This month we will focus on troubleshooting barriers and obstacles in engaging white folks about anti-racism.

Saturday Dialogue (SD) is a monthly gathering for white anti-racists who want to discuss issues of identity, community, privilege and racism in our lives with the intention to strengthen our practice as anti-racists in alliances and friendships with people of color. Regular, recurring dialogues throughout the year focus on the intersections of multiple identities, namely Race and Class, Sexuality and Race, and Gender and Race. Other workshops focus on relationships, Radical White Identity and Community and issues such as police and the prison industrial complex, immigration and gentrification.

More info: http://www.awarela.org/sd

Speaking in support of DADT will be retired U.S. Marine Corps General John J. Sheehan. Those speaking in support of repealing DADT will be former Air Force Major Mike Almy and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Junior Grade Jenny Kopfstein. Both are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and had distinguished military careers, which were prematurely terminated as a result of DADT. This will be the first congressional hearing to feature those whose military careers were ended as a result of the policy since President Obama’s call for repeal of DADT in his January State of the Union address. Be sure to check back after the hearing for highlights and our take.

This week will also see the conclusion of the Pentagon’s review of interim steps that can be taken short of repeal (which only Congress can approve) that would lessen some of the most egregious aspects of DADT, as well as make it more difficult to initiate discharge proceedings of a service member. Possibilities include eliminating anonymous tips as the basis for the start of an inquiry, and requiring that alleged homosexual conduct on which any discharge is based occurs after a service member joined the armed forces. It, of course, remains to be seen just what steps the Pentagon will be willing to take while Congress hashes out the details of a full repeal.

While no substitute for an actual repeal of DADT, the Pentagon can and should take steps to mitigate the ugliest aspects of the policy. Robert Doody, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Dakota, described just such an instance in a blog post earlier this week — “Who You Love Shouldn’t Matter When You Serve” — that discussed the case of a woman who was discharged after being outed by South Dakota’s Rapid City Police Department.

It is certainly encouraging to see all of these positive developments regarding repeal DADT. However, they must not be an end in and of themselves. Nothing short of fully repealing this policy, which states that openly gay and lesbian individuals pose "an unacceptable threat to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability,” is needed.

“I researched the video and found that the girl in question was in fact not Yoon and was done by some girl who resides in Canada,” Carney wrote in a letter to Yoon’s attorney in San Diego, Daniel Gilleon. “I notified Jeff of my findings and told him not to use the video … he did not listen to my advise [sic].”

Schwilk did not immediately respond to a Hatewatch request for comment.

He and his organization employ confrontational tactics to show their displeasure with immigrants who gather at day labor sites and with employers who hire them. The SDMM has called immigrants “wetbacks” and their employers “slavemasters.” Schwilk suggested last year that a federal judge, who ruled in favor of an undocumented immigrant killed by a Border Patrol agent, should be “immediately dragged out, arrested and sent to Gitmo for crimes against our country! Bastard!”

Schwilk allegedly sent an email to about 1,000 people with a link to the YouTube video that has him in hot water, stating that it showed Yoon admitting she was a prostitute. She sued Schwilk, San Diego Minutemen and unnamed others for defamation last week, asking for $1.35 million, plus punitive damages.

Schwilk and Carney have an acrid history with Yoon, who used to monitor SDMM rallies for the American Civil Liberties Union. She sued both men for defamation in 2007 after they circulated photos of her with comments referring to her as “the Korean anorexic ACLU slut.” Carney — who worked for 11 years as a computer expert for White Aryan Resistance, the neo-Nazi hate group led by Tom Metzger, according to radio station KPBS-FM in San Diego — suggested in a mass email to SDMM members that Yoon had a fondness for “Brown Schlong.”

In May 2009, a San Diego County jury ordered Schwilk to pay Yoon — now a high school teacher in Bakersfield — $135,000. Carney didn’t respond to the lawsuit and was a default defendant. Galleon says he obtained a $135,000 judgment against him in a separate court proceeding.

Carney stressed in his letter to Galleon that he had nothing to do with circulating the supposed Yoon video, nor does he want to testify in the case. He is not a defendant in the suit.

“Although I know about the video because I was one of the many who received it, after doing basic research, I knew it was not your client and my involvement went no further besides viewing the video,” he said in the letter to Galleon. “I deleted the video and moved on.”

Galleon says that’s what Schwilk ought to do. “What [Yoon] really wants is for Jeff Schwilk to leave her alone,” he said.

Enrollment in the Detroit public school system has been on a steady downward trajectory for the last ten years. Part of it has to do with Detroit as a city under assault, as a city whose depressed economy and unemployment woes are merely an amplified version of trends throughout the rest of the country. Part of it has to do with the fact that manufacturing jobs in the city dried up so badly that Detroit was topped only by New Orleans in 2007 in the rankings of U.S. cities’ population loss.

In the 2002-2003 school year, DPS’s pre-kindergarten through 12th grade student population was 164,500, but estimates for Detroit’s public school enrollment this year stand as low as 84,000 students. Experts project that in five years’ time, the number of students in Detroit Public Schools will be 56,000 students.

But Detroit also has a robust charter school industry with a student enrollment of 54,000 kids. That’s right, Detroit’s charter school enrollment is set to outpace its public school enrollment. That alone is so mindbending that it eclipses the fact that when the charter school population and public school population of Detroit is combined, Detroit’s pre-K through 12 student population has actually increased in recent years.

Declining enrollment rates have a major bearing on the school district’s ability to function since state education funding is allocated based on classroom attendance. As enrollment has declined, investment in public education has decreased. Public schools that were already struggling are being abandoned by both the state, with its wrongheaded priorities, and parents, who are (and must) demand the best education for their kids. Increasingly, charter schools in Detroit are seen as the answer.

So what we’re looking at right now is the worst-case scenario of the confluence of many factors: the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, already-entrenched poverty in a job-starved city, underfunded and failing public institutions that are being taken over by publicly funded but privately owned companies, and low-income and kids of color that are left out in the cold. It’s not just happening in Detroit, either. Folks even have a name for it: “Black Flight.” If only the same kind of implied choice could explain the mass exodus of Black students from failing city schools.

Last week, Kansas City, Missouri announced that it will be closing half of its 61 schools by year’s end. These drastic moves sound unavoidable. They sound necessary. But they reflect the misplaced priorities of how and where government chooses to invest money.

What remains to be seen is how many more cities will be making similar announcements in the coming months as local and state governments balance their budgets on the backs of students and families and communities of color.

But there’s another part of the battle brewing, one that pits longtime civil rights groups against a relatively new generation of bloggers and online activists of color, aka the netroots. While everyone agrees that communities of color need wider access to broadband Internet, there are different approaches on how to make that happen.

Currently, the United States is behind many similarly resourced countries, like Japan and Germany, in developing a national broadband plan. A national survey released by the FCC in February showed that nearly a third of the country doesn’t have regular broadband access -that’s roughly 93 million people. And poor folks of color generally fare among the worst: 40 percent of households of color subscribe to broadband, compared to 55 percent of white households. According to commission’s own findings, 36 percent of people haven’t adopted broadband because it’s too expensive.

Despite the discrepancy in access, the Internet has still played the role of a sort of great equalizer. It’s what brought us activist efforts like MoveOn, Color of Change, and Presente. It was key in mobilizing a national grassroots effort to elect a President. It’s also brought us rappers like Drake and Souljaboy. Each of these efforts was premised on the fact that most anyone can start their own website (or send a petition or mixtape) and feel assured that it’ll load and be just as accessible as the New York Times, or any other site on the web. That’s net neutrality.

So if that’s how it’s been working, why try to fix what’s not broken? Why add formal regulations guaranteeing the even flow of content? Because industry analysts believe we’re not far from the day when big telecom companies start making profit-based decisions about what content moves where and how. Plus, the fact that they’re openly opposed to any sort of regulation is a subtle hint that we should be worried.

In 2009, 72 democratic members of Congress wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging the committee to consider the “full range of
consequences that government action may have on network investment.”

Then, last fall, 20 national civil rights organizations signed on to a letter asking the FCC to think twice about imposing net neutrality regulations on big telecom companies, saying:

“The Commission needs to ensure that net neutrality would not delay bridging the digital divide by altering consumer prices and discouraging broadband adoption and deployment.”

Which brings us to the FCC’s broadband plan released yesterday. The plan didn’t directly address the civil rights groups’ concerns. But it did suggest expanding the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, which currently provides affordable telephone service to low income customers, to include broadband support. There was also mention of using advertising revenue to offer a free- or low-cost broadband service tier, but no details on how to ensure its reliability. And on a promising note, there’s also talk of creating a Digital Literacy Corps, which would encourage tech-savvy young folks to get out into their communities and show why — and how — broadband is even worth the bother.

So now the big question is: are the civil rights groups’ concerns valid? We’ll be here to answer that.