Building a Firewall Against the Idea of Reparations

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa, 5th District), arguably one of the most radical white-racist bigots in Congress, showed his complete and total contempt for African-American descendants of slaves this week when he tried to label a court-ordered settlement to Black farmers as Reparations for Slavery.

The above video clip is from Rachel Maddow's Nov. 30, 2010 segment known as "Debunction Junction," and the portion dedicated to Steve King starts at 3:15 if you want to skip the first two stories.

The gist of the story is that Black farmers had been systematically denied farm subsidies that white farmers were getting on a regular basis, so they sued. Yesterday, the final battle (mentioned in the fourth paragraph at the link above) was ended by Congress freeing up the funding for the court-ordered settlement. Finally, the Black farmers will get their $1.25 billion for damages. It was a battle against the USDA and its employees who had systematically favored white farmers over a period of decades.

In spite of the fact that even Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called it a "sordid chapter in USDA history," Rep. Steve King still could not swallow the idea that Congress, or the courts, had found that white folks had violated any kind of law in favoring whites over Blacks. I guess in his mind that is just how things ought to be in America...an idea that "might is always right."

This plight of the Black farmers is what put Shirley Sherrod on the map before Andrew Breitbart cherry-picked her out-of-context quote and Fox News re-broadcast it.

Indexing for this Topic:

"Reparations"

"We've Done Enough"

An Interesting MLK Blvd Open Source Blog

One of my professors here at Florida Atlantic University recently pointed out that there is an open source photo journalism site that is dedicated to publishing photos and opinions about the MLK Blvds of America. The photos are all aggregated from the Flickr photo pool entitled "MLK Blvd."

If you have a good photo, poem, or other significant contribution, I would invite you to get involved there. Unlike myself, that site has not adopted a advocacy position like I have, but if you review the photos on the Wordpress site you can see all of the elements of marginalization and oppression that I have pointed out here in South Florida.

For example, just head out to the site and keep the following four topics in mind as you review some of the photos:

NIMBY (Just look at the number of freeway overpasses featured in these photos.)

Urban Blight (Stores with no windows, or bars on the windows.)

Homelessness (Blankets stored under the overpasses.)

Re-naming Resistance (Several posts talked about the resilient former names of these streets.)

My personal favorite was the post by Morgan Jones from Oakland, California where the caption noted that eight freeway overpasses overshadow MLK Way between 35th Street and 36th Street.

The Harry Belafonte - Liberty City - Tacolcy Center - Communism Connection

The photo on the right is the Belafonte Tacolcy Center and it is located on MLK Blvd. in Liberty City. My investigation is still ongoing, but from what I can tell it is one of the oldest community organizations in Liberty City that is specifically targeting at-risk youth. This year it celebrated 43 years of existence.

TACOLCY is an acronym for "The Advisory Committee of Liberty City Youth," and when Harry Belafonte supported the center in its early years with a very generous gift they added his name to it.

The Tacolcy model has been held up as one of Florida's most successful prevention models for catching inner-city youth before they take a wrong turn in making some of those difficult decisions that are made infinitely more difficult when faced from under the barriers and marginalization of the inner-city.

What I found most interesting as I did my research is how some of America's most generous celebrities are labeled as socialists, or in Harry Belafonte's case, communists. What these celebrities are guilty of is putting people first.

When you oppose materialism and corporate greed, it might mean that you are not a good candidate to support a Republican, but does that make you a socialist?

There are two really bad words that most of Harry Belafonte's critics use as a pejorative when they attack him, and those words are "social justice." One right-wing radical site that railed on Harry Belafonte and other Hollywood celebrities was also sounding off against the the History Channel for airing a production called "The People Speak." It was a montage of celebrities reading excerpts from Howard Zinn's book, "A People's History." (That link allows you to read the entire book free, on-line.)

The right-wing blogger called it "revisionist history" that was meant to be biased against the white majority and the "heroic" tycoons and business owners who made this country the envy of the world.

The celebrities featured in "The People Speak" claim the stories of bold protesters and oppressed minorities and workers are "inspiring," while Zinn himself has stated that casting history as a people's movement toward change offers hope.

Critics of the Zinn Project, however, warn that the curriculum is more about pushing Zinn's admitted pacifist and socialist agenda on the next generation.

Michelle Malkin blasts "The People Speak" as an effort to promote "Marxist academic Howard Zinn's capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, 'A People's History of the United States.' … Zinn's work is a self-proclaimed 'biased account' of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market and the military."

I encourage you to watch the 24 video clips and judge for yourself whether it is revisionist history or not. To me, it did not seem that they were making this stuff up. Taken as a whole, those 24 video clips pretty much explain the real history behind the inner-city problems that are faced by Liberty City today, and which justify the 43-year existence of a place called the Belafonte Tacolcy Center.

The rhetoric that has turned the words "social justice" into a pejorative has definitely taken a turn for to the extreme since an African American democrat moved into the White House. How this all plays out remains to be seen, but from the perspective of the "white guy on MLK Blvd.," it would be nice to have a few more men like Harry Belafonte around.

Indexing for This Topic

"Inner-City"

MLK Avenue, Deerfield Beach, FL - The most easily overlooked.

I cross this MLK Avenue every day that I attend classes on the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University, and yet I have failed to blog about it. I guess it is long past time that I write about my very own hometown "MLK Avenue."


View Larger Map

I'm not going to do a formal "report card" on Deerfield Beach's MLK Avenue because it is almost entirely a residential area. There are a cluster of businesses where it intersects with Hillsboro Blvd., and there is even a franchised restaurant there, but it is otherwise not a very nice residential area. Poverty is a part of everyday life here, and the schools in the area all qualify as "Title 1" schools. That, as much as anything else, is the true signature of a low-income area.

Deerfield Beach Elementary School actually fronts right on MLK Avenue, but it is Deerfield Beach Middle School (a short walk east over the railroad tracks) and Deerfield Beach High School (a short walk south of where MLK Avenue ends near SW 10th Street) that have garnered all of the international media attention in the last year. It is my opinion that the behavior that attracted this attention is deeply rooted in marginalized populations and it is not unique to Deerfield Beach. It just happened to come to a head here within the last year for one reason or another.

Before I link you to the stories, let me first say that I am taking an upper level course entitled Sociology of Mental Health as one of my electives this semester. It goes into great detail as to how status and role play into emotional health. When you are poor it dramatically increases the probability that distress will be experienced within families. While race does play a major role in this neighborhood, these events in Deerfield Beach had more to do with poverty and the difficulties associated with life in the inner-city than it did race.

The first event happened on October 12, 2009 (just over a year ago) when 15-year-old Michael Brewer was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire. He told a live international television audience that his school was a "terrible" school. I'll let you read up on the details, but I remember my facts correctly it had to do with a bike, a video game, and $40.

The second event was in March 2010, just when Michael Brewer was getting out of the burn unit. Jocie Lou Ratley had her head stomped and kicked with steel-toed boots as a consequence of an insensitive text message that she sent to Wayne Treacy. They kept her in a medically induced coma for weeks and the brain damage will require years of therapy to compensate for. She will never be the same person. It is not expected to be a complete recovery.

Last month there was yet another tragic event in this neighborhood. In what has been described as an accident, 12-year-old Anthony Alejandre was shot in the face by his 17 year old friend, Jose Torres. The two families were very close. Jose Torres' room was described as a "small arsenal." The boys lived across the street from each other, two blocks east of MLK Avenue in Deerfield Beach.

Yes, these events could have happened anywhere in America, but they happen most often in the inner-city. School counselors are consistently over-worked in these schools, and these schools depend on a tax base that is far less affluent than the schools in the suburbs. The parents in these schools have less time to be engaged in school activities, and they often work longer hours, irregular hours, shift work, or more than one job, leaving the kids alone more as "latch key" kids.

And yet today there is an online story that I found that was carried by The Bellingham Herald, a city that touches the Canadian border and the Pacific Ocean in Washington State. Why this version of the story was at the top of my search results I cannot tell you, but I found it interesting that it is literally the furthest possible city from Deerfield Beach within the continental United States, and yet people there seem to be following the series of events that have taken place here, in schools where my kids would be attending classes if this was happening 10 years ago.

The story that I found today focuses on a few of the positive things that are happening in this neighborhood that borders MLK Avenue here in Deerfield Beach. It talks of how an investment in time and attention will make a difference. Those are two things that I personally am willing to invest in making this country a better place, and I'm starting here at home in South Florida. Please join me.

Indexing for This Topic:

"Complicity"

"Monster's Ball" - Teaching a 'work-around' tactic for racism.

My ally in doing this inner-city research work is Mickey Rowe. He recently suggested that I watch the critically acclaimed movie, "Monster's Ball." I now understand why. I decided to do a formal review of the movie for this blog.

It Takes a Human Being

The 2001 movie production, Monster’s Ball, tells the story of two families in the present-day Deep South. It was not a big-budget film, but that did not stop it from accomplishing something that other producers and directors had failed to do when trying to communicate a message about the racial divide in America. Monster’s Ball effectively skirted around the topic of racism and dealt with it subliminally.

If you have ever heard the expression, “…looked right through me,” then you get the idea of how the writers for Monster’s Ball dealt with a topic that modern America always seems to approach with awkwardness and trepidation. Racism was there. It was bigger than life in the plot, but you never once were forced to focus on it as part of the story. Racism gave the film a reason to exist, but it was only part of the plot because it represented the real world in which the characters lived.

Halle Berry, who won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance, played Leticia. Her husband, Lawrence (Sean Combs), was a death-row inmate who had run out of appeals. The movie’s title comes from the cruel nickname that the prison guards have given to the 24 hour suicide watch for the night before the day of execution. Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) and his son, Sonny (a very young Heath Ledger), are the prison guards assigned to this task.

The tone for the movie is set when Lawrence does a pencil sketch of Sonny. When he hands the finished drawing to Sonny, Sonny tells him how it is a better likeness of him than a photograph. Lawrence explains that this is because, in his opinion, it takes a human being to really see another human being. Scenes through the rest of movie are built upon the premise that only a few of us in modern society take the time to see people who are different from us as real people who are living valuable and meaningful lives.

The impact of the movie comes from the fact that Hank, a widower who is taking care of his invalid and widowed father, is caught between two very different worlds. His father is a hate-filled racist, but Sonny, who still lives at home as well, has black youth as some of his friends. A personal tragedy forces Hank to choose a definitive path for his future. One of the most powerful moments of the film come when Hank finally chooses to place his father in a nursing home.

In what is perhaps the most brilliant maneuver of the movie (it was also nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay written for the screen, but didn’t win), Hank and Leticia don’t stop to think about the fact that events are drawing them together. Simply put, both are exhausted from their fight against fate, and each has reached the point where they are willing to simply allow life to take its course. The minimal script in the movie is part of its magic, and the musical score, composed by Asche and Spencer, is haunting as it fills in for unnecessary dialog. The screenplay was written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos. The cinematography has the raw nerve of an indie film in its risk-taking creativity. The emotions of the movie cannot be put down on paper and need to be experienced.

Monster’s Ball was directed by Marc Forster and produced by Lee Daniels Entertainment.

Indexing for This Topic:

"Cause for Optimism"

MLK Hialeah: Life on the "Right" Side of the Tracks

As you head west on NW 62nd Street (MLK Blvd.) through Liberty City, you will cross the CSX / Tri-Rail tracks.

This will mean that you are in Hialeah, but nobody will have to tell you that.

You will be able to tell that something changed by how many name-brand stores and franchises that you see on both sides of the road.







To Hialeah's credit, many other cities would have let MLK Blvd. end at the tracks and retained the old name of the street (in this case, W 9th Street), but Hialeah continued MLK Blvd. all the way to the canal, and this was courageous.




What is telling is that the inner-city ended as quickly as it did.







Marshall Davis, the manager at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Liberty City, talked about living in "The Canyon" as a child, which was what they called the corridor of homes that backed onto the tracks.






At the time he lived there (and he is probably in his late 50's), there was nothing beyond the tracks at the time. That means that Hialeah got a fresh start as a "new" city and didn't have the baggage of being a segregated city.



That gave them a leg up on Liberty City, and the difference is a clear as night and day.

Indexing for This Topic:

"Wrong Side of the Tracks"

Atlanta: The Martin Luther King Jr. Capital of America

In August of 2009, on a road trip that would take us to Toledo, Ohio, and into Connecticut for our wedding, my husband and I spent the first night of our trip in Atlanta. More than anything, I wanted to visit the King Center.

I was not disappointed in what I found there, and it was gratifying to see that the center was now accompanied by a National Historic Site facility as well. This had been added from when my husband had last been there.


One thing about the National Historic Site that kind of took me off guard was how closely they tied Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Mahatma Gandhi. I was not surprised, but it was one of those, "...of course" moments.


It made perfect sense that it would honor Gandhi as the inspiration behind King's non-violent resistance.


I have been a student of Gandhi and King from the time that I had gone to battle with my church over my changing world view. One of the first books that I read as I sought to expand my understanding of how religion and privilege went hand-in-hand had been Mel White's "Religion Gone Bad."
In his book White talked extensively about how King and Gandhi had been the driving force behind him as he founded the activist organization, Soulforce.

To say the experience at the King Center and the National Historic Site was humbling somehow sells it short. A better word would be reverent. More than a museum, it felt like I was walking on hallowed ground, and standing in the shadow of two men who exhibited a rare kind of humanity that only comes once in a generation.

Indexing for This Topic:
"Cause for Optimism"