Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This video features Hakim Pitts, Mani Martinez, Che Gossett, Pamela Whitney Williams, Tyrone Reed, and Meejin Richart, and was moderated by Gabe Gonzalez.
Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project will argue in support of its motion for summary judgment in its federal lawsuit on behalf of Ada Morales, a North Providence resident who has twice been detained as a deportable “alien” even though she is a U.S. citizen. The hearing is before U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr.
The ACLU’s lawsuit alleges that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and Rhode Island officials often bypass Constitutional requirements and safeguards when they detain individuals on immigration grounds.
In February 2014, Judge McConnell held that there are critical constitutional limits on the power of immigration and corrections officials to detain people while investigating their immigration status and that Ms. Morales “has set forth plausible allegations that she was unconstitutionally detained solely based on her national origin and Hispanic last name.” In July of 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld that ruling.
A decision on the motion for summary judgment is expected at a later date.
More information and documents regarding this case are available here: http://riaclu.org/court-cases/case-details/morales-v.-chadbourne
[From a press release]
[Editor: Pete Hoekstra, who found himself un-welcomed at the Rhode Island Island State House last Monday, had an op-ed in today’s Washington Times. We reprint it here with permission.]
[Comments and responses are welcome.]
Accepting Syrian refugees into the United States is an emotional issue. People are suffering and dying in Syria and throughout the broader Middle East. The grotesque nature of the situation is very real. Innocent Christians, Jews, women, homosexuals and children are being killed, sold as sex slaves and brutalized. Nobody in America wants that. Nor, however,… Continue reading “Pete Hoekstra: Profane hatred blossoms on campus”
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This panel features Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, Larry Hamm of the People’s Organization for Progress in Newark, NJ, Prof. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Prof. Donald Tibbs, Associate Professor of Law at Drexel University, and is moderated by Eugene Puryear.
Sen. Frank Ciccone III and Rep. Anastasia Williams introduced legislation (2016-S 2333 / 2016-H 7610) that would allow the Rhode Island Department of Motor Vehicles to issue driving privilege licenses and permits to applicants unable to establish a lawful presence in the United States. The licenses and permit would not be valid for identification purposes as per the Real ID Act, but would be usable only for the purposes of operating a motor vehicle in Rhode Island.
“We need to ensure that all drivers, regardless of their immigration status, are trained, tested and insured when driving on our roads,” said Ciccone at the press conference to highlight this legislation, “This is a safety issue as well as an economic issue. If the worst was to happen and an accident occurs involving an undocumented person driving, our residents and businesses are protected far better if this legislation is enacted as opposed to the current status quo.” (See the full video of the press conference below.)
Under the rules proposed by Ciccone and Williams, those wanting these licenses and permits would have to have no felony convictions, have lived in Rhode Island for two years and provide proof that they have paid taxes.
As for taxes, a report from the Economic Progress Institute (EPI) demonstrates that “Undocumented immigrants contribute more than $11.6 billion to state and local coffers each year, including $33.4 million in Rhode Island, according to a new study released by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).”
From the EPI press release:
“The study, Undocumented Immigrants’ State and Local Tax Contributions, also estimates that Rhode Island stands to gain $2.5 million in increased revenue under full implementation of the Obama administration’s 2012 and 2014 executive actions and by more than $7.0 million under comprehensive immigration reform.
“EPI’s Executive Director, Rachel Flum notes that “This report shows that undocumented immigrants are contributing to Rhode Island’s economy through sales, property and income taxes. State law makers should take this into account and approve policies that help these residents live safely in our state until comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level provides a pathway to legal status. Providing driver’s licenses for undocumented residents is one such policy”
“The report found that undocumented immigrants contribute $4.1 million in personal income taxes, $11.1 million in property taxes, and $18.3 million in sales and excise taxes to Rhode Island’s. These tax contributions would be larger if all undocumented immigrants were granted legal status under a comprehensive immigration reform and if President Obama’s 2014 executive action were upheld.
“‘Regardless of the politically contentious nature of immigration reform, the data show undocumented immigrants greatly contribute to our nation’s economy, not just in labor but also with tax dollars,’ said Meg Wiehe, ITEP State Tax Policy Director. ‘With immigration policy playing a key role in state and national debates and President Obama’s 2014 executive action facing review by the Supreme Court accurate information about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants is needed now more than ever.'”
To view the full report or to find state-specific data, go to www.itep.org/immigration/.
Last month, Bill Fletcher, host of THE GLOBAL AFRICAN on TeleSur, held a stimulating and intriguing interview with Prof. Lester Spence of Johns Hopkins University. Spence just recently published Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, an expansion on a previous paper he published in the academic journal Souls. Later, Fletcher discussed the recent COP 21 climate change summit that took place in Paris.
Both issues share a similar trajectory. The black liberation and environmental movements were radical emancipatory political projects that challenged the basic coordinates of capital from the outset and contained within them the kernel of class warfare. Neoliberalism’s ability to co-opt these efforts and create a pro-capitalist version of these movements is not a new phenomenon, we can see it at work in the domestication of LGBTQQI or women’s or any other number of radical ventures that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s.
Hundreds of people carrying signs of acceptance and support for refugees and immigrants filled the State House today in response to an anti-Syrian refugee rally sponsored by the Boston based and Orwellian named Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) and featuring former Michigan Congressman Pete Hoekstra. Russell Taub, a Republican candidate seeking US Representative David Cicilline‘s seat, introduced the event. State Representative Mike Chippendale, originally advertised to be part of the event, made one of the smartest moves of his political career by distancing himself as far as possible from this mess.
Things did not go well for the anti-Syrian refugee camp.
As Charles Jacobs of APT spoke, he was several times interrupted by those in attendance. He was called repeatedly on his racist and inflammatory speech. I wrote about Jacobs’ problematic and bigoted past here. Jacobs pressed on through his speech, if for no other reason than to have posted this fake news story about the event here. (Note that the story says nothing about the crowd assembled against Jacobs, that the picture used gives the impression that the crowd was there in support of his message and that the piece gives the impression that the crowd could hear and cared about his message.)
Jacobs became visibly flustered and several times argued with the crowd, turning the event into a call and response. Jacobs claims to represent the interests of American Jews, but the Jewish people who I spoke with at the event all told me that Jacobs is a bigot who does not in any way represent them.
Pete Hoekstra did no better than Jacobs. At one point in his speech, Hoekstra mentioned genocide, prompting a Brown student to ask, “What about the genocide in Palestine?” In response, a photographer with Hoekstra and Jacobs’ group asked, “What Palestine?” eliciting first a shocked silence, then a loud denunciation.
Tired of what she called Hoekstra’s lies, Sterk Zaza, a Syrian immigrant, stood and asked Hoekstra, “Are you better than me?” Hoekstra never answered.
Afterwards, Hoekstra said, in conversation with Omar Bah of the Refugee Dream Center, “I’ve been in politics for 18 years, and I have never been met with a group as hostile and uncivil as what you are. Congratulations.”
The anti-Syrian refugee speakers were continually disrupted throughout their presentations.
The counter protest and the pro-Syrian refugee event held afterwards were organized in part by the RI State Council of Churches, the Dorcas Institute, the Refugee Dream Center, members and families in the Syrian community, Quaker Friends, CAIR-MA, the Standing on the Side of Love committees of several Unitarian Universalist churches, and perhaps 200 students from various organizations at Brown University.
After the failed and frankly embarrassing anti-refugee event was over, Hoekstra and Jacobs left the State House and the pro-Syrian rally began. John Jacobs from the the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MA) introduced the speakers. First up was State Senator Josh Miller.
Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman spoke next. Rabbi Voss-Altman said that he stood before the crowd as “a proud descendant of Jewish refugees who came here,” to America.
Omar Bah of the Refugee Dream Center came to America after being hunted, imprisoned and tortured in his home country. “What America stands for is love, is openness and its welcoming spirit…”
Businessman Youssef Bahralom is a gemologist and “very proud to be a Syriana and an American at the same time…”
RI State Representative Aaron Regunberg talked of being descended from a Jewish grandfather who escaped the Nazis. He was saddened to learn that the United States did not open its borders to Jewish refugees out of ignorance and bigotry. “It’s up to all of us here to make sure this time around,” said Regunberg, “the story has a different ending. This time, instead of succumbing to our basest instincts, Rhode Island stands up for its most fundamental values.”
Reverend Donald Anderson of the RI Council of Churches, said, “Unfortunately there are those among us who would turn their backs on our tradition of welcoming all faith traditions. But we must not let those who would prey upon fear and prejudice to snuff out the flame of religious freedom that makes our state and country so special.”
Sterk Zaza said she went to school in Syria, and contrary to the words of Charles Jacobs, “I was not taught to hate Jews. I was not taught to hate Christians. I have walked the streets of streets of Syraia and I have shaken the hands of Jews, of Christians, of Shia, of Sunni… and the man who was standing here, telling all these lies, couldn’t even answer me and tell me why he was any different than I am.”
Here’s the full anti-refugee rally:
Rep Mike Chippendale is already distancing himself from the State house event planned for 2pm today in which Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich), a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Dr. Charles Jacobs, President of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, will call on Governor Gina Raimondo to reconsider her unconditional welcome to Syrian refugees. Listed in the original press release for the event, Chippendale disavowed any connection on Twitter, telling @jefflevy “I am not speaking at the press conference.”
Charles Jacobs, who runs the Orwellian named Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT). Founded in 2008 as a “pro-Israel” group, APT has actively worked against the interests of the Muslim community in Boston, fighting to prevent the opening of the Roxbury Islamic Center and mosque. Though Jacobs claims to represent the Jewish community in his antics, in 2011 a “group of seventy Rabbinical community leaders together published a letter in The Jewish Advocate… calling upon Jacobs, ‘to discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories.’ The Jewish religious leaders also called ‘upon members of our community to reject the dangerous politics of division that Mr. Jacobs fosters.'”
As for Representative Hoekstra, he’s little more than a paranoid fear monger in the best tradition of Fox News. For just a taste of his batshittery, see here. Rest assured, there’s much more.
Fortunately, Rhode Island, founded by religious refugees, is meeting the lies and hatred straight on. A counter protest is planned to coincide with the APT event at 2pm, and a multi-faith response to their demand that Governor Raimondo rescind her invitation is scheduled for directly after their event, at around 3-3:30pm.
The APT event is in the Bell room, the responses are planned for the main rotunda. Consider attending and showing support for the refugee families fleeing terrible violence, like this one:
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This video, Police Prisons and the Neoliberal State, features as speakers Charlene Carruthers, Angela Y. Davis and Mumia Abu Jamal.
A 13 hour occupation of Providence College President Brian Shanley‘s office ended Tuesday evening as Shanley capitulated and signed the student’s list of demands. According to a Facebook post by Marco McWilliams, “Students will now turn their attention to follow through efforts.”
A statement from the students, who identify themselves as the “Board of Directors” arrived at 1am. It reads:
“We would not leave until the document said he would provide a substantive plan in regards to “each” of the Demands for Redress because there is not one single one that we were willing to go unaddressed. Altogether we were in there thirteen hours, eight of which he ignored us and then gradually agreed to negotiate. This came when he realized we really wouldn’t leave his office until we had his signature and that four students were steadfast in their hunger strikes. We are proud of what we accomplished. We will see how honest he is in his commitment in 20 days and whether or not we believe his plans are substantive enough.”
Video below is from @LadiiePhii96 on Twitter.
The photo below was tweeted out by Marco McWilliams.
A copy of the statement Shanley signed has shown up on Twitter courtesy of @motermouth2 and can be seen below.
You can read the press release put out by the students here:
PC students occupy President Shanley’s office to protest campus racism
A group of Providence College students has occupied the office of PC President Brian Shanley. The following is from their press release:
Beginning at 8:30 am this morning Providence College students who have been organizing against anti-blackness and racism on their campus began to occupy the Office of the President. Student organizers issued a list of comprehensive Demands for Redress in December 2015, based on evidence-based practices and systemic solutions for an inclusive campus that the President will not agree to. This follows three semesters of unproductive dialogue filled with political rhetoric and complacency from the President and his administration. Additionally, Shanley has not responded to any e-mails requesting to meet one-on-one with student activists.
Three of the students are participating in a hunger strike.
Student protesters say they will occupy the Office of the President and remain there until Shanley signs An Agreement of Commitment to the Demands for Redress.
On-campus protests have led to increasing racial tensions, as can be seen in this video:
The video was filmed on Friday, February 13, 2016 at Providence College. Peaceful protesters demonstrated on the continued complacency of President Shanley and his administration on issues surrounding overt anti-blackness and racism on the college’s campus. During the protest, campus visitors, who were attending Family Weekend, physically and verbally assaulted students.
The first segment shows a man who pushed the student in front of him while simultaneously screaming in his ear “If you don’t like it here, transfer!” The same male also threatened another student, saying that if the group continued to chant he would punch him in the face. The younger male, in the yellow hat is seen mocking student protesters by mimicking dance moves while telling them to “shut the f*** up” and calling their efforts “a joke”. The video also shows a woman in a fur jacket screaming “ALL students matter” in retort to “Black Students Matter” being chanted by students.
To say “all lives matter” is not to say that all human life is equal but is to deny the racial disparity that exists in American society. This is an ideology that permeates much of campus.
This display of aggressive hate and hostility is just an example of what some students of color at Providence endure from their peers and professors both in and out of the classroom. This type of behavior is typically met with silence on the part of the Office of Safety and Security and key decision makers such as the President of the college. For example, during the fall 2015 semester when a group of Providence College students peacefully marched in solidarity with the University of Missouri, a spectating student used Snapchat to post the demonstration with the message “shut up you n******”. Instead of investigating, Safety and Security protected the perpetrators and the College has taken no visible action to address such behaviors.
In addition to overt anti-blackness and racism such behaviors permeate other areas of the college, including the curriculum, both implicitly and explicitly. The February 13, 2016 demonstration is, in part, a response to the silence and the increasing sense of insecurity faced by students of color. Students are committed to engaging in various forms of activism in attempts to break the silence in response to racism and anti-Blackness. They are committed until Father Shanley “stands up or steps out”.
Update: The students were told when they entered the office that President Shanley was not on campus. At 9:30 a.m. the President was seen by a student in the hallway outside his office in Harkins Hall 218 but he refused to make eye contact.
RI Future previously covered racial tensions at Providence College here:
Students, faculty accuse PC of racial profiling and anti-unionism
Update: RI Future has just received video from inside the occupation:
[A version of this article was originally published by The College Hill Independent on February 12, 2016.]
Several men huddled around a fire hydrant late on a recent winter night. They were workers with Providence Water, a state-regulated department of the City of Providence that provides the capital with its water supply. They were flushing the main, the large pipe that runs down the center of a street, by releasing a high velocity stream of water from the hydrant. Over time, minerals from the water build up on the walls of the pipe, tightening its aperture and reducing flow and water quality. According to the workers, these flushes have nothing to do with lead.1 Providence, the workers were quick to point out, has the second best water in the country.
The claim that Providence has the second best water in the country used to appear on the homepage of Providence Water’s website, until it was removed sometime between October 16 and December 16, 2014. This despite the fact that in 2012, 2013, and 2014 the water consumers got from the tap exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) lead action level, being the level of concern at which remedial measures are triggered under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Under the provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the utility was required to distribute brochures notifying customers of elevated lead levels in all three years.
The most recent legally required notification of high lead levels was issued May 28 of last year. 2015 water quality data has not yet been released, but a spokesperson for Providence Water, Dyana Koelsch, told the Independent that “the latest testing shows that we do meet current regulations.” It is important to note, however, that meeting current regulations does not mean that the lead levels are below the EPA’s level of concern. For example, an excessively high lead level coupled with an informational brochure is fully in compliance with federal regulations without indicating that water lead levels are safe. As of the time of writing, water quality data had yet to be released.
But the tests that produce such data may be intentionally misleading. UK newspaper the Guardian recently exposed several US health departments for giving at-home water-testers instructions that would lead to systematically underreporting the amount of lead in tap water. The Rhode Island Department of Health allegedly instructed residents selected to participate in the testing to run their taps “until cold” before filling the sample bottles, a practice that reduces the amount of lead in the water and does not reflect the lead content of water that has been sitting in the pipes for several hours (like, for example, when you wake up in the morning).
Koelsch called the Guardian’s claim a “misunderstanding” and said that, while the utility would not go “tit-for-tat” with a newspaper, she conceded it would indirectly rebut the accusation by communicating “the truth.” Providence Water has not yet communicated a statement to the Independent, but has updated the section of their website dealing with lead at least three times between February 5 and 10. The old page, “Lead In Your Drinking Water,” has been replaced with “Reducing Lead Levels in Drinking Water,” and the link on the homepage now reads “Lead in Household Plumbing.” Providence Water has not placed dates on their statements. The most recent one (as of February 10) says, in part, “Our water meets or exceeds all Federal and State Safe Drinking Water Act Regulations.”
Despite lead being a highly regulated and tightly monitored neurotoxin, information about one’s personal risk from lead can be surprisingly difficult to get. Some Rhode Island buildings are certified as lead safe, but most aren’t. And some 80 percent of homes are thought to be older than 1978, the year lead paint was outlawed for home use, according to the Rhode Island Department of Health. Providence Water estimates that 20,000 homes in Providence are still serviced with lead pipes that run from the mainline in the center of the street to the sidewalk, where the homeowner’s piping begins. Federal law has required that Providence Water distribute brochures via mail informing residents of excessively high lead concentrations in the city overall, but doesn’t require that the utility distribute information detailing exactly where utility-owned lead service lines are used. Consequently, a system map is not available online. Customers may call the Lead Service Hotline or the Water Quality Hotline and inquire about a specific address, but it’s easy to imagine that many Providence residents do not know that they should be doing this. And information about pipe material isn’t widespread even among utility employees. None of the maintenance employees from that night knew what metal the service lines off the main they were flushing consisted of.And even if someone does know the material of the pipes, both in their service line and in their own plumbing, testing for lead in the water that comes out of the tap is done mostly by conscientious customers that are willing and able to pick up a lead testing kit and pay a $10 processing fee. Koelsch did say, however, “I’m sure if people can’t afford the $10 they’ll give [the test] to them.”
A recent report by the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island shows that environmental toxins are predominantly concentrated in low-income and minority neighborhoods of Providence. This finding is supported by a 2010 study in the Maternal and Child Health Journal that demonstrates that lead poisoning is concentrated in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket, and in poorer and less white areas within each of those cities. In some suburban census blocks they found zero cases of lead poisoning between 1993 and 2005, compared to one urban census block where 48.6 percent of children were lead poisoned in that same time period.2 But local activists from organizations such as Childhood Lead Action Project and the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island say the problem goes beyond the presence or absence of environmental health hazards in these neighborhoods. “We don’t live in a city and a state where everyone has the same power to act on the information that they may or may not have about lead hazards and other environmental hazards in their homes,” Laura Brion, Director of Community Organizing and Advocacy at the Childhood Lead Action Project, told the Independent.
Since federal and state legislation began targeting lead in the 1970s, the incidence of lead poisoning has steadily decreased in the United States, a fact that has lead some media outlets to call news coverage of the Flint, Michigan water crisis overdone. In the mid-1970s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the average US child under the age of 5 had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. In context, the on-going crisis in Flint finds 4.9 percent of the city’s children with blood lead levels greater than or equal to 5 micrograms per deciliter, the amount of lead that the CDC defines as lead poisoning.
Rhode Island is one of the country’s worst states when it comes to lead poisoning. According to a 2010 study by Rebecca Renner published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the rate of children with elevated blood lead levels in Rhode Island is three times higher than the national average. Renner attributes this, among other things, to corrosive water that strips traces of metals from the pipes, to the fifth-oldest housing stock in the nation, and to the tens of thousands of Providence homes serviced with lead service lines.
“We also have issues, just like Flint, with lead pipes being used to bring our water to our homes,” Jesus Holguin, Youth Leadership Director at the Environmental Justice League of RI, told the Independent. “There are similarities between Providence and Flint when talking about our Industrial past and the way these industries have all closed down and moved away, leaving a legacy of pollution in our communities. The right to clean air, clean water, and safe places for kids to play is something that wealthy communities take for granted. Many low-income and minority communities don’t get parks, street lights, housing code enforcement, or safe drinking water.” Koelsch, for Providence Water’s part, says that the utility “take[s] concerns from all their customers seriously, no matter what neighborhood they live in.”
Renner believes that the Rhode Island Department of Health downplays the correlation between lead in drinking water and lead poisoning among children, arguing instead that other environmental sources of lead are the prime drivers of lead poisoning. “When we see elevated blood levels, the typical sources are either paint, dust, or soil,” Joseph Wendelken of the Rhode Island Department of Health told the Independent when asked about Renner’s position. (For the record, Laura Brion agrees that paint, dust, and soil are more often the culprits behind elevated blood levels, but worries that the current flawed testing protocol means that we don’t really know what the scope of the lead-in-water problem is.)
Despite this worry, Rhode Island is making progress in the fight against lead poisoning. Data from the Department of Health show the prevalence of lead poisoning has decreased steadily from 34 percent of children in 2002 to 5 percent in 2014. “Rhode Island is still known, nationwide, as a lead poisoning hot spot,” says Brion. “We’re known as a lead poisoning hotspot that has done a lot to make the situation better, but we’re still not ahead of the pack.” The 2014 data indicate that about 1,000 children had elevated blood lead levels that year, according to calculations made by the Independent. And for advocates, that number is still too high.
Every case of lead poisoning is preventable. The sources of lead are well-known and the mechanisms by which it enters the blood stream are non-controversial, even if the relative proportions to be attributed to water versus soil, dust, and paint are debated. That’s a big reason why these 1,000 lead poisoned children in Rhode Island represent a scandalous failure to public health advocates despite the fact that the figure is an improvement on ten years ago. And it’s why the situation in Flint is such an outrage to so many. Part of what is missed by those who call media coverage of Flint overdone is the fact that ‘better’ simply isn’t good enough when it comes to lead.
Critics of lead abatement policies point out that the blood lead level considered to be poisoning has been lowered over time by the CDC—most recently in 2012 it was lowered from ten to five micrograms per deciliter. State Representative Joseph Trillo (R–Warwick), speaking in 2014 against a tax increase on home sales that would have provided $2.3 million for lead paint abatements said, the state’s improvement in the lead poisoning rate “wasn’t enough for the lead paint people. So what did they want to do? We had reduced it from thirteen thousand kids ten years prior down to twelve hundred. Now it was going down so low they said we have to lower the standard of the blood level. And they did that… we’re putting a tax on the property owners to put money towards a problem that’s been solved.”
But there is no known safe concentration of lead in the blood, and negative health effects have been found with as little as two micrograms per deciliter. The dangers of even low levels of lead are well established and include risk of a variety of neurological and other disorders. Inadequate funding or political will behind lead paint abatement programs, home risk assessment programs, or upgrades to water systems, will continue to allow a certain amount of lead poisoning to happen. And since the victims are predominately poor and predominately Black and Latinx, a certain political tolerance for lead poisoning seems likely to persist despite the efforts of generally well-intentioned yet underfunded health departments like Rhode Island’s. “Although Providence has made a lot of good progress around lead,” Holguin says, “we still see disparities in who’s affected in terms of race and income.”
“When I look at Flint I’m just heartbroken on so many levels because I just know how possible it was to stop the disaster from ever happening,” Brion told the Independent. “Every child that has been lead poisoned has experienced a violent attack on their brain. And I don’t think that’s a dramatic way of putting it. It deserves that attention, that horror, and that respect. Our normal should be zero. Because it can be zero and because all children deserve that.”
1 Providence Water officials disagree, and tout the practice as part of their anti-lead efforts.
2 The paper does not make it clear whether that census block is in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, or Newport, which are statistically clustered together as the worst lead poisoning areas.
“Churches can be a place where
judgment, shame and contempt
[for families with felons]
are felt most acutely.”
Michelle Alexander
Time for a pop quiz question. Ready? In what year did the U.S. end slavery?
Most agree it’s 1865. Some historians disagree. Their answer: 1942.
True, the Triangle Trade’s enrichment of slave shippers ended with the Civil War. Tragically, however, legally coerced work continued. Some southern states were sly. Police falsely imprisoned blacks, and judges ordered lengthy sentences at hard labor.
“Convict leasing” was legalized. Douglas Blackmon describes this practice as “a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.”
The penal system became the new slavery.
Still, the answer to our black-history-month query may not be 1942. Ready for a shocker? Enslavement of blacks exists today.
The War on Drugs intensified in the 1980s. In just two decades, those jailed for drug offenses increased ninefold. The Director for National Drug Control Policy, retired General Barry McCaffrey, referred to this imprisonment system as a “drug gulag.”
Mass incarceration is aggressively focused on communities of color. Despite blacks and whites having similar drug usage rates, a 1999 Human Rights Watch report states, “Black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men.” Indeed, black men imprisoned, on parole and probation now exceed all men enslaved in 1850.
Bondage for drug offenses is inflicted almost exclusively on black and brown men. Whites are usually ‘off the hook.’ Even when arrested, whites are more often given alternatives to jail. When jailed, whites’ average sentences are 16.3 percent shorter than blacks.
Enormous numbers of black bodies are placed in bondage, their prison labor extracted, for non-violent drug offenses. Isn’t this a new system of slavery? Isn’t this massive discrimination also subjecting prisoners’ families—parents, spouses and children—to excruciating emotional and financial bondage?
As a permanent undercaste, the black community also suffers wage slavery. Whites’ average household income is 68.5 percent higher than blacks—and the black unemployment rate is twice that of whites. This severely depressed income continually increases economic inequality: Average white families now have thirteen times the assets of average black families.
It gets worse: Black prisoners’ sentences continue after release.
Imagine leaving prison. Determined to lead a good life, you plan to go to college—but you’re barred from getting a federal loan. Or you need a job but, if a black man, only five percent of employers will even grant you an interview. You may be desperate for public housing assistance. You can’t get it. By law, you probably can’t receive any public benefits—including food stamps if your kids are hungry. With all these cruel barriers, what choices remain? Can we see why ex-cons often return to prison?
Again, this discrimination primarily decimates blacks.
So who should correct these many forms of racialized financial rape? Why not the white community which perpetrates and often benefits from black bondage?
The first step is education: More fact-packed articles detailing the destructive impacts of racism can be found at www.quoflections.org\race.
Second, share these injustices with friends and family.
Third, let’s seek legislation ending the War on Drugs (really, the War on Black Men). Let’s eradicate laws discriminating against ex-felons. Let’s legalize a living wage. Also, our nation has the wealthiest white community in history, primarily due to centuries of labor stolen or cheated from African Americans. In the name of justice, we who are white can advocate for long-overdue reparations to be invested in neglected black communities.
Oh, and our pop quiz answer: Even in 2016, slavery continues on a massive scale.
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This video, Challenging White Supremacy: the Black Radical View, features as speakers Robin D.G. Kelley Jamala Rogers, and umi selah.
A source within the Pawtucket business community has disclosed the other half of the equation that most failed to mention when reporting on Pawtucket Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino’s address to the Northern Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce, his alleged efforts, apparently with full support of Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien, to gentrify the historic communities of color out of the city.
McCoy Stadium has been adjacent to a large swathe of African, Latino, and low-income white renters who live in multi-family housing units for some time. Now Lucchino is courting the business community around the stadium and encouraging them to buy up the properties so to contribute to an “urban renewal” effort that no one asked for or needed until Lucchino came to town.
Gentrification, called a “benign ethnic cleansing” by writer John Strausbaugh, has been going on for several years in Pawtucket. Unless artists and white LGBTQQI people are conscientious and mindful of their impact on a community, these demographics can oftentimes find themselves as the foot-soldiers of the Caucasian invasion Lucchino and Grebien now wish to throw into overdrive with a sports stadium.
It bears mentioning that sports projects, such as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics or the repeated Super Bowls in New Orleans, have contributed to the gentrification of those historic cities of color. It also bears mentioning that Lucchino was recently seen in the entourage of Hillary Clinton at a Boston stop on the campaign trail before the the New Hampshire primaries. Mrs. Clinton and the policies of her husband are considered much to blame for the gentrification of the past two decades, particularly in regards to the anti-poor “Welfare reform” and “tough on crime” legislation that included housing regulations. When I talked with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report this past summer, he emphasized that capital is eager to reclaim the metropolis and return the communities of color to a pre-World War II status quo, dispersed and marginalized politically and socially in the hinterlands as they were before the Great Migration was shifted into overdrive by the wartime economy under FDR.
At this point, the situation is divided into a rather unfortunate either/or situation. PawSox fans either have to say goodbye to their beloved team, something I get the impression many can handle considering the behavior of Lucchino and company, or they can get behind a renovation project, totally financed by the taxpayers, that will turn McCoy into a bulldozer of communities of color that probably will be far too expensive for these fans to attend anyways. Unless Lucchino comes out in the next few weeks with a plan to create community land trusts for these housing units or, alternatively, Grebien institutes a series of rent control policies, we are looking down the barrel of a very ugly rifle whose shot sounds eerily like Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with labor activist Mike Araujo to talk about his father. George Araujo was a child of the Great Depression who became a boxer. Coming out of the historical Cape Verdean community in Providence, he embraced anti-racism and unionism as the ethos that defined his activism. At a time when race and racism are back in the headlines and leaders from the past are beginning to impact our present politics, here is a real figure from that past whose message should and does matter.
Activists from DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) and Tenant and Homeowner Association (THA) set up outside Mayor Jorge Elorza‘s office on the second floor of Providence City Hall to demand changes to the city’s Everyhome program. About fifty protestors, carrying heart-shaped signs, and a poster-sized infographic about the program dotted with broken hearts, gathered in the foyer on the second floor of City Hall.
Mayor Elorza did not meet with the activists.
Roline Burgison, Tenant and Homeowner Association leader and member of DARE’s Board of Directors, began the speaking program. Burgison explained that she was forced to move in with family after a two-year fight to stay in her South Providence apartment following a foreclosure. She wants to return to the city’s Southside neighborhood, where she raised her children, but the rent is un-affordable, and low-income developments have long waiting lists.
“I went to a local Community Development Corporation the other day and was told that I could qualify for housing based on my income,” said Burgison in a statement, “but that I might have to wait two years or more. There is a housing crisis in this city, and the Mayor and the Everyhome program need to deal with that.”
Burgison explained that the group was there to “break-up” with the Mayor, because he had ignored their proposals to make the Everyhome program better, and denied their request for a Community Advisory Board to oversee the program. According to DARE and the THA, she said, community members’ hearts are broken over the gentrification and displacement occurring in some of the city’s low-income neighborhoods of color.
Malchus Mills, THA member-leader, outlined the group’s major concerns about the way the program is being conducted. “Right now, there are no standards for the quality of the homes once they’re renovated, the city is not being transparent about which properties are being targeted and why, and they are not addressing the desperate need for affordable housing in our city.” Mills went on to share statistics from Housing Works RI’s recent Housing Fact Book, including that 57 percent (over 18,000 households) of Providence renters pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent and the city currently has 10,500 units of affordable housing. “You need to make 43,000 dollars a year to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Providence now. How many people here make that?” he asked.
Joe Buchanan, DARE Board member and life-long Southside resident, outlined the group’s demands for changes to the Everyhome initiative. “We want the Mayor to announce the creation of a community advisory board for Everyhome and hold the first meeting in March. We want to see 50 percent of the properties targeted by the program set aside for very-low income housing, and we want a list of all the contractors hired for receivership jobs. We want this set-aside and the list by Tuesday.”
A one-day conference, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, that seeks to explore “reproductive labor and social reproduction as contested sites of struggle” will be held at Brown University on February 19, and organizers have arranged an excellent slate of presenters. Organizers Arlen Austin and Beth Capper describe the conference as tracking “the multiple historical sites, geographic locations, and activist genealogies that form and inform our collective imagination of,” reproductive labor and social reproduction. “At the same time, [the conference] aims to recalibrate contemporary diagnoses of post-Fordism by foregrounding and historicizing Marxist feminist theorizations of racial capitalism, the welfare state, and neoliberalism. ”
Pretty heady stuff, but organizer Arlen Austin stresses that “all the speakers involved have one foot in academia and one foot in grassroots organizing and activist work. (Of course the two realms aren’t mutually exclusive but have been more or less intertwined historically)… I absolutely think that it is meant to be for grassroots activists and young people just developing an interest in socialism, feminism and Marxism as well as people who have had the opportunity to study these traditions in a focused way through an educational institution.”
There will be opportunities for local groups at the conference as well, says Austin. “We are planning a table for local organizations to present their outreach materials and hope to have representatives make brief statements about their work between presentations if we can successfully coordinate this.” Groups interested should get in touch with Arlen Austin and Beth Capper.
The conference will also “revisit the legacy of the 1970’s Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights movements in relation to pressing issues of contemporary social inquiry and social struggle: the international division of domestic, sexual, and caring labor; the assault on welfare in an age of neoliberal austerity; the rise of the prison industrial complex; and the question of the ‘commons.’”
In conjunction with Seizing the Means of Reproduction, organizers are “launching a digital humanities archive on the international Wages for Housework movement. Drawing on materials housed in the collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archive (Brooklyn, N.Y.) and the personal archives of women involved in the movement, this digital platform will make publicly available, for the first time, photographs, manifestos and other media, many of which are unpublished or not previously available to researchers.”
Seizing the Means of Reproduction is Friday, February 19 at 9:45 AM – 6:15 PM
Location: Pembroke Hall, Brown University, 172 Meeting St, Providence, Rhode Island 02906
You can RSVP on Facebook
Mimi Abramovitz is Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy and the Chair of Social Welfare Policy at the Hunter College School of Social Work. She has published widely on issues related to women, poverty, human rights, and the U.S welfare state. Her books include the award winning Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States (Monthly Review Press, 2000) and Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (South End Press, 1996). She is currently writing a book on the history of low-income women’s activism in the U.S.
Aren Aizura is Assistant Professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the co-editor of the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge, 2013) and his writing has appeared in the journals InterAsia Cultural Studies and Asian Studies Review, and books such as Queer Necropolitics, Transgender Migrations, and Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. He is completing a monograph titled Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginaries of Gender Reassignment. His new project considers transnational circuits of reproductive labor, the political economy of immigration, and queer and trans theory.
Silvia Federici is Emerita Professor in Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University and a long time feminist activist and writer. She has written widely on feminist theory, women and globalization, and feminist struggles, and is the author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004) and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press, 2012). She is cofounder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Selma James is the founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and helped launch the Global Women’s Strike. She is the author of numerous publications, including The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (Falling Wall Press, 1972), Strangers and Sisters: Women, Race, and Immigration (Falling Wall Press, 1986), and Sex, Race, and Class – The Perspective of Winning (PM Press, 2012).
Sara Clarke Kaplan is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies and the founder and co-convener of the Black Studies Project at the University of California, San Diego. She is a scholar of Black feminist and queer theory and African Diaspora literary and cultural production. Her book, The Black Reproductive: Feminism and the Politics of Freedom (forthcoming this fall from University of Minnesota Press) explores how the expropriation, administration, and imagination of Black procreation, reproductive labor, and sexuality have been both necessary to and an endangerment of the creation and maintenance of racial capitalism in the United States. Her published and forthcoming work appears in a number of journals, including American Quarterly, American Literary History, Callaloo, Rhizomes, and the Journal of Black Women, Gender, and Families.
Priya Kandaswamy is associate professor and chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her research focuses on the role constructions of family play in grounding forms of state power that simultaneously produce and regulate race, gender, sexuality, and class. Her work has appeared in journals such as Sexualities, American Quarterly, and Radical Teacher as well as numerous edited anthologies. Her current project develops a comparative analysis of marriage promotion and forced labor programs targeting women of color in the Reconstruction era and the late twentieth century.
Premilla Nadasen is a Visiting Associate Professor of History at Barnard College and has previously taught at Queen’s College (CUNY). Nadasen is a longtime scholar-activist and works closely with community organizations. She is the author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women who Built a Movement (Beacon Press, 2015) and Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge, 2004). She is currently coediting, with Eileen Boris, a special issue of the International Working Class History Association journal on organizing domestic labor. She has written for Ms, the Progressive Media Project, as well as other media outlets.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is the author of the books, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) and Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Duke University Press, 2009). Her current book project is entitled Remaindered Life, a meditation on the disposability and surplus of lifemaking under contemporary conditions of global empire. She is currently Director of the Program in American Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and Co-Editor of the New York based Collective and journal of interdisciplinary cultural studies, Social Text.
Frances Fox Piven is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the co-author, with Richard Cloward, of Regulating the Poor: TheFunctions of Public Welfare (Vintage, 1971) and Poor People’s Movements (Vintage, 1978). She is author of numerous books, including The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush’s Militarism (New Press, 2004), Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (Polemics, 2006), and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate (New Press, 2011). She has received career and lifetime achievement awards from the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association.
Kathi Weeks is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her primary interests are in the fields of political theory, feminist theory, Marxist thought, the critical study of work, and utopian studies. She is the author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011) and Constituting Feminist Subjects (Cornell University Press, 1998), and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000).
Soyoung Yoon is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. She is also a Faculty at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program [ISP]. In 2015-6, she is Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University as a part of its research seminar on “Fatigue,” the first installation in a five year series on “War.” Yoon received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and holds a B.A. from Seoul National University. Yoon has published in Grey Room, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, Shifters, among other journals and books. Yoon is at work on two book projects around the redefinition of the status of the “document” in the postwar period: Walkie Talkie, regarding the rise of cinéma vérité and critiques of the hermeneutics of the self, amidst anti-colonial struggles and development of new techniques of policing; and Miss Vietnam: The Work of Art in the Age of Technowar, a project on feminist mediation, which re-frames technological reproducibility via the framework of reproductive labor.
As previously reported, a historic conference at Temple University intended to guide and radicalize activists in #BlackLivesMatter was held from January 8-10, 2016 in Philadelphia. We are going to post videos from the panels that have just become available online. Tune in next week for further coverage of this historic conference.
This panel features Pam Africa, Angela Davis and Kathryn Summers and was moderated by Iman Sultan.
![Gerald Horne photo[1]](http://www.rifuture.org/wp-content/uploads/Gerald-Horne-photo1.jpg)
Dr. Gerald Horne of the University of Houston is arguably one of the finest historians in America. His prolific and impressive bibliography has profiled and narrated a wide range of topics in African American history, including the American revolution to the history of black Communist politicians who were elected to office.
His book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America offers a fascinating and alternative vision of the founding of this country as a pro-slavery war against British abolitionism, a force that was gaining traction within the Parliament. Included in that work is a discussion of events in Rhode Island that informed my own film Aaron Briggs and the HMS Gaspee.
Another title, his recent Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic, is a continuation and enhancement of the classic title by C.L.R. James and discusses the diplomatic and international response to the slave rebellion in Haiti under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
He has also written biographies of Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Patterson, among many others.
Dr. Horne was kind enough to sit down with me recently for an interview wherein we discussed some of his recent titles as well as currents in African American history so to commemorate Black History Month.
