, the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are portrayed as culturally inferior to the Han. Minorities are seen as exotic and primitive peoples that needed the civilizing rule of the Han to guide them into the modern age.

Dru Gladney, professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, wrote, “One cannot be exposed to China without being confronted by its ‘colorful’ minorities. They sing, they dance, they twirl, they whirl. Most of all, they smile, showing their happiness to be part of the motherland” (Journal of Asian Studies, Feb. 1994).

The process of grouping a heterogenous population into a singular identity was paralleled in the U.S. Race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant described countries like U.S. and China as “racial dictatorships” in their seminal book “Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s” (NY: Routledge, 1986/1989). Racial dictatorships consolidated identities into an umbrella category to negate any differences and oppositional identities. As Omi and Winant say, “Just as the conquest created ‘native’ where once there had been Pequot, Iroquois, or Tutelo, so too it created ‘black’ where once there had been Asante or Ovimbundu, Yoruba or Bakongo”.

Ideology has material ramifications. Han peoples get first dibs on choice jobs, capital investment to startup their own businesses, and monies to purchase properties. Uighurs find themselves economically marginalized, edged out of jobs and priced out of living in neighborhoods increasingly gentrified by the Han. It’s a story we see in the West, with different players but the same ending.

Is there any wonder that there is popular resentment by the Uighurs and other minorities at their treatment by the Han? Much of the English-language coverage in North America and Western Europe by mainstream news outlets have expressed surprise by the mass violence the Uighurs express towards the Han. This is a long-standing struggle for national liberation that Uighurs and the better known Tibetans engage in. To support their fight for recognition and freedom is also to endorse opening pathways for multiple constituencies to seize power from the state and the ethnic fictions it creates.

Photo of Uighur women protesting in Urumqi, Xinjiang on July 7, 2009 by World Bulletin.

Once a month, a movement courses through the streets of Los Angeles. Moving together, in solidarity, Black cyclists are spurred forward by the revolutions of their wheels. Each individual coming together to join the flood that takes over the streets. Their momentum stirs the air, setting in motion a gale that blows clear across the Internet to other locales like Brooklyn, New York. Biking will never be the same.

Freedom Rides, as the organized bicycle rides for the Black community are known, was started by James Spooner. The rides draw about a dozen riders of varying ages and backgrounds; women outnumber the men. Controversy also flares around the ride, as members of L.A.’s fixed gear community attacked the “segregated bike rides” as “racist”, asking if “this ride is a joke”.

James is no stranger to asking difficult questions about race and racial identity. “Race is a complex issue and you have to break some eggs”, he explained recently, over the phone. He authored the documentary Afropunk about Blacks in the punk scene and a semi-autobiographical narrative, White Lies Black Sheep, about a Black youth in search of himself in the white rock and roll world. Both films explore the double consciousness people of color experience in a predominantly white subculture.

The only Black or Brown person at a rock show. You sense that you are estranged, within yourself, from the language and culture you were raised in, as well as from your white peers, who consider you as their token friend of color. You are still the Other.

White kids have a ride. So do women. Why can’t we? Join the fifth Freedom Ride this Sunday at 1pm. The starting point changes monthly so the riders can explore different parts of the city. This Sunday’s ride starts at the Vons parking lot at the corner of Fairfax and Pico, pays homage to Michael Jackson at the dead pop star’s house, and ends with a meal at a Black-owned restaurant. Check the Freedom Ride’s Facebook Group for details.

FREEDOM RIDES 2009 (Los Angeles) from Tara Conley on Vimeo.