Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Rinku Sen
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If You Care About Immigrant Rights, Learn Black America’s History Too
04 days ago
This February, I challenge every immigrant in the country to attend or engage in at least one Black History Month activity each week. If you’re a person who would do this anyway, make a special effort to take another immigrant with you who would be less inclined without your invitation, pushing or cajoling.
There are so many reasons that immigrants need to know a lot about black history.
The relationship between black Americans and immigrants of every stripe has historically been touchy, and our alliances have been built against the best efforts of slave holders, corporations and politicians to maintain racial hierarchies that served white supremacy right up to, well, today. European immigrants in New York City rioted when they were drafted to fight for the Union in the Civil War, and Vijay Prashad has written eloquently in “The Karma of Brown Folk” about the ways in which South Asian immigrants have tried (fruitlessly) to identify with white folks, whom we were taught to see as the “real” Americans long before we ever arrived on these shores.
Second, today’s immigrants, with large numbers coming from Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and Latin America, would not be here at all if it weren’t for the moral pressure of the Civil Rights Movement forcing changes in 1960s immigration policies.
Finally, in my own experience building multiracial organizations for 25 years, it is all too easy for black Americans to fall off the grid. People see other faces of color, and find it convenient not to notice that black people aren’t among them. While the modern racial justice discussion needs to reach beyond black and white, neither is it okay to just leave out the black.
For those of you who are readers, consider participating in the Facebook virtual book discussion of “The Warmth of Other Suns” that our Drop the I-Word campaign has launched. The virtual book club will meet over the next five weeks, in partnership with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
“The Warmth of Other Suns” was the best piece of non-fiction I read last year. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson follows three black Southerners on their journeys West and North, giving us a picture of the enormous internal migration that black folks engaged over half a century. Black Americans are not immigrants–their entry into the United States was forced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But the story of the Great Migration is about the descendants of enslaved people taking their destinies into their own hands. It didn’t solve all their problems, to be sure, but it did open up a space in American politics and culture that didn’t exist before the migration.
These migrants escaped Jim Crow–the segregation that ruled Southern life as whites reacted to Emancipation with new rules enabling the ongoing theft of black labor, the violence that controlled black communities and the institutional arrangements that made it impossible for black people to get their feet under them. Wilkerson places the Great Migration in the context of the pilgrims escaping religious persecution, the Irish escaping hunger, the Jews escaping Nazism and the Chinese escaping the implications of being landless. “What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were,” she writes. “They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”
Starting this week, people who care about dropping the i-word, of all colors and all ages will reading this book and discuss it online. The discussion will take place every Wednesday from 2 p.m. EST on the comment section of the Drop the I-Word Facebook page, which you can access by liking the page itself. If you’re not on Facebook, creating a profile is very easy. Ask the nearest 10-year-old to show you how.
And if this isn’t the way you want to celebrate Black History Month, there will be no dearth of resources to help you find a way that suits. Whatever that way, the important thing is that immigrants engage. We can only move forward on immigrant rights and racial justice with a clear and deep knowledge of how black communities have sustained themselves over a long time, against the greatest odds.
Visit the Drop the I-Word blog to learn how the book club works.
Film Reveals "The Invisible War" on Women in Our Military
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The documentary “The Invisible War” premiered last week at Sundance, and it is already bringing much needed attention to the problem of rape in the military. Watching clips from the film last fall, I found the experience harrowing. I was struck by the sense of betrayal as well as violation that too many women, and a smaller number of men, encounter when they sign up to protect the national interest. It is just really hard to watch one after another woman tell us how she was assaulted, how authorities failed to protect her both before and after the attack, and how post-traumatic stress disrupts every attempt to rebuild her life. As tough as it is to witness, though, it has to be harder to live, and more witnesses are clearly needed to pressure military leaders to act. Their failure to do so is unforgivable, in a time when a woman is more likely to be raped by an American soldier than killed by enemy fire.
The film itself features no women of color among the major protagonists. I don’t know why that is, and I won’t speculate. I do know that thousands of young women of color join the military every year; it isn’t possible that they could escape a fate that affects so many soldiers. I bet women of color are disproportionately affected by sexual assault, as they were by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and, as we reported earlier this week, by homelessness when they return stateside as veterans. I hope that advocates working on this issue take into account additional or just different barriers faced by women of color. Putting proposed remedies through a racial equity impact analysis may help with that.
A slightly strange item in the production notes on the film’s website has director Kirby Dick comparing the military’s anti-racism efforts to its lack of action on rape. The armed forces had to integrate after centuries of racial exclusion, and many people argue that it did a better job of that than, say, our public education systems. Today racism is less evident in the military than in the larger society, Kirby points out, and he wants the institutions to achieve similar results on sexual assault.
It is true that such a campaign took place, but readers will understand my skepticism about lower rates of racial discrimination in the military than elsewhere. Recent hazing scandals in which Chinese American soldier Danny Chen was targeted with deadly, racially tinged assaults and 2009 reports that the armed forces had accepted white supremacists indicate that there’s still a lot to do on the race front. Acknowledging that ongoing struggle takes nothing away from the need to address sexual assault as aggressively as possible. If the model for fighting racism offers some lessons, that’s cool, but I suspect it isn’t as simple as the comparison suggests.
“The Invisible War” was inspired by Helen Benedict’s reporting on women soldiers that first appeared on Salon.com and then in “The Lonely Soldier,” which features in-depth profiles of a number of women of color, including several who were also covered in Michelle Chen’s excellent Colorlines story from 2008.
Benedict, who teaches at Columbia School of Journalism, followed up “The Lonely Soldier” with a novel that adds another critical dimension to our understanding of the female soldier, and of war in general. “Sand Queen” focuses on two women, Kate, a 19-year-old soldier and Naema, an Iraqi medical student, who strike a deal to help each other navigate their responsibilities. “Sand Queen” is a horrible victim-blaming term, a derogatory reference to supposedly unattractive women who supposedly allow themselves to be passed around among dozens of horny men who wouldn’t look twice if they had other choices. In the long tradition of stories about women on opposite sides of a war, Benedict does a great job of humanizing both, while dealing with the inequities, racial, gendered and economic, of the war in Iraq.
Many things need to be done to fight rape in the military. Sexual trauma isn’t currently included, for example, in the 2010 rules that remove barriers of proof for veterans to get help for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the prosecution rates for perpetrators reveal more concern about protecting them than their victims.
All Americans need to help push for reform, whatever our feelings about the military as an institution. This was my position on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and it hasn’t changed. For economic as well as other reasons, a great number of women of color, the vast majority very young, join the military, and they deserve our love and concern as much as anyone who is struggling through civilian life. Go see “The Invisible Soldier,” read Helen Benedict’s books, and get involved in the campaign to make real change.
The Real Goal of Ariz.’s Book Banning Thought Police: Harass Latinos
02 weeks ago
On Jan. 1, Arizona’s ban on the Mexican American Studies curriculum used in Tucson high schools went into effect. The weeks since have been marked by confusion and backtracking as the district leaders and teachers scramble to comply with the state law. The fight is far from over, though, with a federal lawsuit pending and ongoing organizing taking place.
Initially, the Tucson Unified School District Board of Education seemed poised to refuse compliance. But it quickly caved when State Superintendent John Huppenthal, who thought up this whole thing, slapped the district with a $4.9 million penalty by cutting its state funding retroactively to last August.
How do you get rid of a program that has, by all educational standards, been successful for more than a decade? Apparently, the first step is to strip that curriculum of the material that gives it heft. This week, the district began removing seven books from MAS classrooms, which were boxed up and stored in a warehouse where books go to die. That list includes “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” “Rethinking Columbus,” “Critical Race Theory,” Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and “Chicano!: the History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.”
The removal is to be thorough–teachers are not allowed to keep even personal copies of these books in their classrooms. Students and teachers described their fear and heartbreak at an emotional community meeting over the past weekend.
It isn’t just the books but also the context in which they are being taught that is problematic for the district. As the list has made its way around the country, the district immediately objected to accusations of banning books. In a statement, the district said that it had not banned the books, but simply removed them from classes that had been banned. The books could still be found in other classrooms across the district, and in its libraries.
Jeff Biggers, who has done excellent, consistent journalism on this issue, reported the following availability: two copies of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” one copy of “Critical Race Theory” in the online catalog and of 16 in-district copies of “Rethinking Columbus,” none are in Tucson High School, the home of the Mexican American Studies curriculum.
So these books can still be read and taught, says the district, just not in the context of Mexican American Studies and racial politics.
That is the problem, for instance, with “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s play about colonialism and slavery. Teacher Curtis Acosta, who designed much of the banned curriculum and led its implementation, recorded a meeting with district administrators last Wednesday. Everyone is clearly confused, and trying to protect the district. So administrators tell Acosta in the meeting that it would be best not to teach “The Tempest” using the “nexus of race, class and oppression” or “issues of critical race theory.”
In an interview with Biggers, Acosta notes that he was told to avoid texts and lessons with race or oppression as central themes. He further notes that there may be penalties if students independently address these themes: “We also have not received confirmation that the ideas, dialogue, and class work of our students will be protected…. if I avoid discussing such themes in class, yet the students see the themes and decide to write, discuss or ask questions in class, we may also be found to be in violation.”
Three things strike me about this situation.
First, I’m impressed with the rigor of this curriculum. I have read most of these books, and the “Critical Race Theory” anthology is challenging even for me, with 25 years of such theory and a lot of practice under my belt. No wonder this program raised grades and graduation rates so successfully.
Second, I think of books as living entities that come alive when a reader engages them. It hurts me to think of lonely books stuck in storage.
Finally, and most importantly, I understand that in this process, the state and the district will come up with all kinds of maneuvers to replace this curriculum against the will of the teachers, administrators, students and parents who have benefitted in myriad ways from its existence. The powers that be will constantly make and unmake regulations because there is no easy way to do this. All that inconsistency will make no difference to the Hornes and Huppenthals and Brewers who put it in place, because their objective has already been met–to put the Mexican American community on the defensive by reinforcing its un-American image, and to prevent any progressive discussion of racial politics in the state. They aren’t opposed to racial politics, just to a brand that counters their own.
When I was in Tucson last fall with the CultureStrike delegation, I toured historic South Tucson with Salomon Baldenegro, a local civil rights hero who is featured in “Chicano!”. Baldenegro, now in his 60s, told us he was an early reader and fluent English speaker, but when he started school, all kids of Mexican descent, no matter how deep their roots in Arizona, were put into Americanization programs where they “learned” English and American games. When Baldenegro’s mom registered him for school, the principal tested his reading. The little boy read out loud a book for first graders, then one for second graders and then one for third graders. The principal accused him of having memorized all the books and refused to put him in the proper class for his level. Some 60 years later, the state of Arizona, having had to desegregate its schools, has come up with a new way to Americanize Mexican Americans.
The state will fail, just as they did with Baldenegro’s generation. Tucson activists, while understandably angry and disappointed, project an optimism that we often don’t expect from people who have been so put upon for so long, and they are far from giving up. But they can’t protect their right to knowledge alone. The rest of us need to back them up, by following their fight, by talking to our own friends and neighbors about it, and by taking action when we are asked.
The Arc Is Bending Toward Justice. But That Doesn’t Make Our Work Easier
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As 2011 ends, the arc of the moral universe appears to be bending in the direction of justice. Developments in immigration, criminal justice and labor policy point to shifts in the discourse that give communities of color some new leverage. If we avoid triumphalism, get explicit about race and keep fighting, we can make the most of movement potential in the coming year.
Immigrant rights activists are celebrating key victories. For years, huge amounts of money and energy went into advocating what was called “comprehensive immigration reform,” at the expense of all other demands and strategies. The “comprehensive” reform idea was to balance new immigration enforcement schemes with legalizing the status of millions of undocumented people and improving the system overall. But a comprehensive bill never passed. Rather, every year the bill got worse for immigrants–more enforcement and less relief. By 2009, the comprehensive bill was fully dead, leaving the field free to address the racial and economic anxiety behind that loss.
The bill’s failure opened up space for many organizations to take a broader approach, one that was less legislative and more cultural. That shift lets us humanize immigrants, which leads native-born people to ask themselves if the enforcement-only approach is worth the deaths, the family separations and the civil rights violations that result from our system.
Even immigration hard liners are softening their language, and their policy prescriptions. On MSNBC this fall, Roy Beck, the founder of Numbers U.S.A., a restrictionist organization with millions of members, referred to “people who are here without papers” rather than labeling them with the i-word. He also said that mass deportation and mass legalization are not the only options. We’ve always known that Beck didn’t like mass legalization, but backing off from mass deportation is a shift. The right is increasingly playing defense.
It’s not just Numbers’ shift. In November, voters recalled anti-immigrant Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce. Last week, the Department of Justice concluded that Arizona’s celebrity hard line Sherriff Joe Arpaio is, essentially, running a war against Latinos; the findings prompted Immigration and Customs Enforcement to finally rescind his contract to enforce immigration policy. In the meantime, numerous media outlets are officially dropping the i-word, including the New York Times, which just dropped the noun, opening the door for a push to end its use in any form.
On the criminal justice front, Troy Davis’ execution brought the death penalty into the national conversation in a way not seen in years. It used to be a standard question during presidential elections (though mainly from supporters who wanted to ensure that the next president wouldn’t outlaw it). The Death Penalty Information Center reports an historic 75 percent drop in death sentences since 1996. This year Illinois abolished the practice, the governor of Oregon said that no more executions would take place during his term and the Ohio Supreme Court is taking a look at problems in its system. And last week, North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue vetoed an effort to repeal the state’s historic Racial Justice Act, which allows death row inmates to appeal for sentence reductions based on racial disparities in death sentencing. Perdue strongly supports the death penalty, but has said bias in the system is nonetheless unacceptable.
Even in this terrible economy, there are victories to celebrate. Just last week, President Obama took the first steps toward closing a loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations that prevent millions of home healthcare workers from receiving overtime and minimum wage enforcement. Ninety-two percent of these workers are women, and 42 percent are black or Latino. Also on the labor front, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative won back collective bargaining rights for the state’s public sector unions. Public sector jobs are also disproportionately held by people of color, and collective bargaining has been key to the admittedly shaky but still important economic gains communities of color have made in recent decades.
Given all of these victories, as 2012 swings us into the election, I am keeping three imperatives in mind. First, avoid the temptations of triumphalism. Second, put an explicit racial analysis front and center in national debates. Third, fight like hell.
The process of social change looks like an arc over several decades, but in the shorter term it has a lot of dips as well as peaks. As soon as we head into a peak period, it can be easy to assume that more victories will follow. Any such assumption would be wildly premature, certainly now, and possibly ever.
Triumphalism hurts us in multiple ways. It clouds our judgment about the strength of the opposition and its endless creativity. While a celebratory tone motivates many, it can also reduce the urgency for others to get involved. Our triumphalism can also humiliate the other side. Humiliation is a complicated thing. People of color have suffered a lot of it on a daily basis, but returning the damage is not in my list of movement values. While I’m not too concerned about Joe Arpaio, I am concerned about both his supporters and those who are ambivalent about immigration. When people with power are humiliated, they strike out, often by blocking implementation of the change we’ve just won. If we don’t want Joe Arpaio to be replaced with a clone, we need to remember that we have to constantly reach out to the uncoverted and keep building support for a new way of running our society. So celebrate well, but keep the crowing to a minimum.
There’s still a ton of work to do to centralize racial justice as a value, and to reframe key debates through racial justice, especially debates over the economy. The victories we are starting to see owe a great deal to our collective effort to re-humanize people of color in the public discourse. We need to keep doing that. But we also must go a little further to help Americans understand why taking down the country’s racial hierarchy will ultimately unify us. We need to avoid the temptation to advance blander versions of unity through “same boat” arguments that don’t hold up under close scrutiny. Better to have a real analysis that takes into account existing divisions, so that we can figure out how to bridge them rather than ignore them. Racial justice activists and thinkers should be all over Occupy Wall Street, for instance, helping to generate a racial analysis among Occupiers and in all economic justice efforts. There’s plenty of space for that, as evidenced by some 300 people who came to a workshop on organizing with a racial justice lens we did for Occupy Wall Street last week.
Finally, 2012 is a presidential election year–and that means lots of often difficult conversations that offer opportunity to introduce new people to racial justice. We need to keep fighting, through our communications and organizing systems. The election will generate large amounts of racialized, and straight up racist, rhetoric. A lot of it will be coded under themes of religion, tradition, universalism and ethics. We need to expose the racial underpinnings of those codes, and connect them to real policy decisions that hurt communities by punishing and dividing them.
Meanwhile, Black, Latino, immigrant and young voters will need to be protected from harassment. Voting rights are deeply threatened by voter ID laws in numerous states, and until very recently it appeared as though the Department of Justice wasn’t going to challenge them at all. Attorney General Eric Holder finally announced a thorough review of those laws earlier this month. But it’s not just about defending the vote. We also must create meaningful options for voters. So we should be prepared to take advantage of whatever pressure Democrats and Republicans feel to win voters of color to get concessions on both the policies they will support and the language they use.
I’ve been doing this work for a long time now, and every year it gets better. It’s deeply satisfying even when we’re not winning, because there’s inherent value in the process as every action generates reaction. But we need to gear ourselves toward winning, so that we can really prepare for the aftermath of victory–including winning more, implementing what we won and fighting off the backlash. All of that is coming in 2012, and more. Can’t wait.
Tired of Backing Biased Restaurants? Finally, a Zagat’s for Racial Justice
02 months ago
Every time I give a talk that includes the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, whose board of directors I serve on, people ask me how they can figure out which restaurants treat their workers well and badly, so they can figure out the best places to patronize. Sadly, Zagat’s doesn’t include labor practices in its rating system. Now, just in time for your holiday family outings, ROC United has released the first and long-awaited national Diners’ Guide to help you make those choices.
The Guide evaluates more than 150 popular restaurants and chains nationwide against 3 criteria: provision of paid sick days, wages of at least $9 per hour for non-tipped workers and $5 per hour of tipped workers, and opportunities for internal advancement.
These are good criteria. I don’t want a sick person handling my food, nor do I want them to lose wages or jobs because they’re sick. The minimum wage for tipped workers has remained at a measly $2.13 per hour for nearly 20 years, so every day consumers have to push for a higher standard since Congress won’t. And finally, racial and gender hierarchies are a fact of life in the restaurant industry, with white men getting the best paying jobs at the front of the house. Across the country, ROC United has found that a system that enables internal promotion so that back of the house workers can get access to front of the house jobs, is a key element of restaurants that don’t discriminate.
The Guide goes further than telling you where to go. Since it doesn’t cover absolutely every one of the millions of restaurants in this country, ROC United asks diners to simply take a look around and ask a few questions when they eat out. Just opening our eyes will tell us who works where. Are all the waiters white? Are all the bussers Latinos? Are there no black people or women anywhere? It isn’t difficult to ask your waiter what his hourly wages are. And if the restaurant doesn’t meet the standards listed above, there are tear out cards in the back of the guide that you can leave with management to let them know where they can get help to do better.
One set of restaurants you might do this with is highlighted in the guide directly.
The Darden Group owns and operates nearly 2,000 restaurants nationwide, including Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse. ROC-D.C. has identified a pattern of racial discrimination against black workers in particular, which is partly upheld by the lack of internal promotion systems. But its most famous restaurant is the high-end Capital Grille Steakhouse, where black workers say they are routinely told they don’t “meet the standards,” no matter how much serving experience they have.
Industry wide, black workers have a particularly tough time getting work in table-service restaurants. The industry has relegated them to fast food. With black unemployment at record levels–16 percent nationally, well over 20 percent in many cities–ROC’s campaign is an urgently important intervention.
Ironically, the CEO of the Darden Group is Clarence Otis, Jr.–a highly-awarded African American businessman who used to work for J.P. Morgan. I have no doubt that Otis’ race will feature prominently in Darden’s defense against ROC’s findings, but of course the issue is not his identity or even his intention, but rather the actual impact of the company’s employment practices.
You can get your copy of the guide at ROC United’s website. May your eating out be flavored with justice this holiday season.
Join the Colorlines.com Family at Facing Race 2012 in Baltimore
02 months ago
Exactly one year from now, 1,000 racial justice activists will gather in Baltimore for the fourth Facing Race conference. The Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, hosts Facing Race every other year to give our community a much-needed chance to meet face to face, to celebrate the great racial equity work taking place across the country and to learn from and inspire each other. Even in this age of new media tools that connect us remotely, there’s nothing like actually being in the room with people whose work you’ve admired, or even those with whom you’ve disagreed. These are the spaces in which plots take shape, alliances grow and–much to our delight–romances blossom.
Facing Race 2012 will take place 10 days after the election, and we are engaged in vigorous planning to predict the big discussions that will be needed. Whether or not President Obama wins a second term, we expect to be debriefing the election; in 2008 we planned a way to end what was then a spreading meme that black voters were to blame for the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage initiative, Proposition 8. For Facing Race 2012 we plan to assess recent history and gear up for the next stages of critical fights–in financial industry reform, education, policing and immigration. We’ll bring out the freshest cultural voices too, featuring the visual artists, comedians, writers and singers who sustain us and help us spread a vision of racial justice that includes everyone. Baltimore itself is a great city with its own long racial justice story, which we will also explore. And we’ll certainly be announcing new initiatives, as well as featuring reporting on Colorlines.com and Drop the I-Word, which we launched at Facing Race 2010.
You can check out highlights from past conferences at our website. This closing panel of Tim Wise, Maria Teresa Kumar, Van Jones and Cathy Cohen continues to provide insight, as does Melissa Harris-Perry’s rousing keynote and conversation with young activists. We heard from many people after the last conference about what it had meant to them. Perhaps the most gratifying comment I read was this one from a longtime activist: “At age 73, I have experienced racism for a long time and attended all kinds of conferences where race has been discussed. However, this was the most insightful and pragmatic exploration of the topic I’ve seen. Kudos to ARC and Colorlines for insisting on avoiding cathartic expressions of grievance and focusing on practical actions. It also pleased me to see the range of groups, ages and ethnicities involved.”
Young people love Facing Race, too. A 16-year-old who performed spoken word pieces on opening night said, “It’s great that I have a place to showcase my work with people who get my experiences, I had no idea this existed but now that I know, I want more!”
I know we all have a tough year ahead of us economically. While we wish we could make the conference free, we’re working hard to make sure that it proves to be vibrant and valuable to all involved in advancing racial justice, as with previous Facing Race conferences. So I encourage you to start planning now. Sign up to be on the Facing Race 2012 list, where you’ll be the first to receive exclusive discounts and information for Facing Race 2012. Raise donations for your travel, plan your car pool, call the friend that you’re going to stay with, reserve your vacation days from work. Early bird registration kicks off in January 2012. We look forward to seeing you in Baltimore next November!
Two Votes, One Voice Against Hate in Tulsa, Oklahoma
03 months ago
Two weeks ago, I was speaking to the Services and Advocacy
for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders (SAGE) network and Toby
Jenkins, executive director of the LGBT liberation group Oklahomans for
Equality, told me about a summer evening when Tulsa’s residents came together
to protect the vulnerable. On June 17 last year, Tulsa’s City Council agreed to
add sexual orientation to the city’s non-discrimination policy 35 years after
it was proposed. The same night, the Council also voted, by the same
proportion, against requiring city agencies and contractors to verify the
national status of every employee.
The state of Oklahoma has carried its fair share of
conservative policies. It already has a state law requiring employers to verify
employees’ immigration status, and another vowing everlasting resistance to
Sharia law. When the local LGBT community center started HIV prevention and
treatment programs in the 1980s and ’90s, they had to spin off the programs
because local legislators refused to appropriate money for anything associated
explicitly with the word “gay.” Jenkins and others had been fighting for the
city non-discrimination policy to include LGBT people since 1976, losing four
times in as many decades before this recent vote.
By the time the actual vote came, victory was, though
historic and long overdue, a done deal. Over the last 10 years, Oklahomans for Equality conducted a very public
fundraising campaign for the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center, which takes up
nearly a full city block in downtown Tulsa. The campaign and resulting visibility of a
thriving LGBT community laid the groundwork for growing LGBT political power.
In 2009, the center hosted a forum with City Council candidates, where they got
the leading Republican candidate, G.T. Bynum, who is a conservative Catholic, to agree to introduce the sexual
orientation clause. “In conservative places, it makes a difference for our
community to be seen,” he said. “When all you know about gay people is what you
see on TV, we’ve got to show some physical reality. The Council saw all these
lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers and principals, in a beautiful 1800-foot
building that proved our presence.”
Still,
it had been a long-fought battle, so 300 members attended the meeting, while
many others watched a live feed back at the center with champagne cooling. The
majority Republican council voted to protect LGBT people, 6-3.
And then the council turned to immigration. This proposal duplicated
existing state law requiring all employers, including government, to participate
in E-Verify, the program meant to identify undocumented workers. Oklahomans for
Equality had already condemned the proposal, calling it racially motivated and based
on zero evidence that immigrants were anything but good for Tulsa. When he learned that this vote would also take
place during their watch, Jenkins told his folks that no one should plan to
leave until it too had taken place.
The discussion was heated. The immigration measure had been
sponsored by Jim Mautino. According to Jenkins, Mautino is out of touch
with his own district, where many of the city’s Asians, Arabs and Latinos live.
About 100 people had turned out in favor, speaking about their discomfort with so
many foreigners living in their midst. Ten Latinos sat in the front row and
spoke in broken English about being citizens, having kids who fought in Iraq and
wanting nothing more than to contribute to the city.
When a Councilmember told the audience that people could
leave if their agenda item had been discussed, nobody moved. When another asked
how many supported the new law, 100 people stood. When he asked how many
opposed it, the Latinos rose, turning to see 300 gay white people stand up too.
I’ll confess, tears sprang to my eyes as I heard the story – must have been a
lot like those Jenkins saw streaming down Latino faces that night. Afterwards, he
said, the lobby teemed with gay people and Latinos hugging each other.
In our report, Better Together, the
Applied Research Center found that the biggest barrier to LGBT groups and
racial justice groups working together was a lack of strategic clarity about
how race and sexuality issues relate to each other. But Toby Jenkins reminded
me that we don’t need to over-intellectualize that connection. When the Sharia
law proposal arose in their state legislature, Oklahomans for Equality was the
first non-Muslim group to oppose it. “In this part of the country,” he said,
“if we stand up for racial and religious minorities as well as ourselves, it
just builds good community for us.”
* An earlier version of this story misidentified the sponsor of the immigration bill as G.T. Bynum rather than Jim Mautino.
Why It’s Crucial to Keep Immigrant Families Together
03 months ago
When I was about three years old, I observed something that
formed one of my earliest memories. Sitting outside of my mother’s family home
in Calcutta at twilight, I saw a man on the street walking very fast with a toddler
in his arms. I think it was a boy. A few
steps behind them was a woman, running to keep up and begging, “please, please,
don’t take my baby.” The child stretched his arms in her direction, wailing. She
was clearly the mother, but the man could have been father, uncle, landlord, pimp,
anyone.
I’ve been thinking about that incident almost daily as we’ve
prepared to release Shattered Families: the Perilous Intersection ofImmigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System, the first national
research on kids who are stuck in child welfare systems because their parents
have been detained or deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I first
learned about this issue in 2004 when my friend Tanya Krupat (who worked with
the families of incarcerated women) introduced me to three girls who were in
foster care while their mother served prison time. They were looking forward to
being with her when her term ended, only to learn that instead of coming home
to get them, she’d have to leave them behind when she was deported to the Dominican
Republic. The institutions of child welfare, immigration and criminal justice
had collided, and the result was separating these girls from their mother.
When
we started looking into the question, many immigration advocates told us that
it wasn’t happening, and there was no money whatsoever to work on it. So we did
what we could, a story here,
another there,
until we finally got the resources to really investigate.
The basic situation is this: if someone has kids in the child
welfare system, either prior to or because of ICE picking them up, they cannot
do the things that are required to get their kids back. They can’t talk to their
case workers, can’t visit their kids, can’t go to family court, can’t get
social services. Eventually, the parent is deported and the kids either remain
in foster care or are adopted out. A federal law requires states to pursue
“termination of parental rights” if the parent has been absent for 15 out of 22
consecutive months, and some states move even faster. We have found that some
5,000 kids are in danger of never seeing their immigrant parents again.
Child welfare departments are supposed to do everything
possible to help children stay in their own families, because we know from
study after study that they’re better off there than in foster care. Children
are to be permanently removed only if there is a very serious problem in the
family that cannot be resolved with support and services. But ICE practices make
it impossible for child welfare departments to do their job, and child welfare
departments often exhibit a bias against reunifying kids with undocumented or
deported family members. At the extreme, this situation winds up with the
courts terminating parental rights and the kids never seeing their moms and
dads again.
Although the mechanisms of this situation are unique to immigrants,
losing kids to the system largely because of race and poverty are hardly new.
Black communities have dealt with it for so long that Dorothy Roberts had to write
the book Shattered
Bonds about it, and last week NPR released a big
investigation showing that Native American kids are more than half of all
those in South Dakota’s foster care system, even though they’re only 15 percent
of the total population.
Mothers,
in particular, are faced with impossible choices in
this set up. We recorded stories of domestic violence victims who are
supposed
to be protected from deportation under the Violence Against Women Ac.
Instead, these women but arrested along with their abusers, thrown in
detention, and then
deported while their kids went into the system. If you’re such a woman
and you
report the abuse, you might be deported, since some law enforcement
clearly
didn’t get the VAWA memo. Or if you decide not to report because you
wonder who will
take care of your kids if you’re deported, then you can be charged with
failure
to protect the kids from an abuser. There’s no choice there, just a
bunch of
bad options that all separate you from your kids.
I’d like to thank key people without whom our research would
not have been possible. Taryn Higashi, who gave us a travel grant before she
left the Ford Foundation so that we could have a meeting. Kica Matos and Donna
Lawrence at the Atlantic Philanthropies, who funded the current report. Our
long time partners in the work: First Focus, Americans for Immigrant Justice, the
Florence Immigration Project, the Women’s Refugee Commission, Families for
Freedom, Bronx Defenders, and the Detention Watch Network.
The painful scene I watched in India stayed with me so intensely
that I can easily recall it 40 years later. I couldn’t do anything then to
help that woman keep her child. But we can all take action now to help other
families stay together.
Two big things have to happen immediately. First, ICE must
find alternatives to detention and put a hold on deportation until a family’s
situation can be resolved. And child welfare departments need to stop the clock
on parental rights so that immigrant moms and dads can have a fighting chance
at keeping their kids. There’s a whole host of other recommendations in the report.
Please read it, share it and send it to public officials, social workers,
attorneys and everyone else who can make a difference.
Forget Diversity, It’s About "Occupying" Racial Inequity
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The following essay appeared in the Nov. 14, 2011, issue of The Nation magazine, as part of a forum of contributors discussing the Occupy movement.
The incident is well-known now. When civil rights hero Representative John Lewis asked to address Occupy Atlanta, the activists’ consensus process produced a decision not to let him speak. For many, the denial was a damning answer to a question that had arisen since the earliest, overwhelmingly white occupiers first took over Zuccotti Park: Is Occupy Wall Street diverse enough?
“Diverse enough for what?” is the query that leaps to mind. Diversity alone will not ensure that OWS advances an economic change agenda that is racially equitable.
The notion of taking over Wall Street clearly resonates with communities of color. Malik Rhassan and Ife Johari Uhuru, black activists from Queens, New York, and Detroit, respectively, started Occupy the Hood to encourage and make space for people of color to join the movement. On October 19, a different group, Occupy Harlem, put out “a call to Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants to occupy their communities against predatory investors, displacement, privatization and state repression.”
Such interventions have been necessary. The original OWS organizers didn’t consciously reach out to communities of color at the beginning; as a result, many people of color felt alienated. But local movements seem able to self-correct–and some newer occupations have been racially conscious from the start.
In Atlanta, the Lewis decision was followed by renaming Woodruff Park, the local occupation site, Troy Davis Park. In Albuquerque, the General Assembly, after a long and difficult discussion, renamed its movement (Un)Occupy Albuquerque in recognition of the history of indigenous lands. In San Diego, where October 10 was named Indigenous People’s Day, speakers have come from members of the Islamic Labor Caucus as well as immigrant and Native American communities.
These are all great symbols of racial solidarity. We must now move from questions of representation to ask, How can a racial analysis, and its consequent agenda, be woven into the fabric of the movement?
READ THE FULL ESSAY AT THE NATION.
Occupying, Organizing and the Movements That Demand Both
03 months ago
With people power exploding all around us, both new and old social justice activists are trying to figure out where to plug in, how to support the moment and what we can all do to turn it into lasting change. In this context, a colleague asked recently about my 2003 book, “Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy“–specifically, when I’ll write another installment. I don’t know about a new book, but the questions my colleague raised are urgently important. So I’ll answer it here for everyone:
Hi Rinku, in your spare time would you mind banging out the sequel to “Stir It Up” please? I’d like to see a tidy best practices compendium on organizing models, methods, and theory during “movement moments.” I feel like our whole approach and practice is rooted in how to organize when there’s not a wave inspiring people to take initiative on their own. This works most of the time, but then when the wave comes, (as it did maybe for the Battle of Seattle, the anti-gentrification fight in San Francisco in 1999-2001, the antiwar movement pre-March 2003, the immigration marches in 2006, the Obama campaign, devoid of ideology, and perhaps now occupy together), our folks aren’t prepared to deepen, sustain, harness, etc. all the excitement. At least not at a big enough scale. Now that Occupy Wall Street seems to be generating a lot of energy, and people don’t know how to reorient their perspective on organizing and movement-building to fit the moment. Or maybe they do and I’m missing it.
Thanks,
Nato Green
Hi Nato -
No time for a whole new book, but I’ll try to answer your important question. I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement–and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.
Organizations and movements are certainly related. Organizing builds infrastructure for a movement, and sometimes trains a movement’s leaders. The simplified movement stories we read today–how Rosa Parks sat down one day ’cause she was too tired to move to the back of the bus, for example–are pretty much fantasy. Rosa Parks was a devoted member of the NAACP for 20 years before that day. She had put in her time recruiting members, registering people to vote, supporting legal efforts and plotting change. Before Mrs. Parks refused to move, others had, too, just as there were desegregation sit-ins at Southern lunch counters before the Greensboro Five sat down at Woolworth’s. Some of those sit-ins even had some success, but they didn’t spark spontaneous mass action, and only a real history buff or someone who was involved will bother to dig up their memory. Sometimes it’s useful to think of this period as the “pre-movement” stage. This is all the stuff that Gandhi did in South Africa years before the Salt Marches in India; all the work to protect gay people before Stonewall; everything we’re doing right now on our way to a new immigration system.
There does turn out to be a time that a cause, identified with a particular tactic, activates people to an extent previously unseen. So many factors feed into that moment. Some elements are tangible and we can try to influence them, like media pick up of the action, or a simple tactical design that eases replication. But some of these elements are intangible. We can’t predict them and we can’t control for them. They are comprised of some magical combination of an angry-enough constituency, a large-enough break in the system of repression so that what is underground can rise up, and the presence of creative leadership. When these factors are present, we might have a movement moment. Thus, organizers have to be prepared for such a moment to hit at any time. I wish I knew how to call it years in advance, but I’ve never really met anyone who could. The best we can do is open our eyes when it’s right on top of us.
This is the moment when conflict can arise between a new movement and the established organizations that created the pre-movement infrastructure, because this is when the differences between enabling movements and building organizations becomes clear. Movements are decentralized; organizations are centralized. Movements are spontaneous; organizations have strategies and plans, not to mention members and funders. These first two characteristics make movements go fast, while organizations can be slooow. Movements and organizations both want change, but organizations have the added goal of building for the long term, of perpetuating themselves. That goal can make organizations reluctant to embrace movements, even on the issues they’ve worked on forever, and can in turn can feed contempt for established organizations among movements.
We need both kinds of activity. There are things that the NAACP can do because it’s 100 years old, and there are things it can’t do for that very same reason. There are things Occupy Wall Street can do because it is nimble and unknown, but there are things it can’t do for that same reason. A good relationship between social justice organizations and movements requires reorientation from both.
Organizations can speed up by shifting some of their priorities. They can drop the notion that we must get all those occupiers or marchers or queer public smoochers to join their groups. They can be willing to share their planning and tactical skills even for an effort that they do not control and for which they will not likely get credit. In a movement moment, the imperatives of organization building can be set aside, and we might even recognize that not every organization has to live forever to make a great contribution. Organizers are used to hunkering down for marathons, but movement moments require sprinting. As a collective body, we must prepare to run full out.
For their part, movements can slow down enough to make sure they don’t exclude important perspectives in the rush to action. They can do their homework so that they know who John Lewis is when he wants to speak to them. They can adopt enough structure to protect people within the movement who could be abused by people with more power. They can refrain from blaming the current situation on the organizers who “failed” to make change earlier. More than anything else, social justice organizations and movements have to support each other, because the opposition will do its best to divide them by punishing the new movement, by pressuring the established groups to withhold support, even by making some concessions to one or the other.
Lately I’ve been remembering a quote by Omowale Satterwhite, a former board member of the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com. During one meeting, long before an Obama presidency, Omowale said that our organization had to be ready for anything. People might not care so much about race now, he said, but that could change at any moment. He had observed from the fight against South African apartheid that “you never know how close you are to freedom.” We can’t set the timer for a movement moment, but we can act correctly when the clock strikes now.