Elorza makes a PASS: new program pairs cops with kids as sports coaches


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Mayor Jorge Elorza playing catch with After Zone students.
Mayor Jorge Elorza playing catch with After Zone students.

Mayor Jorge Elorza announced a new program that pairs inner city students with police officers as after school sports coaches. It’s called PASS, or the Police After School Sports program.

“This is a great day for the city,” Elorza said on Friday at Gilbert Stuart Middle School. “This is something … many folks have been talking about and working on for a very long time.

Elorza added, “Nowadays with the conflict we’ve seen in other cities, truly the cause of it is that the connection between the police and the community doesn’t exist. But we’re working proactively here in Providence to make sure we have those strong relationships, between our police officers, between the police department, and the community.”

The PASS program is an initiative of PASA, the Providence After School Alliance, which was launched in 2004 by then mayor, now Congressman David N. Cicilline to provide quality after school programs.

PASS has 10 Student Resource Officers, or SROs, who have signed on to coach basketball and/or flag football for students from 5 different middle schools – Nathan Bishop, DelSesto, Esek Hopkins, Roger Williams and Gilbert Stuart.

Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements said officers are excited to work directly with students, stressing the importance of having police officers building relationships with students and in the community.

Chief Clements addressing the crowd
Chief Clements addressing the crowd

“And in this crazy world that’s a good thing, that’s really a good thing because we often times hear about bad interactions between the police and members of the community,” said Clements.
“And that may happen somewhere along the line, but at least if they have a perspective,” Clements continued. “They can say ‘Yeah, but I know Officer Wheeler, or Officer Carvallo, or Torres, and you know what he’s a good guy. I worked with him. I played ball with him before.”

A former SRO himself, Clements said interacting with the students on a daily basis provides a balanced and positive feeling not only for the kids but for the officers as well.

“When you walk in a school, in a day room, in a basketball court, on a field, and you see a young boy or girl you know and there’s a connection,” said Clements. “There’s no question, we as adults, we as police officers, walk away with a positive feeling, that day, that night and going forward.”

The students pictured are members of After Zone, a program dealing directly with middle school students and providing them a range of opportunities. After Zone is completely free of charge for the students as well as provides transportation home, supper, and mentorship outside of school. After Zone is an umbrella program allowing students to experience a wide range of programs and activities such as: Downcity Design, Explore the Bay, and various dance, and hip-hop courses as well.

The PASA and After Zone programs are funded through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program, providing money to schools within impoverished areas and low-performing schools. Aiming to help the students, and the schools as a whole, meet core state & federal academic standards. Every year PASA works directly with over 2,000 middle school students in Rhode Island.

IGTWP_20151009_12_01_58_Pro__highres donated $40,000 for the development of the project and purchasing of equipment for the program. As well as the Providence Fire Department buying basketballs for PASS, the program aims to motivate and build community ties between students and the police department in Providence.

Formerly GTECH, IGT is headquartered in Providence and has been an active member of the Providence community, often times donating computers and other technology for libraries and schools alike.

“We knew from the beginning when we came to Providence. It’s the neighborhoods is what makes the city great, and the kids in those neighborhoods…This is where we belong,” said Robert K. Vincent, IGT senior vice president of human resources and public affairs.

Vincent joked that IGT “had the easy part,” before ceremonially handing Mayor Elorza a large check, and explaining that Hillary Salmons, director of PASA, and the others involved had done the hard work to make the program a reality.

Smiling with the check.
Smiling with the check.

A critique of Brown guest speaker Slavoj Žižek


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Philosopher Slavoj Žižek will deliver the Roger B. Henkle Memorial Lecture at the Brown University Salomon Center for Teaching DeCiccio Auditorium today. In a September 9, 2015 column published in The London Review of Books, he masked a series of relatively conservative positions in his typical confection of psycho-analytic vocabulary and post-Soviet reflections on Marxism. The man who was once called the “Elvis of cultural theory” has some interesting suggestions:

First, in the present moment, Europe must reassert its commitment to provide for the dignified treatment of the refugees… Second, as a necessary consequence of this commitment, Europe should impose clear rules and regulations. Control of the stream of refugees should be enforced through an administrative network encompassing all of the members of the European Union (to prevent local barbarisms like those of the authorities in Hungary or Slovakia). Refugees should be assured of their safety, but it should also be made clear to them that they must accept the destination allocated to them by European authorities, and that they will have to respect the laws and social norms of European states: no tolerance of religious, sexist or ethnic violence; no right to impose on others one’s own religion or way of life; respect for every individual’s freedom to abandon his or her communal customs, etc… Third, a new kind of international military and economic intervention will have to be invented – a kind of intervention that avoids the neocolonial traps of the recent past… Fourth, most important and most difficult of all, there is a need for radical economic change which would abolish the conditions that create refugees… When I was young, such an organised attempt at regulation was called communism. Maybe we should reinvent it. Maybe this is, in the long term, the only solution.

What Žižek fails to understand is this tone may seem unique or even radical in Europe, but the fact is that it is old hat here in America. What he is saying, with some superficial changes, sounds exactly like the type of Gilded Age American populist rhetoric that did pose a challenge to capitalists but failed, in some cases intentionally and some not, to adequately grapple with the challenges of race and racism on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. ZIZEK

Populist politicians such as Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, grandfather of the late Gore Vidal, put forward a simplistic argument that ending poverty would end racism, which they saw as a case of jealousy and resentment as opposed to a psychological abnormality with genuine neurological symptoms, as was shown by a 2007 article published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Of course, other populists, the Southern Democrats who resented northern manufacturing and industrial concerns for their collaboration with Lincoln, were unapologetic racists who passed as many Jim Crow laws as humanly possible. I think Žižek can be classed in the former group but still is mistaken.

To borrow a phrase used by Žižek, this is symptomatic of a far greater issue, his genre of studies, post-Marxism. Turning to the 2004 graphic novel INTRODUCING MARXISM: A GRAPHIC GUIDE by Rupert Woodfin and Oscar Zarate, we find a section that gives a sufficient explanation of post-Marxism as a field of study. One must be mindful that, as with many classifications, these categorizations are sometimes problematic and that some of the figures mentioned, such as the late Stuart Hall, were genuinely valuable resources for their societies. But at the end of the book, the authors put forward a “10-point criticism of Marxism in our postmodern world” that is profoundly anti-socialist. They write:

1. Socialism does not work and neither does any other grand narrative. The ideologies associated with them are always false.

2. Classes are degenerating and disappearing and attempts to explain things in terms of them are reductionist and wrong. There are many other significant sources of identity and conflict, such as gender, ethnicity, sexual preference.

3. The state as such is always dangerous and cannot deliver effective social welfare; this can only be done by civil society.

4. Any form of central planning is inefficient and tends to corruption; markets are the only mechanism which allows for fair distribution.

5. The old left approach to politics always ends in authoritarian regimes which crush civil society. Politics should exist only at the local level, with local struggles over local issues.

6. Conflicts (antagonisms) are inevitable and while some may be resolved, this merely transforms and clears the ground for further, newer antagonisms. An overview of all conflicts and their eventual resolution is impossible. All we can have are understandings of particular situations at particular moments.

7. This is a good thing, since the resolution of all conflicts would result in a stale, rigid society. An ideal would be a pluralist democracy, providing a stable framework for many local conflicts.

8. Revolutions either cannot happen or end badly. The alternative is democratic transition.

9. Solidarity can exist within and across a range of different groups, it is a humanitarian gesture. A belief in class solidarity as the only valid form of solidarity is harmful to this process.

10. In an interdependent, globalized world, anti-imperialism has had its day. The world is too complex.

Here again we find the Cold War dogmatism, wrapped up in typical philosophical dribble, an argument that replaces revolution with the Alinsky/Obama-style ‘community organizer’ method.

The authors use as an example of the antagonisms in Marx the contradictions between a proletarian environmentalist who comes into conflict with the unionized worker in a polluting industrial mill. Ergo, class solidarity is false. But wait! What about Cuba? After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cubans got around the collapse of their petroleum import markets by transferring over to a wholly sustainable infrastructure with renewable energy, organic agriculture, and other wholly green and wholly socialist solutions. In the past quarter-century, the once-infamously homophobic regime has softened up, now fully subsidizing gender reassignment surgery and creating a genuine dialogue about LGBTQQI liberation. The authors, fully aware of this, write off Castro as a dictator, as did Žižek in his 2010 LIVING IN THE END TIMES.

If we examine the 2000 POST-MARXISM: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY by Stuart Sim, we no mention of the great Marxist thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. The post-Marxist critique is that traditional Marxism failed to account for race, gender, sex, and sexuality. If one subscribes to the mainstream history, this is true. But in Du Bois we find the perfect rebuttal to this claim. He was using the historical materialist dialectic in his work and was in full support of socialism. But he also refused to join the American Communist Party in the Great Depression, when it was at its zenith, because he thought the Stalinist framing of the African American struggle in the south as a national liberation struggle, calling for a separate country to be formed out of the states where the majority of the Africans lived, the so-called ‘black belt’ theory, was untenable. Instead, he supported the integrationist position of the NAACP. In reply, the Communists called the NAACP a class enemy. By 1935, Du Bois had written his BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA, a Marxist history of the post-Civil War period, but still had not joined the CPUSA. With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Party would do a classic political back-flip and abandon their radical militancy in opposition to racism, disgusting labor activists like A. Philip Randolph in the process. Du Bois is still a revolutionary and dangerous thinker. One must only investigate the ongoing controversy surrounding the firing of Dr. Anthony Monteiro from Temple to see department chairs trying to sweep Du Boisian Marxism under the rug.

This speaks to the flaw in Žižek’s and post-Marxism’s logic. These thinkers simply have been unable to grasp that there are in fact two Marxisms, the academic method of analysis based on the historical materialist dialectic and a quasi-religious political movement that did the bidding of the Soviet Union regardless of how un-Marxist it could be in action. If one looks at Stalin’s writings on dialectics, we get a profoundly crude philosophical opposites game. Lenin approached this former method with his study of Hegel.

But there is a deeper flaw to be addressed. Returning to the Woodfin and Zarate title, we are treated to the typical Trotskyist historical account of the Russian Revolution and the claim that the original Bolsheviks were indeed democratic. But this is demonstrably untrue. The events in the anarchist-controlled Ukraine under the leadership of Nestor Makhno, the writings of Voline, Alexander Berkman, or Emma Goldman, and revolt of the anarchist sailors at Kronstadt tell the story of the revolution betrayed not by Stalin but Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin knew that the Marxist dialectic dictated that democracy was the ultimate arbitrator in a true socialist order. But, following the thought of Noam Chomsky on this topic, he was unable to sacrifice his right-wing vanguardism that had been rebuked by the mainstream socialists in the Second International, who saw early on this was a recipe not for socialism but naked dictatorship not of the proletariat but the party. He replied to these left critics by calling Makhno an anti-Semitic brigand, dismissing Berkman and Goldman petit bourgeois, and killing the Kronstadt sailors. In 1938, Trotsky engaged in a similar course, writing:

How can the Kronstadt uprising cause such heartburn to Anarchists, Mensheviks, and “liberal” counter-revolutionists, all at the same time? The answer is simple: all these groupings are interested in compromising the only genuinely revolutionary current, which has never repudiated its banner, has not compromised with its enemies, and alone represents the future.

This is a recurring motif of all anti-libertarian socialist logic. Rather than engage anarchism and its founders as equals, they dismiss it as purely juvenile. In turn, anarchists in the academy, such as the excellent anthropologist David Graeber, have tried to stake out a whole new field with anarchism in the academy instead of rightfully asserting the mantle of the actual Marxists who were defeated by right wing opponents pretending to the mantle of historical materialism.

The anarchist Bakunin, who had studied Hegel as well, had been critical of Marx and Engels for their emphasis on parliamentary politics and leadership of the party, a position that Marx and Engels both adjusted in the writings on the Paris Commune, THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE, as well as later prefaces added to THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Daniel Guérin, author of the slim yet extremely valuable ANARCHISM: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE, wrote:

[T]he friction between Bakunin and Marx arose mainly from the sectarian and personal way in which the latter tried to control the International, especially after 1870. There is no doubt that there were wrongs on both sides in this quarrel, in which the stake was the control of the organization and thus of the whole movement of the international working class. Bakunin was not without fault and his case against Marx often lacked fairness and even good faith. What is important for the modern reader, however, is that as early as 1870 Bakunin had the merit of raising the alarm against certain ideas of organization of the working-class movement and of proletarian power which were much later to distort the Russian Revolution. Sometimes unjustly, and sometimes with reason, Bakunin claimed to see in Marxism the embryo of what was to become Leninism and then the malignant growth of Stalinism. Bakunin maliciously attributed to Marx and Engels ideas which these two men never expressed openly, if indeed they harbored them at all… Bakunin translated Marx’s major work, DAS KAPITAL, into Russian, had a lively admiration for his intellectual capacity, fully accepted the materialist conception of history, and appreciated better than anyone Marx’s theoretical contribution to the emancipation of the working class.

Žižek, in turn, has said the following of libertarian socialism:

Žižek: I certainly can understand where the appeal of anarchism lies. Even though I am quite aware of the contradictory and ambiguous nature of Marx’s relationship with anarchism, Marx was right when he drew attention to how anarchists who preach “no state no power” in order to realize their goals usually form their own society which obeys the most authoritarian rules. My first problem with anarchism is always, “Yeah, I agree with your goals, but tell me how you are organized.” For me, the tragedy of anarchism is that you end up having an authoritarian secret society trying to achieve anarchist goals. The second point is that I have problems with how anarchism is appropriate to today’s problems. I think if anything, we need more global organization. I think that the left should disrupt this equation that more global organization means more totalitarian control…

BS: You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being authoritarian. Yet, the model popular with younger activists today is explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think there’s something furtively authoritarian about such apparently freewheeling structures?

Žižek: Absolutely. And I’m not bluffing here; I’m talking from personal experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it’s not limited to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England, France, Germany, and more — and all the time, beneath the mask of this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind of equality. The real state of affairs couldn’t be articulated. Which is why I’m deeply distrustful of this “let’s just coordinate this in an egalitarian fashion.” I’m more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the non-hierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.

Žižek is correct in his statement, there are some anarchist groups that follow the religious Marxism paradigm and behave as cults, positioning themselves as a Protestant alternative to the Leninist orthodoxy. But on the same token, groups like the Industrial Workers of the World and the Spanish CNT-FAI are not interested in this behavior, they instead are continuing to work to form labor unions in unorganized workplaces that carry within them a revolutionary vision of democracy.

Some years ago, Dr. Norman Finkelstein wrote “A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky.” This is true of Žižek, who has claimed that Chomsky defended the Khmer Rouge, a tired and oft-repeated mischaracterization of statements made regarding the genocide in East Timor so to justify the post-Marxist reliance on obscurantism and polysyllable verbiage while delegitimizing Chomsky’s activism. The reality is that Chomsky, a member of the IWW and long-time advocate of direct democracy, rejects the deification of Marxism but arguably is more of a historical materialist in praxis than Žižek is.

The real challenge for post-Marxism and Žižek is to stop with the mental gymnastics and confused polysyllables to figure out why the USSR failed, historical materialists have been presenting the answer to everyone for almost a century. Instead, the discussion must shift to a critical re-introduction of the Marxist-Lenininist and Trotskyist texts, along with Du Bois, augmented with an understanding that the philosophy did not transfer into praxis. I in fact see a real value to works like STATE AND REVOLUTION or Stalin’s work on the national question. But I also know a real scholar and critic must understand these were deeply flawed men with profound gaps. Is Žižek capable of this?

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Activists rally outside Dunkin Donuts in support of #BlackLivesMatter


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2015-10-12 BlackLivesMatter 012Activists and supporters gathered outside the Dunkin Donuts on Atwells Avenue where an employee wrote #BlackLivesMatter on a police officer’s coffee cup. They marched in support of the employee, a 17 year old woman of color, and against the over reaction of the Providence police union. Police officers looked on as the peaceful rally progressed.

After the march, there was a short program of speakers. Some speakers spoke of the importance of acknowledging the date, October 12, as Indigenous People’s Day, so as to ensure that one cause not overshadow another. Other speakers spoke of the history of America’s brutality against people of color and called for the abolition of police and prisons.

2015-10-12 BlackLivesMatter 010The rally was organized by the STEP-UP Coalition of Rhode Islanders for the Providence Community Safety Act Ordinance, which released the following statement in response to the incident:

Across the country, communities are grappling with the reality of violent and discriminatory policing practices. From Ferguson, MO to the jail in Walter County, Texas where Sandra Bland was found dead, to Providence, where youth of color are routinely profiled and harassed, it is clear that something needs to change. The Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union released reports this year revealing that Rhode Island has even greater racial disparities in police arrests than in Ferguson. Those most directly affected by police brutality and profiling are society’s most vulnerable: people of color in poor neighborhoods with little access to stable employment and housing.

2015-10-12 BlackLivesMatter 003“In the face of this crisis, communities have been coming together to address a national and local state of emergency. Police brutality and state violence have lasting effects that ripple through communities and generations, effects borne in large part by Black communities and other communities of color. #BlackLivesMatter is a direct and courageous movement in response to incredibly high rates of Black people being killed by police. For some, it is easier to ignore these wide disparities; for others, it is an inescapable, daily reality.

“When a Dunkin Donuts employee wrote #BlackLivesMatter on a police officer’s coffee cup, she was expressing solidarity with a national, grassroots movement working for the validity of Black life. This affirmation is necessary because of the social, political, and economic disenfranchisement that continues to deprive Black lives of basic human rights and dignity. This affirmation is necessary because a Black person in killed by a police officer of vigilante every 28 hours.

“The Fraternal Order of the Police (FOP) has mischaracterized the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a threat to officers’ safety.  In fact, the rate of violence against police officers has actually decreased since the #BlackLivesMatter movement gained national visibility. Rates of police homicide have decreased from 2014 to 2015. Meanwhile, people of color continue to be profiled, brutalized, and killed by police. The current imbalance of power between the Police Union and the people directly affected by police brutality is immense.

“Writing #BlackLivesMatter on a coffee cup is fundamentally an act of free expression. This was an act of peaceful protest. However, the FOP’s stated: “We bring this incident to the attention of other law enforcement officers across this city, state, and country, to remind them to stay vigilant in your efforts to protect and serve.” In other words, the FOP is using this act to justify increased vigilance, which plays out as profiling of people of color.

“Therefore, organizations and individuals that support the Community Safety Act, a Providence city Ordinance, express disagreement with the statement released by the FOP. We feel that the Providence Police took a simple message of racial justice and equality as a personal attack and justification for even harsher policing, rather than an opportunity for reflection on the current realities of state violence. We need police to stop addressing acts of peaceful protest and dialogue as “unacceptable and discouraging” and start giving that label to acts of racial profiling and police brutality.”

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