Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
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Celebrating Summer in the City–Send Us Your Own Shots!
07 months ago
We cover a lot of tough topics here at Colorlines.com, many of them about urban communities that are, in one way or another, under siege–of joblessness, the war on drugs, deportation and more. We know that many of our readers see and experience the harsh realities of these things in their cities every day.
But it’s the summer, and we also know people still make it out of their homes everyday and do more than survive–they live, love and create community, at the beach, the ice cream shop and in the neighborhood park. We love summer in the city, too, so we’re celebrating it with images of urban community.
And we need your help! We’ve culled images from our own cities–Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles–and we want you to add yours to it. Send pictures of what summer means to you–that can be you enjoying the summer, a nice sunset, kids playing at a park, anything that makes you happy this summer. You can send pictures or links of your pictures to me at jrivas@arc.org with the subject “Summer 2011.” (And so none of us get in trouble, please only send pictures you have permission to share and do let us know who to credit the photo to.) We’ll follow up and share them on Colorlines.
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Families enjoy some time in the water in front of Jaume Plensa’s 50-foot glass block towers of flowing water that project video images of 1,000 different Chicagoans. Millenium Park, Chicago. (Photo by Velnich, C/C) |
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Maybe ice cream under some palm trees in Los Angeles is your thing? Send us a picture of you enjoying a frozen treat! (Photo by _e.t) |
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Maybe you can squeeze a bike ride in there so you don’t feel guilty about all the ice cream you eat. (Photo by Jorge Rivas) |
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Or yoga? Bernice Acosta performs yoga in Times Square during an event marking the summer solstice on June 21, 2011, in New York City. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) |
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Schoolkids go fishing on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images) |
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Youth breakdancing from coast to coast. (Left image in San Francisco by Kevin Duffy. Right image in New York City subway by Annika Lidne.) |
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Hanging out and watching a pickup game of soccer in Patterson Park in Baltimore. (Photo by Stokely Baksh) |
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s Financial Martial Law on Poor Cities
010 months ago
My friend Judith Browne-Dianis, who runs the Advancement Project, just turned me on to this evil mechanism that allows governors to take over local decision making. On the heels of Wisconsin’s move to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights, Michigan has taken things to the next level: stripping cities of self-governance.
Last week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. Now he can declare any city or district in financial emergency, appoint an emergency manager (at county, city, district or township level) and give that person the power to control budgets, sell off assets, bypass city councils and boards of education, take over school systems, de-certify public unions, and even to dissolve the city itself as an entity. This is corporate martial law–it won’t be the military taking over, but business interests that constitute an authoritarian regime.
The idea is that the state will punish localities where incompetent public officials and administrators are wasting money. This is the punishment angle on the master narrative that Republican governors across the country are taking up–”balancing the budget requires sacrifice.” Of course it only requires sacrifice from the people who have already cut to the bone. Simultaneously, Snyder, supposedly a moderate Republican, proposes a state budget that includes a 60 percent cut in corporate taxes, along with plans to tax pensions and kill the earned income tax credit.
Browne-Dianis points out that of the four Michigan cities and school districts (Benton Harbor, Detroit Public Schools, Pontiac and Ecorse) with this status right now, three are majority black. She says, “I believe this is the waterfront and Detroit bill. This is how Detroit will become gentrified. This is how corporate interests and developers will get to have wholesale control of our towns, our land and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The editors of Central Michigan Life note that financial emergency is broadly defined: “There is nothing stopping Snyder from declaring financial emergencies in municipalities whose officials he has a problem with, appointing his friends from corporate circles as the emergency managers who would then run the municipality in the way most profitable to themselves.”
The way the law came into effect holds an important lesson for progressives. In Detroit, the school board won a legal case they filed to stop the city’s financial manager from making dictatorial decisions about everything, including curriculum. To get around the court decision, the state then codified that dictatorship into law. When we win, we have to be prepared to keep fighting, because there will be a backlash. We can choose to see the backlash, as awful as it might be, as a sign of our progress, rather than as a reason not to have the fight in the first place. That’s something the people of Michigan clearly know, given the huge protests they’ve been carrying out. And this outrageous mess definitely requires a fight back.
Black Women Don’t Swim?
01 year ago
The summer heat tends to stir up peculiar media obsessions. On public radio, we’ve been hearing a lot about how Black people and water don’t mix. Or more precisely, why so many Black people don’t swim. Fear of water? Fear of bad hair? Or something else lurking beneath the surface?
New York’s WNYC ran a long feature on the “accepted” belief that Black women just don’t swim. Peppered with references to Chris Rock’s post-racial pop-culture-freakout sensation Good Hair, the reporter Jenna Flanagan wonders whether Black women are kept from swimming by the oppressive crown of straightened locks.
NPR’s Tell me More takes a public health angle, debating whether Black women’s hair anxieties may be indirectly contributing to generalized fear of swimming in the Black community. In a bit of a speculative leap, the segment suggests that this could mean fewer children of color knowing how to swim, and by extension, more kids drowning in the neighborhood pool.
Is hair at the root of the problem? Citing a University of Memphis study on lack of swimming skills among youth of color, Tell Me More guest, Olympic medalist Cullen Jones, tells host Michelle Martin:
…the first big thing is fear. And I can completely speak to that. You know, I almost drowned at five and my mom told me it took me a while because I was very timid about getting back in the water.
Secondly, it’s parental backing. A lot of parents themselves don’t know how to swim and they feel that because they can’t save their child, God forbid anything was to happen, they treat water like fire. Stay away from it. It’s bad.
And third is definitely the physical aspect of it: dry skin, ladies with their hair, which I understand completely, my mom spends good money getting her hair done, I completely understand it.
Jones suggests it’s a complex overlap of factors that keep kids out of the pool. Still, the study itself doesn’t harp on hairstyles, though it does note that Black girls reportedly have less ability or comfort in the pool than Black boys and other females. The key findings include:
• As income increased so did respondent swimming ability/comfort, agreement with “swimming is for me”, “I have a parent/guardian that encourages me to swim”, “a majority of my family members can swim”, and fear of drowning decreased.
• Respondents from homes with highly educated parents/guardians (advanced degrees) were significantly more skilled/ comfortable swimming and inclined to receive arental/guardian support for swimming, and less inclined to express fear of drowning than children from households with less educated parent/caregivers.
• Respondents indicating that it is not easy to get to the nearest pool as well as those citing a “fear of people around pool” and reported significantly lower swimming ability/comfort and higher fear of drowning.
• Free/reduced lunch recipients reported significantly lower swimming ability, significantly less agreement with “swimming is for me”, parental/caregiver support, and greater fear of drowning.
I’m a native New Yorker of East Asian descent who never learned how to swim as a kid. When I took a beginner swimming class in college, I noticed the class was filled with other Asian women, and was incidentally taught by a Black female instructor. Maybe that has some social or cultural significance, maybe not. But does the Black hair theory shed any light on why Black boys and Latino children, and other groups tend to be less aquatically inclined? The media appears to be mixing its fixation on Black hair politics with a separate set of social issues, tied to culture, socioeconomic status and gender.
Lower down in Flanagan’s story, after explaining that a kid might not feel like getting their hair soaked in chlorine after “mom may have just paid $60 to $100 to get it done in the first place”–she touches on some issues other than Black aesthetics that might pose a barrier to water sports:
However, NYU Sociology Professor Ann Mourning says vanity isn’t to blame for the fewer numbers of black swimmers. It’s access to swimming pools and segregation.
It’s no secret that summertime activities in poor urban neighborhoods are more likely to include an open fire hydrant than aquatics.
But Mourning says when segregation was the law of the land, swimming pools were considered to be far too intimate of a place for blacks and whites to mix. Some pools even had rules that if a black person put so much as a toe in the water, the entire pool would need to be drained and scrubbed clean. To back up this exclusion and remove the burden of responsibility for it, theories were created that blacks simply weren’t geneticallly or physically suited for the water. As a result, Mourning says many African-Americans didn’t learn to swim and some even developed a phobia of it. They ended up teaching their own kids to fear the water as well.
Of course, it’s hard to prove that past racist policies are directly responsible for apparent the lack of a swimming culture in some urban communities of color. On the other hand, in segregated cities, where structural racism continues to shade into the use and perception of public recreation, it seems less outlandish to focus on the role of historical memory versus, say, Black women’s supposedly life-consuming hair neuroses. But of course, it’s more fun to just indulge public fascination with how hairstyles influence Black women’s behavior. And when that story gets old, just add water.
Photo: Splash Atlanta, USA Swimming Foundation