The STEP UP Coalition is made up of the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA) and various other activist groups in Providence. The CSA is a citizen-proposed ordinance that would address racial profiling and other abuses of power by police. Mayor Jorge Elorza recently said the CSA could pass before the end of the year.
This is the ninth year for PRONK! (Providence HONK!) which takes place every Indigenous People’s Day. It is not a Columbus Day parade. Local bands, such as the Extraordinary Rendition Band, What Cheer? Brigade, and Kickin’ Brass participated, as well as bands from around the country. Organizers describe PRONK! as “a cacophonous street celebration with out of town brass bands! We are a street intervention like no other, with outfits and misfits from Rhode Island and beyond – musicians, artists, activists, makers – taking over the streets as part of the Providence HONK Parade.”
Organizers go on to say that PRONK! “spawned from the original HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA that has “grown into a new type of street band movement—throughout the country and across the globe—outrageous and inclusive, brass and brash, percussive and persuasive, reclaiming public space with a sound that is in your face and out of this world.”
]]>Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza tore past the twin protests taking place outside his exclusive fundraiser taking place at the Rooftop at the Providence G. On one side were members of Providence Fire Fighters IAFF Local 799, who are in the midst of difficult negotiations regarding overtime and staffing. On the other side were members of the STEP-UP Network, a coalition of community groups eager to pass the Community Safety Act (CSA), which candidate Elorza pledged to support in October, 2104.
Since his election, Elorza has avoided any substantive meetings with any groups about the CSA, and has not supported the bill’s passage as he promised. This protest was, in the words of the STEP-UP Network, “to denounce the fundraiser for Mayor Jorge Elorza’s campaign as he has neglected and in some cases, refused to meet with groups representing low-income people of color on issues such as public safety, housing, and jobs.”
As a result of Elorza’s broken campaign promises and disinterest in meeting with community groups, the STEP-UP Network asks that instead of donating to Mayor Elorza’s campaign, funds be directed “to local organizations whose work directly impacts those affected by police violence, housing instability, and unemployment.”
Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, a PrYSM organizer, introduced three speakers outside, before the Mayor’s arrival.
Malchus Mills, volunteer for DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality), said in a statement, “A fundraiser for a mayor who refuses to meet with his constituents is absurd. We have been asking for a meeting for over a year now, but instead we keep getting passed off to police administrators. We still have not met with Mayor Elorza since the start of his administration, yet he falsely claims to have met with us on numerous occasions.”
Mike Araujo, Executive Director of Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, stated: “Not only have we been passed off to police administrators, but we have been given offers of only 15 to 30-minute-long meetings with the Mayor. How are we supposed to talk about the safety of an entire city in just 15 to 30 minutes?”
Jorrell Kaykay, volunteer at the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), stated: “Last time we publicly asked Mayor Elorza about his changing stance on the CSA, he got this bill confused for a statewide bill. Clearly, Mayor Elorza is not paying attention to the issues that are affecting the community he serves especially when he keeps denying to adequately meet with said community. Whose mayor is he really?”
Kaykay spoke in reference to an East Side community forum that took place in November 2015 in which protestors had shown up as it was the second forum held in a neighborhood where crime rates were actually falling. When questioned about his stance on the CSA, Mayor Elorza responded on a different bill that had recently been passed in the General Assembly. I covered that event here.
The STEP UP Network includes the Providence Youth Student Movement, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association.
]]>“In June of last year, when the candidates were running for governor, we got a promise from all the candidates, including Gina Raimondo, that she would sign an executive order granting driver’s licenses to undocumented people in Rhode Island within the first year of office,” said Juan Garcia, from the Comité de Inmigrantes en Acción.
Garcia was speaking at a State House press conference organized by Todos Somos Arizona, (We Are All Arizona) coalition, a group that supports immigrant rights. Since the Paris attacks last Friday, say organizers, “we have seen a surge in xenophobic messages and remarks made by politicians and the media against refugees and immigrants across Europe and the United States, including Rhode Island.”
Garcia said, “We just want to send a message, especially with everything that has happened in Paris with the terrorist attacks. The people standing behind me are not terrorists. We are human beings, and what better way to promote safety in Rhode Island than to give everybody a driver’s license?”
The coalition argues that this is a human rights issues and that, “driver’s licenses for all residents of Rhode Island would mean safer roads for everyone… Parents need driver’s licenses to drive their children (many of whom are US citizens) to school, doctor’s appointments, and to get to work. They shouldn’t have to live in fear everyday simply to provide for their families.”
“We do not want to be criminalized,” said Heiny Maldonado, director of Fuerza Laboral, “We only want to be recognized for the people that we are.”
José has been in the country in since 2000 and has been driving without a license since 2009. “It’s a safety issue,” he said, “I drive in fear, looking through my rear view mirror… I work a lot, I drive a lot and I need to provide for my loved ones.”
Veronica, speaking on behalf of Inglés en Acción / English for Action (EFA), said that she was speaking for undocumented parents who need to meet with teachers, meet with doctors and need to attend English language classes. They are, says Veronica, “afraid that they can’t get somewhere because they don’t have licenses.”
A dozen states, including Illinois, Vermont, California, New Jersey and Connecticut, have already passed legislation to provide licenses for all of their residents, regardless of immigration status. “We demand that Speaker [Nicholas] Mattiello support the governor, and not block this action,” said Garcia.
So far, Governor Raimondo has failed to keep her campaign promise and sign the executive order. In response to a query, the Governor’s office replied, “The Governor supports providing licenses for undocumented Rhode Island residents and remains committed to pursuing a solution. She has a team across state agencies working on this, but no decisions have been made on timing or process at this time.”
The Todos Somos Arizona coalition includes English for Action (EFA), Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), Jobs with Justice, SIEU, Fuerza Laboral, Comité de Inmigrantes en Acción / Immigrant Action Committee and the American Friends Service Committee.
]]>Coalition members and supporters arrived early and held a press conference outside Nathan Bishop Middle School, where they accused the mayor “of showing preferential treatment to one neighborhood at the expense of the rest of the city.” Once inside, members of the coalition attempted several times to steer the forum towards their concerns, but moderator Cheryl Simmons, who provides an email list for residents to report crimes and receive alerts on the College Hill Neighborhood Association webpage, refused to allow the program to go off track.
At one point Simmons told the South Side residents in attendance that if they wanted to meet with the Mayor they should do the work of arranging their own meeting, to which they loudly replied, “We did!”
Though the Step-Up Coalition held signs and occasionally interrupted the proceedings, it wasn’t until Simmons had exhausted the questions submitted through her East Side crime list serve and decided to take questions from the audience that the coalition finally got to ask Elorza their question.
The floor now open to questions, Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, a PrYSM organizer, walked to the front of the auditorium with her arm raised.
“Can I ask a question or will I be denied because I’m a person of color?” asked Flores-Maldonado.
Simmons was quick to say that questions were open only to East Side residents. Flores-Maldonado replied that she was an East Side resident and that her question was crime related.
“If its related to crime, go for it,” said Simmons.
Flores-Maldonado reminded Elorza that as a candidate for Mayor he had promised, at the People’s Forum on October 22nd, that he would support 10 out of the 12 points in the Providence Community Safety Act (CSA), a proposed municipal ordinance aimed at creating new police accountability policies in the City of Providence. Since being elected Mayor, Elorza has backed away from his promises.
Elorza took the microphone, but he didn’t answer Flores-Maldonado’s question.
Elorza misinterpreted her question to be about the Comprehensive Community – Police Relationship Act of 2015, a bill passed by the General Assembly earlier this year and signed into law by Governor Gina Raimondo in July. This law requires all police departments in Rhode Island to collect racial data during traffic stops for an annual report to the Department of Transportation’s Office of Highway Safety, prohibits consent searches of minors, and contains other measures aimed at protecting citizens from police overreach.
The bill Elorza talked about is not the Community Safety Act. (Here’s a copy of the Act, marked up by Elorza and submitted to organizers ahead of the People’s Forum a year ago.) When the Step-Up Coalition members realized what Elorza was doing, they called him on his act at once. They shouted that he wasn’t talking about the right bill. Elorza smiled, and kept on talking about a state level bill as if he was answering the question about the city level ordinance.
Flores-Maldonado was not allowed a chance to follow up, but was told by moderator Simmons that the question was asked and answered. The next question was from an East Side resident. You can watch Elorza’s entire, baffling and embarrassing performance on this question here:
Afterwards, I spoke to people from both the Step-Up Coalition and the East Side neighborhood. Everyone I talked to was stunned by the Mayor’s outrageous behavior.
One woman, a long time East Side resident, told me, “I was really disappointed by the Mayor’s response to her question. It made me think that he might have been lying about other things he said tonight. I mean, how can I trust anything he said?”
Here’s the Step-Up press conference held just before the forum:
Here’s the full forum , up until shortly after Mayor Elorza left the building.
]]>Comité en Acción is leading the charge on getting driver’s licenses for undocumented workers in Rhode Island. Senate bill 391, which “would allow the department of motor vehicles to issue driving privilege licenses and driving privilege permits to applicants unable to establish lawful presence in the United States” has been held for further study, which is General Assembly language for “going nowhere.”
But the fight isn’t over yet.
I spoke to Sabine Adrian and Catarina Lorenzo, two leaders with Comité en Acción who are leading volunteers in a phone banking effort targeting Senate President Teresa Paiva-Weed, who has the power to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote in the Senate.
According to Sophia Wright, “States like Chicago, California, New Jersey and Connecticut, to name a few, have already taken the step towards greater equality by passing similar laws that provide licenses for all, regardless of immigration status.”
During the May 21 public testimony on the bill, said Adrian, those in favor of allowing licenses for all were in the majority. Arguments against the bill almost exclusively focused on what opponents refer to as illegal immigration, but these issues are not really related. Allowing licenses prevents workers from operating a motor vehicle without the required training and testing. iT becomes a safety issue, and a quality of life issue for workers and their families. The licenses allowed under this bill would not usable for the purpose of legal identification.
The Comité en Acción is not the only organization in the fight. They are part of a coalition, Todos Somos Arizona, that includes the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, English for Action, RI Jobs with Justice, RI Jobs with Justice, the American Friends Service Committee, Fuerza Laboral and others.
Those in favor of this legislation can sign this petition at MoveOn.
You could also call Senate President Paiva-Weed and let her know that you support this important bill.
]]>The People’s Agenda is comprised of three parts:
1. The Community Safety Act, “a proposed ordinance currently being looked at by the Providence City Council which is aimed at curbing racial profiling by police,”
2. Public Money for Public Good, “a set of requirements local community and labor organizations want to see included as requirements for all companies seeking tax stabilization agreements” in Providence, and
3. Community Solutions to Violence, “a set of proposals by local residents aimed at curbing violence at its root.”
The coalition behind The People’s Agenda and the action at the inauguration includes the Providence Youth Student Movement, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, Rhode Island Jobs With Justice, the Mt. Hope Neighborhood Association, the American Friends Service Committee and the Olneyville Neighborhood Association.
Elorza agreed to use his power as mayor to advocate strongly for almost all the items on The People’s Agenda during the The People’s Forum, a mayoral debate held in October. You can see the responses of all the mayoral candidates, and get a fuller understanding of the ideas Elorza committed to, here.
Many politicians will say whatever they have to to get elected, or, after being elected, find that their priorities have shifted. It’s important for citizens and community groups to hold elected officials accountable.
]]>In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny.
The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism.
The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting.
Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.”
Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice.
The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law.
Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights.
On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles.
Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary.
Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others.
The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech.’ Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power.
There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence.
Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
]]>Next up was Onna Moniz-John, of the NAACP and the Urban League, a tireless advocate for the elimination of racial profiling. She related her ongoing struggle to deal with this issue legislatively, and her disappointment that a bill in the recent legislative session was scuttled at the behest of the police chiefs from the various RI communities. (One of many disappointing outcomes in the latest session.) Racial profiling exists, and needs to be dealt with, and Ms. Moniz-John offered us a real route towards dealing with this problem. She is a very affecting speaker.
Next up was Will Lambek of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association and Marlon Cifuentes, talking about Secure Communities, an Orwellian-named government program that puts people from south of the border on the fast track to deportation without any hint of due process. This program had been ostensibly instituted to deal with the very worst violent offenders, but in practice has been used as a means by which to deport anyone for any reason. Efforts to dissociate states from this program have been successful in some states, including New York, but Attorney General Peter Kilmartin and Governor Lincoln Chafee have both ignored requests to meet on this issue.
Last to speak was John Prince of DARE, who spoke about the Prison Industrial Complex, and his own dealings with it. After serving more than his fair share of time for his youthful indiscretions, Prince has become a tireless fighter for prison reform. I feel that the way a society treats its prisoners is the metric by which the society should be judged. On this count, the United States is not doing so well.
One of the eeriest things revealed this night is how all these various problems are related in such a way as to lead a person of color directly from his malfunctioning school directly into the Prison Industrial Complex. A person may be racially profiled, pulled over, arrested on some pretense, run through the court system, and wind up in jail, beginning a life cycle that may result in years of incarceration. It was pointed out by an audience member that the privatization of prisons and the continuance of the failed war on drugs has created a real profit motive to continue the failing schools and the building of more prisons.
Over all it was a very informative evening of refreshing and positive activism within our community. There is much to be done, and I came away feeling that though the situation is dire, it is far from hopeless if we continue to work on these issues.
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