The Substance of Truth

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Volume 71 Series Editor: Shirley R. Steinberg, McGill University, Canada Founding Editor: Joe L. Kincheloe (1950–2008) The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy Editorial Board Jon Austin, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA Nikos Metallinos, Concordia University, Canada Christine Quail, McMaster University, Canada Ki Wan Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea This book series is dedicated to the radical love and actions of Paulo Freire, Jesus “Pato” Gomez, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding the intersection of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series do not assume that the interaction of cultural studies and education devalues other types of knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection of these knowledge disciplines offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and educational institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and transformative. The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators from sterile, monolithic analyses that have for too long undermined efforts to think of educational practices by providing other words, new languages, and fresh metaphors. Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education is dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of education. With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as well as other dimensions of cultural studies including social theory, social justice and positionality, cultural dimensions of technological innovation, new media and media literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality, and postcolonial global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture. Indeed, in the twenty-first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire world. Educators, they believe, must understand these emerging realities in order to gain an important voice in the pedagogical conversation. Without an understanding of cultural pedagogy’s (education that takes place outside of formal schooling) role in the shaping of individual identity–youth identity in particular–the role educators play in the lives of their students will continue to fade. Why do so many of our students feel that life is incomprehensible and devoid of meaning? What does it mean, teachers wonder, when young people are unable to describe their moods, their affective affiliation to the society around them. Meanings provided young people by mainstream institutions often do little to help them deal with their affective complexity, their difficulty negotiating the rift between meaning and affect. School knowledge and educational expectations seem as anachronistic as a ditto machine, not that learning ways of rational thought and making sense of the world are unimportant. But school knowledge and educational expectations often have little to offer students about making sense of the way they feel, the way their affective lives are shaped. In no way do we argue that analysis of the production of youth in an electronic mediated world demands some “touchy-feely” educational superficiality. What is needed in this context is a rigorous analysis of the interrelationship between pedagogy, popular culture, meaning making, and youth subjectivity. In an era marked by youth depression, violence, and suicide such insights become extremely important, even life saving. Pessimism about the future is the common sense of many contemporary youth with its concomitant feeling that no one can make a difference. If affective production can be shaped to reflect these perspectives, then it can be reshaped to lay the groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational and political activity. In these ways cultural studies adds a dimension to the work of education unfilled by any other sub-discipline. This is what Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education seeks to produce—literature on these issues that makes a difference. It seeks to publish studies that help those who work with young people, those individuals involved in the disciplines that study children and youth, and young people themselves improve their lives in these bizarre times.

The Substance of Truth Tolu Olorunda

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6091-532-1 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-533-8 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-534-5 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com

Printed on acid-free paper

Cover art, “Haiti Nightmare,” used with permission of artist, Ade Awofadeju.

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

DEDICATION

For Sisi, a force coming with furious speed…

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................................. ix PART I: This Great Equalizer: Schooling, Pedagogy, and the Essence of Education 1. Teachers: The Good, the Bad, the Great............................................................ 3 2. Are Schools the Assassins of Education? .......................................................... 9 3. Failing Grade: Unlearning the Privatization, Medicalization, and Militarization of Schooling.............................................................................. 17 4. Checkmate: Black Children as Metaphor for a Failed Education System ............................................................................................................. 27 5. Distant Relatives: Bridging the Gap Between Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy ............................................................. 33 6. Education as Etch-A-Sketch: Beyond Books and Brains ................................ 41 PART II: Youth in a Soulless Society: Redemption or Reproach? 7. Black Youth Violence, Adult Society, and the Rage of Reality ...................... 47 8. Children in a Hostile World: When Justice Doesn’t Roll Down .................... 55 9. Victims and Vultures: Sarah Kruzan, Injustice, and the Trials of Today ........ 61 10. In Love with a Stripper: Young Girls as Preys in a Predator Society .............. 67 11. On the Health and Happiness of Kids ............................................................. 73 12. Double Major: Student Loan Reform and the Struggle for a Democratic Academy ................................................................................... 81 PART III: Speaking Truth: Communication, Media Culture, and the Redemptive Value of Hip-Hop 13. Words as Weapons: Communication in an Age of Illiteracy .......................... 89 14. Black Bodies Swinging: Racialized Representations in the Post-Racial (?!) Era ............................................................................... 97 vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

15. Watch What You’re Watching: Mass Media, Television, and the Making of Zombies ........................................................................... 103 16. Can Hip-Hop Save an Illiterate Generation? ................................................. 111 17. Hip-Hop: Then, Today, Tomorrow ............................................................... 117 18. The Responsibilities of Hip-Hop Artists in Times of Moral Anarchy ........... 125 PART IV: Bearing Witness: Searching For Substance in an Age of Poverty (PT. I) 19. When Political Ideology Morphs Into Spiritual Death: Social Darwinism in Dark Times ............................................................................. 135 20. On Citizenship, Choice, and Courage ........................................................... 141 21. “This is Working Very Well for Them”: Katrina and the Aftermath of Apathy ....................................................................................................... 147 22. Social Networking: Privacy, Illiteracy, and the Future of Democracy .......... 155 23. Prophets of Baal: Religious Fanaticism, Christianity Inc., and the Recall of Reconciliation ................................................................................ 163 24. Hope and (Some) Change: Barack Obama and the Audacity of Government............................................................................................... 171 PART V: Bearing Witness (PT. II) 25. Age of Poverty: Consumerism, Privatization, and the Cheapening of Life ............................................................................................................ 183 26. The Substance of Truth: Uncovering the Present, Past, and Future of Society....................................................................................................... 191

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INTRODUCTION

But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long. And perhaps… perhaps I will be a great man… I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course… and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire… —Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun Never did I fall under any illusions, while putting this book together, that my ideas, or those inherited from thinkers and artists (dead and alive), would set off a big bang, and refashion society into a model of what I feel is just. Reality often stings mercilessly. But I believed (and still do) that impacts, however small or insignificant in the present, could be counted on—that someone(s) somewhere would connect with the thoughts contained and rise up and mutter, “The world as it is isn’t all it can be.” That this person, or persons, would gather all that is meaningful, amidst the rubble of rhetoric, and carry out on careful crusades to make more manageable our world. And I’m not speaking of abstracts: I’m speaking of mass movements that begin with disaffected people linking arms to demand better of their government, of their fellow citizens, of themselves. I think here of the Cook County, Illinois, sheriff who ordered his deputies in late 2008 to halt home evictions. “We won’t be doing the banks’ work for them anymore,” he announced. I think of the Ohio Congresswoman who, from the House floor in early 2009, commanded homeowners facing foreclosure—“stay in your homes ... you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave.” I think of the 200 union workers of Republic Window and Doors in Chicago who, fired without the mandatory 60-day prior notice in December 2008, occupied their workplace for six days, until their affluent employers buckled under rising pressure and national outrage. History holds great stock of men and women, tired of asking and begging, who took to the streets, to pulpits, to classrooms, to jailhouses, to government halls, to workplace water coolers, to television and radio stations—to inspire others for great awakenings. Whether the Civil Rights Movement, or the Women’s Rights Movement, or the Labor Rights Movement—examples vary. But prodding masses of Everyday People into action was a firm resolve to recreate reality, even while staring down daunting obstacles. Through time, however, this resolve waned and whittled. Cynicism, narcissism, and nihilism crept in: and millions grew so set into their shabby and bitterly discomforting lives that inhumane bills were passed as law without even a faint whimper from a dominant public lulled into slumber. Politicians could champion legislations that trampled upon basic human rights, and could rest well, assured the public was too burdened with the exorbitant toll of daily life to stop and take account and plot according action. The gap between Rich and Poor expanded out of sight, with millions of children abandoned beneath poverty line. ix

INTRODUCTION

Then a series of events—each one striking with greater force than the last— jolted the public into wide-awake consciousness. To name a few: prisoner-abuse scandals, debunked war pretexts, sky-piercing deficits, and the inevitable financial tumbledown. This time, no amount of fear-mongering, of panic buttons, of skullduggery, could shut back the eyes of millions now privy to the bottomless pits into which their leaders were willing to stoop: to hide the truth. These are the truths I hoped to build this book around. In essays contained, I explore the truth of the education system, the truth of society’s apathy toward— and war on—children, the truth of media and youth culture, the truth of the neoliberalworld-order slowly and impressively manning control of all levers of our world, and the truth of the steps to take for a livable future if all the rage thickening the air today should fizzle out into constructive channels—rather than yet fasten the precipitous decline of humanity. Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, says James Russell Lowell. With great disgust for how things are, and greater hope for how they can be, I set out to create a document unbridled in spirit and fervently committed to letting suffering speak: hopefully corroborating somewhere along Ralph Waldo Emerson’s convictions that “[t]he truth takes flesh in forms that can express it.” At risk of sounding sentimental, or coming across as a journalist brandishing earth-shattering smoking guns, or a prophet pronouncing the doom of society, or a pioneer blazing philosophical trails, I should allay readers of these fears now. Many of the problems underlined, the examples supplied, the suggestions issued, undoubtedly boast lineage far beyond the publication date of this text: all confirming Mark Twain’s theory that a “man originates nothing in his head, he merely observes exterior things, and combines them in his head—puts several observed things together and draws a conclusion.” These are truths which many have brought to the awareness of society in times past, but truths yet to be engaged with the resolve required to force the lasting changes desperately needed. My mission, then, was to peel through the truth and acquire the core—the element—The Substance. While facts may fall under agenda-driven analyses, Truth can’t. My only agenda, then, was to present a clear case why all that glitters shouldn’t be worn around the neck: why an education system only useful to the well-off produces far more than semi-illiterate students; why the true value of any society can be best measured with the quality of life its children enjoy; why a Market Society, where human lives carry price tags, cannot be sustained and must be resisted. But however strong a conviction, James Baldwin’s warning must be heeded: “the truth is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a … delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.” I hope, dear reader, that as you read and wrestle with these thoughts, your quest leads right to the substance of truth—and you forever hold on.

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PART I: THIS GREAT EQUALIZER: SCHOOLING, PEDAGOGY, AND THE ESSENCE OF EDUCATION

CHAPTER 1

TEACHERS The Good, the Bad, the Great

The teacher must have a genuine interest in mental activity on his own account, a love of knowledge that unconsciously animates his teaching. —John Dewey, How We Think1 [T]eachers cannot follow the medieval tradition of detached withdrawal from the world. … [They] cannot be pedants or dilettantes, they cannot be mere technicians and higher artisans, they have got to be social statesmen and statesmen of high order. —W.E.B. Du Bois, “Education and Work”2 Social relations in the classroom that glorify the teacher as the expert, the dispenser of knowledge, end up crippling student imagination and creativity; in addition, such approaches teach students more about the legitimacy of passivity, than about the need to examine critically the lives they lead. —Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals3 The slam poet Taylor Mali is best known for “What Teachers Make,” a prescient poem recounting a dinner party conversation with a witless lawyer whose views, while acidic, well reflect dominant thought in this society: He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn From someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?” He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about teachers: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.4 “I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor,” the lawyer pesters on. “Be honest: What do you make?” While Mali took hold of this chance to remind him why intelligent people, the world over, consider teaching the most important profession, this question, of what teachers make, elicits not so bad a concern. The National Education Association reports that from 2007–2008 starting salary for teachers dipped low as $24,872, with most earning on average between $37,764 and $59,304, contingent on area income of living, district funding, etc.5 Another report revealed in 2006 teachers “earned 85.7% as much (14.3% less or $154 less) in weekly wages as did those in … comparable occupations”—based on “raw skill requirements” and “market valuation of these skills”—“representing a 2.3 percentage point erosion in relative teacher pay since 2002.”6 3

CHAPTER 1

Society does not care much for its teachers—no groundbreaking declaration. Yes, it demands teachers of the highest caliber command classrooms. Yes, it rewards the “good” ones and punishes the “bad” ones. Yes, it moralizes on and on about why schools serve as critical sites of social activity, and why this Great Equalizer must employ the best and brightest taxpayer dime can afford. But society has proved, for decades, unwilling to take timely steps to ensure affordable living wages and encouraging environments that make the work easier done. Teachers, of all “comparable” professions, might receive less pay but are more monitored. They are constantly called into offices to have their works, teaching styles, and instructional models reviewed. They are watched closely by administrators overprotective of the students placed in their cares. They wield little autonomy over curriculum content and its application in the classroom. They must operate within narrow, allotted time schedules to carry out insurmountable loads of work. They are often berated by parents when children fail, and unappreciated when the same children do well. They face sharp, unannounced wage cuts while still expected to carry on business as usual—even when unable to secure decent housing to sleep at night. Through all, they arrive first and leave last—constantly grading papers and engaging in other laborious, time-sapping activities. They help students see a world far apart from the hierarchical design schools are mostly structured after. They inspire hope in the minds of children whose living arrangements speak of anything but life and meaning. Here, I speak of honorable teachers—better yet, educators; best yet, Transformative Intellectuals. Conventional wisdom suggests the scrawls of a leftist thinker shouldn’t contain these words: but not all teachers are equal in purpose. Some are simply substitute teachers with contracts—utterly disengaged from the lives and identities of the students into whom they breathe life daily—while others, with courage and compassion, help redeem millions of kids once thought of lost and irrecoverable. And I speak a great deal from experience. I’ve had teachers I often conjured semi-violent fantasies about. And I’ve had teachers whose unrelenting empathy pushed through to pull me out of academic burning houses, lit with the matchsticks of apathy. I’ve had teachers I believed had personal vendettas or scores to settle against me, for whatever reasons. And I’ve had teachers who displayed deep interests in seeing me successful and great at school. I’ve had teachers whose smugness and cowardly hubris pushed me far away from class. And I’ve had teachers whose love kept me in antsy anticipation of the next day’s work. There are teachers who simply go with the flow, concerned only about the paycheck a month’s hard work brings. And there are those who spit in the face of whatever authority tells them kids must be seated in straight lines and taught objectively. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 drew a demarcating line between these two kinds of teachers. It knew those who failed to find students as sources of inspiration, filled with limitless potentials, wouldn’t dare raise objection to the crude thought of Teaching to the Test. But it also knew thousands across the country wouldn’t take this sweeping assault on the educational process lying down; teachers 4

TEACHERS

who understood curriculum delivered in an “engaging, exciting manner” makes “teaching to the test … unnecessary.”7 Teachers, educators, intellectuals, and concerned citizens of all calling rose up—in one voice, with one statement: children are not widgets. Children, they said, should be the last treated as lab rats by corporate clowns in white suits ultimately invested in privatizing all public institutions; and the Bush Administration knew the fight wouldn’t end simply by facing down insurgent teachers, for bullies, in the end, are greatly unpopular. Thus the scheme of paying “good” teachers—those who followed instruction to the T—and firing “bad” ones—those who questioned why a child’s ability for greatness had to pass through channels of narrow questions with even narrower sets of “multiple” answers. And many fell for it—even liberals otherwise committed to alleviating the insurmountable burdens bending over the backs of teachers. And in one fell swoop, the neoliberal cast cleaned house. The trick worked: officializing the notion that obedient teachers equal great teachers and submissive students equal successful students. Four decades back, Paulo Freire was sounding the alarm against this idiocy: Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.8 Therefore, the better students relinquish all right to critical thinking, the greater their chances of straight A’s. Teacher orders “Sit!” and like trained dogs they must submit without protest. Teacher springs a “pop quiz,” and they must bow their heads and complete (compete?) complaint-free. Students, in this context, must be controlled at all costs, a concept which worked well with 1st grader “Lamya Cammon,” whose teacher late 2009 cut off some of her braids because she made noise with the plastic beads attached to them. “Stress” and “frustration,” the union said, provoked the teacher.9 Teacher as Totalitarian concepts measure intelligence not on artistic, scientific, or social skill, but on how successfully a student follows instructions, unaltered. Other forms feature Teacher as Omniscient and Teacher as Sovereign—though not as sovereign as the principal or school board or chancellor, who can flip a pen and lay off hundreds at once. Teachers, within this frame, must inculcate into students unwavering obeisance to authority—a practice sure to end democracy faster than any plots conjured by cave-ensconced terrorists. Janice Hale, documenting her son’s earlychildhood experiences a decade ago, shared some of the creative language used to bring the message home: When I picked up my son, I was told that he was definitely a smart little boy. He had correctly solved twenty-four of the twenty-six items on a language concepts test. However, he refused to participate in the other tests because he wanted to play with the toys and play with the other children. 5

CHAPTER 1

The director explained to me that they wanted only children who do what the teacher tells them to do. … She said that they draw a circle of behaviors and accept only those children who fall within the circle.10 The circle forms a great metaphor for what schooling has become: an impenetrable cocoon suffocating all attempts at self-expression. Students don’t walk into the circle. The circle is drawn to enclose them, meaning many aren’t even aware they stand in the circle, much less begin coming to terms with its consequences. The “circle of behaviors” not so much connotes keeping “things in order” or ensuring “security,” as defining their destiny before they do so themselves. It is about building boundaries to curtail unacceptable conduct in terms of Law and Order. It is about prepping kids for a society not too fond of dissent and difference. “Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do,” John Gatto observes: This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. If I’m told that evolution is a fact instead of a theory, I transmit that as ordered, punishing deviants who resist what I have been told to tell them to think. This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.11 Kids in many public schools today resemble greatly a model community of I, Robots—unquestioningly submitted to the policies and control of curriculum and corporations. And while mainstream liberal critiques of the education system usually aim well at government practices and problems, the encroaching corporate seizure of public education receives little address. With growing autonomy wielded by companies over federal regulations, even governments fall serf to financial hostage from corporate overlords. So even if, by some stroke of luck and tireless activity, elected officials enact strident legislations to roll back the intrusion of private firms into classrooms and school offices, more would be required, on a grassroots level, to ensure this last domain of moral democracy remains undefiled. The greater work, yet, would have to come from conscionable teachers—whose students are most vulnerable. “Teacher authority can never be neutral; nor can it be assessed in terms that are narrowly ideological,” Henry Giroux informs. “It is always broadly political and interventionist in terms of the knowledge-effects it produces, the classroom experiences it organizes, and the future it presupposes in the countless ways in which it addresses the world.”12 The role—far from function—of teachers demands more than tallying attendance, unleashing tests, and signing bathroom passes. It is no more satisfactory to say, I’m a teacher because I teach students, or I’m a teacher because I work in a classroom. And perhaps this best separates teachers from educators because no teacher of good conscience would rather call armed officers (an increasing, ubiquitous presence in public schools these days) on a student acting unruly, than reach for less caustic and more redeeming options. In inner-city schools, where White teachers often offer the last best hope of qualification, those all too familiar with the “burnout” experiences of colleagues would more likely resolve inter-classroom disputes—which can be common—with unseemly haste. But nothing good comes of children arrested, humiliated, and 6

TEACHERS

dragged off in handcuffs for petty infractions. With raging frequency these days, ambitious White teachers, lacking proper training in cultural sensitivity, trample down the self-esteems of Black and Brown students. Two years ago, a New York suburban middle school White teacher, trying to teach a lesson on slavery, bound the hands and feet of two Black girls, before having them crawl under desks representing slave ships.13 Two years prior, a Kentucky high school White teacher, Paul Dawson, ordered a Black student: “Sit down, nigger.” The honor roll student, Keysean Chavers, hurled the word first, Dawson claimed (Chavers denied). “Stunned,” he blurted: “Get away from the door, nigger!” And he did so because “that’s sort of what I’ve been trained to do.” The school board, concerned for Chavers, suspended Dawson for 10 days and sent him off to the All-Mighty Corrective of “Diversity Training.” With Black men barely breaking 2% of the 4.8 million teachers nationwide,14 no less dramatic a noun than crisis should command the attention of those who still think inner-city schools must be rectified—and quick!—to break apart the schoolto-prison pipeline funneling millions of Black and Brown youth into juvenile halls and jail cells. Surely if White men lacked so great a representation in classrooms— town halls, conferences, emergency meetings, expanded scholarship opportunities and the like would be at once dispatched to help salvage what would take expression as a National Tragedy. For Black males born into female-headed, single-parent households, the issue complicates further. Teachers working in inner-city classrooms should respond with greater sensitivity to this truly national tragedy. A Black male teacher might serve as sole worthy male factor (or father figure) in the child’s life. And for many lowincome kids, the classroom often represents rare steady, stable surrounding. The least asked of conscionable teachers is to make it as loving, caring, healing, and alleviating as possible. Great teachers count because for 6 hours or more daily, a child trapped in deleterious domestic conditions can experience and envision a different side to life— removed from the pain and punishment of abuse and abandonment. Great teachers— not just “good” ones: craven before neoliberal forces—help restore the humanity of a child whose world is frequently turned upside down. Great teachers pose striking threats to the plan for privatization, making life hard for corporations to invade the classroom unopposed. Great teachers stay focused all times, “linking empowerment— the ability to think and act critically—to the concept of social transformation.”15 NOTES 1

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Dewey, J. (1993 ed.). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process (p. 263). Boston: D.C. Heath & Co. Reprinted in Paschal, A. (Ed.), (1971). W. E. B. Du Bois: A reader (p. 320). New York: Collier Books, Macmillan. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning (p. 64). Granby, CO: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Mali, T. (2003). Conviction. New York: Words Worth Ink and Wordsmith Press. Online: http://www. taylormali.com/index.cfm?webid=13 State-by-state salary figures can be found here: http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state

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Allegretto, S. A., Corcoran, S. P., & Mishel, L. (2008). The teaching penalty: Teacher pay losing ground (p. 30). Washington: Economic Policy Institute. Online: http://epi.3cdn.net/05447667bb274f359e_ zam6br3st.pdf Hale, J. (2001). Learning while black: Creating educational excellence for African American children (p. 49). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed., p. 72). New York: Continuum. Teacher cuts off girl’s braid in front of class. WISN 12 (2009, December 11). Online: http://www.wisn. com/news/21944773/detail.html Ibid., Learning while black, p. 71. Gatto, J. T. (2002). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (10th anniversary ed., p. 7). Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (2007). The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrial-academic complex (p. 182). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Block, D. (2008, December 5). New York teacher binds black students during history lesson on slavery. New York Daily News. Online: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/12/05/2008-1205_new_york_teacher_binds_black_students_du.html Lester, T. A. (2009, July 4). Number of black male teachers belies their influence. The Washington Post. Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/03/AR2009070302498.html Giroux, H. A. (2005, ed.). Society and the struggle for public life: Democracy’s promise and education’s challenge (p. 90). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

CHAPTER 2

ARE SCHOOLS THE ASSASSINS OF EDUCATION?

Subordinated by a hierarchical system that indoctrinates students early on, letting them know that their success depends on their capacity to obey, most students fear questioning anything about the way their classrooms are structured. —bell hooks, Teaching Community1 [T]he whole system equates urban children … with what is naturally criminal and in need of reform. ... Encouraging students to be critical thinkers, to question accepted beliefs and norms, remains key to a teacher’s role at any grade level. … The public educational system … should be overhauled! Trashed. Dumped. Parents, teachers, and students need to say it’s over. Enough! —Lenore J. Daniels, “Arne Duncan Doesn’t Care About Black and Brown Children! Why Should He?”2 When civil rights leader Malcolm X declared five decades ago “Education is our passport to the future,” he was unlikely investing infallible trust in the school system to carry the cross. The last two decades alone have printed out hundreds of texts chronicling the deleterious effects schools seem to be having on students—thriving in households nationwide by fanning the sweltering frustration, of parents, with the quality and content of school-based education. Concerned parents understand that if education should “draw out” degrees of greatness in students, the school system might be way of mark with an alarming fixation on provincial curricula and high test scores as metric scales to weigh intellectual worth. The swelling homeschooling movement confirms this much.3 Parents have begun searching, like never before, alternative pedagogical avenues through which the guarantees of self-discovery and metacognition can fulfill in the minds of children. They seem convinced “failure to achieve harmony of mind, body, and spirit has furthered anti-intellectualism in our culture and made of our schools mere factories.”4 Few parents thus desire seeing their seeds of life raised as products and commodities, trampled along the way for exhibiting flaws common to most kids. No more is it secret that many public schools these days are modeled, in style and standard, after prisons. In some states, with more money spent on “correction facilities” than education facilities, disruptive students fall victim fast to zerotolerance policies, leading off to detention halls eerily identical to the penitentiaries many ultimately end up in. And most public schools located in low-income districts, dilapidated and underfunded, invest more energy reducing violence and preventing gang activity than sculpturing and molding future pioneers. Poor students are 9

CHAPTER 2

disciplined into submission with roguish rules and regulations, all to ensure academic “excellence” on tests narrower than a bell’s curve.5 “Zero tolerance is not simply the effect of possibly ignorant adults who misunderstand data on youth violence; it is not simply the resulting social policy of ill-spirited adults who carelessly toe the line of pejorative media representations of youth; it is not simply another devastating practice of traditional top-down, corporate models of school governance. … [It is] all of these things, together.” The words of Christopher Robbins, whose 2008 book, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, writes out the epitaph of a society longrelieved of its soul, consigned now to chop down children whose blooming is yet to begin.6 Schools now feature surveillance systems plastered at every nook and cranny; and all day long, kids are monitored closely by police officers and other security personnel. And even when the closing bell rings, students still fall within the omnipresent reach of curriculum, dragging their feet home, joyless and lifeless, with book bags filled, backs hunched. Why wouldn’t they hate school, when deprived of any opportunity better spent “learn[ing] … by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood”?7 The traditional form of homework, which countless studies have discredited as unproductive, not only deprives children of free time after school, but also “disrupts families, overburdens children, and limits learning.” Still, many solemnly swear any shift in practice promises nothing short of Armageddon. And for good reason: “When education leaders continue to cling to the traditional bromide of blaming student’s lack of success on laziness, even in the face of other reasonable explanations, we must begin to suspect that the emphasis on homework serves the needs of powerful groups within our society.”8 The public school system is fractured nearly beyond repair, and raging calls for a complete overhaul might have it right. Charters, vouchers, and all other commercial alternatives cannot be counted on to do the trick. With strict dress codes and military drills, many of these academies speak more of rigidity and regiment than freedom and fulfillment. bell hooks took a courageous stand in 2003: “When educational settings become places that have as their central goal the teaching of bourgeois manner, vernacular speech and languages other than standard English are not valued.”9 With self-expression penalized (even criminalized), excellence has more to do with wearing school uniforms neatly, and accurately enunciating words, than helping young minds find themselves. Many charter schools also make great use as political footballs, punted back and forth by witless politicians who with error-riddled data claim public schools fail to meet the mark not for inadequate funding or deficient resources but undisciplined students and unwilling parents. Charter schools, numbering about 5,000 nationwide, and serving over 1.5 million kids, have bubbled within the last decade, most at the behest of millionaire executives whose gazes have been increasingly sharpening toward this new financial frontier. Of certain, there are at least two kinds of charter schools: the regular and the boutique, the latter of the Harlem Children’s Zone, KIPP, and Aspire sort (fronted by for-profit 10

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management corporations funded by billionaire hedge-fund managers and other Wall Street tycoons); and the latter has featured, in recent times, a strong push for longer school days, for immersion of students at early ages into the capitalist culture, for school hours from 7:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., including Saturdays (twice monthly), for cell phones in the hands of teachers, who must expect calls late as 11:00 in the nighttime. Strong push has also been levied for early career education, to inject into the mental DNA of kindergarteners a love of money that promptly comes to life following college graduation. Attention is paid closely to the children and how they learn, to their interests, to their dislikes; but the teachers installed to instruct them from rigid manuals often earn less than traditional district peers, while CEOs rake ever higher returns on their investments.10 These schools, whose founders know more about portfolio than pedagogy, and more about CDS than curriculum, are often raised to existence with anti-public philosophies—anti- the very nature and functions of public schools. So, Exclusion and Selection is to be expected, the Refused banished and forced to dust off their jackets and return to their leper colonies. With practices where many are called but only a few chosen, there are no tired, poor, or huddled masses—the wretched and homeless are presumed the responsibility of public schools. Charters are big business today, explaining the sudden interest of the rich and powerful. In mid-December 2000, at the last lap of the Clinton Administration, while charter drones were beginning to find their voice, and the country had lived a full year past predictions of a millennium massacre, Congress passed a New Markets Tax Credit law, under the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000, to stimulate economic and entrepreneurial activities in dilapidated communities. “Wealthy investors and major banks have since been making windfall profits by employing a littleknown federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction,” Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News reported in May 2010. “The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.”11 Looming threats of free-market recklessness in the education system aside, advocates insist The Good outlasts The Bad: that, though money matters can color badly the charter phenomenon, widespread results—with far better performances from students previously falling fast through the cracks of the public school cesspool— should allay critics. Unsurprisingly, a June 2009 Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) study, documenting lower performance of Black and Latino students in charter schools (compared to public school peers), hasn’t inspired doubt in the minds and hearts or cheque books of the most virulent sponsors. The study, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, which swept over 70% of the nation’s charter school students, found in the “robust national demand for more charter schools” something worrying, with only “17 percent of charter schools [reporting] academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.”12 11

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With help from Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim, however, the Charter School Movement could ride a chariot of cheers on to public acclaim in October 2010. Waiting for “Superman”, his documentary, captivated national interest, insisting public schools fail students deliberately (charters: the only promising remedy), cheering on merit pay for “good” teachers (the “bad” needing immediate removal, in droves), and blaming teachers’ unions as the deadliest threats to the futures of a generation of students currently laboring in “drop-out factories.” His documentary caught the glowing eyes of widely watched TV show hosts as Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper. All major cable news networks also treated the documentary to fawning reviews, as did popular publications like Time and New York Magazine. And no less than President Barack Obama was arrested in emotion, following a special White House screening, describing it as “heartbreaking” and “powerful.” The Charter School Movement coalesces strongly with the Merit Pay Movement, the latter urging more schools to pay low-income students for higher performance on standardized tests, as though, like carrots to a donkey, the students need financial incentives dangled before them just to do well in class. Money better spent rebuilding defunct public schools, better spent furnishing rundown libraries, rushes down the hands of harebrained bureaucrats into drain holes, all the while bright futures dim out. Kin to this scheme is rewarding teachers for classroom test performance, encouraging a by-any-means approach to pedagogy where teachers feel compelled, if not duty-bound, to do all it takes to produce high grades. Merit pay has failed woefully wherever applied. Revelations of teachers and principals forging student records—in hopes of higher bonuses—should dash the dreams of those who find it refreshing.13 From Britain, 1710, where teachers had students memorize passages before English exams, to Texas, 2010, where a principal and assistant principal helped students erase wrong answers and fill the right ones in—the line runs unbroken.14 Multiple studies, published 2010, should also finalize this debate.15 It seems only logical that public school teachers, surviving on miserable paychecks, would stoop to whatever moral lows to keep the lights on. Proponents of merit pay yet maintain it supports “good” teachers; goodness, in this sense, turning out incalculable, indefinite, and inconsistent, for a “bad” teacher might thrive in a room filled with high-income students, while a skilled and sensitive teacher would likely face steeper hurdles helping Ritalin-riddled kids see their inner purpose and flourish. But the concerns of teachers rarely pinch top priority these days; they are left behind—like the children. And though the Obama Administration, unlike its predecessor, doesn’t find confusing the timeless truth that no vocation beats that of the teacher in importance, nothing yet honors this conviction legislatively. High school teachers with monthly incomes of $2,500 can hardly perform with the exuberance expected of them when bills stack high, unpaid; and stomachs roar, unfilled. All successful artists, thinkers, critics, activists, essayists, intellectuals, and educators can point back to what crucial impact great teachers had on their development. For low-income students especially, skilled and sensitive teachers often separate success from failure, snatching their bodies from the clenched jaws of nihilism. 12

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This, sadly, falls far from the convictions held by some—among whom, tragically, might be President Obama, as when speaking at a Los Angeles town hall meeting in March 2009, he remarked: [Y]ou can’t just be talking more money, more money, without also talking about, How are we going to reform and make the system better? … [E]ven as overcrowded as schools may be, as poor the computer equipment may be, if you took a bunch of kids right now from China or India and you put them in these classrooms, from their perspective these would be unbelievable schools. I mean, they don’t have better facilities, but they’re out-performing us in Math and Science. Why is that?16 That money alone can’t solve all problems rings true enough, but for schools so dilapidated that students share textbooks, that students cram into rooms with broken heating systems at wintertime, that teachers have to photocopy book pages for student use, money certainly would make strong difference. That an ostensibly liberal president acknowledges overcrowding and underfunding as real problems, but fails to connect the dots between inadequate resources and underperforming students should give pause to those convinced, as Sir Ken Robinson lamented at the 2006 TED conference, “all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.” President Obama’s words not only echo his predecessor’s—and the No Child Left Behind battalion—but also discredit the tireless work of those struggling to redeem the hopes and humanities of disenfranchised kids—those gradually withdrawing from a society seemingly more invested and interested in prisons than schools. Ken Robinson outlined, with depth and eloquence, why narrow and myopic conceptions of intelligence—scientific and mathematic, for example—corrupt the minds of both adult and child: We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms. We think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain … intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. ... And the third thing about intelligence is— it’s distinct.17 That intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct must have eluded the ears of President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan—a man of modest academic achievements: there but for a bachelor’s in Sociology—who, while “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools, ran a reputation of militarizing and privatizing the schools, shutting many down abruptly, mass-firing teachers (often entire school staff, including janitors and kitchen staff ), and erecting, in their stead, charter, voucher, and other private models, via a program, Renaissance 2010, launched in 2004 to close 60 “low-performing” neighborhood schools and open 100 state-of-the-art replacements.18 Duncan, through all, found ample time to square against teacher 13

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unions, parents, activists, and community leaders, who saw their neighborhoods dilapidating in real time.19 Duncan, though unproductive, had working for him “a style that made it seem like he was listening,” even while deaf to the protests of mothers whose kids were being bused to schools over an hour from home; in addition, a firm relationship with his new boss, with whom he regularly played pick-up basketball for over a decade.20 Besides catchy slangs like “standards” and “up-to-speed” and “high bar,” Duncan boasts a scanty vocabulary to address the pressing problems of today. Yet, in January 2009, Duncan was approved unanimously in the Senate—and with haste. Senators laced him with precious praise. “I think you’re the best,” one gushed; another: “This is a guy who gets it.”21 A year later, Duncan hailed Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,”22 as the floods washed away many regulations that would otherwise have prevented the silent swapping of neighborhood public schools with charters, which sped up while great panic gripped the city.23 In the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress February 2009, Duncan received $10 billion to raise standards and rectify dilapidated schools across the country. Of his bounty, $5 billion had no strings attached, meaning, as a PBS report put it, “[h]e can spend it to push for the changes he wants. That’s real power.”24 Duncan not only had the power to do as he pleased; he also had the press. Mainstream channels (including PBS) readily set a table before him, even while many Chicago students still reel from the pinch of his seven-year stint; more so those, as reported March 2010 by the Chicago Tribune, who didn’t enjoy privileged school placement— which Duncan mercifully bestowed upon students lobbied for by the rich and powerful of Chicago.25 Tasking as it may seem, the struggle ahead must involve, in very significant ways, low-income parents, for though their cause hardly generates much traction in society, it would take the determination and fortitude of parents fed up with the brutally unfair school system to surrender substantive transformation. For years, critics (liberal and conservative) haven’t budged in insisting kids from “at-risk” backgrounds don’t do well because, lack of will aside, parents refuse to invest as much interest in their success as do suburban parents. Unaccounted for are the burdens low-income parents—especially single mothers—shoulder in trying to make ends meet, against insurmountable odds. (The social resources required—time, money, emotional energy, etc.—to attend PTA meetings or track grades or supervise homework assignments don’t flow freely as water from damaged dams.) But their experiences through life evoke crucial reminders why kids must be educated for more than financial freedom—for awareness of our unequal and unjust world, and just what justice requires for fulfillment. Collective cooperation between family and school can help facilitate a Pedagogy of Redemption, and restore the goals and visions of millions of ingenious, however disenfranchised, children. With respect for students and teachers and parents placed as priority, the knee-jerk, malignant medication of misunderstood minds on Ritalin would cease at once, and teachers would teach with conviction that no child ever 14

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classifies as unteachable or uneducable or unreachable, and poor parents wouldn’t feel forced to acquire unaffordable homes in friendlier districts, just to send kids to better financed public schools; and once devalued and demeaned students would, to paraphrase historian V.P. Franklin, regain their rightful position as leaders and pioneers of the future, aware that, as First Lady Michelle Obama advises, “all that matters is where you are and where you want to be.”26 NOTES 1 2

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hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope (p. 86). New York: Routledge. Daniels, L. J. (2009, March 19). First it was a cell behind prison walls—Now it’s a seat behind the walls of a military academy: Arne Duncan doesn’t care about black and brown children! Why should he? The Black Commentator (316). Online: http://www.blackcommentator.com/316/316_ror_arne_ duncan.html In December 2008, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics released a report, 1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007, revealing a 74 percent relative increase in homeschooling since 1999 and 36% increase since 2003. Online: http://www. nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf Ibid., Teaching community, p. 181. Alonso, G., Anderson, N., Su, C., & Theoharis, J. (2009). Our schools suck: Students talk back to a segregated nation on the failures of urban education (p. 106). New York: NYU Press. Robbins, C. G. (2009). Expelling hope: The assault on youth and the militarization of schooling. New York: State University of New York Press. Gatto, J. T. (2002). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (10th anniversary ed., p. 10). Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Kralovec, E., & Buell, J. (2000). The end of homework: How homework disrupts families, overburdens children, and limits learning (p. 38). Boston: Beacon Press. Ibid., Teaching community, p. 45. Off, G. (2010, September 27). Some teachers’ salaries not meeting state standard. Tulsa World. Online: http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20100927_11_A1_Becaus79 038& archive=yes Gonzalez, J. (2010, May 7). Albany charter cash cow: Big banks making a bundle on new construction as schools bear the cost. New York Daily News. Online: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/ education/2010/05/07/2010-05-07_albany_charter_cash_cow_big_banks_making_a_bundle_on_new_ construction_as_schools.html Multiple choice: Charter school performance in 16 states. Center for Research on Education Outcomes. (2009, June). Online: http://www.credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf Gabriel, T. (2010, June 10). Under pressure, teachers tamper with tests. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/education/11cheat.html Kershaw, S. (2000, April 10). Long history of turmoil entwines incentive pay plans for teachers. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/10/nyregion/long-history-of-turmoilentwines-incentive-pay-plans-for-teachers.html (1) See, Goodman, S., & Turner, L. (2010, May). Teacher incentive pay and educational outcomes: Evidence from the NYC bonus program. Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Online: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/MeritPayPapers/goodman_turner_10-07.pdf (2) Also see, Glazerman, S., & Seifullah, A. (2010, May 17). An evaluation of the teacher advancement program in Chicago: Year two impact report. Mathematica Policy Research. Online: http:// www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/tap_yr2_rpt.pdf (3) Lastly see, Springer, M. G., Ballou, D., Hamilton, L., Le, V.-N., Lockwood, J. R., McCaffrey, D. F., et al. (2010, September 21). Teacher pay for performance experimental evidence from the project on incentives in teaching. Project on Incentives in Teaching. Nashville, TN: National Center on Performance Incentives 15

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at Vanderbilt University. Online: http://www.performanceincentives.org/data/files/pages/POINT REPORT_9.21.10.pdf President Barack Obama speaking at Miguel Contreras Learning Center, Los Angeles, California. (2009, March 19). Transcript online: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/obamatext-la.html Robinson, S. K. (2006, February). Do schools kill creativity? Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference. Online: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html Giroux, H. A., & Saltman, K. (2008, December, 17). Obama’s betrayal of public education? Arne Duncan and the corporate model of schooling. Truthout. Online: http://www.truthout.org/121708R Libby, K. (2008, December 29). No cheers for new education secretary: Arne Duncan’s dark years in Chicago. CounterPunch. Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/libby12292008.html Sharkey, J. (2008, December 18). No school left unsold: Arne Duncan’s privatization Agenda. CounterPunch. Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/sharkey12182008.html Isenstadt, A. (2009, January 13). Lamar to Duncan: ‘You’re the best’. Politico. Online: http://www. politico.com/news/stories/0109/17388.html Anderson, N. (2010, January 30). Education Secretary Duncan calls Hurricane Katrina good for New Orleans schools. The Washington Post. Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2010/01/29/AR2010012903259.html Dingerson, L. (2007, Summer). Narrow and unlovely. Rethinking Schools, 21(4). NewsHour. (2009, March 12). Duncan poised to assert new power as education chief. PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june09/duncan_03-12.html Ahmed, A. (2010, March 23). How VIPs lobbied schools. Chicago Tribune. Online: http://www. chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-cps-admissions-0323--20100322,0,5656688.story Swarns, R. L. (2009, March 19). Michelle Obama advises anacostia students. The Caucus: The Politics and Government Blog of The Times. Online: http://www.thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/ michelle-obama-advises-anacostia-students/

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FAILING GRADE Unlearning the Privatization, Medicalization, and Militarization of Schooling

All that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and that is not morality. —James Baldwin, Just Above My Head 1 The absurdity of defining education as an economic good becomes clear if we ask ourselves what is to be gained by perceiving education as a way to enhance even further the runaway consumption that threatens the earth, the air, and the water of our planet? —John Gatto, Dumbing Us Down2 50 years ago, very few toyed with the idea of a time when public schools more reflected market values than moral virtues. And to predict an era of schools modeled, structured, and designed after prisons could ratchet up calls for psychiatric evaluation. But that seemingly dream-world of leftist-paranoia is the reality staring us down today. Not only do schools increasingly take flesh in forms of corporations—with students treated as consumers—more now adopt regimental tactics straight from prison rulebooks. So much does this thinking abound in the school system that a child born today might never know what it means to attend school daily without being strip-searched en route to classes whose teachers register more about Pepsi than Paulo Freire, and more about Wal-Mart than W.E.B. Du Bois. “As a for-profit venture, public education represents a market worth over $600 billion,” Henry Giroux observed over a decade ago, as schools facing budget cuts and under-funding progressively fell at risk to the strings-attached generosity of mega-corporations: [T]hey often find themselves engaging in partnerships with businesses such as Campbell Soup, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nike, all of whom are willing to provide free curriculum packages that shamelessly instruct students to recognize brand names or learn the appropriate attitudes for future work in low-skilled, low-paying jobs rather than learning how to define the meaning of work and struggle over what it means to subordinate matters of work to the imperatives of a strong democracy. Worthy example was a Florida elementary school’s quid pro quo with McDonald’s for financial support, and in return implementing a curriculum package designed by 17

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the fast food giant. The students “learned how to design a McDonald’s restaurant, how a McDonald’s works, and how to apply and interview for a job at McDonald’s.” Asked if the experience was worthwhile, a 10-year-old replied: “If you want to work in a McDonald’s when you grow up, you already know what to do. ... Also, McDonald’s is better than Burger King.”3 A decade later, not only is McDonald’s designing curriculum for schools, but now also passing out Happy Meal coupons with report cards. In 2007, Seminole County, Florida, some elementary school students brought home free coupons with their report cards, as part of a Made the Grade program. The school board was short on funds—but McDonald’s wasn’t; never is. So McDonald’s gleefully picked up the $1,700 tab to cover envelopes and printing fees, simultaneously marketing directly to school kids without the consent of parents, in violation of its Council of Better Business Bureaus pledge. “I was appalled and shocked, because I don’t want her eating that type of food,” vented a concerned mother whose nine-year-old daughter brought home a report card package with fast food menu items printed in front.4 The message to kids was clear: academic success should tie in with consumption, a worthy reward. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, under the supervision of Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr., unveiled a plan June 2007 to motivate low-income kids to perform better on standardized tests: cold-hard cash. Reported by The New York Times, “fourth-grade students will receive up to $25 for a perfect score on each of 10 standardized tests throughout the year. Seventh-grade students will be able to earn twice as much—$50 per test, for a total of up to $500. Fourth graders will receive $5 just for taking the test, and seventh graders will get $10.”5 Morally meritless, Bloomberg and his acolyte sold it as sound step toward financial liberation for Black and Brown low-income kids—to not only motivate them, but also deposit critical cash into their pockets. While the kids targeted did truly have poverty stamped across their foreheads, and likely to remain branded for good while, resources better spent by social organizations aimed at assuaging gruesome burdens bearing down upon poor families, and better spent holding up safety nets to rescue indigent families, goes to coaxing students—with private money—to answer accurately on flawed tests. The purpose is clear, rendering farcical any notion of education as an impulse which directs citizens to envision, imagine, and work toward, a better society. Also, kids must know that the playing field is finally leveled; that, now, everyone has a shot to do well; that the poor in life have every opportunity otherwise, but choose to be—poor and stupid. In life, then, those who make it rich are the smartest and hardest workers, those who don’t are the dumbest and laziest, replenishing the centuries-old definition of students binaristically—good and bad; right and wrong; obedient and obstinate; A and F. And what of the insurmountable toll sure to take hold on families where the child becomes sole source of earned income. Neither the politician nor professor can explain the psychological dividends as parents start depending on the paychecks of their young kids for survival. And no one would have any lips left when the private corporations footing the bill start demanding more return on their investments. 18

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Early 2010, as reported by The Detroit Free Press, four Detroit public high schools partnered with Wal-Mart to commission a training and entry-level program for students, replete with afterschool employment opportunities. Students would walk off with 11 weeks of job-readiness training (during school hours) and 10 high school credits. A principal who signed on cheered the benefits: it would grant “students an opportunity to earn money and to be exposed to those from different cultures— since all of the stores are in the suburbs.” In the past, Wal-Mart had donated gifts to city students and furnished Detroit Public Schools with class supplies.6 In the coming years surely the big companies with even bigger interests in the education market would start throwing heftier weight around and molding school policies to boost their benefit, building on great success from the last two decades. With schools strapped for cash, and budget cuts claiming what’s left of taxpayer funding, public schools have found benevolent sponsors in food and toy companies, ever effervescent in lending a hand to struggling institutions housing millions of kids. In 2001 when a Brooklawn, New Jersey, high school failed to pull resources for a new gymnasium, heavyweight supermarket chain ShopRite flew to rescue, shedding $100,000 ($5,000 annually for 20 years)—with a catch: to be named after ShopRite. School superintendent John Kellmayer lamented this “privatization of public responsibility,” adding: “We’ll be the first school district to be branded with a corporate logo. You hope children can become sophisticated enough to deal with it.”7 At other schools, students have been learning the greatness of fossil fuel and other wonders of the oil industry—courtesy material supplied by Exxon Mobil and the American Coal Foundation.8 In the case of six million California public school kids (K-12: 1,000 districts), starting Fall semester 2010 their environmental curriculum would bear the contributions of British Petroleum, which only a few months earlier, on April 20, 2010, had unleashed the greatest oil spill in the country’s history— killing 11 men and thousands of wildlife, endangering tens of thousands more (humans and marine mammals), tarnishing businesses and lifestyles, and forever scarring the Gulf of Mexico.9 Those lucky to attend schools signed to exclusive contracts with soda and snack companies enjoy the ubiquitous branding of walls, buses, hallways, textbooks, classrooms, restrooms, and cafeterias with posters, pictures, and vending machines of the very products health classes warn to flee from. And when responsible legislators propose bills to axe the mighty arm of soda and snack companies, those to whom parents entrust their kids waste no time choosing sides. “It’s not surprising that the bills have been blocked by lobbyists from the soft drink and sugar industries,” Susan Linn writes in Consuming Kids. “What’s sad, however, is that they have been joined by the National School Boards Association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, who say that the loss of funds to schools would do more harm than the costs to children’s health.”10 From within this network of privatization blares calls for expanded schooling: that the hours and days are too short, and the “challenges” too dire. Innocent as it may appear, the Intensification Movement has turned on early signals that suggest behind the faint fog of reform stand corporate interests, basket in hand, ready to reap returns. As John Gatto disclosed nearly two decades ago, 19

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Unlike true communities, pseudo communities and other comprehensive networks like schools expand indefinitely, just as long as they can get away with it. “More” may not be “better,” but “more” is always more profitable for the people who make a living out of networking. That is what is happening today behind the cry to expand schooling even further: a great many people are going to make a great deal of money if growth can be continued.11 The Obama Administration certainly seems keen on the idea. March 2009, speaking to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the president announced: “[T]he challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.” His Education Secretary was out bemoaning how “[y]oung people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here.” Expanding school hours would help “level the playing field,” he said, and measures must be actualized soon, in spite of strident opposition from students like 5th grader Nakany Camara who promised to “walk straight out the door” if local school boards end up coerced. An Associated Press article briefly threatened the truth of the president and secretary’s testaments: Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests—Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).12 Perhaps Camara knew that with no interest in being prepared for a demanding future, or education for social change, the expansion policies are to deploy her and her peers as political props to “compete” and “contest” with rival nations, their humanities of no consequence. Coordinating too loud a protest, or daring let their dignity speak, could dispatch clear warning, through the butt of billy clubs, that children—though still vulnerable to life-without-parole sentencing—should wield no autonomy over their lives. Another potent measure to field home this message has been psychotropic medication, of which the personality-repressing Ritalin is king, today claiming the minds of four million kids nationwide. 25 years ago, Janice Hale, skeptical of the alleged benefits of Ritalin, observed: In California in 1976, 25 percent of the children were classified as hyperactive. This group includes “approximately 2 million children who are taking tranquilizers, amphetamines, and Ritalin—the latter being a behavior-modifying drug.” The effects of these drugs taken on a daily basis are not known. The only known fact is that the children are more quiet.13 Multiple studies and reports later, abounding evidence confirms drugs like Ritalin often provoke anxiety, depression, melancholy, stunted growth ( height and weight), and permanent twitches. Psychologists and physicians also warn of possible suicidal and homicidal tensions from untimely withdrawal. Patients—students once vibrant 20

FAILING GRADE

and vivacious—who, fed up and fagged out, try to quit cold turkey, usually end up paying with their lives, often those of others, too. The War on Kids, a documentary released late 2009, tells stories of several kids unleashing rampages, killing sprees, and various other deadly deeds following attempts to get off medication. To thank is a society which, as psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin noted, deposits “toxins into their brains, at extraordinarily high concentrations, in the name of psychiatric treatment: so that, our children’s brains literally grow up adapting to a bath of toxicity.” Behavior-modifying medication, when forced on children, often inspire side effects, requiring more medication, leading to addiction later on, all the while drug manufacturers struggle to meet skyrocketing demands. From 1993 to 2002, antipsychotic drugs prescribed to kids shot up six-fold in sales.14 Between 1991 and 1999, U.S. sales of Ritalin and its variants, Concerta and Metadate CD, surged over 500%. Yet, as a 2005 Los Angeles Times report revealed, the road map from prescription drugs to recreational drugs leads endless.15 “Their drugs of choice are those often preferred by adults,” the Times reported. “After amphetamines such as Ritalin, they’re turning to painkillers such as Vicodin and Percocet, then sedatives and tranquilizers.” Black markets for prescription and over-the-counter drugs vary at schools nationwide, open to students taught by adults the preeminence of bio-chemical solution over psychotherapy and counseling: “Some students see the pills as a way to enhance sports performance. They say football players at some schools take opiates such as Vicodin before games to blunt the pain.”16 This Ritalin Generation was raised to extol the sovereignty of instant magic over elaborate, comprehensive solutions. And with prescription drugs less expensive— though no less harmful—than the traditional street stuff most young people can expect stiff fines or jail terms for possessing, the choice isn’t so hard to make: “Pain pills such as Vicodin sell for around $5, depending on the dose, while stronger medications such as OxyContin can cost several times that. Ritalin, one of the most widely available drugs, sells for $1 to $2 a pill, students say, but can be more expensive before midterms and finals, when students use them to cram.”17 A 2005 study by University of Texas researchers found methylphenidate—Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate CD—increased risks of cancer and other health defects in all dozen kids tested. Blood was drawn from kids diagnosed with Attention Deficit/ Hyperactive Disorder, right before taking Ritalin, and again drawn three months after. All children showed threefold increase in chromosome abnormalities.18 Yet, Ritalin still ranks as Holy Grail in the hearts of many psychologists, parents, and politicians. That the same kids plagued with disorders can be set straight with proper changes in diets and exercise hardly generates as much interest as the brainless baptism in seas of pills. A December 2009 New York Times report on the disproportionate administering of antipsychotic drugs to poor kids shared some psychiatrists’ fears that many accept it the “most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children.”19 In plain speech: poor kids don’t count. And a society short on time and temperance cannot identify the unique qualities 21

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of each child. Why waste time trying to find out why Johnny or Jaquan won’t read; why Mary or Maria is irritable in class, when it’s easier and cheaper to recommend Ritalin—and any other paraphernalia strong enough to subdue children and turn once bright minds into dull receptacles to be filled endlessly, with no concern for their health and happiness? In a 2001 exchange between Akeisha McKnight, a student at Fremont High, and then-Superintendent Roy Romer, this notion, that low-income kids don’t command prominent concern, rose up in full flair. McKnight complained of overcrowding and year-round schooling at the dilapidated Los Angeles high school. Romer rebuffed swiftly: “It is the policy of this district that once a school becomes so over-crowded that more than 250 students are bused out to other schools, it must be put on the yearround calendar. That is the situation at Fremont. ... [A]t this point, we don’t expect there to be a change … in the foreseeable future.”20 Mid-December 2009, the new district superintendent announced Freemont would be overhauled and recreated into a “turnaround” school, a plan applauded by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who championed the turnaround cause in Chicago. The plan collided with protest and civil disobedience from students who wondered why their teachers had to be punished—all fired—for the faults of administrators and lawmakers. Beyond the condescension and corrosive arrogance of Romer’s reply, how fortuitous that metaphors straight out of prison rulebooks should fit so neatly as school policies: students are “bused out” when “over-crowded.” But this was a school so low on resources that not only were students unpermitted to take textbooks home, most had to share with two or more classmates; a school so rundown that “roaches, ants, and rats make periodic appearances in class”;21 a school which in 2004–2005 could only boast of “10.2 percent of graduates … eligible for a California State University or University of California admission.”22 Yet, we don’t expect there to be a change in the foreseeable future. Rosa Bracero learned her lesson a decade later. The 17-year-old high school senior in Brooklyn, New York, who completed all necessary credits in 3 ½ years, and earned admission to Lincoln Technical Institute (acing the exam with 490 out of 500), was told early February 2010 she couldn’t graduate. Rosa was homeless— and had been a decade before, shifting between shelters and passing through four elementary schools, until saved by a gifted-and-talented program. Her mother, though working part-time, had recently lost an administrative assistant job and, consequently, fallen behind on three months’ rent. Rosa couldn’t graduate because she missed the final exam—the same day her family was kicked out. A week later, she took the exam. Then New York State Education Department bureaucrats, wielding a regulation to minimize cheating, invalidated her results. “I’m homeless so I have to be set back in my goals for my life?” Rosa asked her tormentors. “Isn’t it enough that I’m homeless?”23 Such hatred and contempt do officials feel for kids that recess, the sole period upon which young students can move about freely and exchange in lively conversations with peers, is today a privilege at many schools. In rush to stop bleeding costs and focus squarely on academic achievement, all avenues through which 22

FAILING GRADE

young children once expressed themselves censor-free cease to exist. No. Child. Left. Behind. With childhood obesity rates ascending annually, with more students than ever calloused toward school, the answer isn’t to address directly their needs, or to craft creative models that better engage their interests, rather to make life more miserable. The American Association for the Child’s Right to Play reports over 40% of elementary schools, by 2006, had either drastically shortened recess time or eliminated entirely. Three years later, Stuart Brown, founder of Institute for Play, warned in a PBS NewsHour report that “serious play deprivation in human beings has serious consequences. And those consequences are the inability to have as much resilience and social competency and other elements, such as good memory and curiosity.”24 “There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time,” John Gatto grieved almost 20 years back. “Class change lasts exactly three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. … A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.”25 Today, most public schools employ surveillance services to monitor students’ every move. Some schools even require students pass through metal detectors and security checkpoints, and empty their book bags and take off their shoes and surrender their belts, before advancing to learn the wonders of Pythagoras’ theorem and the importance of the Gettysburg Address. Lest students feel the need to voice grievances, a militarized machine stands armed and ready to neutralize any undesired “consequences.” At most public schools today, lockdowns are common, and impromptu locker searches/raids run frequent. At this rate, with maximum security entrance doors, in no time parents might be asked to tender “visitation” requests before being permitted to see their children or speak to their children’s teachers. On November 5, 2003, police officers, clad in SWAT team attire, stormed Stratford High School, South Carolina, armed with K9s, and advanced through the hallways with guns drawn, aimed at students who, by this time, trembling for dear life, were all knelt or laid down with arms wrapped around their heads. This comforting charade kept on until the protect-and-serve force, whose trusted sniffing agents turned up 12 false-positives, decided the mission was in vain—with no drugs or weapons found. School officials swear such excessive security measures hold only the good of students at heart, and are well-meant, but no evidence of support stands. All the while reports of schools spying on students remain prevalent. One broke February 2010, of a Philadelphia district monitoring kids at home through web cameras installed onto school-issued laptops, switched on and off at will. Assistant Vice-Principal Lindy Matsko, of Harriton High School, ordered a 15-year-old student into her office and let him know she had evidence he was dealing drugs. “I’ve been watching what was on the web cam and saw what was in your hands,” she spilled. “I’ve been reading what you’ve been typing, and I’m afraid you are involved in drugs and trying to sell pills.” The illegal substances: Mike and Ike candies.26 Students, parents, teachers, educators, intellectuals, and all concerned, must have courage to step up and act before Education, as known by Henry David Thoreau 23

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and James Baldwin, takes a final bow at this late hour. Recent trends dictate only greater erosion in the years ahead. By no means would corporations, pharmaceutical firms, and the State halt their invasion of public schooling any time soon. All evidence suggests sharp increase in coming years. And if children should grow up with clear distinction between schools and prisons, with clear understanding why classrooms and corporations are separate and by no means equal entities, this poisoning of their humanity through euphemisms like “business partnerships” and “behavior control” and “school security” must have a “stake driven through its heart and be nailed into its coffin.”27 NOTES 1 2

3

4

5

6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20 21

22

24

Baldwin, J. (1979). Just above my head (p. 391). New York: Dial Press. Gatto, J. T. (2002). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (10th anniversary ed., p. 60). Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (1998). The business of public education. Zmag. Online: http://www.henryagiroux. com/online_articles/business_education.htm Good Morning America. (2007, December 8). School report cards offer happy meals. ABCNews. Online: http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3973139&page=1 Medina, J. (2007, June 19). Schools plan to pay cash for marks. The New York Times. Online: http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19schools.html?_r=1 Kane, M. (2010, February 12). Detroit schools offer class in how to work at Walmart. The Raw Story. Online: http://rawstory.com/2010/02/detroit-schools-offer-class-work-walmart/ Linn, S. (2004). Consuming kids: The hostile takeover of childhood (p. 78). New York: New Press. Ibid., Consuming kids, p. 81. Why is oil giant BP helping develop California Schools’ environmental curriculum? Democracy Now! (2010, September 10). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/10/why_is_oil_giant_bp_helping Ibid., Consuming kids, pp. 87–88. Ibid., Dumbing us down, p. 10. Quaid, L. (2009, September 28). Obama: More school, less vacation. The Associated Press. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/28/obama-more-school-less-va_n_301694.html Hale, J. (1988 ed.). Black children: Their roots, culture, and learning styles (p. 76). Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Hitti, M. (2006, June 6). Kids’ use of antipsychotic drugs rises: Researchers report increase in prescriptions for ‘Second-Generation’ Drugs. WebMD. Online: http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/ 20060606/kids-antipsychotic-drug-use-rises Costello, D. (2005, March 10). Little pills can lead to big problems: ‘Ritalin generation’ has discovered prescription drugs as a new high. Los Angeles Times. Ibid. Ibid. Study shows methylphenidate linked to chromosomal changes. Newswise (2005, February 24). Online: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/510069 Wilson, D. (2009, December 11). Poor children likelier to get antipsychotics. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/health/12medicaid.html?pagewanted=1&em Letter and response accessible online (p. 6). http://www.decentschools.org/declarations/decl-0206.pdf Alonso, G., Anderson, N., Su, C., & Theoharis, J. (2009). Our schools suck: Students talk back to a segregated nation on the failures of urban education (p. 74). New York: NYU Press. Ibid., Our schools suck, p. 73.

FAILING GRADE 23

24

25 26

27

Kolodner, M. (2010, February 4). Officials are not buying Rosa Bracero’s reason for missing regents exam - she was homeless. New York Daily News. Online: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/ education/2010/02/04/2010-02-04_red_tape_kept_whiz_kid_from_taking_regents.html NewsHour. (2009, July 24). During school recess, new focus on playing nice. PBS. Online: http://www. pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec09/recess_07-24.html Ibid., Dumbing us down, p. 10. FBI, US Attorney investigating Penn. school district’s computer spying on young students. Democracy Now! (2010, February 25). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/25/penn Ibid., Dumbing us down, p. 52.

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CHAPTER 4

CHECKMATE Black Children as Metaphor for a Failed Education System

If it was doubtful as to how far the social and economic classes of any modern state could be essentially transformed and changed by popular education, how much more tremendous was the problem of educating a race whose ability to assimilate modern training was in grave question and whose place in the nation and the world, even granted they could be educated, was a matter of baffling social philosophy. —W.E.B. Du Bois, “Education and Work”1 We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous. —Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings2 Close all the schools you want, enforce all the dress codes you wish, fire all the principals you hate, but the difference would merely measure ephemeral. At a time far removed, students didn’t always cringe at being sent to school each morning— but that time is no more. Those days, teachers didn’t always worry to death about the paychecks their laborious work in the classroom earned—but those days are past us now. That age, schools put greater emphasis on the burdens bearing down upon students. This: an age distant to our current crisis, for the education system is fundamentally broken, and all attempts at Reform would only prove futile in the long run. Needed at this junction is a transformation of not only school policies, but of attitudes, values, and perceptions in ways that hold sacred the humanity of every child. For too long misconceptions of the academic abilities of Black children have received little challenge, setting up a society where teachers, principals, legislators and, inevitably, parents invest in a magnificent mythology: that Black students lack the intellectual capacity to function parallel with White and Asian counterparts. And for too long little has been done to bridge this ever-widening gap of inequality. But time has come for substantive engagement of these issues that affect profoundly kids whose socio-economic backgrounds often indicate how far toward the promised land of financial independence they’re likely to travel. For a Horatio Alger-obsessed society, the idea of a Great Equalizer being anything but evenhanded in dealing with kids of color—and more so Black kids trapped in desolate ghettoes—smells of Racial Pandering and Affirmative Action Activism, and any other reality-resisting terms conjured in the minds of detractors. In other words: yes, certain kids drop into conditions worse than others, and thus fall short 27

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in healthy options at birth; yes, poverty is a real and life-altering state which kids might suffer great setbacks from; yes, all children deserve better than a rock and a hard place; but, no: to any suggestions that all these maladies can’t be corrected with the education system as it currently stands, with strong will, hard work, and a determined spirit. In short, no matter your background, all fates are malleable. Detractors are quick to trot out shining examples of men and women born into purse-emptying poverty who, eventually, after much tenacity in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, rose as respected generals, businessmen, and elected officials. Thus the consensus: If they could do it, anyone can. Of course it’s easy to belittle the harsh realities maligning millions of Black low-income kids if one never came close enough to experience; but, increasingly, more so with the rise of Barack Obama (whose mother once depended on food stamps), a growing number of Black selfresponsibility doctrinaires are trumpeting this theme, leading the struggle against “lazy” and “ignorant” students who, out of sheer will, refuse to better themselves, even when, it is often said, granted golden opportunities. The Voucher School Movement represents but one megaphone through which zealots blare out this theme. Selling their system as key to education reform in inner cities, some even “invoke the language and imagery of the Civil Rights Movement.”3 Speaking at a luncheon a few years back, Howard L. Fuller, a former Milwaukee schools superintendent (who “quotes Frederick Douglass frequently”), asked: “Did we sit down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C., February 1, 1960, to arrive at another lunch counter today where we are welcome but we can’t read the menu?”4 But the Movement mirrors, and advances, anything but the Civil Rights Movement. At no point during the fight for equal rights did a rally cry go out for an agenda addressing only a select number (and kind ) of kids, leaving the unselected to fend for themselves and feast on ill-nourished refreshments. Vouchers, a far cry from the “let freedom ring!” anthem of the ‘60s, “do more than undermine the viability of public education. … They also undermine hard-won civil rights gains,”5 as the case of Tenasha Taylor shows; a Black student who, in 1995, presented an English class speech, critiquing “racist” practices at her school (the elite, private pre-K - 12 University School of Milwaukee), and was subsequently suspended till the following fall. Taylor sued on grounds of free speech but lost: a federal judge argued private institutions, this particular school being one, enjoyed exemption from statutes imposed by the Bill of Rights.6 In his seminal work, Walden, Henry David Thoreau railed against educational worth measured through market modalities: “I cannot but think that if only we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting education would in a great measure vanish.”7 In this age, where more public schools succumb desperately to the private model, handing over the affairs of students to contracted workers, Thoreau’s thoughts take deeper meaning. Little promise for democratic education hovers over the horizon when in cases far frequent than admitted these academies hold waiting-lists in the hundreds, and some in the thousands, of kids with dreams of being “selected” to a “privileged” 28

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education. What conceptions might form in the minds of kids growing up with no memory of an education system that welcomes and serves all equitably—social strata and family income notwithstanding? What values would master the minds of the next generation of students if, for them, the hallmark of a quality education means uniform tucked in neatly, with zero-tolerance for self-expression? Take Capital Preparatory, a “public magnet school” with a “college prep school attitude.” Capital Prep, located in a low-performing district in Connecticut, was featured in a 2009 CNN documentary on Black life in America.8 Principal Steve Perry is unyielding in his “demanding approach” and “tough love” toward students— the 300 6th–12th graders enrolled. Students must adhere to strict, “approved” dress codes (Blue and Gray). Girls’ earrings must be “smaller than a pencil eraser.”9 When a student shows up in, one can only assume, an unapproved outfit, Perry reprimands the young soul unflinchingly: “That’s not our grey.” Capital Prep, a school located in a business building (with entrance revolving doors), looks anything but the stereotype of schools containing mostly low-income Black and Brown kids. Capital Prep, Perry explains, holds one mission infallible— “to send children to college.” And 100% of Capital Prep graduates go to college. To the disenfranchised kids he oversees, the message always is: “You have to learn to play hurt.” He’s just warming up: “You want to sit? You want to cry? Then, when you’re done crying, guess what’s going to happen? Nothing,” he says, as the CNN correspondent, Soledad O’Brien, indulges a snicker. All seemed to be going according to plan till O’Brien announced over 2000 kids stood currently on the waiting-list for an available 40 slots. And, yet, viewers should feel enthusiasm for the future—a future where miracles of the sort Capital Prep is working would be multiplied across the country, to feed 5000 hungry minds with five loaves and two fish. Except, of the 5000, following this logic, only 100 can return home with bloated bellies. At risk of coming across opposed to all forms of private education, I find necessary to commend any media through which the essential skills of critical thinking, independent reasoning, and intellectual freedom can be conveyed to young students—public or private. What often gives, on the contrary, with deliberate flushing of resources exclusively into private ventures, is a shortchanging of public school students, mostly Black and Brown, abandoned at the mercies of inadequate resources, unhappy teachers and, at times, bellicose administrators. And with studies suggesting many charter school students fare no better academically—often worse—than public school students, the self-satisfying fantasy built around charter schools should lose much hold of the minds of lawmakers. But it hasn’t, for this is a chess match in which Black children are pawns. In a semi-ethnographic text published May 2009, one Black student described his school settings with unbridled clarity. It feels more “like a factory. ... Like a sweatshop ... ‘Go to work, do this, sit down and focus. Ya’ll gonna fail the citywide test if you don’t get this’.”10 Another student thrashed the lifeless routine of standardized tests which, he explained, are “empty from the inside.” Several times, “school staff said that this test is really important to us.” He disagreed: “This test is crap because it’s supposed to show us how smart we really are but I don’t need to know 29

CHAPTER 4

how smart I am because I try hard and that is how I get far in my classes.”11 It’s obvious: kids aren’t stupid—only stupid adults think they are. And it seems to me more is at stake now than ever before if the next generation should hold any inkling, any remote idea, what public education as a living imperative means—not just as an arbitrary category or alternative. The promise of Equitable Education (for all!) remains in large part broken. And the crisis in public education today, particularly in the underperformance of Black students, betrays this break. With suburban schools in some states furnished double the financial resources inner-city schools receive, it should surprise no one if, and when, students from middle-class neighborhoods perform better than those trapped in low-income or zero-income communities—the ghettoes, the ‘hoods, the barrios. Conservative commentators can squeal as high as their sponsors permit, but Black children aren’t intellectually inept. They know the truth before it’s spoken, and have no problem identifying teachers who cannot relate to the everyday struggles interlocking their humanities. This explains why zero-tolerance rules, and other illiberal disciplinarian policies employed by intimidated school administrators, only exacerbate the very conditions they hope to eliminate. Black students, aware of this funding disparity, react in ways that displease some and anger others, but reality keeps still. These students, who for lack of more understanding and empathetic counselors classify as “irate” and “irritable” and “erratic,” don’t deserve to be ridiculed, put down, humiliated, or medicated; or to be handled like criminals, handcuffed and hauled off to jail cells for minor infractions. They deserve love, as Paulo Freire prescribed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “The oppressor is in solidarity with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love.”12 They deserve to be understood as legitimately frail and flawed human beings who deserve fair shots at redemption. They deserve Critical Pedagogy, to help untie the social, political, and economic knots of the society they exist within, and to realize demands made of them to leave it in better shape than found upon entry. They also deserve Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy, to uncover the history from which they spring, and to nurture a sense of pride that serves to strengthen their cultural capital and breathe life into their everyday realities. It’s a beautiful sight when children know who they are, and just why our disastrously imperfect world deserves great correction and transformation. NOTES 1

2

3

30

Reprinted in Paschal, A. (Ed.). (1971). W. E. B. Du Bois: A reader (p. 304). New York: Collier Books, Macmillan. Angelou, M. (1969, 2002 ed.). I know why the caged bird sings (pp. 175–176). New York: Random House. Miner, B. (2004, Spring). Distorting the civil rights legacy. Rethinking Schools. Online: http://www. rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/voucher_report/v_kpsp183.shtml

CHECKMATE 4

5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12

Howard L. Fuller’s speech before the BAEO Symposium. School Reform News (2001, March 2). Online: http://www.heartland.org/publications/school%20reform/article/9933/The_Continuing_Struggle_ Howard_ L_Fuller.html Ibid., Distorting the civil rights legacy. Ibid. Thoreau, H. D. (1999 ed.). Walden (p. 46). New York: Oxford University Press. Principal’s tough love, high expectations gets kids into college. CNN (2009, July 22). Online: http:// www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/07/22/bia.education.success/index.html The Capital Prep “Parent Compact” for 2008–2009 requires parents agree to these terms: “Purchase an entire school uniform and require my child to wear it every day. I understand that the Capital Prep uniform includes a blue crested sweater or blazer, a white crested button down shirt, the school’s tie (for boys), khaki dress pants (no cargo are denim) and/or school kilt, for girls), a black belt with a reasonable buckle, blue knee socks for girls wearing kilts, and black dress shoes with a reasonable heal, no sneakers of any type nor boots. I also understand that the uniform does not include jewelry. The only acceptable accessories are a watch and metal knob earrings that are smaller than a pencil eraser.” Alonso, G., Anderson, N., Su, C., & Theoharis, J. (2009). Our schools suck: Students talk back to a segregated nation on the failures of urban education (p. 124). New York: NYU Press. Ibid., p. 107. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed., p. 50). New York: Continuum.

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CHAPTER 5

DISTANT RELATIVES Bridging the Gap Between Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy

The principle of interaction makes it clear that failure of adaptation of material to needs and capacities of individuals may cause an experience to be noneducative quite as much as failure of an individual to adapt himself to the material. —John Dewey, Experience and Education1 We must create an educational system that not only celebrates African and African-American culture but also imbues Black children with the skills they need to survive in this society and to contribute to its creative development. —Janice Hale, Black Children2 When would the general public lose its passion for political correctness and courageously admit Black kids don’t do well on standardized tests because they lack the intellectual capacity for rigorous academic work? Why do parents insist on squandering taxpayer dime on a Race of children unable to grasp complex ideas presented them by tenacious teachers? Isn’t it about time we turned to more successful models like charter, voucher, and private schools, rather than keep dumping valuable money into that cesspool otherwise known as the public school system? Why do Marxist educators want so badly to indoctrinate our kids with redistributionist, Deweyan, Freirean, anti-Capitalism ideals? These and other sanity-suspending questions have for decades pushed from the lips and pens of parents and politicians who would rather have kids brought up with values Orval Faubus couldn’t cherish more. They’ve been asked by some of the wealthiest and some of the poorest, with no sense of the absurdity in telling teachers all kids learn the same; hence, the notion that a child grows up within unique surroundings which produce unique experiences, therefore unique perspectives— all falls flat. They insist no special attention be paid to any marginal group of kids because schools ought not to be breeding grounds for a welfare state of mind. Schools ought not to be soil upon which is planted the belief that a society structured on the ethics of Capitalism demands certain people—no matter how hardworking, talented, or gifted—wallow at the bottom while a select few breeze through life on top— most without the skill or stridency their bottom-placed “competitors” have to show. For the last four decades debates have raged from conference rooms to White House offices, from market places to TV studios, from public parks to public libraries, from school classrooms to PTA meetings, from halls of Congress to living rooms 33

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in middle-class homes, from workplace water coolers to synagogues and mosques and cathedrals. To be sure, as with most hype-helmed issues of the kind, very little substance emerged from these often impassioned sessions. But true to tradition of invigorating national debates, great contributions were made, still reaching out for rescue from beneath the rubble of polarizing, partisan drivel-fest. From the ashes of madness rose two distinct fields bringing to bear questions of learning and the consequences of curriculum and the toll taken on the minds of kids kicked around as the political football matches played on—ad infinitum. Both disciplines, Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy, though often working divorced from each other, essentially espoused radically similar—if not exact—ideas of the need to extensively interrogate education matters, with emphasis on the structuring of society by values ingrained in kids early on.3 With clear implications: if a child at 5 is taught a hyper-competitive spirit wields the key to success, she would swiftly adapt to the neoliberal model of privatized services and disposable commodities governing her society: groomed to go on unfazed; as though Power has not, through time, conceded much to the demands of courageous citizens who strived strenuously to make good on the democratic promises their elected leaders swore to deliver. The child learns that, in life, questioning authority parallels almost with sedition; that a complicit citizen is a “real” citizen, as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin might suggest.4 Scholars from both fields have since attempted to advance theories, structures, and models that imbue kids with understanding of, and appreciation for, the past, fostering critical thinking about the present to inspire desire for transformation of the future. If educators and intellectuals could do right by kids and sow in them seeds of curiosity and empathy, they figured, before long those seeds would germinate and sprout trees a democratic society can feed from. The aim, contrary to what a few confused critics contend, was never to indoctrinate or mentally assault kids, but to guide them into the natural process of dialectics. Every child born, they realized, wants to challenge all assumptions passed down through generations: every child pushes through the womb with voluminous sets of questions, demanding quick answers. The child wants to know why it is smaller than everyone else, why it cannot do the normal things others can effortlessly, why self-reliance is a skill not yet mastered, why, as Marian Wright Edelman projects, “the sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”5 In many homes, children are silenced out of this questioning spirit by adults intolerant to the wailing anguish of precious souls crying out for meaning. Schools, pre-K - 12 (and up right through college), then form holy ground offering some semblance of hope in getting those questions answered. From playground battles with equals, to fiddling with toys, the child develops an identity independent of the dominance and surveillance of the ubiquitous giants: Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context, not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly 34

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less alienated. Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.6 As meaning is found, and identities developed, the child increasingly recognizes the authority of teachers. And it is at this stage that the screw-up usually triggers— when transformative intellectuals are called on to impart “knowledge and power … in a pedagogy of cultural politics to give students the opportunity not only to understand more critically who they are as part of a wider social formation, but also to help them critically appropriate those forms of knowledge that traditionally have been denied to them.”7 Students carry loaded baggage—other than book bags. Students bear burdens. Students are filled vessels. Students have stories to tell. These facts, unfortunately, often impress little upon school officials in dealing with students: hubris usually takes over when children and adults converse. Many children can account multiple occasions when reprimanded by an adult for obsessing over a problem, since, they were told, whatever problems could command their solemn attention ranks nothing to what adults have endured, complain-free, for decades. “The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people,” wrote Logan Pearsall Smith nearly a century back, “and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.”8 The Black child whose living environment more resembles a warzone than community is then encouraged, indeed coerced, to stomach the pain and misery and general deadness around because far worse has happened that dwarfs current circumstances. The bias and privilege of the official runs uninvestigated, callous to students who each morning take hour-long bus rides across town to school, their empty stomachs crying out. All blame rests firmly on the heads of students granted great educational opportunities but short on “structural discipline,” and in need of “character education.” Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy teach two essential concepts all educators dealing with kids should keep in mind: (1) that school-based education cannot be divorced from the public realm, underscoring the need to incorporate memory, history, empowerment, vision, and hope in classroom instruction; (2) that a child’s cultural capital—past to present—ranks just as important as the focus on a future free from injustice and inequality. “Learning, for instance, could be seen as a growth process,” General Semanticist J. Samuel Bois wrote four decades ago. “If we admit that every human is as different from his fellows as every plant species is different from another, we easily accept the fact that no two persons learn the ‘same’ subject in the same manner.”9 Whether or not deemed Controversial, whether or not considered a half-chant from Communistic Commandments, “before any study of the classroom social relations is put forth, it must be made clear that the content of what is taught in social studies classes plays a vital role in the political socialization of students.”10 Both the formal and hidden curriculum must be absolved of all racist, sexist, classist, imperialist content which render human beings and history expendable. Teachers would have to consider a concept some find bitterly discomforting—that cultural ancestry also suggests much about cognitive learning styles. 35

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On this topic, Janice Hale has been breathtaking. “Black children are described as entering school with excitement and enthusiasm, only to have the school crush their freedom and creativity,” she wrote 25 years ago. “[They] cannot channel their energy until given permission to release it. Consequently, many Black children elicit punishment and are labeled hyperactive because of their high motoric activity.”11 The learning styles of most Black kids, she argued, differ diametrically to those of White kids; and Black kids, predominantly art and activity-oriented, prefer handson experiences to theoretical methods. To this point, many have answered with savage mockery and charges of Reverse Racism, but, understandably, “[t]he notion that students come from different histories and embody different experiences, linguistic practices, cultures, and talents is strategically ignored within the logic and accountability of management pedagogy theory.”12 The aim is to satirize any calls for complex and ecumenical approaches to pedagogy, pushing through a familiar theme: kids, and especially those poor ones, aren’t special; at best, they’re less special than kids whose parents have enough money to select schools with diverse curricula tailored to engage each child creatively. Low-income Black and Brown kids know this, which explains why, finding little joy in school, many take the intelligent and rational step of either skipping classes intermittently or dropping out entirely. Those who choose to use the national, escalating high school dropout rates—7,000 each passing day—as mandates for tougher laws, or greater youth-bashing, stand on the losing end of a battle to selfdelusion since, as Janice Hale added a decade ago, The mere fact that we must bombard inner-city children with admonitions to stay in school is an acknowledgment that participation in school is not intrinsically motivating to them. … When we change the way schooling is done, when we make it culturally salient for African American children, we will not need sports figures to encourage them to stay in school.13 Reality shouldn’t escape us so easily: the education system, as it stands today, does not serve (and never was meant to) kids whose cultural capitals wage eternal wars with free-market fundamentalism. A young child born between prostitution and poverty might find it hard to embrace the All-Mighty Creed of Social Darwinism, and might pose problems if told ruthless jingoism is the way to go—as Sylvia Woods did.14 If told starvation only finds home in “3rd World” countries, and shares no relation to the West, she might feel forced to snicker at the intellectual effrontery of a teacher whose knowledge of the world comes through the numbers on a TV remote. Reality shouldn’t escape us so easily, but history holds evidence of men and women attempting the hard, the unrewarding, the absurd “not because they are easy—but because they are hard!” Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy have never been invested in “a simplistic call for relevance,” but a need and responsibility “to understand the traditions of mediation students bring to their encounter with institutionally legitimated knowledge.”15 Speaking life to the experiences of students certainly beats out pandering to perceived desires (and foibles) with humiliating and desperate voyeuristic practices, of which Hollywood has made mincemeat through the last 36

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two decades, selling scores of films identifying Black and Brown students as troublesome, erratic, unfocused semi-savages—in need of compassionate, unwavering White messiahs (civilizers?). This shameless practice of trying to relate to innercity kids with drug-dealing metaphors or street innuendo has revealed, with glee, not just moral mischief but a vile and contemptuous betrayal of what Hollywood screenwriters and directors think of low-income students. The vocabulary of spiritual death—“Ho,” “Pimp,” “Bitch,” “Dope”—doesn’t help better convey a mathematical equation. Do away with the nonsense and seek out “thematic units and hands-on instruction that would tap multicultural modalities and stimulate creativity and higher-order thinking skills.”16 With transformative intellectuals in the classroom helping students interpret the rigid, technocratic semantics of establishment curriculum, children once classified helpless and hopeless would spring to life, filled with the renewed self-confidence true educational experiences deliver. But if neoliberal serfs, of the Left and Right sort, who demand end to special treatment, keep at their reign of terror upon public schools, unchallenged, educators, students, and parents who mean business would witness the greatest defeat of a lifetime—more so with a new Administration just as sold as its predecessor, if not more, on the private model. But from history we realize without struggle many of the luxuries enjoyed today would never have slipped off the palms of a power structure too full of itself to imagine resistance, opposition, or replacement. These are the concepts students should collide with from Day 1. Educators should nurture the kindred spirit in kids, using Critical Pedagogy and Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy to expand their cultural capital, forging solidarity amongst oppressed students of diverse shades and backgrounds. J. Samuel Bois cautioned four decades back of potential cataclysmic dangers in teaching kids to root out differences rather than celebrate diversity: “From the days of grade school, when we had to labor through long lists of synonyms and antonyms, we have been told that there are two sides to any question, a right one and a wrong one. No wonder our thinking is still of the black-and-white, yes-or-no type.”17 Like the curious child who, through trial and error, through studious meditation of surrounding social factors, forms a unique identity amidst a terrifying cascade— of toys, adults, rules, handbooks, TV, vehicles, pollution, infantilism, castigation, pain, love, sorrow, joy—students should be encouraged to revel in the diversity that envelops them early on: “a period in the development of the young mind when the perception of differences in humanity is reduced to an absolute minimum, even if, obviously, it cannot be eliminated completely.”18 Demagogues, in this sense, would lose legs to stand on because “the notion of difference is subsumed within a discourse and set of practices that promote harmony, equality, and respect within and between diverse cultural groups.”19 Let not this call coalesce with fantasy-fueled desires for colorblindness or postracialism. The two concepts differ greatly: one champions individual character and celebrates the inherent beauty diversity promotes; the other seeks to escape controversy by sidestepping reality.

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But we must work toward the day when next time those sets of inquiries raise up, demanding answers why more funding should be appropriated to public schools, or why teachers should treat “cognitively deficient” Black students with dignity— bound for life behind bars, anyway—it would be students talking back, delivering, on point, clear, cohesive rejoinders in one chorus. We must work toward the day when next time conservative culture warriors decide to restart the long-running, self-pious protests against “leftist” and “radical” and “activist” professors, accused of propagandizing in the classroom, those spineless pariahs would have to face students of diverse backgrounds fed up with political hitmen using fellow classmates as human shields to spread corrosive, baseless values. Time dictates we must swiftly work toward that day when students would no more wait until questions of meaningless worth replace serious concerns; when students would no more need prompting by invasive corporations to take action; when students would no more feel violated after years of schooling spent learning values that in no way enrich their cultural capital and remain firmly opposed to making society a model of justice and fairness: for students, schooling would extend their everyday educational experiences; schooling would mark the means to an educational end (not the end thereof ); schooling would reflect and represent the moral frameworks—democracy, hope, love, freedom, expression—they feel obligated to transform the world after. NOTES 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14

38

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education (pp. 46–47). New York: Macmillan. Hale, J. (1988 ed.). Black children: Their roots, culture, and learning styles (p. 3). Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Leading scholars and pioneers in Critical Pedagogy include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Shirley Steinberg, Joe Kincheloe, and Donaldo Macedo; while V.P. Franklin, Janice Hale, and the late Asa Hilliard trail-blazed the Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy field. Reference to comments by Palin while on the campaign trail in October 2008, about certain parts of the country representing “real America” and “pro-America,” with the implicit suggestion, of course, that others didn’t. She later apologized if her comments were misconstrued. Edelman, M. W. (2008). The sea is so wide and my boat is so small: Charting a course for the next generation. New York: Hyperion. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed., p. 81). New York: Continuum. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning (p. 106). Granby, CO: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Smith, L. P. (1945 ed.). All trivia: Trivia, more Trivia, afterthoughts, last words (p. 191). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Samuel Bois, J. (1973 ed.). The art of awarness: A textbook on general semantics and epistemics (p. 150). Dubuque: W. C. Brown Co. Publishers. Ibid., Teachers as intellectuals, p. 31. Ibid., Black children, p. 75. Ibid., Teachers as intellectuals, p. 125. Hale, J. (2001). Learning while black: Creating educational excellence for African American children (p. 44). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Read her brave testimony in Zinn, H., & Arnove’s, A. (2004). Voices of a people’s history of the United States (pp. 336–340). New York: Seven Stories Press.

DISTANT RELATIVES 15 16 17 18

19

Ibid., Teachers as intellectuals, p. 131. Ibid., Learning while black, p. 99. Ibid., The art of awareness, p. 264. Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (p. 115). New York: Random House. Ibid., Teachers as intellectuals, p. 95.

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EDUCATION AS ETCH-A-SKETCH Beyond Books and Brains

What does education often do!—It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. —Henry David Thoreau, Uncommon Learning1 Education is never innocent, because it always presupposes a particular view of citizenship, culture and society. —Henry Giroux, The Mouse that Roared 2 Education occurs in a context and has a very definitive purpose. The content is mainly unspoken, and the purpose very often unspeakable. But education can never be aimless, and it cannot occur in a vacuum. —James Baldwin, “Dark Days”3 The witty comedienne Wanda Sykes unleashed the following in I’ma Be Me, a HBO special premiered late 2009: “We really do need to revamp our education system. It doesn’t work. It does not work. … We don’t learn anything. It’s not comprehension—it’s just retention, it’s just rote. That’s it. We just keep it long enough to spit it back out—pass the test, and we get rid of that shit. … It’s like our brain’s a big Etch-A-Sketch.” At this Sykes began rattling her head rigorously, in like manner of a kid scrubbing scrawls from an Etch-A-Sketch pad, leaving audience members bent over from laughter. But in jest, as the adage goes, much truth seeps out. The read-then-regurgitate style most kids today learn by does in fact provoke sobering consequences not only for their intellectual development but for the social stability of society, for any society filled with individuals too timid to think for themselves, too civically illiterate to decide their best interest, runs in short risk of self-damnation. A number of implications trouble a society that teaches its kids instant gratification and ephemeral pleasure should win out in life, among which is loss of long-term commitment to even the most basic elements of human existence (family, community, friendship, etc.)—which should explain the gloriously high divorce rates these days, and should also explain why some seem to find greater joy blowing life-savings at casino crap tables (à la Las Vegas) than investing in the future of kids and other righteous, rewarding causes. Why spend the time, energy, or money requisite to cultivate lifetime friendships and social bonds when a weekend in Atlantic City promises equal measure of thrill? This is the Etch-A-Sketch model: The Sovereignty of Now. I want it—and I want it now! Such rancid values do kids growing up today learn to live (and die) by. In effect, 41

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good grades on tests determine intellectual worth. Whatever effects the tests’ contents hold on their futures lose out. All that matters: “doing well”—now! Whether or not the students shoulder certain cultural baggage which school, by nature, should address, draws little consideration. The demand is plain: give us what we want—or get held back. And because kids, through admirable perception, find this speeddriven, subversive model deadly to their survival, many are held back and staved off—further away from their futures. The Etch-A-Sketch model not only denies kids the social values without which a livable society ceases in function: it also ingrains in them resistance to critical thinking. And this pathetic philosophy, teaching kids knowledge is agenda-driven and narrowly estimable, creates adults unable to elect political leaders affirming substantive policies to make society more fair and just. Many end up resigned to immaterial qualities (fashion choice, personality, charisma, even paternal legacy), for a child fed on instant gratification eventually morphs into an adult socially malnourished. Education as Etch-A-Sketch is both limiting and limited. Limiting: because kids find no freedom to explore a subject widely and engage deeply in what, for instance, makes Los Angeles the largest city in California. All they learn is that it is so. Clueless why, clueless about its current demographic (and how certain social factors account thereof ), clueless of the history—a rich and hybrid one—that produced Los Angeles. At most, if lucky, they learn that a widely sought-after attraction rests there. To expect detailed elaboration why Hollywood is at all a fascination would be welcoming disappointment. It is simply assumed Disney has already taken care. Limited: because it compresses—mostly for political purposes—history, culture, and language into sound bites of reference, distilling the past subjectively, susceptible to selection and pickiness. As example, kids learning of the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s only hear that Rosa Parks sat, Martin Luther King Jr. marched and, viola!, doors once shut opened, and color barriers faded, and economic prosperity flourished into reality, or possibility—for whichever Black families preferred a deluxe apartment in the sky to rundown slums on the ground. This model wipes out entirely the diverse and complex characters whose irreducible contributions helped reclaim the dignities of people of color, smashed by Jim Crow laws and an erased history. No talk of Malcolm X—except in disparaging terms. No talk of Dorothy Cotton. No talk of Fannie Lou Hamer. No talk of Reverend Joseph Lowery. No talk of Medgar Evers. No talk of Grace Lee Boggs. No talk of Mahalia Jackson. No talk of Odetta, James Baldwin, or Nina Simone. No talk of Kwame Ture. No talk of the Freedom Riders. No talk of John Coltrane. No talk of Louis Armstrong. No talk of Harry Belafonte. No talk of Bull Connor. No talk of Orval Faubus. No talk of John Edgar Hoover. No talk of Bloody Sunday. No talk of Sept. 15, 1963. The Etch-A-Sketch machine spits out: a Black woman spontaneously refused to relinquish her sit to White passengers, a Black man slept soulless nights in jolting jail cells but came back swinging with dreams of integrated playgrounds, and today the Blacks lucky enough to live in the suburbs owe all gratitude to that Movement for their prosperity. The economic quagmires within which people of color—and Blacks especially—have long-wallowed lacks interest. The prison-industrial complex 42

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is deemed too controversial for kids. And, most devastating, the history leading up to Rosa Parks’ December 1, 1955, defiance escapes unengaged. That she was a seasoned student taught the art of protest at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee is a mystery to most kids. Ralph Waldo Emerson warned over a century ago against patronizing kids and demeaning their intellectual interests: I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child.4 Emerson’s exhortation hardly impresses a society obsessed with IQ’s and other likeminded provincial judges of intelligence. Society is yet to settle on whether kids, young enough to earn life sentences and be banished to expire in jail cells, can handle the weight of determining what pedagogical models best apply in teaching, and reaching, them. The “tampering and thwarting,” we are begged to believe, merely shows a society concerned about the contents kids are exposed to—not a surveillance State bent on monitoring their every move. For kids who can’t adequately choose what’s best, it’s easier—even self-satisfyingly benevolent—not to “respect” their estimations that schools deal more harm than the streets. Ani DiFranco, the folk singer, penned a stellar poem in 1993, “My IQ,” excoriating the sham of IQ testing and the segregative classification of kids based on perceived performance differences: When I was four-years-old/ They tried to test my IQ/ They showed me this picture/ Of 3 oranges and a pear/ They asked me, “Which one is different?/ It does not belong”/ They taught me different is wrong/.5 Society loves “exceptional” kids: the ones whose parents proudly post “My Child is an Honor Student” bumper sticker on cars, refrigerator doors, and office computers: kids told early on they are “special,” possessing something their peers lack—“intelligence”—and would most likely be “successful” in this world: graduate High School valedictorian (or an acceptable variant), earn enough college scholarships to cover tuition costs, and matriculate with enough honors to stumble into highpaying jobs. Seldom do these kids go on to earn master’s or, heaven forbid, PhD degrees. They don’t have to. What it takes other students PhDs to earn (in financial terms), they settled for right out of college. After all, they are “exceptional.” Better than most—with self-esteems nurtured even pre-birth, to ensure they grew up highbrowed enough to look down upon the many “un-exceptionals” around. On the other side of town are children born not in hospitals but in crack houses, in trailer parks, in mobile homes: with no one to fill in their heads lofty ideals of exceptionalism. They learn early on that to demand so much as food when hungry could earn thunders of insults: not because adults hate them or fail to see their unique qualities, but because sobriety makes rare appearances ‘round those parts. When sober, the same faces shower unbridled affection and love—until the pipe or needle or bottle begins calling their name anew. These are children placed in dilapidated nursery centers, who end up in middle schools and high schools that speak more of 43

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death than life. Those that make it far as high school graduation barely earn requisite grades. Those who don’t—and they tally the majority—resort to street crimes and petty hustling. When society turns from a Child as Problem to a Condition as Problem philosophy, not only would the playing field both set of kids compete on level out, but the second set would no longer have their futures written out and defined, indeed defiled, pre-birth. Then, only, would the “better, richer, and happier life” promise yield more than laughter and mockery from all those who know better. A Child as Problem philosophy contends children hold in their hands various opportunities from which to choose and plot out successful futures, regardless of social strata: they deserve blame for all shortcomings. It visits on the heads of failing students ridicule and humiliation, quick to point out that Social Darwinism works well in separating the wheat from the chaff; in which case, chaffs like them do no good for a world facing “complex challenges.” It readies—and narrows— options kids of this kind can stretch their hands and cling to: Jail. Army. Grave. That districts in California reportedly build prisons based on the 3rd grade reading levels of children tells strongly which side they stand on. Kids, in this sense, are not only set up, but destined, to fail.6 Condition as Problem, however, takes seriously possibilities of redemption and liberation, doing away with farcical, lunacy-led fantasies of Personal Responsibility, holding up the State as responsible for the lives of its disenfranchised, tax-paying citizens, with strong commitment to creating livable neighborhoods for the intellectual growth of children whose conceptions of life are bound to reflect poverty and nihilism. If the condition is problem, then greater emphasis falls upon constructing avenues through which kids can dream bigger, brighter, and bolder than the social constraints enforced upon their imaginations by surrounding blights. This philosophy tears down that inhumane wall dividing kids into categories and defining their destinies from scores on superficial tests. It reorders the policies and priorities of society to remember every child holds the skills, values, and ideals to help set the world free from oppressive forms of prestige and privilege, ever aware “the motivation to succeed is present among children of all cultures, no matter the way in which it is directed.”7 NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

44

Reprinted in Thoreau, H. D. (1999). Uncommon learning: Thoreau on education (p. 39). New York: Mariner Books. Giroux, H. A. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence (p. 31). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Reprinted in Baldwin, J. (1998). Collected essays (p. 788). New York: Library of America. Emerson, R. W. (1883–2008 ed.). Lectures and biographical sketches (p. 143). New York: AMS Press. DiFranco, A. (1993). My IQ. In Puddle dive. Righteous Babe Records. How schools can work better for the kids who need the most. Challenge Journal (Spring 1998 Volume 2, Number 2). Online: http://www.annenberginstitute.org/Challenge/pubs/cj/v2n2/pg1.html Hale, J. (1988 ed.). Black children: Their roots, culture, and learning styles (p. 51). Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press.

PART II: YOUTH IN A SOULLESS SOCIETY: REDEMPTION OR REPROACH?

CHAPTER 7

BLACK YOUTH VIOLENCE, ADULT SOCIETY, AND THE RAGE OF REALITY

No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration. —Hannah Arendt, On Violence1 The young black generation are up against forces of death, destruction, and disease unprecedented in the everyday life of black urban people. —Cornel West, Race Matters2 The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. … They are imitating our immorality, our disrespect for the pain of others. —James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a letter from Harlem”3 On October 7, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to the videotaped beating death of 16-year-old Chicago student Derrion Albert, expressed hope it would blare a “stark wake-up call to a reality that can be easy for too many to ignore as they go about their daily lives.” Holder explained why the ongoing onslaught of youth-on-youth attacks should receive greater attention, adding, “Youth violence is not a Chicago problem anymore than it is a Black problem, a White problem, or a Hispanic problem. … It is an American problem.”4 But the attorney general failed to mention that as much as it is a national (and, really, international) “problem,” it just as much is an adult problem. When youth channel their rage and righteous indignation unproductively, it marks mostly a cry for attention and care, a tragic tell-tale of feeling abandoned and invincible, for as James Baldwin observed, “Every child’s sense of himself is terrifyingly fragile. He is really at the mercy of his elders, and when he finds himself totally at the mercy of his peers, who know as little about themselves as he, it is because his peers’ elders have abandoned them. … But children, I submit, cannot be fooled.”5 Derrion Albert’s death, sad as it was, might just afford timely catalyst to turn a sharper gaze upon the vulnerable conditions most youth of color live under the shadow of—all the days of their lives. If, however, we resort to the reactionary, redundant recoil of rebuking young folk for their recalcitrance, that brutal scene, captured on camera, would be looped over and over again. 47

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“All of us know little shorties, and we see them when they are young,” thenU.S. Senator Barack Obama announced in 2006 at a Chicago church, after a series of shootings in Black neighborhoods. “Something is happening to them around age 4 or 5. A darkness comes over them, and you can see the loss of hope in them.” In rare acknowledgment of the weighty load bearing down upon millions of young Black and Brown kids, he rejected the Personal Responsibility dogma which only a couple of years later formed the foundation of his message to Black America: “There is a reason they shoot each other, because they don’t love themselves, and the reason they don’t love themselves is we are not loving them, we’re not paying attention to them, we’re not guiding them, we’re not disciplining them. We’ve got work to do.”6 In May 2009, Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of the South Side of Chicago’s St. Sabina, called for a fast, and flew the national flag above his church inverted—to raise consciousness concerning the horrifically high rate of teen shootings and deaths Chicago had produced in those few months alone. For this, he was attacked and protested. Detractors claimed they sympathized with the cause but felt disrespected by Pfleger who, to hear them tell it, was merely exploiting the tragedy to generate controversy. Plainly, the scores of lives lost in but a few months still hadn’t adequately constituted “a signal of dire distress” (to warrant the inverted flag). For long, this numbskull narrative has played out, as also seen in the aftermath of Albert’s death, upon which many thought it wise to call for National Guard intervention and other State-sponsored services to put pressure on adolescent villains; others, like Reverend Marcia Dyson (of Georgetown University’s Center for Social Justice, Research, Teaching and Service), understood that an arms-race in the ghetto—between youth of color and police officers (authorized April 2008 to carry M4 carbines through the dark streets of Chicago)—would only exacerbate casualties. Rather than begin the work of liberating disenfranchised youth before democracy checks out, many have found greater fulfillment preaching personal responsibility and self-accountability. In short, bashing young folk has gained ground as legitimate response to undeniable suffering. Cornel West wrote a decade and half ago of the indifference directed toward youth of color as they journey through life. Parental imperfection coupled with corporate greed, he assured, nourishes a life extinguished of all hope and bound by unrelenting nihilism: “The tragic plight of our children clearly reveals our deep disregard for public well-being. … Most of our children—neglected by overburdened parents and bombarded by the market values of profit-hungry corporations—are ill-equipped to live lives of spiritual and cultural quality.”7 Legal scholar Michelle Alexander advanced the terms in early 2010, with the publication of her provocative text, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which argued criminalized Black youth had a role and identity in society, and this role “marking” them as “criminals is essential to the functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. For the system to succeed … black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. … This process of being made a criminal is, to a large extent, the process of ‘becoming’ black.”8 So, for long now, it’s become easy to neglect those caged in and denied meaningful citizenship for eternity because, even before committing whatever deeds they 48

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stood in a courtroom accused of, society didn’t consider them clean enough to warrant concern. And now that the stain has grown greatly, and spread through far and wide, it’s more acceptable—even reasonable—to turn backs, eyes, and ears against millions crying out for help. The youth suffer unwarranted (often deadly) police presence, and no significant, mainstream outrage is raised. Families of color are dropped to their knees, fathers and mothers saddled with lengthy sentences for harmless infractions, and news channels implore their cameramen and correspondents to keep seeking more sensational stuff. Children are snatched from broken homes and dumped into foster care (or worse), and the winds of national concern fail to blow their direction. Society treats youth of color as nothing but a problem, a hassle, a nuisance, a burden—to the convenient lifestyles adults can’t afford to give up. And the teenage new mother who, burdened with responsibilities far beyond human aptitude, dumps her daughter in the trashcan, knows this all too well.9 That mother who we are quick to vilify, quick to demonize and ostracize, reflects the values of the society that is now turned against her, for she’s perceptive: she understands that the same society building billion-dollar prisons—money otherwise put into much, much, much better use (education, shelter, employment opportunities, drug abuse treatment facilities, etc.) — to house her, and those who look, act, think like her, stands in no moral position to wag its finger or shake its head in disappointment. She sees young men around her whose lives—once promising—have been handed over to the State (for permanent ejection). “If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world,” Henry Giroux writes, “they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized.”10 The clueless and cowardly assumptions of many aside, young people aren’t stupid. They’ve witnessed, in little over three decades, utter disregard for the high esteem with which society once handled its young. And what says soullessness better than a people’s inability to make the connection between children and the future? Problem is some have deluded themselves into thinking mortality isn’t real—and inevitable: I’m gonna live forever/ I’m gonna learn how to fly! Society refuses to turn bankrupt (too late!)—and sees youth as a very real, but containable, threat to its financial health. Containment is easy. Society knows this. And the speediest means to get rid of a threat is—to get rid of it. W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in a not-so different context one century ago (then, “The Problem”), punctured this phenomenon with precision: “It is not so much a desire to reach the best and largest solution as it is to clean the board and start a new game.”11 Through society’s prism today, disadvantaged youth embody the—not just a—problem. Back in the days, our parents used to take care of us, reminisced late Rap legend Notorious B.I.G. over a decade back. Look at ‘em now: they even f**kin’ scared of us!12 And increases in prison-funding, increases in militarized school complexes, expansion of arbitrary police power, all indicate a vicious need to get rid—as fast as possible!—of this ever growing problem: young people. 49

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More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.13 In June 2010, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereka, a 15-year-old Mexican boy, was killed near the Paso del Norte Bridge. Border agents, on bicycle patrol in El Paso, Texas, had just been tipped off to nearby illegal immigration activities, and soon found themselves the victims of rocks being cast by an unknown number of people from the direction where the boy was standing. He had gone to eat with his brother who handles luggage at a border customs office, said his mother, and simply was playing with a group of friends when the agents began firing and struck him down in close range. Early November 2009, video surfaced of a 15-year-old boy, Marshawn Pitts, learning an unforgettable lesson in Society 101. It was in May 2009 when the specialneeds student at the Academy for Learning High School in Dolton, Illinois, was ambling down a school corridor as a burly police officer began hissing from behind that he tuck in his shirt. He had just began following as told when the unsatisfied officer, stalking closely, put down the coffee in his hand and smashed Pitts against the lockers, swinging his fists violently, then rushing Pitts to the floor in a face-downtake-down chokehold, which has been proven responsible for dozens of deaths nationwide. The blows to Pitts’ face resulted in a broken nose and a bruised jaw— all because this Black boy, who suffered from a childhood brain injury, had not followed fashion orders soon enough. Being smashed into walls, cussed out, teased, mocked, and attacked at school counts, for a number of students, as inextricably tied to the educational experience. Only difference now, unlike the days of old when fellow classmates made this their duty, police officers have taken over to contain the threat factor they consider students—no matter how young, no matter how unintimidating—pose to their wellbeing (and ego).14 Unlike the bullying classmate who could be reported to the principal’s office— and thereafter corrected, reprimanded or, as last resort, suspended—the officers answer to no one on school grounds. And with widespread reports of officers and school staff clashing over disciplinary policies, evidence abounds why militarized measures to monitor or manage kids’ conducts only encourage deleterious consequences—for all involved.15 The prison-industrial complex—inescapable future for nameless youth (of all color, class, and creed) —must be understood for what it is: a cowardly construction to dispose of those society has no use for anymore. In one word: Disposability. But dissident journalist I.F. Stone had it right: “if there were no handful of the desperate in the ghetto and on the campus to make threats and hurl rocks, who in our smug and complacent established order would begin to listen and to move a little?”16 Black youth violence isn’t considered more often because it rips the mask off a complicit society’s face. And many in Washington (press, politics), knowing this, have caricatured the crisis for decades. Regenerated by the Nixon Administration, 50

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and furthered in more pugnacious directions when Reagan ruled, the concerns of inner-city kids have never climbed the top of public conscience in modern times— except when useful as a political footballs to score against fiscally irresponsible opponents. Shallow-minded politicians have instead clamored louder about selfresponsibility and Law and Order: to still White fears (of racial pandering), all the while stoking Black sorrows. Today, even popular Black politicians blare through the bullhorn with excitement: Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities. But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child—it’s the courage to raise one.17 Yes, forms of responsibility and accountability should fall on all shoulders, but when poor Black youth must walk into under-staffed schools, filled with the same police officers known to routinely abuse them on the streets, government must do more than hand out bootstraps. Classrooms overflow, with limited resources, and yet much is demanded of the students to make best with what little opportunities come their way. They are told to straighten their backs, pull their pants up, pick their feet up, and cast down their buckets on dry, arid grounds which lack resources as fundamental as clean water.18 Those who survive—and very few do—are hailed as examples to others—the overwhelming majority—of the good diligence and hard work brings. And this is the sort of envy-inspired hatred that often makes young men like Derrion Albert (an honor roll student) easy targets in inner-city neighborhoods. Albert’s attackers mostly, if not entirely, dropped into the second column: young, desperate, disenfranchised Black males—“gang members.” Long before birth, their destinies were determined by a State short on resources and hand-tied toward traumatized kids—who grow through life frustrated to see a few do well while most wallow below academic proficiency. No one can justify these young men’s crimes, or look the other way while mothers like Anjanette Albert weep for their lost and loved ones; but all great Neptune’s oceans could not wipe clean the sins of a society culpable in the perpetuation of violence in the ghettoes—a society which still rejects the reality that “there are more police in their schools than teachers, more surveillance cameras in their neighborhoods than public spaces that afford privacy and meaningful social interactions, and more liquor stores than health care centers, community outreach facilities, and recreational centers combined.”19 On all corners death stands, and in all forms—spiritual, social, moral, educational. Nothing speaks of life. Branded with the mark of violence, thus criminal by nature, poor Black youth represent outcasts in the Real World—that of opportunities and possibilities. And when they journey across train tracks, or towns, or streets, White ladies clutch for dear life at their purses, drivers lock up all car doors swiftly, bank 51

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tellers fix their fingers firmly on the panic button with pressing urgency, store clerks stay on alert for any signs of shoplifting or armed robbery. On better days, the criminals remain stuck in disagreeable conditions—home, school, prison—that only further shelter a society too ashamed to confront its creation. And now, we are indignant because the stuff we have done has come home to roost loud and clear for the world to see and hear. Society would rather dispatch National Guards into these 3rd World environments than confront squarely the many victims of its apathetic negligence; it would rather ask for added police forces—which equal added abuse—than establish rigorous social programs to offer better opportunities for kids acculturated from birth to violence; it would rather complain of how unwilling to learn inner-city Black kids seem, how thick-skulled and thin-brained they appear, than go survey the quasi-boot camps they must troop to daily to meet its silly and sinister demands for Structure and Order; society would rather convince itself low-income Black kids spring from a different breed not to be expected civility from than admit how completely it has dehumanized them for decades. “As a society,” Michelle Alexander admonishes, “our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.”20 Black youth violence, contrary to popular convictions, propounds neither pathology nor parody, but a real-life reminder of how shamelessly societies often turn unwanted human beings into commodities to furnish private programs, à la for-profit prisons. And rather than collapse into panic mode and side with such societies, Derrion Albert’s death should reinvigorate all willing to break free and stand in alliance with the disregarded. NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10

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12 13 14

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Arendt, H. (1970). On violence (p. 8). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Cornel West. (1993). Race matters (p. 104). Boston: Beacon Press. Reprinted in Baldwin, J. (1998). Collected essays (p. 173). New York: Library of America. “Holder: Student beating death ‘a wake-up call’. MSNBC (2009, October 7). Online: http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/33208453/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/ From “Dark Days”; reprinted in Baldwin, J. Collected essays (p. 794). Bacon, P., Jr. (2007, May 3). Obama reaches out with tough love. The Washington Post. Online: http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202813.html Ibid., Race matters, p. 7. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (p. 195). New York: The New Press. Shakur, T. (1991). Brenda’s got a baby. 2Pacalypse Now (Jive/Interscope/Priority, 1991). Giroux, H. A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? (p. 29). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. From “The Color Line Belts the World”; reprinted in Paschal, A. (Ed.). (1971). W. E. B. Du Bois: A reader (p. 263). New York: Collier Books, Macmillan. The Notorious B.I.G. (1994). Things done changed. In Ready to die. Bad Boy. Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. 72. For a detailed account, see Robbins, C. G. (2009). Expelling hope: The assault on youth and the militarization of schooling. New York: State University of New York Press.

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17

18

19 20

Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. 101. Stone, I. F. (1970, March 9). Who are the real kooks in our society? I.F. Stone’s Bi-Weekly. Online: http://www.ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1970mar09.pdf President Barack Obama in a Speech to Black Fathers on Father’s Day, June 15, 2008. Transcript: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15text-obama.html?ref=politics Themba-Nixon, M. (2009, October 13). Fighting for clean water in inner-city schools. The Defenders Online. Online: http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/10/13/fighting-for-clean-water-in-inner-cityschools/ Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. 18. Ibid., The New Jim Crow, p. 171.

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CHILDREN IN A HOSTILE WORLD When Justice Doesn’t Roll Down

Since the nineteenth century, developmental psychology has been moving away from the notion that children are nothing more or less than miniature adults. In suggesting that children need to learn to deal with adult levels of pressure, we risk doing them untold damage. —Etta Kralovec and John Buell, The End of Homework1 I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.” —Conservative shock jock Michael Savage2 How does an autistic, cognitively impaired 11-year-old end up charged with felony assault? Zakhqurey Price, who lives and schools in Arkansas with his family, learned on October 30, 2009, when, as his autism flared, two school staff members cornered and tried to subdue him, after which, the more he refused, law enforcement was summoned. The 11-year-old was afterward arrested, booked as a juvenile, charged with felony assault, and suspended for 12 school days. For three months before the incident, Carole Reynolds, his grandmother, had continually requested an Individual Education Plan (IEP)—required by law—to assist Zach in school (IQ score: 68, reading level: 2nd grade) and allay behavioral concerns. She tried to get it right early on but was told to wait till school started.3 “We made requests to receive a copy of his evaluation/assessment results before the October 15th temporary placement IEP meeting and were refused because they said it was not allowed by state law,” Reynolds reported.4 Even after repeated requests “for a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA), and positive behavior plan with positive behavior strategies,” Zach was denied Physical Therapy since, school administrators told her, he could “get around ... just fine.” And even with recommendation from a counseling center that Zach be provided a full-time aid, he never got one. At the October 15th meeting, “suggestions and guidelines were agreed upon but no formal positive behavior support plan was completed.” Two weeks later, the abusive incompetence ripened and bore fruit. And though his IEP rules out police intervention, Zach left school grounds in handcuffs. This is a child caught in the crosshairs of a society content in criminalizing helpless children—so sick a society that mentally challenged children face prosecution for 55

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being (essentially) challenged; also for failing to comply with orders even when all programs and assistance to foster rehabilitation have been denied them. Zach was subsequently consigned by the district to homebound schooling for four hours weekly. While bound, he lost his “favorite sibling,” a three-year-old little sister. Justice! The epigraph quote containing shock jock Michael Savage’s convictions say it all: that autism is an invention—made-up: merely the attention-seeking antics of bratty, moronic, idiotic kids refusing to act with dignity. Savage implored fathers— and, consequently, society—to thunder down on autistic kids: “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.” His prescription to cure autism must have delighted the Chicago police officer who slammed 15-year-old specialneeds student Marshawn Pitts into the ground, right before punching out his face. More and more working-class and middle-class youth and poor youth of color either find themselves with vastly diminishing opportunities or are fed into an ever-expanding system of disciplinary control that dehumanizes and criminalizes their behavior in multiple sites, extending from the home and school to the criminal justice system.5 Of this “hard war,” Zakhqurey Price and Marshawn Pitts can swap stories. More than indifference to the concerns of youth reduced to insignificance by racism and classism (or any of the other eternal vices), it demands callousness toward—indeed hatred of—young people who refuse to fall in line and do as told, for if Zakh and Marshawn had simply complied—cognitive impairment be damned!—their fates would have accounted much different. But long before stepping into school those separate days, both had “been cast into an ever-growing circle of group targeted through the rhetoric of war and terrorism.”6 In this respect, the 8 Afghanistan children executed late December 2009 by NATO forces can also sign off—from beyond. All enrolled in school, and ranging from 11 to 17 years of age, they were accused of manufacturing bombs for terrorists—a charge disputed by Afghan officials. “The deaths sparked protests across Afghanistan, with students in Jalalabad burning an effigy of Barack Obama and children in Kabul as young as 10 demanding that foreign forces should quit Afghanistan,” reported The Times of London.7 How do 8, doubtlessly innocent, children end up executed in a night-time raid based on inconclusive evidence? The puzzle isn’t so hard to piece, really, for if we believe, as a society, that children, no matter how misled, can be redeemed, we would demand new practices and new policies to reflect this conviction. But if we remain convinced that each one, no matter how young, should be held responsible always, and that a set of strict, often inhumane, regulations must be instituted to contain and curtail all poor children (particularly those of color), then it makes sense to suspend 11-year-olds for carrying Tweety Bird key chains to schools, and to handcuff and haul out of class five-yearolds who throw tantrums, and to hand 45-day suspensions to five-year-olds for packing Cub Scouts camping tools to school; it makes sense to remain quiet as 56

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police officers draw out guns and aim squarely at high school students, with sharptoothed K-9s on duty, all because a principal suspected drugs were being dealt on his campus. And the derivatives, in the last months alone, can fill up volumes: A 13-year-old expelled for turning in a pellet gun he found lying around. 25 middle school 12-year-old students arrested for a food fight. A 10-year-old suspended for bringing peppermint oil to school. An 8-year-old frisked each time he travels by plane (patted down first at 2), for sharing the exact name with a Department of Homeland Security personof-interest. Four 8-year-olds bound with jump rope by a substitute teacher for “whispering” instead of “writing,” thereafter informed, “This is what it’s going to be like when you’re in jail.” A 7-year-old whose braids were cut off by a “frustrated” teacher. A 6-year-old suspended for curling his fist into the shape of a gun and directing at students. A 5-year-old handcuffed and transported to a psych ward—and “evaluated”— for punching an assistant principal. A 4-year-old suspended for long hair. A 4-year-old suspended for hugging a teacher’s aide—interpretable, school officials said, as “inappropriate physical behavior [and] sexual contact and/or sexual harassment.” Society has no doubt dashed over the line of sanity and hypocrisy—when young kids are discouraged from, and disciplined for, physical affection. And insanity costs. A 2005 Yale University study, “Prekindergarteners Left Behind,” discovered roughly 5,117 prekindergarten students are expelled annually—3.2 times the national rate for K-12 students. Get ‘em while they’re young? No surprise that expelled children fare “more likely to be ill-prepared for kindergarten and elementary school, and are likely to be among those most at risk for school failure.”8 The words of Whitney Houston fail this generation: I believe the children are our future/ Teach them well and let them lead the way/ Show them all the beauty they possess inside/ Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Kids, no matter how young or little or innocent, can be suspended or expelled— and for infractions only a few years ago never even drew referrals. Demand creates supply, we are told—the times have changed: terrorism on the rise; guns and drugs at-large; video games simulating—and glamorizing—warfare; internet accessibility; swelling secularization (oh, my). All these account, then, for strident measures to protect kids (often from other kids) and instill in them Structure. At least, so insist apologists for zero tolerance and other fear-fueled, ethically empty policies. We can’t play today’s game by decades-old rules. We just can’t! They say the 21st century society is just as caustic as it is complex, and not even children should be spared 57

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the rod of incarceration if caught committing unlawful acts. Unlawfulness, for the curious, reaches from hugging and kissing to speaking out of turn in class. 8 years back, the Bush Administration was losing one of many wars with reality when, during the February 2002 Super Bowl, it premiered a $3.5 million, 30-second ad to warn young people drugs not only harmed the individual and immediate environment but sponsored terrorist activities, too. Acting young drug users confessed the following: “I helped murder families in Colombia.” “It was just innocent fun.” “I helped kill policemen.” “I helped a bomber get a fake passport.” “I helped blow up buildings.” The point: “Drug money supports terror. If you buy drugs you might, too.” This unswerving commitment to insanity and inaccuracy offered good glimpse of the minds at work that craft bellicose policies pushing hordes of young people into detention centers and adult prisons for practices less harmful than puffing through packs of cigarettes.9 Far back as 1952, crime novelist Jim Thompson saw something terrible taking shape: [K]ids are kids; and if that sounds pretty obvious, all I can say is that a lot of supposedly deep thinkers have never discovered that fact. A kid hears you cussing all the time, and he’s going to cuss, too. He won’t understand if you tell him it’s wrong. He’s loyal, and if you do it, it must be all right.10 Meaning, everything children learn is adult-created and adult-celebrated. Children see cult worship of men with guns, and they, too, start staggering into schools with guns. Children watch misogynist men treated like demigods, and they soon find out sexism pays much more than standing up for oppressed women. Children witness the world surrounding them brutal to the unemployed, the homeless, the underclass; they notice a paradigm which exalts certain people onto pedestals and demotes others beneath the ground; they come to full recognition of the privilege of power and the unconscionable fate that befalls anyone too stupid and too lazy to end up poor—and from Day 1 in prekindergarten they aim not to link education with selftransformation or to nourish the life of the mind, but to find out those who represent the underclass and how best to keep them so in order to survive. Bullies aren’t born— but created: created through steady indoctrination by various streams of media that shamelessly show men with the biggest muscles and deepest pockets getting their way always. In Head of State (2003), which chronicled (comedian Chris Rock) Mays Gilliam’s travel from local, hopeless politician to president of the United States, a particular moment stands out. “In Florida, today, guns and explosives were found at a junior high school,” announced a TV reporter. Gilliam’s advisors swiftly urge to seize the chance, as it could reduce drastically his opponent’s lead: “Talk about the kids—not about the guns.” His opponent, current vice-president and former army general, 58

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clamors the classic jingoistic diatribe, espousing neither substance nor sanity— mastered by politicians near and far: “Ladies and gentlemen, our American children are hurting today, and we need to reach out to them and give them all a good oldfashioned American hug. America is the greatest country on the face of the earth, and I want to say: God bless America! And no place else.” Gilliam decides otherwise. Though politically costly and right away devoured by mainstream press, he calls not for blame and punishment but introspection. Kids, he says, “act like us. We’re bombing countries all the time. If I was [a kid], I’d have a gun, too.” Kids not only act like adults—they are adults: the handiwork of an adult society that hates what it sees—and wishes to get rid of it by any means. Suspension, expulsion, incarceration—all bear out but a few of those means. And kids know this. Only delusions of grandeur comfort adults into thinking kids remain unaware. Well, kids are aware, and have begun taking steps toward safety from a society hostile to their very existence. Turn on nightly news and watch sensationalized, context-deprived reports—of kids flipping out in class, of kids liberating classmates from this hellhole, of kids liberating themselves. And who can blame them? Who dares cast stones as they discover that for no justifiable reason their worth and place in life were determined before birth: that no adequate measures have been (and will be) taken to help make their life meaningful and fulfilling: that no one cares enough to stretch a helping hand and lift them out of miserable conditions: that their very lives are often used as political pawns to checkmate opponents: that they have “been betrayed by the irresponsibility of their elders and relegated to the margins of society, often in ways that suggest that they are an excess, a population who, in the age of rampant greed and rabid individualism, appear to be expendable and disposable.”11 And if they protest too loudly, a jail cell in some discrete location features their name tags written all over its walls. The options left, they know, are very limited. But if we, as responsible, conscientious individuals—worthy of the title “human”—don’t start about the business of overthrowing these pernicious policies and practices that force children to pass through life complacent and compliant (in essence: lifeless), we would not only have sold out a vibrant generation well able to change the world—we would be endangering our very security and existence. Only so many prisons can a society build. NOTES 1

2

3

4

Kralovec, E., & Buell, J. (2000). The end of homework: How homework disrupts families, overburdens children, and limits learning (p. 13). Boston: Beacon Press. Savage on autism. Media Matters for America (2008, July 17). Online: http://www.mediamatters. org/research/200807170005 5th grader with autism charged with felony assault. Making Special Education Actually Work (2009, December 31). Online: http://www.kps4parents.org/blog/?p=712 Hansen, R. (2009, December 30). Fifth grade autistic boy charged with a felony. Examiner. Online: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-4959-Special-Education-Examiner~y2009m12d30-Autismis-considered-a-felony-in-fifth-grade#

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Giroux, H. A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? (p. 72). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ibid. Starkey, J. (2010, January 1). Hamid Karzai demands US hand over gunmen who killed children. The Times. Gilliam, W. S. “Prekindergarteners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Prekindergarten Programs,” Foundation for Child Development Policy Brief (May 2005 - Series No. 3). Online: http://www.fcdus.org/usr_doc/ExpulsionPolicyBrief.pdf New U.S. ads tie drug use to terrorism funding. CNN (2002, Febrary 4). Online: http://archives.cnn.com/ 2002/US/02/04/ret.terrorism.drugs/index.html Thompson, J. (1997). The killer inside me; reprinted in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (p. 68). New York: Penguin Books. Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. xi.

CHAPTER 9

VICTIMS AND VULTURES Sarah Kruzan, Injustice, and the Trials of Today

If young people were once defined as part of the vocabulary of innocence and compassion, they are now largely understood through the discourse of fear, guilt, and punishment. —Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society1 But the system works as it works, and it attracts the people it attracts. The poor, the Black, and the ignorant become the stepping stones of careers; for the people who make up this remarkable club are judged by their number of arrests and convictions. These matter far more than justice, if justice can be said to matter at all. —James Baldwin, No Name in the Street2 One October 2009 evening, I was browsing the web and ran across the following headline: “16yr old gets life in prison for killing her pimp.” Perhaps a considerable awareness of internet culture—Shock and Awe = Traffic—prompted the initial skepticism, but upon clicking this YouTube video link all ambiguity vanished, for I soon learned of Sarah Kruzan, 31, a female inmate in California. Filmed by the National Center for Youth Law, an advocacy group assisting her, Sarah detailed her background and the path leading up to the prison cell in which she currently resides. She grew up in Riverside, California, in the home of a drug-addicted mother who frequently assaulted her. Through all, this “over-achiever” excelled in school, reaching the principal’s honor roll consistently, running track, winning a Young Authors Award for a book on the effects of drugs. It appeared the perfect Horatio Alger mythology vindicated, until, at 11, she met a 31-year-old man, George Gilbert “G.G.” Howard, who often took her and her friends skating and to the mall, and filled the “father figure” vacuum in her heart. “G.G. was there at some times,” she said, “and he would talk to me, take me out, and give me all these lavish gifts. … And then he would tell me, sex-wise, ‘You don’t need to give it up for free’.” G.G., a masterful manipulator, knew what he wanted—and just how to get it. When Sarah turned 13, he raped her. “He uses his manhood to hurt—like, break you in,” Sarah recounted. (Breakyou-in: prostitution.) The same age, Sarah was put on the streets, working 12-hour shifts (6 P.M. – 6 A.M.) for G.G. She earned nothing in those years. “Everything was his.”

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Three years later, fed up and frustrated, Sarah snapped and killed G.G., and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Plus four years. In court, “I remember my lawyer saying that he wanted to ask for me to be sentenced as a Juvenile because Y.A. [California Youth Authority] had found me amenable and susceptible to the [abusive] treatment; but the judge said that because of my crime—and he said it was well thought-out—that I deserved life without.” “That means I’m gonna die here,” she reflected and, with teary eyes, admitted all wrongdoing: “I definitely know I deserve punishment: I mean, you don’t just take somebody’s life and think that it’s okay. So, yes, definitely, I deserve punishment.” But then she asks and answers a question the judge who sentenced and condemned her for lack of “moral scruples” should have pondered with stricter discipline: “How much? I don’t know.” And even while any chance of life beyond bars seems a stretch for Sarah, she’s tried to “educate” herself, “reading books”—though confessing it’s hard to “excel in prison.” Given the chance at a parole hearing, Sarah would like to tell the Board: “First of all, I’ve learned what moral scruples are; second, that every day is a challenge … that I’ve found the ability to believe in myself, and that I have a lot of good to offer, now—the person who I am today, at 29: I believe that I could set a positive example. I’m very determined to show that no matter what you’ve done, or where you’ve come from, or what you’ve experienced in life, it’s up to you to change.” Welcome to California, a state with 150,000 inmates, 70% recidivism, 200% capacity, and a $10 billion annual prison budget.3 Here, harmless offenders like Sarah Kruzan, whose actions while unlawful seem justifiable, rot out eternally, denied any shot at redemption. Sarah Kruzan is a woman—and of color. She hit the jackpot with a racist and sexist justice system—dominated by White male judges. Gender, for her, lords the rings because, even in progressive deliberations of the repugnant disproportionate incarceration of Black males, the booming of incarcerated females often escapes unaddressed. According to a March 2008 report by the Women In Prison Project, from “1995 to 2006, the number of women inmates in state and federal prisons nationwide increased by 64%,” while the “growth rate for women in state and federal prisons in 2006 (4.5%) was higher than the average annual rate of growth in each of the previous five years (2.9%).”4 In all the years Sarah Kruzan was being abused, tortured, manhandled, and molested, how many who mattered—who could intervene—failed her? Failure has much to do with “public attitudes,” as revealed in a July 2009 PBS feature, “Fighting Child Prostitution,” based on the Atlanta prostitution market. On several reports of prostitution victims “going to jail while their pimps and johns ran free,” Alesia Adams, a social worker against sexual exploitation, explained: “Very few people see these children as victims. And they don’t understand the … victimization of this child and the dynamics of what has happened to her.” Failure reflects the priorities and presuppositions of a morally bankrupt society. It explains why the 2006 Academy Award for Best Original Song went to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” a commercial Rap tale bemoaning the hardships of making change off these women. 62

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If G.G. survived, history suggests he wouldn’t have faced any charges for conducting a prostitution ring, for snatching from young girls their innocence—for building with their humanities an economic empire of oppression. Justice would have stood still: transforming a vulture into a victim, and a victim into a vulture. Lena Baker would agree—a Black maid denied clemency and executed in 1945 for murdering her White male pimp/captor, ripping the veil off a society, and its justice system, in bed with patriarchal racism. “What I done, I did in self-defense or I would have been killed myself,” her last words read. “Where I was, I could not overcome it.”5 Kruzan’s case also directs emphasis upon a striking phenomenon: kids as financial fodder for the prison beast. Early 2008, two Pennsylvania judges left the bench for pocketing $2.6 million in kickbacks by sentencing teenagers to privately run juvenile detention centers. One student earned three months for building a spoof MySpace page satirizing her principal.6 And yet, mainstream coverage fell bitterly short of addressing the school-to-prison pipeline or penitentiary privatization schemes that bank on human error, suggesting this instance marked but an arbitrary, exceptional case of lack-of-moral-scruples. In March 2010, an NYPD officer, Adil Polanco, revealed to a local ABC News reporter the demands of service—at least 1 arrest and 20 summonses each month. Failure to meet “quota” could mean denial of shift changes and denial of overtime pay and off-days. Once trapped in the throes were two brothers and three friends, one of whom had fallen and bruised his eye while racing. Curious officers demanded and received answers, but “that didn’t matter to them.” All five received summonses for unlawful assembly and spent overnight in jail. They faced no judge. Officers let them out the back door upon daybreak. “We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults,” Polanco lamented. “At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number’s there. So our choice is to come up with the number.”7 Security is costly. Wallace Shawn accounts: “We actually have a large army as well, and a navy and an air force, plus the F.B.I., Coast Guard, Central Intelligence Agency, and marine—oy. It turned out that simply in order to be secure and protect our neighborhood, we needed an empire.”8 Sarah Kruzan was condemned to eternal damnation on murder charges, leaving unanswered pressing questions: Who was the real killer? Did G.G. not take out of her all that mattered—so much that killing him seemed the only way to reclaim whatever remained? Why would a justice system “blind” to bias and prejudice afford life after death to vultures? Did it occur to the judge who extended this innocent woman’s suffering that lectures on “moral scruples” do as much good for sexually abused victims as sending prostitutes back into the battering arms of their pimps? Kruzan, like Baker, like countless other women, felt forced, following years of abuse by men who easily leapt over whatever humble and harmless hurdles have been erected by law. But when the bolts safeguarding the soul of any society have been capped off, victims who self-liberate from under their oppressor’s heels are punished far worse than they ever suffered. A soulless society teaches kids early on 63

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that to protest injustice incurs potential punishment: it expects—even encourages— young girls to bear immense pain and suspend taking matters into their hands when all else fails. Children want a predictable, orderly world. They need a program of some kind. They need a life that is organized and structured. They need a steady family life, all-powerful parents that protect and shield them from harm. Inconsistent orders or extreme permissiveness disturbs their security: they don’t feel safe. Injustice and unfairness are intolerable to them.9 Each year nearly two million kids shuffle through juvenile courts, ensuring 90,000 wallow incarcerated in juvenile facilities on any given day. Each year, 200,000 kids— some too young to legally drive cars, drink liquor, or buy tickets to NC-17 movies— are tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult prisons. Between 1985 and 2002 alone, the number of kids sentenced to residential placements shot up 44%.10 The result: 2225 people in prison cells nationwide locked up forever for crimes committed under the age of 18, 73 of which were 13- or 14-year-olds at the time.11 No one is too young anymore to be arrested, locked up, and dispossessed permanently. The principles upon which society once stood—that all kids deserve fair shots at redemption—don’t hold any longer. Today, for “stealing loose change from unlocked cars to buy a bag of chips,” 14-year-olds are stiffed with one-year bids.12 In an episode of the popular courtroom TV show Judge Judy, this new-age principle earned acclaim. The imposing 68-year-old character heartlessly interrogated an 11-year-old boy in front of his mother, who had to stand back and watch her son reduced to a pint-sized scoundrel. He had been accused of throwing a pinecone through some lady’s windshield. Judy called him up to the stand and grilled him into immediate submission. “Now we’re gonna get down to business because, you know, sometimes you tell your mother a bologna story and she believes you, right?” Yes, the boy responded, upon which she delivered a witchy whisper—“I don’t.” Then a full minute of intense interrogation. “I raised a lot of children. I like children who tell the truth, and children who don’t tell the truth do not do well here. We understand each other?” she asked. “So I don’t care what bologna story you told your mother. Here we’re going to talk about the truth because I know everything,” she bullied on. Judy questioned his academic abilities, mocked his high-pitched tone, made of him a miscreant, and satisfied her audience with laughter, then let him off after four minutes of TV time. He tried to take a seat. She thundered fearsomely: “I said, Stand!—over there,” directing him to his mother’s side. “I don’t believe that he was lying; I think that you’re very intimidating to him,” insisted the boy’s mother to Judy, who right off set on a rampage: “Listen to me! This little boy who has been suspended from school at least three times is not so intimidated by an adult.” He is “a child that’s troubled—with a big ‘T’,” the unlicensed Judy diagnosed. Didn’t matter that sometime between walking into the courtroom to steering into the face of a woman six times his age, he had been transformed from “a child that’s troubled” to a troubling child—with a big T. 64

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Today, we face a reality with no precedent—children born into a world hostile to their very existence: legislators working swiftly to pass anti-gang laws and zerotolerance policies they hope fervently their kids never fall victim to; for what parent would ever feel comforted in hearing his 11-year-old daughter was suspended from school for bringing along a pair of scissors, or that her 11-year-old autistic son was booked and charged with felony assault at the local precinct for resisting abusive adults? Cornel West has it right: [O]ur kids today see clearly the hypocrisies and mendacities of our society, and as they grow up they begin to question in a fundamental way some of the lies that they’ve received from society. … This often leads to an ardent disappointment, and even anger, about the failures of our society to consistently uphold the democratic and humanitarian values that can be born in youths in this phase of their life.13 The relationship between society and kids rests on lies and myths. Kids are told hard work ensures a prosperous future. Not true. Kids are told doing the right thing invites righteous rewards. Far from true. Kids are told only bad kids give the criminal justice system meaning: that the road from cradle to cell is narrow and selective, that lady justice weighs a clean conscience and can do no wrong. Tell that to Sarah Kruzan—who knows the scales of justice often tilt to favor vultures, more so to extend the suffering of victims. NOTES 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

11

12

13

Giroux, H. A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? (p. 20). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldwin, J. (1972). No name in the street (pp. 143–144). New York: Dial Press. NewsHour. (2009, August 19). California budget woes squeeze overcrowded prisons. PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec09/prisons_08-19.html Fact Sheet. (2008, March). Women in prison fact sheet. Women in Prison Project. Online: http:// www. womenandprison.org/WomenInPrisonProject-factsheet.pdf Philips, L. B. (2003, May 1). The Lena Baker story: Execution in a small town. The Black Commentator, (#40). Online: http://www.blackcommentator.com/40/40_guest_commentary.html Urbina, I., & Hamill, S. D. (2009, February 12). Judges plead guilty in scheme to jail youths for profit. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html Hoffer, J. (2010, March 3). NYPD officer claims pressure to make arrests. WABC. Online: http:// www.abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=7305356 Shawn, W. (2009). Essays (p. 20). Chicago: Haymarket Books. Samuel Bois, J. (1973). The art of awareness: A textbook on general semantics and epistemics (p. 237). Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Co. Cited in the Campaign for Youth Justice National Statistics. Online: http://www.campaignforyouth justice.org/national-statistics.html Equal Justice Initiative. (2007, November). Cruel and unusual: Sentencing 13- and 14-year-old children to die in prison. Online: http://www.eji.org/eji/files/20071017cruelandunusual.pdf Stier, K. (2009, March 24). Getting the juvenile-justice system to grow up. Time. Online: http://www. time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887182,00.html West, C. (2004 paperback ed.). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism (p. 177). New York: Penguin Group.

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IN LOVE WITH A STRIPPER Young Girls as Preys in a Predator Society

Encouraging five- to ten-year-old children to model themselves after sex workers suggests the degree to which matters of ethics and propriety have been decoupled from the world of marketing and advertising, even when the target audience is young children. The representational politics at work … connect children’s bodies to a reductive notion of sexuality, pleasure and commodification, while depicting children’s sexuality and bodies as nothing more than objects for voyeuristic adult consumption and crude financial profit. —Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society1 In late 2009, a toy company began selling a female doll which, as main feature, twirled around a plastic stripper poll. “The doll begins dancing when the music is turned on,” a blogger described, “and she goes ‘up and down’ and ‘round and round’.” On the box cover ran the following: “Style.” “Interesting.” “Music.” “Flash.” “Up and Down.” “Go Round and Round.” The targeted demographic: kids unskilled to decipher this insidious suggestion, of the stripper lifestyle as fun and chic—the thing to be. Gone are the days when society’s young girls are encouraged to emulate educators, pioneers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, architects, activists, artists, or cultural critics. Today, the energy-expunging, dignity-diminishing exercise of stripping— all to temper the carnal demands of lustful men—is the new it. But selling spiritual death to children marks nothing new. For years now, corporations, in frenzy to enlarge coffers, have found children (and more so young girls) most vulnerable and lucrative. “Subject to an advertising and marketing industry that spends over $17 billion a year on shaping children’s identities and desires,” writes Henry Giroux, “American youth are commercially carpet-bombed through a never-ending proliferation of market strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives.”2 The Market reigns sovereign, and profit prizes over all objectives; and items targeted at young girls offer good ground to understand how far into the gutter of exploitation some companies would stoop and slurp—so long as the promise of profit abounds: Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing franchise for young people, has earned a reputation for its risqué catalogues filled with promotional ads of scantily clad kids and its over-the-top sexual advice columns for teens and preteens; one catalogue featured an ad for thongs for ten-year-olds with the words “eye candy” and “wink wink” written on them. … Girls as young as six years old 67

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are being sold lacy underwear, push-up bras and “date night accessories” for their various doll collections.3 Disgusted? Turn on Disney and watch in horror. In The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Giroux argues adeptly that kids raised on Disney often fall prey to primitive, deleterious values—mostly funneled through a Eurocentric Male Supremacist prism. Reading into classic, blockbuster Disney pictures like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, Giroux concludes “Disney is not merely about peddling entertainment; it is also about politics, economics, and education.”4 Certainly, young Black and Brown girls, with TV schedules devoted to Disney, luck out on all counts. Most Disney animated pictures have pointedly normalized (and often championed) sexism: men are dominative characters who deserve their way (with women) all times; and women must surrender to the crude advances of these men—even men they despise. (Men who refuse to take “No!” for an answer.) In Beauty and the Beast, Belle, the innocent and feckless female, swallows constant verbal abuse and torment from the maniacal Beast who once kidnapped and starved her. She somehow musters and manages, through all, to love him enough to see the soft, subtle prince lurking, and laments later: There’s something sweet/ And almost kind/ But he was mean/ And he was coarse/ And unrefined/ And now he’s dear/ And so unsure/ I wonder why/ I didn’t see it there before/. As though abusive boyfriends and husbands are not so but, alas!, genteel personalities deprived of affection, and afraid to unburden their inner prince. Love, of course, is more potent than punishment. But when life-and-death concerns are brought to bear, not only is it insidious, but also insane, to encourage women or girls trapped in homes or relationships with demented, patriarchal male partners to keep still and dig further down till the pearl shines through—till the better angels of his nature awake. It all works out, however, for the subservient and dependent female whose life counts for nothing without a male around to validate. Boys are no less destroyed psychologically. Imagine young men encouraged to test the limits of their hormonal predilections because no matter how much abusive, how far invasive, the young lady doesn’t feel dehumanized but flattered by the attention of a man—without whom her life wouldn’t count a shilling. There are no winners here. Boy and girl, man and woman, are driven almost beyond the pointof-no-return—never chanced to call into question values that pleasure exerting pain on human life. Disney’s deal with parents is terribly complex. Parents must be willing to submit their kids up for inspection, after which Disney decides which roles they fit, and which identities they adopt. But parents must also realize the prize of the birthright: admission of inherent deficiency, in themselves and in their kids. After all, successful parents don’t need imaginary characters raising their kids: and smart kids don’t need imaginary characters for stimulation: and, more pernicious, a manageable society does not need moral lessons from the world’s largest media and entertainment empire. But such is the deal brokered, which explains why Disney has raked in millions of dollars from the absurd Baby Einstein products which swear to enable toddlers whose parents “want their kids to keep up in a highly competitive world”—a 68

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Darwinian Society. It also explains why DisneyFamily.com was launched to, amongst other excuses, provide “resources on parenting and raising healthy children.” For this reason, in Disney’s film history adults have always represented quirky, uncouth, uncool, burdensome characters. Kids are central target—adults: merely proxy. Once the heart of the child has been claimed, the adult is of no use anymore, and kids must come to understand that. Ironically many adults were raised by/on Disney, and stand forever armed to bring down the hammer on anyone who claims Disney does more than entertain—that it educates (explicitly or otherwise). This has made Disney Teflon for years—even as it carries out some of the most retrograde work practices in the modern world, and bombards children with consumerism, and attempts to subvert parental authority, individual agency, social community, public spaces, and private lives. Disney also wins in a world where the worth of children factor less each day, where hundreds of billions of dollars are cashed in annually from direct marketing to kids of any age. Parents who think the battle stops once the credits roll out stand in no shape ready for the feistier war of commercialism and commodification that turns kids into brands and foot-soldiers for a multi-media giant/cultural engine “capitaliz[ing] on children as the new arena for the production of pleasure and commercial exploitation.”5 All Disney motion pictures, for this reason, sponsor a “commercial blitzkrieg aimed at excessive consumerism, selfishness, and individualism,” ushering toys, dolls, backpacks, clothing, pillows, novels, and other high-priced accessories.6 “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective,” revealed Michael Eisner, former CEO of The Walt Disney Co. in a leaked internal memo. Mickey Mouse has left the building! After money, Disney pursues—and with programming sure to wreck young girls’ self-esteems, for Disney is anything but innocent in message and meaning.7 Its highly successful sitcoms like Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place, starring female teen pop stars, never fail in stretching toward one definite climax— a male character whose interest is sought at all costs. Equally successful sitcoms like The Suite Life on Deck, starring two male teen icons, hold one ambition sovereign— mackin’. The polar opposite characters celebrate crypto-sexual exploits which, for their age, and for kids as young as 6 watching, hold no healthy benefits. Early 2009, the irreverent animated show South Park addressed Disney’s exorbitant promotion of hackneyed boy bands to preteen and teenage girls, insisting parents can’t afford to trust kids with groups who swear Innocence and claim to be avowed Christians because “purity rings” and “love” for “God” are all part of the act. The better, South Park suggested, to “sell sex to the little girls” without being faulted. Evidence: unwitting parents honor the Jonas Brothers as holy and harmless (and good for their daughters), but at concerts the band routinely sprays white foam over adoring, however oblivious, tween and teen female fans. Same goes for female teen pop stars, like Miley Cyrus (host of Hannah Montana), who at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards performed upon an ice cream cart, with a supporting stripper pole. Not long before, (then 16-years-old) Cyrus had posed provocatively in a spread for Elle magazine. Father Billy Ray Cyrus was asked his 69

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thoughts, and spilled: “You know what? I just think that Miley loves entertaining people.” Channeling Eisner, Cyrus rebuffed critics a year later. “My job first is to entertain and do what I love and if you don’t like it, then change the channel. I would do that pole dance a thousand times again, because it was right for the song and that performance.” Selling stripping and pole-dancing to preteen fans should least concern critics because “if you think dancing on top of an ice-cream cart with a pole is bad, then go check what 90% of the high schoolers are really up to.”8 True. But what better ambassador to furnish the “ongoing reification of young girls in a market society that largely reduces them to commodities, sexual objects, and infantilized accessories for boys and men.”9 In 2007, Viacom subsidiary VH1, desperate to explore “the wonderful world of children’s beauty pageants,” put up a one-hour documentary, Little Beauties: Ultimate Kiddie Queen Showdown. Producers promised behind-the-scenes “humor and love” that make child pageants delightful. Far from demeaning and degrading, selling and sexualizing young girls, pageants can be fun and good for self-esteem. VH1 is on good ground with WE tv, a cable channel which hosts a weekly show, Little Miss Perfect, following girls as young as four each step through their quests—or the quests of parents and other enabling lunatics—of walking off with the tiara. Privacy is no issue here, neither is sanity. Parents screech down the throats of children for not strutting right, for forgetting routines; pageant coaches reduce the self-worth of their clients beneath the ground; psychopathic judges evaluate “contestants” on details specific as beauty, class, (sexually explicit) poses and performances. The consequences loom large: mothers watching young girls celebrated as more beautiful (than others) might absorb harmful values; young girls would be brainwashed, watching (inordinately White) kids their age spray-tanned, obscenely madeup, dressed to imitate supermodels—just to be judged by (overwhelmingly older White) males; and, in due time, a generation of girls might spring forth whose values reverse back to a time when women, it was said, preferred nothing more to languishing at home and anticipating the return of hardworking husbands after a hard day’s labor. In shorter words: a predator society—where young girls find greater joy stripping than reading, and in waiting for a knight in shining armor to swoop down and sweep their feet off, rather than charting independent courses toward self-fulfillment. Cornel West explains: The incessant media bombardment of images … on TV and in movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification—a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation—is the only way of being human. … This media bombardment not only robs young people of their right to struggle for maturity—by glamorizing possessive individualism at the expense of democratic individuality—but also leaves them ill equipped to deal with the spiritual malnutrition that awaits them after their endless pursuit of pleasure.10

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With authoritarian companies and complexes, which shoot for profit and nothing else, which hold no “obligation” or “objective” esteemed enough to trump the Penny Pursuit, no one is safe anymore. Not even children. Not even toddlers. Not even young girls. “[I]n this business the only persons deceived are the poor unfortunate girls,” Tolstoy understood.11 And this business boasts multi-billion dollar annual profits. But to keep in business, many a parent must be willing to sell their own children. NOTES 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9 10

11

Giroux, H. A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? (p. 45). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. 41. Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, pp. 44–45. Giroux, H. A. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence (p. 163). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Giroux, H. A. (2000). Stealing innocence: Youth, corporate power, and the politics of culture (p. 50). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ibid., The mouse that roared, p. 163. For more, see the brilliant documentary, Mickey Mouse monopoly: Disney, childhood & corporate power. Media Education Foundation. (2001). Sessums, K. (2010, March 21). Nobody’s teen queen. Parade. Online: http://www.parade.com/ celebrity/2010/03/miley-cyrus.html Ibid., Youth in a suspect society, p. 155. West, C. (2004 paperback ed.). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism (p. 177). New York: Penguin Group. From “The Kreutzer Sonata”; reprinted in Tolstoy, L. (2004). The death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories (p. 164). New York: Barnes & Noble Books.

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ON THE HEALTH AND HAPPINESS OF KIDS

By encouraging children to nag, and by bombarding them with messages that material goods are the key to happiness, the marketing industry is taking advantage of parents’ innate desire for their children to be happy. … By encouraging children to nag, one aspect of “doing our job” is to foment family stress. For advertisers, another aspect of doing their job is to insure that the products children nag for are the brands their companies represent. —Susan Linn, Consuming Kids1 On January 20, 2010, the Chicago Tribune ran a front-page report on the ongoing selling of sugar-saturated, nutrient-deficient cereals, despite a 2006 pledge2 from leading cereal companies to promote healthier options to children under 12. Four years since, according to the October 2009 Yale University study upon which this report was based,3 most had advanced little: still “aggressively” promoting unhealthy products as a “nutritious way to start the day.” In 2008, over $156 million—highest for any other category of packaged food— was spent marketing to kids cereals which contained high doses of sugar, some up to 43%. “When we looked at the nutritional quality of [the] cereal, we realized it’s not just that the companies are marketing unhealthy products to children,” lead author Jennifer Harris was quoted. “It’s that they are only marketing unhealthy products.”4 ***

That the rapacious food industry finds little compelling in playing fairly with the health and happiness of kids should provoke no surprise; but that government agencies can only boast of little done in addressing these worrisome findings gives greater need for pause. It’s been a long and lethargic journey since 1980, when the Federal Trade Commission proposed restrictions on advertising aimed at kids. Congress caught whiff of this intent and struck down at once, deregulating the commercial sphere. Then, companies spent $100 million annually selling kids products. Three decades later, over $17 billion.5 There’s a reason why, and it’s not so hard to come by: children, vulnerable to catchy slogans and enrapturing graphics, can persuade parents—to do anything. Anyone who’s watched a kid convulsing by a grocery aisle knows the stakes. Unseen by most parents, however, are the invincible hands of the ventriloquists string-pulling their kids (by now wiggling rhythmically upside down and baying at cereal packs). For years, marketers have clung to the fantastic notion that kids—more so “tweens”—want to grow up a lot faster: and, thus, should be exploited limitlessly. 73

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Commercials aimed at children in the last decade have made of adults useless and unnecessary cramps interested only in bringing hell to kids’ happiness. Parents have been popular targets: the classic cuts show children nagging parents endlessly for products parents consider unhealthy, until finally the parents give in to restore peace within the home. All this, ringing a loud bell in kids’ ears: parents really have no idea what a kid wants, and when they veto a product, a good nagging would always do the trick. Advertisers share no shame exploiting the insecurities of young children or assaulting authority within family structure. They bluster openly of turning kids into productpitchers to Mom and Dad. Early as a decade back, Heinz catsup division senior brands manager Kelly Stitt tore down what remained of the blinds, revealing kids must be manipulated to pester parents for profit: “All our advertising is targeted to kids. You want that nag factor so that seven-year-old Sarah is nagging Mom in the grocery store to buy Funky Purple. We’re not sure Mom would reach out for it on her own.”6 Selling parents on products traces but one string of the many floating from the puppets’ backs. Marketing companies also understand the power of peer pressure, and don’t mind abusing friendship for profit. Susan Linn reported in her exceptional book, Consuming Kids (2004), of companies “actually comb[ing] neighborhoods to find what they refer to as trendsetters, knowing that when a trendsetter uses a product, other kids will want to use it.”7 No more can, or should, kids bond around any non-commercial values; and at very young ages kids learn that tinkering with the emotional frailties and vulnerabilities of loved ones shouldn’t elicit an iota of concern. In past years, marketers have also ventured into “relationship mining,” falling a sharp gaze upon families—as toy and food companies see in kids perfect, unblemished jewels enshrined within the muddied land of parenting. Drill here; drill now—and with such intensity as to displace parents who out of courageous concern for their kids cap limits on electronic use or television watching. And the miners don’t stop drilling until stumbling upon gems. To this end is the perception of families as repositories “containing valuables that are there for the extracting—and exploiting.”8 And no kid is too young to be mined. Kids as young as six-months-old can identify brands, some studies suggest. The price: a $10 billion infant and toddler market.9 Smart marketers know birth isn’t even early enough. Brand Loyalty can be sealed before the fetus outs its first scream. Once a case of cradle-to-the-grave, today we hear of “conception to the grave.”10 Early as 1988, a senior vice-president of research at Nickelodeon was quoted in a Chicago Tribune report guaranteeing a future wave storming into homes at unprecedented speed: “The latest European research shows that product preferences develop at a much earlier age than anyone had ever thought. … As people begin to understand this, to see how brand loyalty transfers to adulthood, there is almost nothing that won’t be advertised as for children.”11 Two decades since, the doors have flown apart, welcoming all intruders. At the 1996 annual powerhouse marketing conference Kid Power! a marketing director for McDonald’s delivered his keynote address on “Softening the Parental Veto.” Later, marketing consultant Paul Kurnit raised the bar. “[A]ntisocial behavior 74

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in pursuit of a product is a good thing,” he assured.12 Then he proudly batted theories no sane person cannot but parallel with another kind of child-obsessed perversion— which we treat worse than earth scum. “Kids love advertising,” he swung. “It’s a gift. It’s something they want. There’s something to be said, by the way, about being there first and about branding children and owning them in that way.” Kids, innocent and insecure, and without the wealth of experience to decipher good and evil, might jump into cars with strangers who promise candy or warm rides to school on a snowy day. However horrid the outcome leaves not one spot of stain on the conscience of men like Kurnit—divorced from any modicum of decency. But for all the benevolent work of marketers who prey on innocence and insecurity, no other clan more deserves Congressional Medals of Honor than child psychologists who share research with corporations and lead them through the occupied minds of kids. In 1992, the American Psychological Association published its Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, and implored psychologists in a section on “Social Responsibility” to “apply and make public their knowledge of psychology in order to contribute to human welfare.” In the June 2003 edition, the Social Responsibility section was altogether omitted.13 And for good reason: through the last three decades, psychologists have increasingly prostituted their services to advertising firms, cleaning out the dusty windows to conceal what’s left of the privacies of kids, placing at risk the very clients parents pay them to service. Through this great betrayal do many companies make ends meet, and through this shameless shilling do they fine-tune advertising to hit kids precisely where it hurts, to weaken their knees. With focus groups—in which psychologists have kids evaluate products—marketers glean greater sense of what, and how, to promote. On the playground, in the classroom, at the daycare, in the bedroom and bathroom (young girls swimming in bubble-soaked bathtubs, shampoo raining down their hair)— every public and private space kids once called their own has been violated. ***

The average preschooler, reported the Tribune, viewed more than 500 cereal TV ads in 2008. Most kids “would have to watch 10 hours of television before … one ad for healthy food” appears. The effect: “a whopping 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium than those aimed at adults.” Early December 2009, USA Today published an exposé of tainted beef, deemed unsafe by public health officials, shipped to school cafeterias and served to students.14 The cause: corruption, negligence, graft. Today, kids no more count as healthy investments. Meaning, often less secure standards are used to address them than those applied for adults. A walk through most public school cafeterias confirms this point. And as if fatty, grease-begotten food items weren’t bad enough, now kids fall prey to poisoned beef in the one institution once thought of safe and secure for them. Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist Sean Croxton, founder of Underground Wellness.com, explained in January 2010 the implications of the Tribune report and Yale Study.15 Parents cannot afford to take seriously any pledges because “although the food companies may put out a press release saying that they’re going to take 75

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X and Y ingredients out of foods, very seldom do they actually follow through. It’s just good Public Relations,” he said. “It just perpetuates what a lot of people think about the food companies—that they’re really nice people, that they really care about us.” For profit-driven corporations, only one factor counts: profit. “If advertising to children is what’s bringing in the money, why would they stop it?” Just as assuredly should parents expect strident government regulations because, though unknown to most, many elected officials “work in cahoots with the corporations.” Take Michael Taylor, current senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA, who worked previously as lawyer and, later, vice-president of public policy for biotech giant Monsanto.16 Often, Croxton said, products advertised on TV, or displayed on billboards, or composed as Rap jingles, or endorsed by star athletes, end up “not just as a treat—these are the kids’ diets.” And the alarm bells ought to toll louder in parents’ heads because “you can’t develop their brains and bodies without proper ingredients.” Most kids sit tied to TV screens for 4 hours or more daily, accounting, according to one study, for over 40,000 TV ads absorbed annually.17 A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released early 2010 reported the average young American (8-to-18 years of age) spends almost 8 hours weekly consuming multiple media forms (up 1 hour, 17 minutes a day in just 5 years),18 meaning, once children born today turn 30, most would have spent an entire decade transfixed before some type of digital screen. How retooled become the brains—and eyes!—of kids following series of commercials praising sugary cereals, greasy burgers, artificially flavored soda, sodium-rich snacks, and genetically modified fruits as safe—and the only—options worth considering when shopping at the grocery store or lunching at a fast food shop. “By the end of [this] decade,” predicted the International Obesity Taskforce in 2006, “46 percent of children in North and South America are projected to be overweight and 15 percent will be obese.”19 Between 1976 and 2004, children severely obese in America tripled to 2.7 million. Today 1 in 3 children are either overweight or obese. And yet the health and emotional consequences—type 2 diabetes, infertility, melancholy, self-flagellation, etc.—haven’t starved the consciences of food companies and the government agencies whetting their appetite. “I don’t want our kids to live diminished lives because we failed to step up today,” confessed First Lady Michelle Obama February 2010, upon launching the Let’s Move campaign to end childhood obesity. “I don’t want them looking back decades from now and asking us: Why didn’t you help us when you had a chance? Why didn’t you put us first when it mattered most?”20 Finally a first lady nails this tragedy squarely—the unwillingness of an adult society to intervene decisively on behalf of at-risk kids. The Chicago Tribune report took note of websites set up to keep kids connected even when not facing a TV screen: “Millsberry.com and Postopia.com, the largest youth-targeted cereal Web sites, are designed to keep children engaged in a branded environment. On Millsberry, where visitors can design an avatar and explore the ‘Millsberry’ city, Trix, Lucky Charms and Honey Nut Cheerios were each prominently featured on the majority of the pages.” 76

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Television marks but one frontier of the various fronts on which marketers aim to brand kids for life. With cell phones and video games, slumber parties and websites (many of which require detailed personal info), the war for the mind, attention, and loyalty of kids wages strong. In this digital age where privacy is all but a forgone privilege, kids can be reached anywhere, and by anyone. Locking mature programs with cable passwords and monitoring TV ads meticulously won’t do any longer. As reported by ABC News in November 2009, soda giant Coca-Cola employs “technology” through which teens can “send audio messages to each other at high frequencies, sounds that adults over 25 cannot hear.”21 Children denied the skills of media literacy fall victim fast to predator corporations boundless in imagination and interest. As schools depend more on food and drink conglomerates for financial stability, calls for media literacy curricula fall largely on stuffed ears. Many schools today hold media literacy at arm’s length, watchful of the potential conflicts of interest in teaching kids to diligently decipher deceitful commercials, all the while promoting calorie-stacked soft drinks and candy as essential to school survival. Sold out of a meaningful education are millions of kids uninformed that “[t]he purpose of schools, in part, is to promote reason. And the purpose of advertising is to subvert reason to promote the sale of a product. And for that reason alone, advertising has no proper place in the school.”22 Advertising creeps up at every nook, cranny, and corner of schools these days. On buses and scorecards, in hallways and cafeterias, in textbooks and classrooms—brands drive hard bargains to kids. How fortunate for the food companies that we live in a society convinced kids aren’t worth the wait anymore? Very few, like 2010 South Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Andre Bauer (Lt. Gov. at the time), understand the stakes. “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman,” he informed a local crowd on the campaign trail mid-January 2010, “but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals.” Why? “Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so … you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” Bauer, a certified compassionate conservative, was railing against food stamps, free school lunches, and public housing. Kids = “stray animals.” His comments lit up blog sites, internet forums, cable news programs; even earned withering criticism on satirical news shows like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Still, he stood steadfast. “This is out of love and compassion,” Bauer confided to a local paper, following unexpected national outburst. “If I have to take a hit, then fine. ... I will take short-term pain for long-term gain.”23 William James warned a century ago of indifference to suffering, that it rested at “the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.”24 Society, in dealing with kids, has surely emptied many angels of tears. Low-income kids, especially, face hurdles almost impossible to overcome. It’s hard to exercise outside in full confidence as bullets exchange shelter all around. As bonus, surrounding all corners are fast food stores—of the unhealthiest kind, 77

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with menus offering overwhelmingly high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar options. The schools they spend one-third of the day in are no less unsafe—food-wise. And with many Black and Brown kids born into single-parent households, where mothers maintain as both breadwinner and housekeeper, it’s rational to substitute video games for the real-life thrill of athletics—which demands hard work, free time, dedicated parents, and supportive mentors. Only a few low-income single mothers enjoy enough time (and the knowledge) to place healthier varieties on the dining table. There is not even the privilege of dining tables at these homes. That many kids pass through life never welcomed by well-prepared meals, unsaturated with sugar and salt—that wasn’t picked up at some smelly drive-thru, that doesn’t come grease-stained in a white or brown paper bag—should frighten anyone with a conscience. When Los Angeles Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district houses mostly lowincome Black and Brown residents, tried to stamp bans on local fast food stores in 2006, civil libertarians and fast food PR henchmen denounced her as a Big Brother serf one step from telling people what to think and read—and eat. “When you have a community where people don’t have choices and the only choice they have is a fast food restaurant,” said Perry in an ABC News report one year later, “then they are conditioned to believe that fast food is the only way to eat.”25 Imagine children “conditioned” from birth to prefer fast food over real food, who never lick a plate of organic food, of non-processed, non-packaged, non-genetically modified food. Much as this bodes bad medically, it also triggers an identity crisis— some children come to see fast food logos and brands as wholly reflective and representative of their culture, as inextricably linked to who they are and what they can ever be(come). Those—and I’m one—who’ve heard young Black kids wish out loud dreams of someday standing and working behind McDonald’s cash registers perhaps understand better the severity of concern and action demanded in the coming days. The only visible route out of the tunnel within which we are currently trapped is through an education of the soul—to remind ourselves how critical the health and happiness of kids are to the survival of any democratic society. Food companies cannot be depended upon; no matter how many pledges they sign, no matter how much regulation they fall under. NOTES 1 2

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Linn, S. (2004). Consuming kids: The hostile takeover of childhood (pp. 39–40). New York: New Press. The “Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative”. US Council of Better Business Bureaus (2006), can be read online: http://www.bbb.org/us/storage/16/documents/InitiativeProgramDocument. pdf Harris, J. L., Schwartz, M. B., & Brownell, K. D. (2009, October). Evaluating the nutrition quality and marketing of children’s cereals. Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Online: http:// www.cerealfacts.org/media/Cereal_FACTS_Report.pdf Deardorff, J. (2010, January 20). Pact to limit sugary cereals to kids not worth its salt. Chicago Tribune. Online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-nat-cereal-20100120,0,6267012.story Malcolm, T. (2007, November 16). Hard to find sanctuary from $17 billion in marketing to kids. National Catholic Reporter. Online: http://www.commercialexploitation.org/news/hardtofind.htm Quoted in Linn, S. Consuming kids, p. 34.

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Ibid., Consuming kids, p. 6. Ibid., Consuming kids, p. 36. The U.S. market for infant, toddler and preschool home furnishings and accessories. Packaged Facts (2006, February 1). Online: http://www.packagedfacts.com/Infant-Toddler-Preschool-1173381/ Ibid., Consuming kids, p. 60. Quoted in Linn, S. Consuming kids, p. 131. From 1997 PBS documentary. Affluenza. Online Viewer’s Guide: http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/ treat/vguide/vguide.html Ibid., Consuming kids, p. 23. Morrison, B., Eisler, P., & DeBarros, A. (2009, December 2). Why a recall of tainted beef didn’t include school lunches. USA Today. Online: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-01-beefrecall-lunches_N.htm Olorunda, T. (2010, January 29). Society to kids: You’re on your own. The Daily Voice. Online: http:// thedailyvoice.com/voice/2010/01/society-to-kids-youre-on-your-1-002523.php Kenfield, I. (2009, August 14–16). Monsanto’s man in the Obama administration. CounterPunch. Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/kenfield08142009.html Williams, Z. (2006, December 1). The commercialisation of childhood. In Compass: Direction for the democratic left. Online: http://www.criancaeconsumo.org.br/downloads/commercialization%20 of%20childhood%20from%20britain.pdf Rideout, V. J., Foehr, U. G., & Roberts, D. F. (2010, January). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. The Kaiser Family Foundation. Online: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf Parsons, T. (2006, March 20). Childhood obesity is projected to increase dramatically by 2010. The Jhu Gazette, 35(26). Online: http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2006/20mar06/20kidob.html Press Release, First Lady Michelle Obama launches let’s move: America’s move to raise a healthier generation of kids. The Office of the First Lady (2010, February 09). Online: http://www. white house.gov/the-press-office/first-lady-michelle-obama-launches-lets-move-americas-move-raisea-healthier- genera Harris, D., Yeo, S., Brouwer, C., & Siegel, J. (2009, November 1). Vigilant parents say they are often unaware of marketing techniques that draw teens, kids. ABC World News. Online: http://www.abc news.go.com/print?id=8969255 From 2008 Media Education Foundation documentary. Consuming kids: The commercialization of childhood. Online: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134 Chapman, L., Jr. (2010, January 24). Bauer: Furor over comments won’t change stance. The State. Online: http://www.thestate.com/local/story/1125111.html James, W. (1962). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals (p. 130). New York: Dover Publications. Coverson, L. (2007, September 12). The menu police of L.A.. ABC News. Online: http://www.abcnews. go.com/Health/TenWays/story?id=3590218&page=1

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CHAPTER 12

DOUBLE MAJOR Student Loan Reform and the Struggle for a Democratic Academy

Why have the right to a college education depend upon whether the father or mother is so well to do as to send a boy or girl to college? —Huey Long, “Every Man a King”1 Since their appearance in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, American colleges followed the traditions established by Oxford, Cambridge, and the continental universities in the preparation of their overwhelmingly white male student body for law, ministry, medicine, and politics. —Henry Giroux and Susan Giroux, Take Back Higher Education2 One November morning in 2009, about 100 students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), seized a couple campus buildings to protest the 32% tuition hike passed by the UC Board of Regents. Starting the following spring semester, they would have to pony up an additional $585, right before a second increase of $1,344 scheduled for the fall. Those who could afford returning would fork over, on average, more than $10,000 the next year—triple the cost a mere decade ago. Approval of this proposal was near unanimous, with the lone opposition vote cast by the only student in the 25-member body.3 How ironic? In no time police officers, riot-gear-ready, had swooped down on scene, equipped to take down any unruly, snot-nosed kid in sight—or the union members, parents, community leaders, and activists who together had formed a crowd of more than 2,000 outside in solidarity with the students. About 50 of the 100+ students inside ended up arrested. In a prepared statement, UC President Mark Yudof bluntly defended the hike, passing the buck: “We’re being forced to impose a user tax on our students and their families. This is a tax necessary because our political leaders have failed to adequately fund public higher education.” President Yudof, who then-raked in over $800,000 annually, failed to mention the $200 million his university had just loaned the state of California—of $26.3 billion deficit infamy—with a 3.2% interest payback.4 Life for the college student today is hell. A recent College Board report, “Trends In College Pricing 2009,” revealed an average 6.5% tuition increase at four-year public colleges, and a 4.4% increase at four-year private, not-for-profit colleges, lifting the one-year cost of public higher education to $7,020, and private to $26,273.5 These “trends” have left most before five options: (1) drop out and transfer to a community college; (2) pick up a second job; (3) quit school altogether; (4) bear 81

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the brunt temporarily and hope a degree pays off in the long run; (5) take direct, non-violent action. With 10% increase enrollment at two-year colleges, many students seem to have split alliances between options 1 and 4; but if the UCLA incident offers any insight, it must be that a new “trend” is taking shape nationwide: civil disobedience to protest tuition hikes and other elements of college life—e.g.: exorbitant boarding and book costs—students find displeasing.6 On March 4, 2010, 33 states featured 100 Day of Action events with tens of thousands of students, professors, teachers, parents, campus and union activists firm in solidarity to resend the call for greater commitment from elected leaders. Mark this down as but the iceberg’s tip; not only of freezing outrage, but of a rise to consciousness. On the national and international front, students have begun wrestling with reality—with how powerless they truly are. They’ve begun to recognize student senates, student governments, and other petty outfits as farcical props to pacify any possibilities of genuine student-led governance. San Diego State University professor Jerry Farber penned a popular essay in 1969, “The Student As Nigger,” arguing most students are “politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Lowndes County. Most of them can vote in national elections— their average age is about 26—but they have no voice in the decisions which affect their academic lives.” And while Farber frequently fell to hyperbole, his paralleling of the African-American experience with the realities of student life measured accurately: The students are, it is true, allowed to have a toy government run for the most part by Uncle Toms and concerned principally with trivia. The faculty and administrations decide what courses will be offered; the students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen. Occasionally when student leaders get uppity and rebellious, they’re either ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or maneuvered expertly out of position.7 Yes: niggerization. If, for realistic example, a particular student feels a particular professor is “indoctrinating” her with a particular set of leftist or radical values, she is encouraged to report at once to the dean or chair of whichever department the professor calls home. The student should believe the school cares deep enough about all her concerns: and with swiftness, depending on what amount of discipline the administration presses on the professor, this belief holds firm. (If lucky enough, she might even be paid a special visit from David Horowitz, director of Freedom Center, whose organization funnels millions of dollars annually into college campuses—ostensibly to guard jealously students’ “intellectual freedoms.”) So far, so good. If, for a moment, however, this student expects equal enthusiasm upon raising concerns of tuition costs, book costs, infantilizing curricula, department-consolidation, or encroaching private firms, the foundation-of-belief would crumble soon after, for she would discover the academy’s ear mostly only opens to cries against “bad teachers” or “activist educators”—and shuts back upon faint sense of concrete concerns, like the blotting out of the public character of higher education. 82

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In August 2009, the House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (253–171), terminating the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL), cutting off private lenders from federal student loans. Since FFEL was enacted under the Higher Education Act of 1965, private companies have made a killing, generating loans of over $56 billion in 2008 alone.8 Also in 2008, according to a National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, two-thirds of students seeking a bachelor’s degree borrowed more than $23,000 from the federal government. Another 13% fell into the arms of private lenders, dipping more than $11 billion into their pockets. Again in 2008, Congress eliminated bankruptcy protection from a reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965, sending gift baskets to oligarchic private lenders like Sallie Mae, who’ve made bundles holding hostage overburdened students, most too preoccupied with academic work or social functions to meticulously track ballooning interest rates and loans. For many, the Pell Grant—which thirty years ago covered up to 77% of a public four-year education—is last messiah standing. Today, however, the Grant only stretches 35%. Students with family incomes below $50,000 ideally qualify for the Grant; but, in such turbulent times of economic encumbrance as ours, many find it increasingly difficult to get their due. Early February 2010, The New York Times reported of rammed-up lobbying efforts by private student loan lenders to derail the Obama Administration’s ambitious Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. What President Obama once defined a “no-brainer” was being vehemently rebuffed by private loan sharks, through versatile techniques including “sit-downs with lawmakers, town-hall-style meetings and petition drives.”9 The only no-brainer should have been that no profit-driven corporation with competent CEOs would for a second let anyone—not even government— wrench out of its wet hands lucrative opportunities to further sink a young, untrained generation into the deep ends of debt. The slots are slim for low-income and middle-income youth to pursue higher education. “We can lose a greedy bank more than we can lose a generation of needy students,” announced Reverend Jesse Jackson in March 2009, calling for a federal bailout program to relieve student loan debts.10 “I mean, the banks are self-inflicted wounds. Students, in their innocence, are trying to borrow money, are trying to get a scholarship, to do the right thing. They want to be productive, and this is a very counterproductive measure.” Students don’t have lobbyists as powerful and resourceful as those hired by big banks and insurance companies to push through or destroy legislation. If trends keep up, “4.4 million college-qualified high school graduates will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and two million will not go to college at all because they can’t afford it.”11 Higher education today slips ever more beyond the reaches of low-income and middle-class youth, furthering mass erosion of job sectors once guaranteed to anyone brandishing a bachelor’s or master’s degree. And with academic inflation ever peaking, many today need PhDs for jobs four years of undergraduate studies once cleared. College campuses have lost significantly the diversity thousands of dedicated teachers, activists, parents, and students worked hard for decades to establish, now morphing into gated communities (culturally and financially)—open only to those 83

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with CEOs for parents. In April 2009, journalist Andy Kroll described this systematic—far from accidental—sequence in full detail: [S]tate flagship universities and a group of other major research universities spent $257 million in 2003 on financial aid for students from families earning more than $100,000 a year. Those same universities spent only $171 million on aid to students from families who made less than $20,000 a year. Similarly, between 1995 and 2003, according to the report, grant aid from the same public universities to students from families making $80,000 or more increased 533%, while grant aid to families making less than $40,000 increased only 120%.12 As with the decades-long wealth transfer that made few exorbitantly rich, bringing misery to most, money much-needed by starving families goes the direction of the well-to-do, who have it made without spending one dime on higher education. And several colleges have already registered their faith in this philosophy. One in particular, Purdue University, unveiled late 2009 a $52 million “luxury” dorm-line which includes 365 single-occupant rooms with private bathrooms, flatscreen TVs, wireless internet, free laundry and cleaning services. Demanding $5,000 more than average, the cost crosses $14,000 for one year only. “You feel guilty at all when you walk in here and think of your friends across the street in the other dorm?” a privileged student was asked. “No,” she scoffed, “I feel bad for them!”13 College campuses, once considered melting pot for diverse cultures and ideas and values, are being recast after the narrative of the world beyond—where cash rules, where the Super-Rich share nothing (in common) with the masses of society, where the poor must feel perpetually guilty for their financial woes. Gone are the days, it seems, when public colleges sought to challenge students to make of the world a better, fairer, more just and equitable place. Now, students who have it all should revel in gluttony while kids from humble homes get used to a world dictated by the ethics of economic worth—denied all “rights to access higher education, to participate in the governance of the university, and to freely express and debate their ideas in the classroom.”14 In 1984, nationwide net state funding for higher education topped 4.1% of total state government spending. In 2004, funding slipped to 1.8%.15 Lost in the whirlwind of private vs. government loans are real-life stories, of women like Gina Moss, a social worker and single mother (raped in college—kept the baby), who ended up evicted and near-homeless having watched her student loan debt mushroom from $50,000 to $70,000 in but a few years.16 Since the 1960s—when one set of students had backs turned against segregationist policies barring Blacks from academic upward mobility, and another set turned just as firmly against the Vietnam War efforts of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration— much has changed. For the worse. And only students can force public outcry loud enough to effect sweeping transformation. But the struggle to lift the burdens breaking the backs of students cannot involve young people alone: it would take the sympathy and sensitivity of adults—working 84

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hand-in-hand, side-by-side with tomorrow’s leaders. It would take the empathy and energy of courageous intellectuals—stepping above the academic bubble and standing up for this righteous cause. It would take the unwavering support of parents, community leaders, and educators—making good on the hopes and dreams of young people. NOTES 1

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Long, H. P. (1935, January 14). Every man a king. 1935 Senate Speech and Radio Address. Online: http://www.sagehistory.net/deprnewdeal/documents/HLongSOW.htm Giroux, H. A., & Giroux, S. S. (2004). Take back higher education: Race, youth, and the crisis of democracy in the Post-Civil rights era (p. 144). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. As UC regents approve major tuition hike, students, faculty decry erosion of public education in CA and nationwide. Democracy Now! (2009, November 20). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/ 2009/11/20/students Estrada, R. (2009, August 6). Protesters want Yudof out of UC. The Daily Sound. Online: http://www. thedailysound.com/080609Yudof Trends in college pricing 2009. College Board (2009). Online: http://www.trends-collegeboard.com/ college_pricing/pdf/2009_Trends_College_Pricing.pdf College enrollment hits record, mostly thanks to 2-year schools. The Associated Press (2009, October 30). Online: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-10-30-college-enrollment_N.htm Farber, J. (1970 ed.). The student as Nigger: Essays and stories (pp. 90–91). New York: Pocket Books. Woodward, R. (2009, September 18). Congress moves to revise student loan system. Gazette Times. Online: http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/education/article_f49a0912-a3ea-11de-a9e1-001cc 4c03286.html Lichtblau, E. (2010, February 4). Lobbying imperils overhaul of student loans. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/us/politics/05loans.html?pagewanted=all Reduce the rate: Rev. Jesse Jackson joins movement against crippling rates on student loans. Democracy Now! (2009, March 12). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/12/reduce_the_rate_ rev_jesse_jackson Reed, A. L., Jr. (2004, January). Majoring in debt. The Progressive. Online: http://www.progressive. org/node/921 Kroll, A. (2009, April 3). A crisis of affordability: How our public colleges are turning into gated communities for the wealthy. AlterNet. Online: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/134770/a_crisis_ of_affordability%3A_how_our_public_colleges_are_turning_into_gated_communities_for_the_wea lthy/?page=entire The Early Show. (2009, October 13). Some college dorms race to go Luxe. CBS News. Online: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/13/earlyshow/main5381370.shtml Giroux, H. A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability? (p. 132). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Trostel, P. A. (2008, Spring). High returns: Public investment in higher education. Communities and Banking. Online: http://www.bos.frb.org/commdev/c&b/2008/spring/Trostel_invest_in_higher_ed.pdf NOW. (2009, December 25). Student loan sinkhole? PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/ 525/index.html

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PART III: SPEAKING TRUTH: COMMUNICATION, MEDIA CULTURE, AND THE REDEMPTIVE VALUE OF HIP-HOP

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WORDS AS WEAPONS Communication in an Age of Illiteracy

Communication is what one does with words and what they do to us. —J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness1 Our language points up contrasts and dichotomies while reality often falls through the cracks between the categories. —S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser, Dimensions of Meaning2 There is no language without deceit. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities3 Aristotle rightly acknowledged that “the power of speech is intended to express what is advantageous and what harmful, what is just and what unjust.”4 Human ability to communicate, to inspire and motivate, to exchange ideas about the world, not only softens the blows of life, but separates us from other surrounding species. And it appears to me the value of language (or communication) can be used to estimate the quality of life within any society and community. The words used, the verbs executed, the labels invented—all measure a people’s understanding of, and connection to, their reality. Society has a way of keeping track of the unwanted and undesired. Words sharing no relationship with reality soon find meaning and take on unimpeachable authority to define masses of people registered as worthless in the banks of public consciousness. “Snitch,” “Punk,” “Faggot,” “Bitch,” “Ho,” “Junkie,” “Whore,” “Bastard,” “Kike,” “Gook,” “Chink,” “Raghead,” “Wetback,” “Nigger,” “Coon,” “Shine.” None of these, of course, would mean a nickel’s worth if kids from very young ages weren’t taught the tradition of dehumanization and implored to carry it on. These various designated titles could never renew the curse of generations if the young weren’t taught to think any other form of communication was abnormal and, indeed, inappropriate. But in a world where categories and ranks and files finance human interaction, language, as Bertrand Russell understood, forms “matter of habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others.”5 The late Edward Said wrote instructively in his meditation on communication as an invaluable weapon deployed in lead-up to unpopular wars—more damning in a post-9/11 era. “The initial step in the dehumanisation of the Other,” Said said, “is to reduce him to a few insistently repeated simple phrases, images and concepts.”6 For a while—and up till this moment in many respects—speaking Arabic marked in and of itself a terrorism predilection. And reading the Qur’an—tell-tale of a 89

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terrorist’s mind at work. The words “Allahu Akbar” carried greater criminal weight than “I Shot the Sheriff.” Anyone who even dared utter such dastardly sentiments in public aroused the interests of federal agents with swiftness. The air thickened with suspicion. Agents bumped passengers off planes for such sinister signs as closing their eyes with palms stretched forth, praying to their God. Word around town was most terrorists did so right before capping off explosives on unsuspecting hordes of travelers—50,000 feet from land. And the public consumed these fabrications unquestioningly. Women wearing ‫ف‬ijƗbs ended up escorted by armed guards from airports, and relieved of their traveling privileges. Middle Eastern folk had their humanities trampled upon by forces trooping from multiple directions, all pushing one purpose—to identify ethnicity with criminality: to make Terrorist synonymous with Arab and Muslim. In early 2010 when a White, middle-aged, middle-income computer software engineer, Joe Stack, crashed his plane into an Austin, Texas, IRS building, wounding several and killing one, what ordinarily would count as act of terrorism, and provide fodder upon which cable news shows could feast for days, was interpreted sympathetically by many, including high-ranking politicians, who saw in Stack a man driven off the cliff ’s edge by a capricious government agency. (The dead and wounded notwithstanding.) Iowa congressman Steve King, though “sad … the incident in Texas happened,” confided, “it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it’s going to be a happy day for America.” Another Republican, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, revealed on FOX News that “people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things affecting their daily lives.”7 The standards, it should be obvious, betray a bias which, incidentally, has stood the test of time. One group of “criminals” steal pound cakes from neighborhood stores, or smuggle loaves of bread underneath their jackets, and the world fills up buckets of cement to shower down their heads. Members of another group loot billions from the poor, pillage indigenous land, supply paramilitary gangs with arms, bribe governments, swindle millions of their retirement savings, and never have to worry of mere disparagement in the popular press. The Illegal Immigration debate, which in recent years has managed greater command of the imaginations of society, offers some clarity against the confusion, for as the historian Barbara Jeanne Fields warns, “[l]oose thinking ... leads to careless language, which in turn promotes misinformation.”8 Of interest are key words bandied about ruthlessly and carelessly, often emotionlessly. Right off, we are informed—by Right-wing ideologues and their confidants on the Left—that Mexican families—not Cubans, not Canadians, just Mexicans—who cross the border overnight to establish humble livings in the U.S. are not “undocumented workers” but “illegal aliens.” Very little room to breathe then exists for the histories and backgrounds of these “aliens” bound to “illegal” intentions, or for the policies that provoke families toward drastic measures. They are “aliens”— foreign species unworthy of recognition and hostile to the wellbeing of human beings (citizens). On better days, detractors rewrite the rules of speech to simplify 90

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the invective—“illegals.” That the combination of “illegal” and “alien” is nonsensical at best, and intellectually valueless at worst, never crosses the minds of the pundits and shock jocks whose hard work ushered it into mainstream and celebrated discourse. In mass culture, the very nature of an “alien” demands radically different principles, unlike those for punishing or promoting citizens. And if Star Wars should hold sway on this issue, aliens demand unique devices just to understand—let alone control and repress—them. An “alien,” in this sense, belongs to different worlds and different territories. (Of course in official lexicon “alien” takes up less criminalized connotations; but for a public of which only 20% own passports,9 very few spawned of the TV-crazed culture can boast insight independent of Hollywood presentations or mainstream news coverage.) It is critical intellectuals and educators take seriously the effect words can master on citizens who otherwise consider themselves enlightened enough to stay clear of semantic manipulation. History shows of even the most advanced men and women being seduced into unconscionable deeds dictated from the lips of trained orators. As was the case in Germany during the Hitlerian regime, many never thought themselves that gullible, that impressionable, that susceptible; but words that appealed as abstract and indirect evoked strong and costly reactions in the hearts and minds of everyday citizens. Language scholars S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser explained four decades ago the vulnerability of the human mind to “magic words”: The Nazis purposely used terminology which appeared concrete but was in reality ambiguous and meaningless. The “enemies” of Germany that had to be destroyed, said Hitler, were the “November criminals,” the “red dragon,” the “Jewish plague,” the “parliamentarians,” the “democratic-Marxist-Jew,” the “Jewish bacillus.” All these referentially meaningless abstractions were in turn grouped together into the equally abstract “System.”10 Two decades ago, psychiatrist Anthony Storr suggested Hitler’s words, specifically at Nuremberg rallies, were not “intended to convey information but took on the quality of an incantation or chant.”11 The marching bands and musical performances preceding and proceeding Hitler’s remarks, Storr wrote, provided much cover for his oratorical deficits and “reinforce[d] the effect which the music, the banners, the searchlights, and the processions had already induced.”12 Even the most inhumane and repugnant charges played with melodic tones—the better memorized and internalized. Many on the extreme-Right today, though lacking the strength and smart and skill of Hitler, have been eliciting no less pernicious an effect in listeners’ minds, rewriting reality for everyday, hardworking (H.R. Clinton), predominantly White, Americans. And how best but by making predators preys and preys predators, as with the healthcare debate of 2009 in which health insurance giants represented, to hear many on the Right-wing croon, everything good of a free-market system; and the real enemies (plotting against the people) then took form as congressmen and congresswomen, and even President Obama—who hoped to smash the yoke insurance giants had tied around the necks of everyday citizens, dragged off until 91

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emptied of their last dimes. “[I]mages may stimulate desire almost as strongly as do the objects they represent,” Bertrand Russell pointed out about a century ago.13 The man who shot his way into a Tennessee Unitarian Church in June 2008 confessed he “hated the liberal movement” in America and didn’t care much for “liberals in general as well as gays.” He was particularly offended by some of the liberal stances of the Unitarian church.14 In a letter written right before unleashing his murderous rampage, the gunman wanted to “kill … every Democrat in the Senate & House [and] the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book”—100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), which recreates liberals and democrats as America-hating traitors with deep-seated desires to see their country destroyed. Police officers discovered other liberalism-bashing books at the gunman’s house: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder and Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism. Shock jocks understand that in times of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, human beings fall impressionable, and can be manipulated easily. A local Tennessee police chief explained how the church shooter, a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, came to blame liberals for his financial woes: “It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.” Like in Hitler’s Germany where it was fashionable to blame the Jews, and in George Wallace’s Alabama where it was rational to blame the Niggers, so it is in the hard-Right’s America logical to blame the Liberals, or democrats, or progressives— or just about anyone bold enough to think for themselves. With tens of millions of Americans tuned into the various frequencies of talk radio, those who cherish the foundations upon which a livable society stands must generate greater concern about the level of acidity spewed daily in the name of Free Speech. Examples of the corrosiveness that today passes for political discourse stream endless, but a couple are worth citing. Consider the words of driveler Neal Boortz who, in early 2008, ridiculed thenpresidential candidate John Edwards’ work on behalf of New Orleans residents, insisting that the “so-called refugees,” with their relief-seeking efforts following the 2005 Category 5 hurricane, was “just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage.” Steering passions wasn’t good enough. He knew to develop vivid imagery to convey to listeners just why those they might have otherwise considered victims not only weren’t but failed to count even as human beings: That wasn’t the cries of the downtrodden. That’s the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to, fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them.15 FOX News host Bill O’Reilly had laid the groundwork three years earlier: Now, our government has a duty to provide a safety net so these people aren’t living under bridges. But some of them are anyway, because all the entitlement money they get they spend on heroin or crack or alcohol. … Many, many, 92

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many of the poor in New Orleans ... weren’t going to leave no matter what you did. They were drug-addicted. They weren’t going to get turned off from their source. They were thugs.16 These hardly mark just the expressions of relatively heartless values and presuppositions; they sound marching orders to listeners who, as with talk radio king Rush Limbaugh, happily accept the role of “dittoheads.” Over a decade ago, Limbaugh revealed the primary purpose of the shock jock: “to make you mad. And the formula for making you—the viewer or the listener—mad hasn’t changed a bit, yet people keep falling for it.” And whether the “dittoheads” who’ve made of him a demigod care at all, his only interest is “stirring them up.” For Limbaugh, “callers are like music on a record station—you play the top ten. You don’t take bad calls.” Callers must not “control the show.” After all, “people turn on the radio to be entertained, to be entertained, to be entertained.”17 Contrast Limbaugh’s language with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s in his 1967 talk to Black radio announcers, calling for cognizance of “the role which the radio announcer plays in the life of our people—for better or for worse.” King praised icons like “Tall Paul” White, Pervis Spann, and Georgia Woods for using their airwaves to furnish social justice—educating, fundraising—during the civil rights battles of the ‘60s. “We would certainly not have come so far without your support,” King assured them. “In a real sense, you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful, cultural bridge between Black and White.” He acknowledged the radio as a critical medium upon which the masses depended for information; and with much given, much was required from radio announcers. “But, my brothers and my sisters, we are only beginning. We still have a long, long way to go” to expand the possibilities of radio as an educational tool. How disappointed would Dr. King be today in what has become of talk radio? How embarrassed in witnessing the rise of the shock jock and the decline of the radio educator? And how morally indignant against the soulless ways talk show personalities inflame passions and incite emotions—at times to fatal ends, as with Bill O’Reilly’s probable contribution to the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, whom he frequently attacked as “Tiller the Baby Killer.” Media critic Rory O’Connor explained late 2008 just how listeners are, as Limbaugh might frame, stirred up—over and over again: When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it’s not shocking any longer. It’s already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? … [Y]ou have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And, ultimately, there’s gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who’s gonna say, “You know what? That’s a good idea. Let me act on that.”18 When words are used weapon-like, to attack and destroy, to conquer and dominate, most affected are those on the sidelines—considered spectators, entertained by the spectacle of cruelty. But what of the psychological impacts on minds which, day-in, day-out, submit to the terrorizing ramblings of on-air personalities whose agendas 93

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rest solely on calling enemies incendiary names and putting political bounties on the heads of opponents? “A notable aspect of all-pervasive fear,” Wole Soyinka informs, “is that it induces a degree of loss of self-apprehension: a part of one’s self has been appropriated, a level of consciousness, and this may even lead to a reduction in one’s selfesteem—in short, a loss of inner dignity.”19 If the incidents of the Unitarian church and abortion doctor hold any significance, it’s clear more emphasis must be placed on the non-neutral observers shocked into ever higher levels of inhumanity by characters who consider themselves little other than entertainers. As Henry Giroux explains, the language of oppression and cruelty becomes normalized, removed from the sphere of criticism and the culture of questioning. Such a language does more than normalize ignorance, illiteracy and irrationality; it also produces a kind of psychic hardening and deep-rooted pathology in a society increasingly willing to eliminate the policies that enable social bonds and protections necessary for a substantive democracy.20 In such times, marked by mass civic illiteracy and economic uncertainty, with political instability and private elitism raging wild—citizens fall most vulnerable to the primitive suggestions of low-grade thinkers funded by Right-wing firms to bluster on for (on average) four hours daily.21 And in such times can those same vulnerable populations be best uplifted and educated by concerned thinkers and intellectuals dedicated to making the best with what’s left of our wobbling world. The future may very well depend on response to this call. NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

8

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10 11 12 13

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Samuel Bois, J. (1973). The art of awareness: A textbook on general semantics and epistemics (p. 130). Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Co. Hayakawa, S. I., & Dresser, W. (1970). Dimensions of meaning (p. 5). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities (p. 48). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Quoted in Bauman, Z. (2002). Society under Siege (p. 53). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Russell, B. (2009 ed.). The analysis of mind (p. 153). Memphis: General Books LLC. Said, E. (2002, October 17). ‘We’ know who ‘we’ are. London Review of Books, 24(20). Online: http:// www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n20/edward-said/we-know-who-we-are Cockburn, A. (2010, March 4). Joe Stack, suicide pilot and American hero. The First Post. Online: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/60463,news-comment,news-politics,joe-stack-suicide-pilot-orworking-class-hero-irs-building-austin-texas-suicide Fields, B. J. (1990, May/June). Slavery, race, and ideology in the United States of America. New Left Review (pp. 95–118). Online: http://www.solidarity-us.org/pdfs/cadreschool/fields.pdf Bush: No passports at borders. The Associated Press (2005, April 15). Online: http://www.foxnews. com/story/0,2933,153552,00.html Ibid., Dimensions of meaning, p. 50. Storr, A. (1992). Music and the mind (p. 46). New York: Free Press. Ibid., Music and the mind, p. 47. Ibid., The analysis of mind, p. 160.

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15 16 17

18

19

20

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Police: Killer targeted church for liberal views. The Associated Press (2008, July 28). Online: http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25872864/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts// Transcript and audio. (2008, February 1). http://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/200802010015 Transcript and audio. (2005, September 15). http://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/200509150001 Video clip. http://www.muckmakers.com/video-rush-limbaugh-explains-how-he-manipulates-radiolisteners/ Bill Moyers Journal. (2008, September 12). Rage on the Radio. PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/ moyers/journal/09122008/watch.html Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (p. 8). New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Giroux, H. A. (2010, January 19). Language and the politics of the living dead. Truthout. Online: http:// www.truthout.org/language-and-politics-living-dead56192 Hedges, C. (2008, November 10). America the illiterate. Truthdig. Online: http://www.truthdig.com/ report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/

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BLACK BODIES SWINGING Racialized Representations in the Post-Racial (?!) Era

… But apparently this is not the stuff of Hollywood entertainment. It doesn’t titillate. It doesn’t shock. It can’t offer the same mechanisms for exotic escape that mainstream white audiences crave in their consumption of blackness. —Henry Giroux, The Abandoned Generation1 A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’s face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary—something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps. —Toni Morrison, Beloved2 Black people have always made for titillating coverage. It’s a bet with very good chances; ratings bonanza, even. Show a Black Man (!) brandishing a shotgun and blasting his way into a gas station, and viewers would likely tune in. Show a Black mother treating her child unfavorably, and the eyes of the world would surely turn your direction. Show Black kids acting unpleasantly, and it’s likely to generate high traffic. The visual expectations of the average White viewer must be appeased somehow, and strong likelihood prevails, history bearing witness, that the Black body would be employed accordingly. Using Black people as cannon fodder to further insidious ideals strikes of nothing new, as Ralph Ellison understood, who wrote a half-century ago: [T]hese negative images constitute justifications for all those acts, legal, emotional, economic and political, which we labeled Jim Crow. The anti-Negro image is thus a ritual object of which Hollywood is not the creator, but the manipulator. Its role has been that of justifying the widely held myth of Negro inhumanness and inferiority by offering entertaining rituals through which that myth could be reaffirmed.3 Each way the eyes turn, Black people feature deplorably—from the inarticulate (ubiquitous) crime witness; to the politician caught stuffing cold-cash into his refrigerator; to the reality show female contestant dropping expletives unguardedly; to the teenager fleeing athletic cops. These have marked the reality for decades; 97

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and the Age of Obama isn’t likely to alter much in significance. In truth, having a Black Man (!) for President stands strong chance of triggering even more unflattering representations of Blackness—more so as TV advertising agencies try to better reflect the times, unaware presenting White Values through Black Bodies hardly screams Progress. Soon as Senator Barack Obama announced his run for the United States presidency in February 2007, he was crowned a “post-racial,” “race-transcending,” “multi-racial” candidate—by White pundits. One political show even enlisted an all-White panel to discuss “Obama’s Blackness.” Questions of his racial merits weren’t “offensive,” an analyst noted, just “unanswerable.”4 That this society has by no means crossed post-racial signposts—or any such Utopia—received little attention from the political bloviators who like to hear themselves talk more than listen—to voices much different and more enlightened (than theirs). But the news coverage of Barack Obama’s candidacy itself indicated overt consciousness of Race, in spite of self-satisfying assurances to the contrary. Even while Hillary Clinton led the Democrat race in polls, greater attention pursued Obama’s run—as though to catch him doing something (anything!) wrong. The conservative cable channel FOX News flew ahead of all competitors. To one host, he was a “Black candidate surrounding himself with a lot of White advisors.” Another asked: “What do we really know about Barack Obama?” Leading up to the All-Mighty Investigative Task of outing him as a smoker: “His team works overtime trying to hide his dirty, little secret. He is, get this, a cigarette smoker.” “Do we want somebody like that in the White House?” inquired a FOX News commentator. Host after host took turns driving into the same hoop. “There’s kind of been a drip, drip, drip of stuff: His middle name—Hussein. Now the news that he was raised a Moslem,” alley-ooped an anchor. And then the slam-dunk: he “went to a Madrassa for four years.”5 Madrassa, to the geniuses at FOX, meant breeding ground for future terrorists, not Arabic word for school. In a 2007 episode of the Comedy Central series The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart sought to quell raging reports that Obama was a Muslim who, it almost seemed certain, participated frequently in phone conferences with Al-Qaeda henchmen. Stewart explained to a show correspondent that “what they’re [Right-wing numbskulls] doing is … linking him with a loaded image. It’s unfair to do such a thing.” Correspondent concurred, admitting “it’s patently unfair,” but then, in ironic twist, suggested: “Obama has been laden with a name that causes all kinda problems.” Far from a comic skit, this “smear” soon spread wide enough that 43% of voters6 in June 2008 failed to confirm correctly Obama’s faith—never mind repeated claims that he was “not a Muslim and I never have been. I never studied at a Madrassa and I have never sworn on the Koran. I am committed to Christianity.”7 And with greater confusion came fiercer denial from the Obama camp which inevitably took flesh in forms of xenophobia and religious intolerance. The circus built around Barack Obama and former Trinity United Church of Christ senior pastor Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. betrayed further a Raceobsessed media unwilling to mature or evolve. Refusing to consider the contexts 98

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in which Wright’s sermons dropped from the pulpit, or present accurate and responsible reporting, mainstream news networks sliced his most “controversial” and “incendiary” sermons into, at times, five-second sound bites, looped ad nauseam, to the shock and awe of the dominant public, which began, soon after, questioning whether Barack Obama was as post-racial as they once thought him to be, whether he wasn’t just another, ordinary Black Man (!)—filled with Black Rage (!!). Obama had suddenly lost the trust once invested in him to convince the world racism now signaled a thing-of-the-past, a bygone reality. It took his epic denunciations of Wright to win it all (or, least still, some of it) back. Mainstream media showed unbridled slow-wittedness in covering President Barack Obama, and weren’t far off with First Lady Michelle Obama; with FOX News, again, ahead. In February 2008, its primetime star, Bill O’Reilly, openly discussed leading “a lynching party against Michelle Obama”—if “evidence, hard facts” turned up showing her to be militant and anti-American. On the night of his historic June 3, 2008, victory over rival Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama shared an affectionate moment with his wife, bumping knuckles. “Terrorist fist-jab!” a FOX News anchor cried the next morning. Seven days after, she was “Obama’s Baby Mama.” When Rush Limbaugh helped give legs to a fictional account suggesting Mrs. Obama had used the word “Whitey” on a tape recorded years back, FOX News stayed on hand, offering sturdy boots. But FOX News had good help. One liberal blog enjoyed photoshopping pictures of Michelle Obama to resemble a gun-toting-sex-driven-marauder.8 Another liberal site thought it wise to craft a picture of the first lady strung up on a noose, half-burnt by hooded men in Ku Klux Klan attire. The fairly liberal New Yorker magazine fell under fire in July 2008 for a cover photo featuring an afro-haired, gun-slinging Michelle Obama fist-bumping her turban-fitted husband. New York Magazine audaciously declared in a feature, titled “Black & Blacker: The Racial Politics of the Obama Marriage,” that Mrs. Obama wears a “mask … in public, most of the time, and we aren’t sure what is underneath.” Other popular publications like The Atlantic and Time reduced her to an “American Girl” and “America’s Next Top Model,” respectively. And when she announced to a Milwaukee audience in February 2008 that “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback,” holy hell let loose on her precious soul. One conservative commentator revealed March 2009 the “burning question” within her “circle” of crackpots: “[I]f the First Family gets a female dog, will she be the First Bitch or will she have to settle for second place?” All these in a post-racial era?! It’s mighty clear not even the presence of a Black family in the White House would significantly alter the racial landscape of representations anytime soon. And if the sudden, unusually high, resurgence of Blackface—in fashion magazines, on TV shows, on blogs and websites—holds any value, it seems a rise in misrepresentations marks but the inevitable backlash. As Jasiri X, a Pittsburgh Hip-Hop artist, questioned: Post-racial; now, how we gon’ get past Race/ When in 2009 they still putting on Blackface? Yet, many, like MSNBC host Chris Matthews, fail to 99

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acknowledge society has far to go to reach any semblance of racial parity. Following President Obama’s first State of the Union Address, Matthews announced Obama was “post-racial by all appearances. … You know,” he confessed, “I forgot he was Black tonight for an hour.” In wake of Hurricane Katrina, all doubt was dashed if mainstream media networks had evolved beyond sensationalism and spectacle in documenting the humanities of Black people. Several stories circulated, portraying Black residents as predominantly looters, with Whites celebrated as survivors,9 pressing popular rapper Kanye West to deviate from prepared remarks at a televised celebrity benefit and take on the media directly. Amongst his complaints was “the way they portray us in the media. You see a Black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a White family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food’.” This racial disparity of representations was again reproduced following the 7.0 Mw earthquake that rocked Haiti mid-January 2010. Mass media obsessed over suspicions of “widespread” looting, examples of which included men, dying of hunger and homelessness, picking up single bags of evaporated milk and fabric from abandoned grocery stores. Writer Rebecca Solnit adeptly observed, in a scathing critique of the obsequious obsession with “looting,” that unenlightened journalists “often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.”10 Solnit went beyond most peers in mapping the connection between sensational imagery and simultaneous police brutality against residents. With fear filling the air post-Katrina, officers arrested Black men in droves, often for infractions like walking the streets without identification. The same act played out in Haiti, and more dramatically in an incident where a police officer bled to death from the bullet wounds of a colleague who mistook him for a looter. TV coverage for Katrina and Haiti featured little or nothing of the antecedents which exacerbated the natural disasters. In Katrina, for a state with the third-highest rate of children swamped with poverty, and whose illiteracy rate topped 40%, many, educated by popular press, wondered why residents couldn’t simply drive off from the impending storm. For Haiti, the most financially disempowered country in the Western hemisphere, dilapidated by decades of political instability, and flooded with foreign food imports and subsidization, which inevitably led to famine, which inevitably led to street riots and violent protests in mid-2008—little of this history found solace in the shock-and-awe broadcasts administered on cable news networks. Viewers simply learned that Haiti was a poor country. Poor by nature. The vibrant history of successful revolt against former colonizers, of economic independence, of genuine democracy—which spans centuries—remained unknown to most. The news networks which sensationalized every bit of the Katrina debacle— and then patted each other’s backs hard for ostensibly holding elected officials accountable—returned to business in Haiti: sticking microphones into the faces of hapless victims, holding up babies as props, shedding insincere tears. Ralph Ellison explained this pitiful practice as “the crime of reducing the humanity of others to 100

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that of a mere convenience, a counter in a barrel game which involves no apparent risk to ourselves.”11 When repeated in loops and recycled endlessly, even abhorrent suggestions become normalized, thus the need, now more than ever, for enlightened educators to take seriously how easily racialized representations—even in a “post-racial” era— master “ominous clouds of inferiority” in the mental skies of children.12 Not even a Black president would change “how certain meanings under particular historical conditions become more legitimate as representations of the real than others … and go relatively unchallenged in shaping a broader set of discourses and social configurations.”13 NOTES 1

2 3 4

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Giroux, H. A. (2004 paperback ed.). The abandoned generation: Democracy beyond the culture of fear (p. 139). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved (pp. 155–156). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Ellison, R. (1964). Shadow and act (pp. 276–277). New York: Random House. Tucker Carlson hosted all-white panel of journalists to discuss ‘Obama’s blackness’. Media Matters for America (2008, August 7). Online: http://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/200708090005 In February 2007, Brave New Films, the media organization, released a three-minute video montage of the earliest FOX News slimes slung at Obama: http://www.bravenewfilms.org/blog/?p=573 Dimock, M. (2008, June 15). Belief that Obama is Muslim is durable, bipartisan – but most likely to sway democratic votes. Pew Research Center. Online: http://www.pewresearch.org/pubs/898/beliefthat-obama-is-muslim-is-bipartisan-but-most-likely-to-sway-democrats Sommer, A. K. (2008, February 27). ‘I Am Not a Muslim’: Obama Woos the Jews. Pajamas Media. Online: http://www.pajamasmedia.com/blog/i_am_not_a_muslim_obama_woos_t/ Meet Michelle Obama, my (black) friend! 23/6 (2008, June 18). Online: http://www.huffingtonpost. com/archive/236/news/2008/06/18/meet_michelle_obama_my_black_f_1_7205.html Kinney, A. (2005, September 1). ‘Looting’ or ‘finding?’ Salon. Online: http://dir.salon.com/story/ news/feature/2005/09/01/photo_controversy/index.html Solnit, R. (2010, January 21). When the media is the disaster: Covering Haiti. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/when-the-media-is-the-dis_b_431617.html Ibid., Shadow and act, p. 124. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” spoke of the specter of segregation degrading young Black kids’ self-esteems. Giroux, H. A. (2001). Public spaces, private lives (p. 79). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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WATCH WHAT YOU’RE WATCHING Mass Media, Television, and the Making of Zombies

TV images are not only trusted; they are given more credence than real-life experiences. —Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism1 The fact that a growing section of the “world out there” which the viewer learns about through the television is a world created by the television itself, acquires particular importance in view of the understandable tendency of the communication media to self-reference. —Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom2 Images matter. The last decade alone yielded unassailable proof of the dangers produced by an irresponsible Media State when held to no account. From the spectacle-centered broadcasts of the 9/11 attacks; to the case for war, brought to you by compliant cable news networks; to the unethical, unsubstantiated reports of mass looting, daily murderous rampages, and child molestation, following Katrina’s landfall; to the manufactured scandal involving President Barack Obama and his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, sufficient proof isn’t hard to come by anymore, confirming mass media as a myth-making machine which thrives and survives on the gullibility and vulnerability of ignorant viewers. Whether to help propagate political propaganda, or to arouse viewers to unconscionable deeds, images can draw the defining line between Life and Death. The power of imagery stands so strong, it has defined the humanity of millions of immigrants, condemned millions more to death, converted vast populations into supporting unpopular wars, and programmed children to believing in fables, with a stated aim— to “elicit specific and planned emotional reactions in the people who see them.”3 In 1992, raw footage of LAPD officers brutalizing a drunken Black man’s skull awoke the sleeping beast of unrest in disgruntled youth, tallying damages topping $1 billion. Far from an accurate representation of the historical and political realities brought to bear, the media “presented the LA riots as a racial morality play,” captured brilliantly by Juliana Son, a New York University researcher: Blacks, as the problem minority, have bullied Asian storeowners, the model minority, while the white state and media stands to the side as the referee. … We see the black looters, the Asian American business owners, and the white police officers. These images are repeated over and over until it becomes “truth”, as if looters are all black, business owners are all Korean, and the police officers are all white.4 103

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Images matter critically to how a society functions, and how those within it understand each another. TV sitcoms, movies, comedy shows, even network news, cultivate certain values and understandings in the viewer. As Henry Giroux confirms, “Mass and image-based media have become a new and powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, engagement, and resistance.”5 And for this, the television—The Electronic Babysitter—ought to be engaged with greater discipline than many have applied since the early 1900s. With the average American child devoting three hours daily to a TV screen, by age 75 many would have flittered 9 years, raptured by unreal creations. Nine years of adherence to unhealthy principles can cause long-lasting psychological problems, as discovered by Psychophysiologist Thomas Mulholland, who in 1970 performed an experiment with young viewers whose brains were connected to an EEG machine. After only 30 seconds of watching their favorite programs, all slowed down brain activity immensely and produced Alpha waves—considered “neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall.”6 While it never hurts to regulate children’s TV-watching schedule, it seems much better to assess the hidden values and principles programs on TV promote. Example: what children raised on Disney animated movies learn about society, about sexuality, about masculinity, can remain unchallenged through the various ages and stages of life. Two decades back, two psychologists captured presciently the irony of TV addiction: “Many of us know that most [of what is shown on] television is fiction, yet we see television as a key source of information about the world we live in.”7 We let TV shows, news programs, and movies tell about our inner fears, inner interests, inner desires. E. B. White observed seven decades ago: “By [Hollywood’s] adherence, over so long a period of years, to a standard of living well in excess of anything known in the lives of its audience, it has at last communicated to its audience a feeling of actually living in this dream world and a conviction that the standards of this world are the norm.”8 We not only exist in a dream world—where fantasies with no real-life value are made manifest—we also see it as normative, as the order of the day, as the reference point through which to live out our lives and determine what principles to internalize: as in early 2010 whereupon, with the release of the blockbuster sci-fi movie Avatar, a few moviegoers felt such connection to the depicted aliens that some wound up depressed subsequently, with others naming newborn babies after characters from the movie.9 On one level, we can read this as innocent response to a captivating film; yet, on another, as further revealing cultural illiteracy of a fatal kind. And the social and psychological implications, as Sheldon Wolin points out, know no limits: For more than a century the public has been shaped by a relentless culture of advertising and its exaggerations, false claims, and fantasies—all aimed at influencing and directing behavior in the premeditated ways chosen by the advertiser. The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, godfearing and moral.10 104

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For a people so vulnerable to visual manipulation, no wonder mass media giants get away, night after night, spewing epic misinformation. Of course those who call for responsibility in broadcasting almost always end up pushed back against vehemently—from all angles arguing such talk prances around the circle of Communism and desires obliteration of the First Amendment guarantee to Free Press. But in the name, and under the guise, of exercising a right to uncensored reportage— ruthless misrepresentations run unchallenged, countless lies get told, and corporatefriendly accounts are presented as unbiased. Since time immemorial, TV networks have always told less of the truth to viewers, citing an unspoken-general-consensus that if the public was ever granted the blunt truth, unbound and unfettered, consequences uncontrollable could let loose and put at risk the lives of the guilty. But only in modern times have the mainstream media adhered so strictly to monolithic tones and topics. Only in modern times have only a half-dozen giant corporations (General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp, TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS) owned every bit of popular press and controlled the whole media landscape.11 No good comes from consolidation of this kind. Not only do reporters have to walk the straight line of Corporate Order, but the rights and liberties of journalists face suspension to fit the profit motif, as a Florida couple, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, learned in 1997 when, working for a FOX affiliate, both were coerced to censor a report exposing toxic chemicals in milk produced by biotechnology giant Monsanto. The couple was bribed, asked to lie, and finally fired for refusing to buckle under pressure. They sued FOX and won a $425,000 jury award. In a later appeal, however, a judge overturned the decision, arguing the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “news distortion policy” holds no substance in a court of law; hence, journalists can, in fact, falsify facts without facing any legal repercussions: viewers can remain vulnerable to a Media State granted by law permission to make up its own facts—public safety be damned. “Amidst the fragmentation of images and the overflow of information,” Henry Giroux instructs, “the intrusion of the ‘fact’ appears like a reliable trustworthy tool to sort out the confusion and uncertainty.”12 A four-month investigation by The Nation magazine, published February 2010, revealed TV news networks habitually employ military and public policy analysts to discuss real-time agenda, disregarding any disclosure of the conflicts of interests involved, as many working for lobby firms or military contractors remained connected directly to the issues their expertise was summoned for: Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials—people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests— have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens— and in some cases hundreds—of appearances. The 2009 healthcare cable circus comes to mind, wherein men and women who worked at lobby firms or PR outfits representing pharmaceutical overlords enjoyed 105

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unregulated access at news studios to join the parade, never once ousted as serving to benefit financially from the outcomes they expressed faith in. Most pernicious, The Nation observed, is the “cumulative effect from hundreds of appearances by dozens of unidentified lobbyists and influence peddlers.”13 All this coming one year after journalist David Barstow’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposés in The New York Times, of Pentagon officials funneling erroneous talking points in the lead-up to the Iraq Invasion (and beyond), through military analysts hired by the big networks in lieu of war correspondents. Barstow wrote of a “Pentagon information apparatus” using “analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Administration’s wartime performance.” The analysts wore proudly their eagerness to amplify “administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.” Those who sang the tune best received fine rewards; those who didn’t returned home empty-handed. Pentagon officials knew these retired, decorated veterans could lend legitimacy to the unpopular war aspirations and convince the majority of Americans invasion was the only feasible option for a democratic Iraq. They were “the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary.” But the cable news networks saw no wrong and protested not one bit. After all, they merely formed part of a larger wheel of fortune—turned and turned around till the game was declared over: Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles. So gallingly transparent was this charade that a retired Army general and analyst for FOX News and NPR, simultaneously employed by a consulting company which advised military firms on weapons and strategy in Iraq, asked the Pentagon for a better seat at the banquet, having carried its water cans with perfection. “Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he coaxed. “I will do the same this time.”14 Before this scheme, however, the public needed a convincing narrative to support a plan which seemed, on the surface, unjustified and immoral. Invasion of Iraq could not prosper so close to an election year without a media blitzkrieg campaign that seized the attention of the whole nation. And to Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter, the Bush Administration turned. Over a two-year span, from 2001 to 2003, Miller had pampered power at the Pentagon and amassed great power herself, enough to be trusted with lies about secret biolabs and nuclear factories supervised by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where the construction of Weapons of Mass Destruction was in rapid procession. Secret “sources” and “officials” with pseudonyms were being employed to this end, from late 2001 till summer of 2003—all swearing Hussein was on the verge of great evil. 106

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On September 8, 2002, Judith Miller, alongside Michael R. Gordon, reported in The New York Times that the days were growing hot. “THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS,” ran the headline, and the screed began: “More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.” Through the last 14 months, Iraq had attempted buying “specially designed aluminum tubes,” which officials had intercepted and blocked. She went on to cite war-wanting defectors and members of the Iraqi National Congress who corroborated her tells of a remorseless leader who was almost daring the United States to a duel, one decade after the Gulf War had humbled his empire. And “senior administration officials” also put stamps on the report’s veracity (“The jewel in the crown is nuclear”). Church-going citizens had barely returned home that Sunday morning—where presumably they heard a Galatian exhortation: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”—when four senior Administration officials, Vice-President Dick Cheney (NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (ABC’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer), National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer), and Secretary of State Colin Powell (FOX News Sunday with Tony Snow), had placed themselves comfortably before network news cameras to tout Miller’s front-page story as undeniable moral justification to incinerate Iraq. Former New York Timesman Gay Talese knew of which he spoke in writing three decades ago of an “understandable desire on the part of politicians to cooperate with the press, to flatter and possibly confuse with confidence those journalists who are most important or critical—but one result of close cooperation between the press and the government is that they often end up protecting the interests of one another, and not of the public that they presume to represent.”15 The rush to judgment, the desire to be first-in-line, the crave for the All-Mighty Exclusive, had pushed two reporters, along with the prestigious outfit for which they labored, off the ledge of public trust. “We journalists seemed at times to be allied with the fast-food industry,” Talese reflected decades later in 2007, “being the short-order cooks for consumers of often half-baked information and ideas. What we wrote in haste was frequently incomplete, misleading, inaccurate.”16 This, amazingly, falls a far cry from the assurances of PBS host Charlie Rose, who in March 2003 rebuffed independent-media veteran Amy Goodman’s concerns about consolidation because, having worked at a few major news companies, he could testify none were “influenced by the corporations that may own [them].”17 Former MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield would disagree. She committed a grave error in April 2003—delivering an address castigating cable news coverage of the invasion. In her eloquent talk at Kansas State University, Banfield eviscerated the persistent jingoism that had marked nationwide news reporting right up to the start of the Iraq Invasion—a fanatical frenzy summed up four decades ago by Norman Mailer as “the 107

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patriotic unendurable fix of the television programs and the newspapers.”18 Banfield then addressed a budding phenomenon better known as the “FOX News effect. I know everyone of you has watched it. It’s not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe FOX as having streamers and banners coming out of the television as you’re watching it cover a war. But the FOX effect is very concerning to me.” And this effect was threatening the identities of more moderate channels like CNN and MSNBC: the public was responding favorably to FOX News, scaring its competitors senseless. But Banfield explained what FOX did, as a cable news outlet, failed to factor as legitimate broadcasting, being more or less Right-wing propaganda, though its quick success could push ratings-hungry executives at the other networks toward imitation.19 She worried “there’s not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it’s turning out, but not news.” To delight their audience, “some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative.” Banfield noted the influx of conservative, xenophobic commentators into fairly moderate spheres (like, say, MSNBC)—this told of a desire to chase the money. Before stepping down, she urged students to be “very discerning” about what they watch; to take all in “with a grain of salt,” to “choose responsibly,” and to “demand” real reporting, not primitive presentations.20 As payback, MSNBC executives snatched her off the air, though she still “had to report to work every day and ask where I could sit. If somebody was away I could use their desk. Eventually, after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet. They cleared the tapes out and put a desk and a TV in there, and a computer and phone. It was pretty blatant.”21 Four decades ago, Hannah Arendt was prophetic: “what first appears as a hypothesis—with or without its implied alternatives, according to the level of sophistication—turns immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a ‘fact,’ which then gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the whole enterprise is forgotten.”22 Arendt was lashing against print-based journalism, but the same can be said of the visual realm in our age. Swap “paragraphs” with “clips,” and the parallels form. The public is being taken for a ride, as Comedy Central host John Stewart knows all too well. His October 15, 2004, appearance on CNN’s Crossfire laid to waste the “partisan hackery” and political “theater” Crossfire and other likeminded cable news shows championed, calling to question charades like “spin alleys”—following national debates—which, “for people watching at home,” must be a “drag,” knowing “that you’re literally walking to a place called Deception Lane.” But in this experiment the viewer is specimen, and cable news networks had longdisabused themselves of any “responsibility to the public discourse.”23 The public is invited to a circus in which grown men and women screech down each other’s throats (or the satellite camera lenses confronting them) for approximately five minutes, while still enjoying veneration as Experts (in whichever narrow fields the dominant discourse of the day calls for). Meanwhile, the minds of human beings are being hardwired to revel in sophomoric banter, provoking greater confusion and misunderstanding of the critical issues staring us down. The freak 108

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show plays uninterrupted, as the wealth of society—cultural, social, financial—is being divvied up amongst a select few; the public handed unwanted scraps to brawl over. The buttons of a remote control, however, grant citizens power to demand ethical and serious programming. Left to be seen is whether we intend to reclaim our dignity and move out of “Zombieland”—or remain at the mercies of cash-crazy oligarchs.24 NOTES 1

2 3

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15 16 17

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Jhally, S., & Lewis, J. (1992). Enlightened racism: The cosby show, audiences, and the Myth of the American dream (p. 31). New York: Westview Press. Bauman, Z. (1988). Freedom (p. 79). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Francis Davis, J. (1992). Power of images: Creating the myths of our time. Media & Values (57). Online: http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article80.html Son, J. (2008). Beats of yellow peril. Asian Pacific American Institute. Online: http://www.apa. nyu.edu/studentwork/JulianaSon.pdf Giroux, H. A. (2009, June 19–21). The Iranian uprisings and the challenge of the new media. CounterPunch. Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/giroux06192009.html Moore, W. (2001). Television: Opiate of the masses. The Journal of Cognitive Liberties. Online: http:// www.cognitiveliberty.org/5jcl/5JCL59.htm Ibid., Enlightened racism, p. 17. White, E. B. (1944). One man’s meat (p. 64). New York: Harper & Brothers. Hamilton, J. (2010, January 18). Boom in Avatar names for kiddies. The Sun. Online: http:// www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2811820/Boom-in-Avatar-names-for-kiddies.html?OTC-RSS& ATTR=News Wolin, S. (2008). Democracy incorporated: Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (p. 262). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ownership chart: The big six. Free Press. Online: http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning (p. 31). Granby: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Jones, S. (2010, February 11). The media-lobbying complex. The Nation. Online: http://www. thenation.com/doc/20100301/jones/single Barstow, D. (2008, April 20). Behind TV analysts, Pentagon’s hidden hand. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html Talese, G. (1969). The kingdom and the power (p. 478). Cleveland, OH: The New American Library. Talese, G. (2007). A writer’s life (p. 192). New York: Knopf. Video of Charlie Rose’s interview with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. http://www.charlierose. com/view/interview/2104 Mailer, N. (1968). The armies of the night: History as a novel, the novel as history (p. 60). New York: New American Library. A couple of months earlier, MSNBC had fired veteran TV host Phil Donahue, at the time host of its highest-rated show. A leaked memo revealed just why: “Donahue represents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. … He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” And this trend could eventually culminate—heaven forbid!—in the Donahue show flourishing as “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” MSNBC also, around the time, hired conservative shock jock Michael Savage, who once described Banfield as a “mind-slut with a big pair of glasses that ... looks like she went from porno into reporting.” For full transcript of Banfield’s talk. http://www.alternet.org/story/15778?page=entire

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22 23 24

Dumas, T. (2009, January). Truth and consequences. Moffly Media. Online: http://www.mofflymedia. com/Moffly-Publications/New-Canaan-Darien-Magazine/January-2009/Truth-andConsequences/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc Arendt, H. (1970). On violence (pp. 6–7). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Transcript. (2004, October 15). http://www.mediamatters.org/research/200410160003 Giroux, H. (2009, November 17). Zombie politics and other late modern monstrosities in the age of disposability. Truthout. Online: http://www.truthout.org/111709Giroux

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CAN HIP-HOP SAVE AN ILLITERATE GENERATION?

... How many souls Hip-Hop has affected How many dead folks this art resurrected —Common, “The 6th Sense”1 Knowledge is Power. May that force be with you. —Nikki Giovanni, Racism 1012 If all statistics on functional illiteracy in inner-city schools hold any merit, it’s clear difficult days lie ahead—if at all we intend to turn this crisis around. Black and Brown kids languish at the lowest rung of the ladder in every education report tallied by whatever group, organization, or political party still interested in their affairs—and for whatever (ulterior) motives. And while almost all alternatives have been expunged, little to no progress can be accounted for. Dropout rates show crippling heights, and a Black president’s continual assertion that “dropping out of high school is ... quitting on your country” may not be the affirmation educators and students deserve in desperate times as this. Selecting Arne Duncan as Education Secretary also seems to have hung out to dry the hopes of many who sought renewed commitment, on federal and state level, for a new way forward. Duncan’s god-awful record3 as Chicago Public Schools “CEO” screams invectives at calls for total transformation of the education paradigm, caricaturing how badly needed is a system that values the humanities of all students— more so those dumped into the dustbins of neglect by racism and classism. “Every man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture,” Ralph Waldo Emerson explained over a century ago, “finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school education.”4 Uncritical public school teachers and administrators have certainly drilled subordination (and, consequently, subversion) into the minds of Black and Brown kids, teaching them that sitting silently in the same seat for hours, inanimate and inhibited, is fundamental to the educational process. To this destructive pedagogy is owed transformation of the classroom into a laboratory, where kids—better yet, lab rats lower their heads for experimentation by the white suits of standardized tests. Taught little of Critical Pedagogy or Culturally Appropriate Pedagogy, many learn to search for intellectual compensation in external and extrinsic sources—foreign to the experiences that form and fund their cultural capital. They learn soon that non-White history and heritage can’t sufficiently cultivate a competent or qualified mind. Thus they find little worth holding onto, commencing a long-lasting precipitous social decline. “This instinctive action never ceases in 111

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a healthy mind,” Emerson understood, “but becomes richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of culture.”5 And as they learn less of who they are, dreams narrow out. For salvation, many have turned to charter and private schools, as though with wave of the magic wand these models can transform—or replace—the decrepit public school system. And while often exaggerative of any benefits brought by the private model, few advocates readily admit the countless limitations. And just as grudgingly do they concede charter and voucher programs can be, and often are, capitalized on by special interests seeking to curtail the democratic guarantee of equitable education every breathing child deserves. A Republican Senator’s eloquent convictions come to mind: “If you send a kid to [public] school in D.C., chances are that they will end up in a gang rather than graduating high school.”6 Jim DeMint, South Carolina. But even while disagreeing which way best provides hope for the future, many agree, without dispute, that inner-city kids are falling through the cracks faster than failed parachutes, and it seems, as Tupac Shakur lucidly lamented, don’t nobody else care. Part of the challenge facing public education today is a cultural disconnect, or barrier, between teacher and student. Strong lack of qualified Black and Brown teachers has forced many White teachers into isolated rooms encompassed by dark faces. It gets tricky quick. And a good deal end up thrusting upon students fears of urban terror; fears fueled by pugnacious portrayals of inner-city youth as harbingers of criminality—a scalpel mass media wields best, promoting, for decades-long, vicious stereotypes of young Black and Brown kids as primitive and petulant. Notorious for eschewing reality, Hollywood has charitably painted rosy pictures of the guaranteed good that comes with having White teachers in classrooms filled with Black and Brown students; and not just any White teachers, but those with premeditated, tacit presuppositions of Black and Brown students (more so males). Films like Dangerous Minds (1995), High School High (1996), Sunset Park (1996), and Freedom Writers (2007), have surrendered strong cases for the intervention of White minds into these dungeons of darkness, often turning classrooms into criminalized spaces to keep Unruly and Unstructured students in line, and to best distinguish between those deserving attention and those not. Though the battle looks—and is!—upscale, concerned readers can be assured help has arrived—and this time through a vehicle most educators have refused the last three decades to recognize. And though not required to like or understand it, educators cannot claim to treasure the uniqueness of young Black and Brown kids, and yet remain ignorant of, if not indifferent to, a culture which has shaped, molded, defined, inspired, and identified them—continuing to: The glimmers of hope provoke those without dollars to dream/ Through your existence become wealthy: knowledge is king/.7 Hip-Hop music and culture, to the hopeless agitation of misinformed parents and politicians, has left an indelible mark on the world’s youth. The C. Delores Tuckers of the world have tried and failed, only succeeding in making of themselves laughingstocks in the Hip-Hop community, for though Misogyny, Materialism, and Machismo might be spreading cancers in the body of Hip-Hop, critics must also 112

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account the level of complicity and hypocrisy of a dominant society tolerant to these very values: only indignant once expressed by young people. Through the last decade, a rising generation of scholars began exploring HipHop’s pedagogical impulse and educational possibilities. And though voluminous reams of fiber have since strolled with black ink to document this discovery—far too many straddling the fence of covert exploitation and fruitless voyeurism—it’s worth digging into. Asheru (Gabriel Benn), a Hip-Hop artist and educator with a Peabody Award to his name, stands among the best of that stock, bearing witness to the redemptive possibilities Hip-Hop offers. For over a decade, he has worked with inner-city and special-needs students, and in 2005 he co-founded the Hip-Hop Educational Literacy Program (H.E.L.P.), which received a nod of approval from Barack Obama in September 2008, and has, in short time, gained grounds in several school (and afterschool) programs nationwide. Obama, in his letter congratulating Asheru, assured that “[by] encouraging students to push themselves to read and develop a love of learning, you are building the next generation of leaders.” From frustration with the illiteracy levels of former students, H.E.L.P. was created. Monitoring high school students in detention centers reading on 2nd and 3rd grade levels quickened his desire for a program of “high-interest,” all the while “appropriate for their reading level.” These students, he knew, listened more to Rap music than to their parents, teachers, and community leaders—combined. And this is the undeniable reality many educators yet stand unwilling to confront. Using Hip-Hop artists—their “celebrity and influence as a springboard for discussion around the various themes and issues … of literacy”—thus seemed only logical. From HipHop lyrics, various themes and issues—“metaphors, allegories, the parts of speech, punctuation, etc.”—are drawn. In each package, containing 15 activities, lyrics are used as wordlists to enhance vocabulary lessons on the four basic reading levels: Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle, and High School—critical because within a specific class, all students, regardless of literacy level or comprehension competence, can learn liberally without feeling left out: rare in a system where teachers are forced to deal with the “inclusion mode, which puts special ed students [and] general ed students in the same classroom,” even when lacking “the tools and training to differentiate appropriately and meet everyone’s need at the same time.” But, why Hip-Hop? Of all alternatives, why Hip-Hop? “I’m a Hip-Hop artist, myself,” Asheru answers. “My whole worldview was shaped by Hip-Hop. As a kid growing up, Hip-Hop just had a wide variety of content and subject matters that could be addressed; [so] I felt like it would be the perfect springboard.” More to it: “it’s the language that our kids speak. When I was a kid, all my teachers were [from] a different generation. Now, we’re in an age where both the teacher and student bought the T.I. album, both bought a Nintendo Wii, both have an X-box. So, it’s the thing that bridges our gap—culturally and generationally.” Asheru says it’s also important to dispel devious misconceptions of Rap music, as many educators have accepted blindly the myth that “Hip-Hop and education are mutually exclusive— when they aren’t.” 113

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H.E.L.P. does well in advancing beyond the stolid and one-dimensional models often constructed to deal with inner-city education issues. H.E.L.P. gets students “active” in classroom activities by expanding their worldview through interactive and relatable curriculum. And H.E.L.P. hardly fields sleepless nights from questions of legitimacy or accreditation: greater concern is devoted to “equitable education, where everyone gets a fair shake and opportunity.” The “imperative [is] to be ahead of the curve, to be trend-setters, to find new ways to disseminate and assess information.” If more educators don’t follow suit, inner-city kids would keep dropping out in droves, sticking up their middle fingers to a system that continues to fail miserably in addressing their needs. The rusty, retrogressive models must concede to new and compatible paradigms. “We can’t use the old standards of teaching, where we have the same textbooks that say Columbus discovered America,” says Asheru. “We have to change with the time.” Technology and popular culture, in aural and visual forms, can work as positive channels to “boost … instructional techniques.” None of this would mean much, however, if teachers aren’t open-eared to the concerns of students, if teachers don’t “listen to what they have to say.” With H.E.L.P. Asheru hopes to usher in new educational paradigms, and empower teachers in making successful transitions from education colleges to inner-city environments since, he says, the “Master’s program” offered at many schools doesn’t “prepare them for what they’re coming into the classroom to see.” Teachers must be enlisted for “emancipating” students—“teach them to teach themselves.” Asheru fitted his gloves for the fight against illiteracy upon discovering an unsettling truth—that illiteracy is key to all problems confronting young Black and Brown students. “I believe that illiteracy is a public health issue,” he says. “It leads to high school dropout rates; it leads to kids being unqualified to go to the job market; it leads to low wages, which leads to selling something illegal to supplement their low wages; [it leads to] youth incarceration, dropout, drug abuse, unplanned pregnancy, and low test scores.” Illiteracy also cancels out conflict resolution, which could end or preserve lives: “A lot of kids just could not articulate what they wanted to say, if it’s a matter of life-and-death. That’s how people get shot and killed over stupidness.” The will to “just communicate and reason” breaks off from “deficiency in vocabulary and inability to express themselves.” Asheru’s parting cry to young people: “Knowledge is Power”: to be illiterate is to be “half-living.” To restore millions of students back to full consciousness, then, requires educators across the country and world get involved in the war against all forces holding back this generation of geniuses and scholars. We can—we must. NOTES 1 2

Common. (2000). The 6th sense. In Like water for chocolate. MCA Records. Giovanni, N. (1994). Racism 101 (p. 93). New York: Quill.

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4

5 6

7

Jitu Brown, E. (Rico) G., & Lipman, P. (2009, Spring). Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: Myth or reality? Rethinking Schools, 23(3). Online: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/ arne233.shtml From “Intellect”; reprinted in Emerson, R. W. (1949). Selected essays (p. 224). New York: Peoples Book Club. Ibid., Selected essays, p. 225. Warren, T. (2009, March 6). Senator: Parents worrisome about D.C. schools system. The Washington Times. Online: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/06/senator-dc-students-end-up-ingangs/ Nas. (2001). Book of rhymes. In Stillmatic. Columbia Records.

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HIP-HOP Then, Today, Tomorrow

In the public transcript, the political performance of rap music often is seen as a strategy of marketing and promotion, rather than as one of resistance. —Mickey Hess, Is Hip-Hop Dead?1 Rap music is like a pipeline. With a pipeline you can have the flow going either way. Anything can be pushed through that pipeline and that’s what has happened in recent years. It’s like we helped push the door down and now everything is coming through. —Chuck D, Fight the Power2 I come back/ Every year I get newer/ I’m the dust on the moon/ I’m the trash in the sewer/ … I come back/ Through any endeavor/ This is Hip-Hop/ We gon’ last forever/ —KRS-One & Marley Marl, “Hip-Hop Lives”3 It’s been 30 ripe years since the cultural force known today as Hip-Hop mushroomed out of the ghettoes of South Bronx and spread over the surface of the earth, but no one could have claimed, back then, to foresee the journeys Hip-Hop would take or the magnitude of a legacy it would build through those journeys. It was simply impossible that a gang of hopeless, crime-prone Black and Brown saps should set off a cultural explosion which in little over two decades began boasting a multibillion dollar empire. Today it’s easy to look back and reminisce with great pleasure (and, o!, displeasure), but Hip-Hop’s pioneers surely had no clue what trail they were blazing would one day make many multi-millionaires, and just as much provoke intense international dialogue and debate. The early ‘70s (Nixon) and much of the ‘80s (Reagan) saw to it Black and Brown youth benefited little from life. The Reaganomics of the ‘80s especially made life hellish, with pronounced contempt for government “handouts” and “entitlements”— upon which many relegated to the ghettoes depended to keep their heads above murky waters. Fittingly, the Rap group Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five ripped the veils in 1982 with “The Message,” releasing righteous rage to represent a people disposable and invincible. Revelations of human beings living in a bag and eating out of garbage piles shocked many who thought themselves well-learned and welleducated about the surrounding world. Hard it was to contemplate the sad fate of a generation abandoned to the inspirations of Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, 117

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gamblers/ Pickpockets, peddlers, and even panhandlers.4 The chances slimmed out each second. Gangs exploded. Nihilism set in. On “Things Done Changed,” the late Notorious B.I.G. offered a glimpse: If I wasn’t in the rap game/ I’d probably have a Key knee-deep in the crack game/ Because the streets is a short stop/ Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump-shot/.5 Of this, Rider University English professor Mickey Hess complains: “The Notorious B.I.G. rejects the paths of education and hard work because he believes that crime, sports, or music are the only ways out of the ghetto.”6 Contrary. For kids trapped in conditions where poverty marked the tall order, where the education system promised little in return, where the dance between birth and death measured short—crime, sports, or music offered about all the options guaranteeing livable wages. This was a generation cut into conditions where, as Jay-Z spoke of his hometown (Marcy, Brooklyn), ain’t nothing nice. They knew few people cared if they survived or not. And they knew little was being done to lift the burdens bending their backs over. They were staved off into parts of the city that hardly generated public or policy interest. Politicians wiped their hands clean and pretended the world was as it should be. And out of this reality rose an awakening that, through different forms, still stands strong to remind those in power the disposable and invincible can never be silenced out of memory. DJs plugged their equipments into street lights and blasted sounds through amplified speakers. Breakdancers acrobated their bodies in death-defying angles, on flattened cardboards covering the open street. MCs rhymed with rhythmic precision about life in its entirety, and engaged the park audiences in democratic dialogue. Graffiti painters, creeping through the night, plastered their identities upon public walls, moving trains, and city buses—never again to be taken for granted or erased from public consciousness. Everything about Hip-Hop was meant to be public, provocative, and prescient—to send a message, to issue a warning. Youth of color, expected to fall in line and trouble no one, took dead scraps lying around, breathed life into it, and created a cultural force of irreducible significance that changed, perhaps even saved, the world. Hip-Hop has since stood the test of time as one of the few artistic creations, through humanity history, to come to life without the help, supervision, or even awareness, of an adult population. Never before had street kids, most missing astute academic backgrounds, created their own cardinal directions to map out a future of Possibility and Hope: (1) they would paint pictures of the legacies they intended to leave behind (2) set music to it (3) carve out dance steps to supplement the sound (4) and prophesy upon the waves and melodies. It started with rhythms I heard listening to the wall/ The bouncing of basketballs on playgrounds and all/ The empty bottles that’s hollow, wind blowing inside ‘em/ The flow and the rhyming got my alignment to a science/ Mixing with my moms in the kitchen, them spoons rattling/ Pots and pans, faucet water pouring, tunes managing/ To come from all the fussing and rambling, what I noticed was/ Pure music un-tampered with by things showbiz does/.7 Three decades later Hip-Hop still stands. And though without the groundwork laid by Muhammad Ali, The Last Poets, Langston Hughes, Phillis Wheatley, 118

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, Gil Scott-Heron, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, James Brown, Sonia Sanchez, and scores of other preRap scribes, Beat poets, and folklorists, Hip-Hop would have lacked a foundation to build upon, it also stands true that, up until the early ‘90s, most adults still openly expressed doubt about this budding phenomenon of creative genius they saw some potential in. And those were the good and decent old folks. There were those who reviled Rap because, to take their word, it presented nothing original—simply stealing from existing traditions, remixing what was old into new, catchy, upbeat repetitive loops. The technique of sampling, they fumed, fell far from an ingenious activity— was really theft and laziness. It’s been a long and winding road, but the travel was not in vain. Since 1979, when Hip-Hop for commerce was first explored and put to good use, the canvas has attracted many painters. Once the primary apparatus deployed to survive street struggle, today loads of firms, agencies, corporations, organizations, universities, and even governments look to Hip-Hop to lead the way to the hearts of the youth. Even the 47-year-old president elected on November 4, 2008, had to declare his critical allegiance to Hip-Hop several times before the young generation that propelled him into office could rally around exhortations of Hope and Change. When exactly Hip-Hop flourished best as a financial firebrand still puzzles most aficionados, but the ‘90s, a decade hung on financial pendulum swings and rancid individualism, is widely cited for creating an atmosphere in which shortcuts ruled and the marketing of artists assumed acclaim over the skill or talent or tenacity those artists could show forth. What once guided Hip-Hop artists to forge along strong in the midst of oppression lost much rigor to the allure of The Market; and, most pernicious, the public washed over for the private to percolate. Hip-Hop evolved less as a provocative voice in the wilderness, promoting people’s problems, and devolved into a private enterprise obsessed with instant payback. Most evident did this thinking manifest, writes Chuck D of the seminal Rap group Public Enemy, when White Hip-Hop fans “saw it … easier to go to the mall and pick up a tape and learn about the culture that way, or they could just watch Yo! MTV Raps in the comfort of their living rooms and copy the culture that way.”8 Music-playing TV and radio stations exploded in listenership, cassette and CD sales surged. But for all the interest in Hip-Hop as a corporate cash cow, critics still registered their rage loud. From the early ‘90s on, political leaders lived high off the curiosity Hip-Hop was arousing in society. From congressional hearings to television panels to newspaper columns, the fix was in—Hip-Hop dominated national dialogue. Everyone had a say, and couldn’t remain tight-lipped long enough to ponder its accuracy. What is Hip-Hop? When was Hip-Hop conceived? Why is Hip-Hop relevant? Why do White kids love Hip-Hop (so much)? Very few could answer; but far more wanted to— and did—weigh in. Commentators and critics divvied up Hip-Hop into categories—“Gangsta,” “Commercial,” “Mainstream,” “Underground,” “Good,” “Bad.” But the scale weighed with bias—they shamed “Gangsta” and “Commercial” Hip-Hop for exploiting social maladies and repackaging trauma and glamorizing violence and fetishizing fatalism. Black activists invited TV cameras to special sessions where stocks of Rap CDs 119

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cracked under their trampling boots and the crushing tires of tractors. Few voices of conscience (and, oh, sanity) made headway as debates ratcheted; and as fewer flew to defense of this great contribution to society—contribution without which a generation might have lacked meaning—the full swath of Hip-Hop remained, and remains, unknown to most, especially those quick to mouth-off about how bad and despicable and vile and endangering Rap lyrics are. For a generation raised on the terror of Reaganomics, and brought to life in an age where their humanities had dollar signs written all over, the pent-up rage that found refuge through the mic didn’t do well in pleasing authority figures. Unimagined it must have been three decades ago that through all the struggle and strife that produced this remarkable phenomenon, few would have the courtesy— nay, the human decency—to acknowledge its place and time in history as a moving mass of artistic genius: the notion that all Hip-Hop artists wallow in the wasteland of gutter-talk still passes for intelligent assessment today. Mid-March 2010, the Texas Board of Education cast its lot with those unconvinced Hip-Hop deserves the light of public recognition. In a whitewashed draft of the state’s high school social studies curriculum, conservatives struck out, on multiple counts, attempts to add Hip-Hop to the list of noteworthy cultural creations in American history. “Experts had recommended students study the impact of cultural movements in art, music and literature,” reported the Houston Chronicle. “The board’s seven social conservatives, joined by Geraldine ‘Tincy’ Miller, R-Dallas, considered some of the [Hip-Hop] lyrics offensive and voted to eliminate [it] as an option for students to consider.”9 Students, under this statute, would learn next to nothing of the global force for political and social advocacy that is Hip-Hop. But perhaps this very fact—that HipHop at its best lifts the voices of the unloved and rejected, of the displaced and dispossessed—is what makes the culture so threatening and so scrutiny-served: and this must be kept from the hearts of schoolchildren, even as they listen to HipHop artists, some of whom, it should be admitted, stray far, far from any forms of advocacy for the meek and muted, the weak and wasted—The Wretched of the Earth, to invoke Fanon. Through the ‘90s, artists faced stark sentences in the court of public opinion, but those who sponsored controversial Rap records (and benefited good from them) never had to worry of subpoenas of any sort. Bryan Turner, founder of Priority Records and once-distribution czar of Hip-Hop records, comes to mind. Turner’s brand did well in the ‘90s by co-opting and buying out small, independent, Black-owned record labels. In the much-ballyhooed Gangsta Rap explosion of the early ‘90s, his fingerprints scarred the scene. But as fingers went flying the direction of Hip-Hop artists, executives like Turner escaped unscathed. A 1998 New York Times op-ed wondered why of all the moral indignation heaped on artists, very few ever landed Turner’s way. “Although a handful of white executives built their companies on rap in the early 80’s,” observed author Neil Strauss, “the soft-spoken Mr. Turner was the only one willing to engage in music so extreme.”10 Hip-Hop artists, to their credit, played the game well—refusing to genuflect or cower. They understood “only a small percentage of people … have a genuine concern for Hip-Hop.”11 120

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Not even the major record labels, which at times went to bat for the First Amendment rights of their artists, would have remained so loyal if the financial wells suddenly dried up—as did later on. The War on Hip-Hop took no prisoners—raging on till this moment. Calls for brandishing of CD labels with “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” stickers marked but the first of many infantile steps to assure HipHop artists their message would be tolerated no longer by society. Those convinced the music could never serve as source of self-correction for a society hostile to its young—and more so to its dark young—have kept the fight going, at every turn crafting new campaigns to criminalize Hip-Hop as but an extension of the drug game. It is true that many Hip-Hop artists, through time, have given life to this sentiment. Mickey Hess points out: “the concept of music as drug has permeated hip hop lyrics. Rap lyrics’ particular and unique attention to the marketing and distribution of the music see this metaphor make sense: Music as commodity and as illegal substance, making rap music out as outlaw production and distribution.”12 But the ruthlessness with which the eye of public scorn watches over them certainly draws unfair parallels between what Hip-Hop artists do with their poetry and the paraphernalia peddled by drug dealers. News broke late 2003 of secret units housed in the Miami Police Department and the New York Police Department (NYPD) set up to monitor rappers as they roam the music scene. Both forces denied vehemently existence of any covert surveillance operation specifically targeting Hip-Hop artists, but in no time a former NYPD firstgrade detective, Derrick Parker, came through with a 500-page dossier containing pertinent information on popular Rap stars, part of which detailed their aliases, vehicles, rap sheets, associates, and hangout spots. Parker announced the unit was initiated in 1998 and operated until 2002. Upon the department chief ’s command, he compiled files, interviewed suspects, and stalked rappers around in nightclubs. “It’s not called the hip-hop unit,” Parker corrected MTV in 2003, “it’s really just under Gang Intel.” Of importance here are “the force’s younger officers, who know the hip-hop scene and are occasionally called on for their expertise during cases in which hip-hop culture and its personalities figure prominently.”13 To my knowledge, no unit to follow Rock ‘n’ Roll stars around or chase down Country Music crooners about exists. On January 16, 2007, two popular Hip-Hop DJs, alongside 17 others, were hauled out of their Atlanta studios in handcuffs on racketeering charges. The crime: selling mixtapes illegally—a practice as ancient as Hip-Hop. In the chilling raid of the offices where both produced their well-received mixtape series, SWAT teams seized computers, recording equipments, cash, bank statements, vehicles, and over 50,000 CDs.14 In a taped Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) meeting leaked early February 2008, Deborah Robinson, regional council for the outfit’s anti-piracy division, claimed without shame “this type of crime affects quality of life in the D.A.’s jurisdictions, the cities in which they work and live. The other thing is that it’s a link to other types of crimes.” Prod deeper and this “might lead you to a drug investigation. It might allow you to have probable cause for a drug house you couldn’t get in before but now you can get in by … doing undercover purchases 121

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of CDs.” And if you thought the raft suspending her tortured logic couldn’t give in any further, Robinson outsmarts all skeptics: “It also has links to some terrorist organizations; for those federal prosecutors out there, there are a number of cases that we’re working on right now. But what we are seeing is also a link to selling drugs with the CDs—and some gun activity, as well.”15 Mixtapes have, for many years, overseen—if not entirely funded—the artistdevelopment process (now long-abandoned). Artists badly needed street presence, and no other medium offered best chance, in ease and cost, but mixtapes. Most DJs made no money off the mixtapes but won recording contracts, exclusive releases, or production gigs as reward for their hard work. In the last days of the major record labels, however, fear and greed have run amok, and DJs (as everyone else) stand accused of benefitting from lost revenue. Indeed, revenue has vanished. The big-four—Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, EMI, and Sony BMG—have in the last decade stomached heavy blows from consumers disaffected with meaningless music driven not by passion but pressure. In 1996 the big-four could boast of $14.5 billion in net sales; a decade later: $11.5 billion. Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson cited even more ominous figures in his popular text, The Long Tail (2006): “Sales fell 2.5 percent in 2001, 6.8 percent in 2002, and just kept dropping. By the end of 2005 (down another 7 percent), music sales in the United States had dwindled more than a quarter from their peak. … Between 2001 and 2005, the music industry’s total sales fell by a quarter. But the number of hit albums fell by nearly half.”16 To compensate, music fans charged with downloading illegally can expect billing as high as $675,000 and $2,000,000. Per song, defendants can end up charged up to $750 - $150,000.17 On less rainy days, record industry bullies face down 11-year-old gymnasts for using licensed music as part of practice routines—without paying.18 Record labels, saddled only from self-inflicted wounds, claim the whole world plotted their demise, but, a decade ago, visionaries like Chuck D saw the crash coming: Record companies seek young artists that have skills and sign them, they sell a whole bunch of records the first time around, they get a second chance, don’t sell any records and then they’re cut loose. Frustrated at twenty-one. A record company would make crazy money and continue to do that same thing over and over again for a hundred years if they could keep that pattern flowing.19 The pattern forever flows—even as the future Hip-Hop is to step into finds little promise in the private realm. Once a public force for empowerment, today it remains inextricably bound to the private organ, vulnerable to the boom and bust of The Market, and even taking cues from the free-market sensibility which humbled the global economy. But at times when hope hides in the darkness, Hip-Hop always comes through to redefine its mission and place in society, constantly challenging and critiquing from within. When the chambers of commerce fly open, however, it seeks to temper any revolutionary or political impulse and attend to commercial interests. And so the pendulum has swung through the last three decades. The times today speak more of gray patches than clear blue skies, so Hip-Hop can make good use of this opening to break free from the “very excesses and 122

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amorality it was born in rage against.” Its legacy should never be forgotten as presenting “stronger and more clearly than any cultural expression in the past generation a profound indictment of the moral decadence of our dominant society.”20 But more than reductionist rage and vain vulgarity, Hip-Hop artists would have to see their primary purpose as saving the soul of the same society that seeks to mute their righteous voice. NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13

14

15

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Hess, M. (2007). Is hip hop dead?: The past, present, and future of America’s most wanted music (p. 87). Westport, CT: Praeger. Chuck, D., with Jah, Y. (1997). Fight the power: Rap, race, and reality (p. 259). New York: Delacorte Press. KRS-One, & Marl, M. (2007). Hip-Hop lives. In Hip-Hop lives. Koch Records. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. (1982). The message. In The message. Sugar Hill Records. The Notorious B.I.G. (1994). Things done changed. Ready to die. Bad Boy. Ibid., Is hip-hop dead? p. 55. Nas. (2006). Music for life. In Hi-Teknology²: The chip. Babygrande Records. Ibid., Fight the power, p. 113. Scharrer, G. (2010, March 13). New standards in history class. Houston Chronicle. Online: http://www. chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6910429.html Strauss, N. (1998, September 3). The secret power in big rap; Bryan Turner makes rap records but escapes the criticism. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/03/arts/secretpower-big-rap-bryan-turner-makes-rap-records-but-escapes-criticism.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1 Ibid., Fight the power, p. 117. Ibid., Is hip-hop dead? p. 57. Century, D. (2003). Hip-Hop cops: Is the NYPD at war with hip-hop. MTV News. Online: http:// www.mtv.com/bands/t/task_force/news_feature_020503/ Sanneh, K. (2007, January 18). With arrest of DJ Drama, the law takes aim at mixtapes. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/arts/music/18dram.html Paul, R. (2008, February 20). Reviewing the RIAA’s ‘Reefer Madness’ for the digital age. Ars Technica. Online: http://www.arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/02/reviewing-the-riaas-reefer-madnessfor-the-digital-age.ars Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more (p. 32). New York: Hyperion. Kravets, D. (2009, March 23). Obama sides with RIAA, supports $150,000 fine per music track. Wired. Online: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/obama-sides-wit-2/ Masnick, M. (2009, December 2). Canadian collection society pushing gymnastics clubs to pay up for music. Techdirt. Online: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0312457107.shtml Ibid., Fight the Power, p. 113. West, C. (2004 paperback ed.). Democracy matters: Winning the fight against imperialism (p. 179). New York: Penguin Group.

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THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF HIP-HOP ARTISTS IN TIMES OF MORAL ANARCHY

The artist is no freer than the society in which he lives. —Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act1 Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is ... to make freedom real. —James Baldwin, “The Creative Process”2 Most of the attacks against Hip-Hop music through time have held at center one conviction: that its artists have no leg to stand on. You lack the credentials! society is quick to fire back. Your concerns are as valuable as a toad’s croak. But HipHop artists have remained effervescent in demanding dignity from this society, refusing to let the bellicose barrage stomp out their message and mission. Through all the storms and static, they still find this their responsibility—to hold the feet of the rich and powerful to the fire, speaking loud for the oppressed and underserved. In truth, no other group best qualifies to render fiery and scornful critiques upon the immediate world: Hip-Hop artists—mostly young, Black and Brown—speak for millions who live daily under the sanction of White Supremacy and a caustic capitalist system that drives people toward conscience-shocking deeds. They can testify firsthand to the limitations of dreams and ambitions when all corners of life slowly close in to send you packing in one or two direction(s): Jail. Grave. As young men and women their surroundings spoke not of life but death, constantly ringing the message—that the world has no use for them; that their burdens would have to be shouldered with the backbone of Personal Responsibility; that society bears no ethical obligation to alleviate those burdens: on their own, and expected to be for as long as oxygen flowed to and fro their nostrils. No one came; no one cared: We from the block where people stay prepared to rock/ And it’s hard ‘cause opportunity be scared to knock/ And mo’ people in the ‘hood found dead from cops/ Than guns that drop, that sprayed off random shots/.3 On “Hip-Hop Saved My Life,” off The Cool (2007), prolific Chicago Hip-Hop artist Lupe Fiasco chronicles the nail-and-hammer life of an aspiring rapper wrestling with the complicated world crucifying him: He said, “I write what I see/ Write to make it right/ Don’t like where I be/ I like to make it like/ The sights on TV/ Quite the great life”/. Lofty dreams aside, the world demands more of him: He turns down the beat/ Writer’s block impedes/ Crying from the next room—a baby in need/. His father’s life hangs in the balance on death row; his best friend lies dead in some graveyard; his mother works “like a slave” for a fruit juice company. But love and 125

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support from his baby’s mother sustains him through all—through the tumultuous work ethic demanded of un-established artists, through the pain and wane of financial strife. Man, it feels good when it happens like that, Lupe accounts. Two days from going back to selling crack.4 The Hip-Hop community is no monolith, so anomalies do exist, and not all artists emerge from conditions that threaten the scruples of anyone hostile to oppression. But most share these stories. And they do because far too often are Black and Brown children cast to the same fate, asked to toe the same line. Hip-Hop is streets struggle—in all forms—gravitating toward “grassroots hermeneutics.”5 Nothing ontologically Hip-Hop should seek admission into, or acceptance from, the corporate and establishment world. “The message of hip hop grammar, then, is one of metastability, of a world of constantly shifting meanings,” writes Lewis R. Gordon. “It is no wonder that the grammar of hip hop embodiment is always slightly off; everything, from how one stands to the clothing one wears, is a celebration of the idiosyncratic, the offbeat, and the polyvalent.”6 Hip-Hop is “slightly off,” preoccupied with turning over the status quo and establishing just conditions. But Hip-Hop is also borne of this society, so it reads often as a transparent glove— confirming what society seeks to conceal and pretend exists elsewhere. In the late ‘90s, when much of the political rage early Hip-Hop artists adopted as second nature morphed into misogynistic frenzy, no surprise that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was swinging with full force. The militancy of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s did give way to “libidinal displays centering on the female body,”7 but the broader society wasn’t far off, with more flesh than ever broadcast on mainstream TV (to indict a couple: The Jerry Springer Show and The Real World), before unfurling the magic carpet for a new millennium that lifted all censors and took televised sexuality to unimagined heights. And just as the ‘90s entertained financial scandals en masse, Hip-Hop, running parallel, opened its doors to all bidders. To Gordon’s point, “Hip hop artists face the realities of commodification as did their predecessors. Much money has been made and continues to be made by a version of hip hop culture that takes the dollar to near levels of idolatry. Such versions will take their inevitable course in the short-term medium of popularity, decay, and death.”8 Every popular art-form wades through uncertain periods, wrenched by identity crises. Hip-Hop—no different. And in those dark moments, opportunities are presented for self-examination and critical introspection. Hip-Hop, halfway through the last decade, took deeper looks inward to determine what went wrong and where, some even arguing given the past and present any future might be irreparably imperiled. Nas, a lucid wordsmith, stood up, armed with sobering criticism of the culture and music he had contributed voluminously to over the past two decades: Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game/ Reminiscing when it wasn’t all business/ It forgot where it started/ So we all gather here for the dearly departed/.9 His comments sparked fury from many who felt the elegy premature; but for those with mature minds, the truth was pleasant to hear: somewhere-somehow-someone(s) had dropped the baton. Nas’ sound-off also sought aim at the larger society—a world hijacked by forces of neoliberalism, offering the illusion of choice while presenting little in substance. 126

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Nas was speaking of a world where public concerns and public constructs years ago died a thousand deaths to make way for privatization and commodification, overhauling all institutions from schools, to jails, to hospitals. Nas was speaking of the need to break free from a business-bent society, and imagine a world where wealth didn’t decide one’s fate, a world where Might didn’t make Right. His remarks extended a critical tradition that calls out the conscience of society whenever a great movement readies to take place. And in an age when many Hip-Hop artists influence young people—of all ethnicities—more than presidents and politicians and pundits (combined!), greater examination should attend the message being delivered. It’s often difficult for Hip-Hop artists to all speak the language of social consciousness or political militancy. The slots are slim—and the categories easily suffocate. Many feel boxed in, against their will and interest, to fulfill the marketing discretions of White-owned companies with either little knowledge of the complexity of Black artistry or no desire to go the extra mile. Talib Kweli, one of the notable Hip-Hop veterans still wielding a mighty pen, explained once the failure of labels to accept his full swath: Back to the topic we on: it all started at Rawkus/ They couldn’t find the words to describe me so they resort to the shortcuts/ Is he a backpacker? Is he a mad rapper?/ An entertainer or the author of the last chapter?/.10 This confession ranks common with many artists celebrated as “conscious” or “underground.” They finally crack the ceiling after many agonizing years, only to find out the room isn’t large enough to fit all. So a cubicle is chalked around them, from which they are advised not to deviate. Black scholars bell hooks and Cornel West shared the same fears two decades back in their published dialogue, Breaking Bread: “Once a corporation or even an independent publishing house can market an author as a specific kind of voice, it becomes a label which is put on you.”11 Switch “independent publishing house” with “record label,” and “author” with “artist,” and the blindfolds fly off. The same rules apply with well-to-do Black academics. And for good reason. The larger society has no use for Black men and Black women with broad visions and tireless aspirations. Those who stay where they belong—“in their place”— enjoy the crumbs occasionally tossed down The Rich Man’s table. But those who refuse any compartmentalizing, who refuse to be bottled up and swallowed, can expect obstacles at each step and stop of their careers, because the humanities—the full figures—of Free Black People don’t comfort power-structures very kindly. When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. added an extra wing to his civil rights crusade, critics tried to clip him for, ostensibly, jeopardizing the lives of millions he had worked ceaselessly on behalf of for the past decade. For speaking out against the Vietnam War, his enemy-list boomed overnight. “Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? … Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they demanded.12 Many White liberals, once fettered to his feet as he marched down southern streets, denounced him. Many White moderates, who had settled within their souls that integration was the right way forward, attacked him viciously. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a former ally, reportedly fired off against that “goddamn nigger preacher.”13 And, most tragic of all, 127

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many Black allies, many Black fellow warriors, many Black churches, condemned this meddling in issues above his pay-grade. Rappers report often of the pigeonholing that counts for marketing and promotion in the music industry—afterward received unquestioningly by fans and critics. If, by calling, their music carries of a socially aware odor, fans and critics demand forever to be greeted by that scent and no other. If their sounds speak of commercialism and misogyny and fatalism, they dare not ever take a righteous stance for social justice causes, lest they risk the scorn of a furious public quick to accuse them of publicity stunts and agenda-driven activism. In this sense, we risk unmeasured harm both to artists and the young they instruct. How far removed from reality is a society which teaches young people to pick one route in life to pursue and forever remain on course, no matter the convictions encountered later on, no matter the life-changing experiences engaged, no matter the epiphanies a fulfilled life brings? Young kids, under this vision, never relent in thwarting all potentially destiny-altering events because society cannot tolerate complexity in human beings. Here, a rapper who started out extolling the glorious enterprise of drug-dealing and senseless violence can never see the wrong in his ways and advise admiring fans to reconsider learned assumptions. Yet, rappers wield immeasurable influence over young people. And just as well. It’s only right that millions of young people, globally, should look up to rappers as venerable sources from which to cultivate values and learn of the world—adults have abandoned them. The dangers, of course, count multiple. “Through Rap music,” writes Chuck D, “the most negative projection of ourselves becomes the most popular for young people. What develops is a driven hipness to be cool and to be on the side of the criminal.”14 And as the pornography of violence transfers from television tubes to various forms of screen-based media, more scrutiny ought to meet anyone with influence over the thoughts bubbling in the brains of impressionable kids. Whether with executives, army recruiters, pundits, politicians, presidents, rappers— responsibility must be leveled out equally. No more. No less. Rappers should bear some responsibilities, to ensure their remarkable stories of struggle and survival show the possibilities available even when outmatched by crisis and chaos; but the messenger shouldn’t take blame for the message. The April 2007 John “Don” Imus controversy flourishes with resource. Imus was a multimillionaire shock jock whose empire rested on the backs of those he trampled down in a daily climb to the top of imbecility. No one immune—but women, and dark women especially, faced greater risk of trampling. Imus, as journalist and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal laid out, “was a creature of White corporate and political power, who made millions playing to the small-mindedness of millions who wanted to snicker at the lot of those worse off than them.” And on April 4, 2007, he dragged his boots once more—this time upon members of the (predominantly Black) Rutgers University female basketball team. The dialogue with show executive producer Bernard McGuirk ran but a few seconds long: IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and— McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos. 128

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IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some—whew! And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so … I don’t know. McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing. IMUS: Yeah. McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes...15 Neither Imus nor McGuirk, nor CBS nor MSNBC—both channels which, at the time, simulcasted his morning show—anticipated much to come of the comments. This was his shtick—and millions loved him for it. But the tables turned this time, and national outrage forced him off the air for eight months. Once, however, it appeared unlikely Imus would win sympathy with the public, many on the Right and Left had their fingers directed at another target—Hip-Hop. They yelped to the cause— screaming double standard! They protested: when young Black rappers call women hos, cash bundles fly into their coffers, but when old White shock jocks do the same, everyone wields a rope with which to hang ‘em. Of course this “juvenile rant,” to quote Abu-Jamal, fails to register, for “while it is undeniable that some of what is said is naked misogyny—a profound hatred of women—it’s obvious that rappers have nowhere near the social or political clout of Imus,” for Imus had one thing most rappers—for all their influence—lack: Power. And Power outlasts Influence any day. “People who wanted to be president flocked to Imus like supplicants kissing the ring of a bishop, because he had the daily ear of millions and his blessings meant votes.”16 Hip-Hop artists have never had much power. Rarely do they own their master recordings or control the directions in which their careers veer. Rarely do they have say-sos over the image or brand (of themselves) marketed to the public. Seldom do they get to decide what songs to put out as singles in promoting new projects. And in the new age of 360° deals—wherein record labels earn sizeable cuts from all ventures artists engage in—whatever little power once had has whittled down permanently.17 But even within the autonomy-absolving music industry, they share a stage which few people ever rise to. They own megaphones reaching millions across the world—from old to young, from dark to White—performing “first-person vocals as characters, often switching between these narrative modes as they construct narratives that preserve self-identity throughout their interaction with commercial forces.”18 And, yes, with much influence should come much responsibility. On “Don’t Rush Me,” off Jeanius (2008), Jean Grae, a Cape Town-born artist, raps of battles waged against forces determined to change and break her: Just as I was finding my level of maturity/ Just as I was minding my business/ Tried to murder Jean’s confidence/ But lucky for me, you’re all incompetent/.19 “My Story,” another offering from the incandescent artist, counts to remind of the pure therapeutic possibilities of Hip-Hop, when used with grace. Grae touches on personal accounts of heart murmurs, promiscuity, abortion, miscarriage, melancholy, and more. She starts: If I could swim a thousand lakes to bring your life back/ I write that, but infinity can’t rewind facts/ You are divinity/ My primitive mind was struggling/ 129

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Just to understand the meaning of life: forgive me/ I never told my mommy: I couldn’t break her spirit/ She always wished her daughter extraordinary thinking/. Then Grae recounts dizzy spells, ulcer-like symptoms, unwanted pregnancies, and abortion trips to the hospital: And you don’t know what it’s like in waiting rooms/ And outside their picketing pictures could slay you/ They’re screaming, “Victims!” and spitting till they shame you/ I hold my head low and shiver-push my way through/ They put you in a room/ Where you can change into your gown and shower cap, shaking as a fiend would do/. Grae’s story brings to life the buried consequences most women in this marsh face—thoughts of fleeing the building, the screams of unborn babies piercing their skulls, post-op regrets: Then you wake up in another room with plenty others/ They call it recovery: you’re thinking, “We ain’t mothers”/. Her story’s far from complete—parents later discover pills, rage and hate and homicidal thoughts set in, failed suicidal attempts. Then a miscarriage at 22—headed to a breakdown/ Swallowed up some pills and I laid down/. She laments closing in on 27 with three kids I never met, and wonders what thoughts might have gripped them of a mother murdering her babies. Grae’s honesty stings, as she reflects on all that happened, and acknowledges in hindsight perhaps not much would change: I’m thinking about another life that almost got close/ Praying that in another time we could’ve changed posts/ If I could just reverse time, I would/ I don’t know what I would do: honestly, it’s not good/ I’m sorry/.20 Hip-Hop artists like Jean Grae have much to teach a society that looks down on, as in her narrative, pregnant women who abort fetuses. No one guarantees that the message would always fit any particular model of moral purity, or that the prescription would guarantee stability in times of anarchy; but to choose to listen is to open up channels that otherwise deafen the eardrums of many to the kicking screams of a generation suffering in a soulless society. NOTES 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

Ellison, R. (1964). Shadow and act (p. 44). New York: Random House. From “The Creative Process”; reprinted in Baldwin, J. (1998). Collected essays (p. 672). New York: Library of America. The Roots. (2006). Can’t stop this. In Game Theory. Def Jam. Fiasco, L. (2007). Hip-Hop saved my life. In Lupe Fiasco’s the cool. Atlantic Records. Gordon, L. R. (2005). The problem of maturity in Hip-Hop. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Nas. (2006). Hip Hop is dead. In Hip Hop is dead. Def Jam. Kweli, T. (2007). Hostile Gospel Pt. 1 (Deliver Us). Eardrum. Blacksmith Music. hooks, b., & West, C. (1991). Breaking bread: Insurgent black intellectual life (pp. 75–76). Boston: South End Press. Excerpted from “A Time to Break Silence: Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimeto breaksilence.htm Jones, B. (2009, January 19). The king they won’t celebrate. Socialist Worker. Online: http://www. socialistworker.org/2009/01/19/the-king-they-wont-celebrate

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15 16

17

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Chuck, D., with Jah, Y. (1997). Fight the power: Rap, race, and reality (p. 45). New York: Delacorte Press. Transcript and audio. Online: http://www.mediamatters.org/research/200704040011 Abu-Jamal, M. (2007, April 14). Imus amongst us. Prison Radio. Online: http://www.prisonradio.org/ ImusMumia.htm Leeds, J. (2007, November 11). The new deal: Band as brand. The New York Times. Online: http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/arts/music/11leed.html Hess, M. (2007). Is Hip Hop dead?: The past, present, and future of America’s most wanted music (p. 62). Westport, CT: Praeger. Grae, J. (2008). Don’t rush me. Jeanius. Blacksmith Music. Grae, J. (2008). My story. Jeanius. Blacksmith Music.

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WHEN POLITICAL IDEOLOGY MORPHS INTO SPIRITUAL DEATH Social Darwinism in Dark Times

[A] broad mind [is] always in danger of becoming narrow. —Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me1 A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom. —Henry David Thoreau, Uncommon Learning2 Perhaps the worst havoc wrought by the George W. Bush era of unbridled neoliberalism was dismantling all investments in the concept of a social safety net to safeguard deliberative democracy. The Bush gang established, with frightening ease and expedience, a revised order of thinking—where citizens could calculate the amount of support and sympathy a crisis and its victims deserved (the Iraq Invasion, for one), based on such spiritually dead criteria as ethnic orientation, national identity, religious affiliation, and political ideology. Thus, the count of Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire lessened in value as time passed. But before Bush had come Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan— masters of the Southern Strategy that swept clean all supplies of the Social State laid out by liberal (though far from faultless) leaders like FDR and LBJ. On domestic (Fiscal Responsibility) and foreign slates (National Security), the sweeping quickened. Most memorable of Reagan’s contributions to the dialogue of oppression is his 1976 triumphant fictional narrative of a “woman in Chicago” who with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards … [was] collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.”3 And in that instance, many who had once championed Welfare Assistance and Food Stamps as necessary in a society rife with economic inequality began losing touch with their humanity, effectively setting stage 20 years later for a Democrat president to celebrate “an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.”4 Reverend Jesse Jackson offered a counter-narrative in 1988 which fell largely on stuffed ears: “Most poor people are not lazy. They are not Black. They are not Brown. They are mostly White and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry baby’s belly turned inside out is the same color—color it Pain, color it Hurt, color it Agony.”5 But Reagan and Clinton found common cause in stigmatizing poor single mothers whose sources of income had narrowed out to government handouts. 135

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One a conservative; the other a triangulator: both saw welfare-receiving citizens as unnecessary cargo burdening an already-sinking economic ship. And even President Obama seemed to find very little objection-worthy in this practice when he listed at a March 2009 Orange County town hall the prerequisites of a hard-worker: All I’m trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard—they’re not on welfare, they’re going to their jobs every day, they’re doing the right things by their kids—should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while.6 His 2008 presidential election rival, current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had gaffed her way into headlines a year earlier for suggesting Obama couldn’t win support from “working, hard-working Americans—White Americans.”7 The trend is quite clear: a parallel drawn between assistance-accepting individuals and shiftlessness, with laser-like focus through a racialized prism. That White women form the largest group dependent on Welfare Assistance has hardly measured any difference to the many pundits, politicians, thinkers, and leaders—of both parties— who incessantly spew the lie that middle class Whites’ hard-earned dollars mostly end up picking the tabs for Black and Brown crack-addicted single mothers. For decades now, this has been the uninterrupted chant, repeated and recycled by politicians short on policy substance. It has worked well in convincing many to go against the better angels of their nature which encourage help for the unprivileged and a hand-up to those crippled by poverty. After all, “we are, or try to be,” as Gore Vidal reminds, “what our society wants us to be.”8 Suburban Whites especially have been rallied in rage against legislators uncommitted to cutting off, permanently, individuals and families dependent on government assistance—in deluded hope that this unconscionable act of Tough Love would force them out of their mobile homes into nonexistent job sectors. With the 2008 economic meltdown, however, many who once held steadfast to individualistic values of self-reliance soon realized how dispassionately and indiscriminately the storms of homelessness can blow over even middle-class families’ homes. It took a tragic event of epic magnitude, but finally the message found traction in the hearts of millions—millions described by The New York Times as “the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives—potentially for years to come.”9 No one was safe anymore. Tent towns blew up fast as realistic alternatives to mass homelessness; thousands who never once begged for bread were found stranded in lines at soup kitchens; young college graduates scuttled back into their parents’ basements to cut unnecessary costs; and every family monitoring the news knew at any moment their foreclosure bell could begin tolling. This fear-factored humility reminded many of another time, not quite a century ago, when the air was thick with want and need—The Great Depression. Thousands of men put out before daybreak, scouring the streets for jobs only a few months prior no one would insult them with offers for. Women who never before broke a sweat outside the home were, too, forced out in search of any opportunity to keep the ground still. The whole country had lost its character and self-worth, 136

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and Washington could foresee the effects which could still linger even after a potential recovery. With innovative initiatives like the Federal Writers’ Project, an offshoot of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to inspire in citizens the courage to examine the world for all its beastly and beautiful qualities: to dream beyond the visible to the imaginable: to work in establishing those dreams in the neighborhoods, cities, towns, and states within their reach. But, just as Barack Obama is starting to find out, for a society served by partisan bickering and political spats, any disengagement from market-mediated principles and practices is considered half-step from Communism. Though the Federal Writers’ Project produced prodigious scribes like Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Jim Thompson, doubt was raised regularly, by Democrat and Republican leaders, of the usefulness and social service of commissioning unlicensed writers to document towns down and out—more so without watchdog agencies to weed out unflattering observations or dissenting political pronouncements. FDR faced his share of Rightwing thuggery; and so did LBJ, who, for all his flaws, attempted to make more meaningful the promise of the social contract. Lyndon Johnson, three decades later, fell under similar scrutiny for suggesting greater compassion was critical if society should at all bridge the widening gap segregating the few rich from the most poor. A piece of legislation alone couldn’t rectify the conditions people of color and the poor in general faced torment from; much had to be done on a structural and institutional—federal—level to protect and promote the dignity of the underclass. And thus the Great Society was proposed—a neocon’s worst nightmare. ***

On October 27, 1964, Reagan rejected any federal investments in the lives of everyday folk as enabling “greater government activity in the affairs of the people”— thus, the logic leads, creating bads far outweighing goods.10 The aim, of course, extended beyond producing good theater and sparring with the most visible political opponent; it also trivialized the notion that a citizen only legitimately became one when she took special time out to be concerned with the plights those less fortunate face daily. And, in such sense, any true citizen could never simply stay confined to one state, country, or continent, for as the poet and theologian John Donne admitted, Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. The implications bear out: if I take critically my responsibility as a citizen whose allegiance beats beyond national or regional borders, this should handicap all capacity for narcissism and antipathy, and any shedding of innocent blood should arouse in me burning passion to bring wrongdoers to justice and the at-risk to safety. If I took critically my responsibility as a world citizen, as a human being accountable to the suffering of those around me and far away (one who understands borders “turn whole peoples into prisoners in glorified camps”11), hardly can I “love oppressed people,” as Cornel West writes, “and not be a fanatic for fairness.”12 “To strike a proper balance between citizenship and common purpose on the one hand, and communal autonomy and cultural variety on the other, is no simple 137

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matter,” Noam Chomsky points out; “and questions of democratic control of institutions extend to other spheres of life as well.”13 Certainly many hard-Right conservatives and “Blue Dog” democrats disagree. They “want,” instead, to “take” their “country back.” And one of their intellectual icons repeatedly orders, in all but seditionist terms, that they do everything required to return to the “simpler times”14 of the past—when the enemy wasn’t hard to spot; when code-words like “Red” and “Black” and “Brown” and “Woman” self-explanatorily condemned groups as “other,” “different,” “outside,” or “waste”15: times when Blacks knew, and stayed in, their place, and Whites didn’t have to feel so threatened by the prospect of racial depopulation. ***

Lyndon Johnson had eyes set on a greater front; he believed that for the Civil Rights Movement to gain ground substantively, the struggle for Black self-determination had to broaden to address moral dilemmas bearing national implications. Johnson saw the moment seasoned for blunt talk and straight speech, and on March 15, 1965, he delivered a riveting address to Congress, which shook the seats of both Democrat and Republican lawmakers.16 In his most eloquent exhortation, Johnson, stern with purpose, betrayed his bias by adopting the anthem of the movement he was throwing great political weight behind—“We Shall Overcome.” Johnson assured that even with a bill passed, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. The election of Barack Obama, in large measure, was to pick up where Johnson left off, and render a fierce indictment of the fear-mongering plots presidential aspirants before him had successfully sold in place of policy promises. But those who toiled tirelessly to see this young, bright, charismatic figure assume the presidency now find it hard to believe he may lack the courage and candor to stand up to the thugs on the Right and their allies in his own party. The president, it is now painfully clear, once convinced himself Rush Limbaugh’s brutish minions truly wished to work with him and make manifest the promises of bipartisanship. Worse than a costly conflation of enemy with adversary also appears the willingness to negotiate with some whose moral principles should stand completely conflicted with his—a rabid Right-wing, Ideology-driven opposition hell-bent on establishing an “utterly privatized and commodified society where corporations and markets define politics while matters of life and death are removed from ethical considerations, increasingly subject to cost-benefit analyses and the calculations of potential profit margins.”17 It counts as willful blindness to the suffering of the masses, prompted by Privilegepressured guilt. Of course the sadistic irony wears a strange mask, for the Few Wealthy 138

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(top 1% controlling roughly 35% of nation’s wealth)18 have successfully convinced the Many Poor (50% of U.S. kids now dependent on food stamps)19 of some mythical, shared struggle. And it’s increasingly evident with those who would rather blather about how close (Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh tell them) the president’s policies align with Socialism than discuss, and act on, the annual deaths of 45,000 lacking healthcare coverage.20 It’s just as evident with the tens of thousands more willing to rally against ill-defined terms like cap-and-trade than support meaningful legislations hoping to protect the environment their kids would be forced to survive within. Wole Soyinka’s reflections come to mind: Constantly immersed in the cumulative denigration of human sensibilities, only to have one’s most pessimistic predilection topped again and again by new acts—or revelations—of the limitless depths to which the human mind can sink in its negative designs, one is tempted to declare simply that the world has now entered an irreversible state of global anomie.21 These events betray a society tinkering on the brink of moral collapse, a civilization stepping into social schizophrenia. At this critical juncture, where very little anymore invokes a spirit of public or communal significance, one question raised two decades ago applies with even greater relevance: “[H]ow do we promote non-market values such as equality, justice, love, care and sacrifice in a society, culture, and world in which it is almost impossible to conceive of a non-capitalist alternative?”22 The perpetual privatization of life—from medical needs to education fields— threatens to push humanity over an edge no amount of recovery can restore. At this rate, the value of life loses out to expendable prices subject to the laws of inflation and deflation, tumbling between the aisles of consumption and production: the rancid, Darwinistic individualism of the ‘90s swings back harder in a Market Society where those who can, do; and those who can’t, die. And the biopoltics of corporate authoritarianism sweeps away from public recognition debris of wasteful lives lost in a world where wealth is worth and money is meaning. No society can survive such death-march to its grave. “What is at stake here,” Henry Giroux explains, “is not just a struggle over authority and the production, distribution, and transformation of meaning, but also the equally important task of changing those forms of economic and political power that promote human suffering and exploitation.”23 “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. taught. “It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”24 NOTES 1

2 3

Thompson, J. (1997). The killer inside me; reprinted in Crime novels: American noir of the 1950s (p. 68). New York: Penguin Books. Thoreau, H. D. (1999). Uncommon learning: Thoreau on education (p. 71). New York: Mariner Books. ‘Welfare Queen’ becomes issue in Reagan campaign. The New York Times (1976, February 15). Online: http://www.threatofrace.org/threatmap/single_element/234/

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8 9

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18

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August 22, 1996, remarks by former President Bill Clinton upon signing into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Online: http://www.ontheissues.org/ Celeb/Bill_Clinton_Welfare_+_Poverty.htm 1988 Democratic National Convention address by Reverend Jesse Jackson. Online: http://www. americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1988dnc.htm Transcript of March 18, 2009, town hall. Online: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0903/ 18/se.01.html Kiely, K., & Lawrence, J. (2008, May 8). Clinton makes case for wide appeal. USA Today. Online: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-07-clintoninterview_N.htm Vidal, G. (1993). United States: Essays 1952–1992 (p. 585). New York: Random House. Goodman, P. S. (2010, February 20). Millions of unemployed face years without jobs. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?hp “A Time for Choosing” speech by Ronald Reagan, delivered October 27, 1964. Online: http://www. americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganatimeforchoosing.htm Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (p. 100). New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. West, C. (2009). Brother West: Living and loving out loud, A memoir (p. 23). New York: Smiley Books. Chomsky, N. (2007). Interventions (p. 217). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Courtesy the nightly lunatic rants of FOX News host Glenn Beck. For an enlightening meditation, see Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge, UK: Polity. “We Shall Overcome” speech by Lyndon Johnson delivered on March 15, 1965. Online: http://www. americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm Giroux, H. A. (2009, November 6). Market-Driven hysteria and the politics of death. Truthout. Online: http://www.truthout.org/1106095 William Domhoff, G. (2005, September). Wealth, income, and power. Santa Cruz, CA: University of California. Online: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html Tanner, L. (2009, November 2). Food stamps will feed half of US kids, study says. The Associated Press. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/food-stamps-will-feed-hal_n_342834.html Wilper, A. P., Woolhandler, S., Lasser, K. E., McCormick, D., Bor, D. H., & Himmelstein, D. U. (2009, December). Health insurance and mortality in US adults. American Journal of Public Health, 99(12). Online: http://www.pnhp.org/excessdeaths/health-insurance-and-mortality-in-US-adults.pdf Ibid., Climate of fear, p. xxi. hooks, b., & West, C. (1991). Breaking bread: Insurgent black intellectual life (p. 101). Boston: South End Press. Giroux, H. A. (2005 ed.). Society and the struggle for public life: Democracy’s promise and education’s challenge (p. 68). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. “A Time to Break Silence: Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

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ON CITIZENSHIP, CHOICE, AND COURAGE

A citizen is by definition a citizen among citizens of a country among countries. His rights and duties must be defined and limited, not only by those of his fellow citizens, but also by the boundaries of a territory. —Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times1 Which way does the pendulum tend to move in the kind of society we live in? Is it freedom or communal togetherness which we miss more? Has our society, with its freedom to pursue wealth and social importance, with its free competition and ever-growing range of consumer choice, supplied all the freedom one may desire? Is the satisfaction of the other need, that of communal support, the last task still left on the social agenda? —Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom2 In a society ever expanded by immigration (and the inevitable xenophobia brought to bear), concepts of Citizenship should be addressed more often. And most have been comforted into believing Citizenship speaks only of residency or nationality in states and countries. Accordingly, citizens ought to uphold the values and traditions of the territories they exist within—locally and nationally (rarely internationally, which, for obvious reasons, explains hysterical neocon demands to disregard human rights-securing statutes like the Geneva Conventions). But if citizens can only be defined in terms of nationality, what definitions fall upon those considered citizens of empire or dissident citizens or exiled citizens? And what of those unrepresented or underrepresented by their governments? Are they not citizens? Or do they lose this identity—and its added privileges? And it would appear more meaning must be given to other kinds of citizens—those who, for their limitations (economic and otherwise) alone, have been rendered invincible and disposable. A striking, though resourceful, example was the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina victims, most of whom were poor and Black.3 While, then, all rhetorical weaponry in the Bush arsenal were at once deployed to intimidate the logical conclusion—that millions of helpless citizens failed to arouse top concern because their wallets didn’t do enough in stimulating the economy—more, even some on the Right, have since wised up to the hierarchical system that determines who gets what, when and how. One group could fly out of New Orleans overnight in private jets while another was left to rot out on the rooftops of water-soaked houses: and only after much public outrage was food, drinkable water, and emergency supplies airdropped. The bank bailout of late 2008 also jolted millions out of slumber into wide-awake consciousness of what rung on the priority ladder their government had them ranked. 141

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The many homeowners whose lives today remain fragmented and shattered—all to comfort self-sufficient, megalomaniac CEOs responsible for sponsoring the financial disaster—have also in recent months begun questioning who exactly their elected representatives hold in greater light: corporations or citizens. With schools falling apart from budget shortage, and teachers losing jobs to console the concerns of private companies steering the educational ship in all wrong directions, both children and parents find it increasingly hard to trust leaders elected to serve them. And the moral outrage unleashed when employees at the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the Federal Reserve, wound up first-in-line to receive H1N1 vaccines—even before several hospitals and elementary schools—yields great proof of a disheartened citizenry fed up with the politics of disposability and displacement.4 This swelling movement of citizens emerging from the woodworks to protest irresponsible policies—whether the two major military exploits, whether land-grab legislations, whether dispossessing eminent domain laws, whether environmental causes—confirms the obvious: push a people hard enough and prepare for blowback. And though Right-wingers—in cast as Tea Party patriots, birther and deather conspiracy theorists, and climate-change deniers—earn no applause from the Left for their erratic antics and blind obeisance to deformed and manipulative multimillionaire leaders like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin, behind the cascade of wigs, hats and placards stands a fragile and frightened population which, though harboring some racist and misguided views of their president, knows the problem isn’t with the man in the Oval Office but the corporations marching back and forth, bearing gifts. Virtually no country on earth boasts a majority deeply satisfied with the work its government is doing—even in tyrannical regions where dissent is cracked hard upon and brainwashing the norm of everyday life. And if that at all sounds generic, it shouldn’t. If out of the nearly 200 countries tied to the United Nations, only a few can boast mainstream national support, what say this of a human race still yet to engage successfully deliberative democracy? In South America, where recently a great revolution of values rewarded a vibrant people recovering from the vicious setbacks of decades-long neoliberal domination, it took years of Capitalism run amok for the oppressed masses to overthrow one corporatist-conservative dictatorship after the other and replace with leftist alternatives which, while not always perfect, have restored the faiths of millions across the continent. Noted linguist Noam Chomsky described this coming-to-being in 2006: “As the elected governments become more formally democratic, citizens have expressed an increasing disillusionment with the way democracy functions and ‘lack of faith’ in the democratic institutions. They have sought to construct democratic systems based on popular participation rather than elite and foreign domination.”5 The same can be said of the U.S. While President Barack Obama has turned out, before the eyes of an increasingly disillusioned base, far from the Change Agent he earnestly and eloquently claimed to be (or they believed he was, against all evidence), the support raked from tens of millions frustrated with eight years of inverted totalitarianism6 tells of the potential present for a greater political awakening. 142

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The ‘08 presidential election echoed a call to action—a defining moment to walk back, if at least aesthetically, some of the damage Bush’s gang had engineered with great pride. In Obama, many saw a calm, collected, composed thinker ready to beat back the shallow models of Group Think presidents of the past went into war with. They saw a former community organizer concerned with the plights of the middle class—even if he all but stayed silent on the underclass and its unwinnable war with poverty. They believed in the fruitful potential for change. And in contrast, even with compelling narratives of national security and military qualification, John McCain, many were convinced, represented merely a less agile and more erratic version, and extension, of the Reagan-Bush (I and II) regime. No other demographic took more seriously this charge than young people—often marginalized and condemned for perceived political nonchalance—who accounted for the largest turnout since 1984, marking a 4–5% increase from 2004 and 11% increase since 2000.7 “The point is that in society,” Hannah Arendt advised, “everybody must answer the question of what he is—as distinct from the question of who he is—which his role is and his function.”8 But millions pass through time and space never once being posed this question of role and function—let alone answering. James Baldwin, in his reflections on the dialectic tension between the expectations of education and a society resistant to educated citizens, poignantly pressed: “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. … But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.”9 To Baldwin’s point, society relishes dormant and docile citizens—those too burdened with the heavy toll of daily life to begin resisting and resetting oppressive social configurations. Kin to these kinds of citizens are those relegated to the margins (better yet, off the margins)—unsalvageable or unreachable. Hurricane Katrina bears the most explicit brunt of this tradition in recent times; soon after landfall, government officials, and their busboys in the Right-wing media sphere, ran off berating those who couldn’t drive out of the impending storm, who simply refused to help themselves—i.e. were too strung out on crack or involved in equally self-destructive endeavors—and did not deserve the help of a government brimming with the means, “power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, and social destruction that impacted the Gulf Coast.”10 The sympathy millions felt for their fellow citizens was extraordinary, as was the disbelief which seized millions worldwide. But the operatives knew their away around town: to pacify citizens, physically and emotionally, it’s usually helpful to cause commotion between groups more likely to find common ground and link arm against shared oppressors: to keep a displeased people under control, it’s key to make the important trivial and the trivial important. What then gives is endless fixation on supercilious customs like reality shows and celebrities-behaving-badly—and a polity extinguished of all ethical energy to demand from Power what is due. In an age when Choice, Option, and Diversity replace concrete concerns as sumtotal of democratic engagement—the be-all and end-all of Struggle—many have 143

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traded true freedom for artificial diversity. The late George Carlin, one of society’s clearest critics, spoke lengthily on the limitations lofty ideals of “freedom of choice” harvest: If it’s an important thing—limited choice. Two political parties—essentially, two. Big media companies—five, six? … Oil companies—down to three, now, I think, overall; three or four. Banks, the big banks, the big brokerage houses, the big accounting firms (all the things that are important)—reduced in choice. Newspapers in the city—how many? Used to be three, four; now, it’s one or two. They’re owned by the same people, and they also own a radio station and the TV station. But, jellybeans? Thirty-two flavors! Ice cream (all the things that don’t matter: the unimportant things)—a lot of choices.11 In line with this plot, a false sense of empowerment is bestowed upon citizens quadrennially, through well-performed narratives that entertain over a dozen presidential candidates at start but successfully narrow out to two opposing candidates reciting similar scripts. Those whose views fall outside of mainstream thought or corporate concerns are rigorously maligned, humiliated, and mocked. The hostile treatment populist candidates like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) enjoyed during the ‘08 presidential race exposed a media market more devoted to appeasing corporate sponsors than offering qualitative “freedom of choice.” The corporate news vassals, owned by six overlords—General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, CBS12—realize their audiences, already cut out by reality TV shows, are tailor-made with the seams of sentimentality. Voters (tagged “Independent,” “Democrat” and “Republican”) are selected and housed in clandestine backrooms and handed remote control-shaped objects with which their views are reflected on screen, in real-time—for viewers at home to reel in. The aim, here, greatly shifts from presenting critical presidential debates to packaging popularity contests mediated by random sets of voters. And the big-six media conglomerates sense very little to fear from a federal board more aghast at semi-second flashes of nudity than lost grounds in diversity of ownership and fair reporting on issues threatening the future of humanity.13 When countervailing outlets offer non-propaganda reporting, they are often viewed as “instrument of enemy propaganda,” and even worth incinerating.14 Neoliberalism holds no intentions of welcoming dissent or entertaining divergent dictums: The Market as purveyor of all-that-is-good dissolves all desires to reconcile citizens with their civic duties as watchdog and sponsor of government. And as governments fall subservient to Wall Street warriors, citizens must let The Market run its course. Much, however, can and must be done if the future should differ from the past and present, if generations ahead should lead lives sheltered from the penetrating fangs of predator companies and malevolent corporations. Citizens must fight back against the freakish conservative chauvinistic charade that imposes social tariffs on human beings of different nationalities. Citizens must craft a radical agenda, one intolerant to the binarism of Left vs. Right political theatrics that promotes and rewards legislators uncommitted to serving their constituencies. This agenda would do more than address the political pitfalls of government: it would challenge and overturn the “frontal assault that equates public service 144

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with corruption, diversity with lowered standards, public schools with race wars, private schools with free enterprise, free enterprise with civil liberty, choice with self-segregation and the segregation of whites from blacks with opportunity.”15 It would take forging alliances with swelling ranks of citizens—on the Left, Right, Center, Margin, and those bent beyond narrow boundaries of ideological territories— to reproduce courage in a season ripe with hope but withering of inaction. It would take a “Community with a capital C—a community of thought, values, and sensibilities, one that … transcends boundaries and governments.”16 For too long, parochial and provincial conceptions of Citizenship have halted national and international transformative movements. And endless bombardment with vague and meaningless social and cultural options successfully seduced citizens into deep sleep—which many are yet to arise from. But the age of change falls upon us, and at no other period has it been more critical that conscionable, courageous citizens of humanity restart the work of making our world as good as its promises. Indeed, “power arises only where people act together.”17 NOTES 1 2 3

4

5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15 16

17

Arendt, H. (1968). Men in dark times (p. 81). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bauman, Z. (1988). Freedom (p. 52). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. For greater insight, see Giroux, H. A. (2006). Stormy weather: Katrina and the politics of disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Deprez, E. E. (2009, November 2). New York businesses get H1N1 vaccine. BusinessWeek. Online: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/nov2009/db2009112_606442.htm Chomsky, N. (2007). Interventions (p. 193). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Term coined by political theorist Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Soule, S., & Nairne, J. (2009, January 8–11). Youth turnout in the 2008 presidential election; Data from the we the people civic education alumni network. Southern Political Science Association. Online: http://www.civiced.org/pdfs/research/SPSASouleFinal.pdf Ibid., Men in dark times, p. 155. From “A Talk to Teachers”; reprinted in Baldwin, J. (1998). Collected essays (pp. 678–679). New York: Library of America. Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 42. Smiley, T. (2008, June 23). George Carlin. PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/ 200806/20080623_carlin.html Ownership chart: The big six. Free Press. Online: http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main Here, the five-year long fixation on singer Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, juxtaposed with swift measures passed by the FCC in 2008 granting giant conglomerates access to media consolidation. For more, see Bill Moyers Journal, “Massing of the Media,” PBS (December 14, 2007). Online: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12142007/watch2.html See Patricia J. Williams’ analysis of the vitriolic threats leveled at Al Jazeera during the Bush years: Patricia J. Williams, “Killing the Messenger,” The Nation (2005, December 2). Williams, P. J. (2000, November 13). Middling against the ends. The Nation. Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (p. 99). New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Ibid., Men in dark times, p. 23.

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“THIS IS WORKING VERY WELL FOR THEM” Katrina and the Aftermath of Apathy

As the survivors of Hurricane Katrina try to piece their lives back together, it is all the clearer that a long-gathering storm of misguided policies and priorities preceded the tragedy. —Noam Chomsky, Interventions1 Waste is the dark, shameful secret of all production. Preferably, it would remain a secret. —Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives2 Various storms come, unveiling different degrees of disaster and demolition. Most storms leave behind legacies of chaos and catastrophe. But few storms reveal rare prestige and potency, yielding such unprecedented effects that years, decades, perhaps even centuries, after, tales of their wonder still flow from the lips of eyewitnesses, historians, descendants, and meteorologists. These storms aren’t transient but longlasting—eternal in measure. Such was, and is, Hurricane Katrina: 85% of the city under siege; 1,800 lives lost; 200,000 homes destroyed; 18,700 businesses shattered; 1,000,000+ citizens displaced. Katrina may have gained upper-body strength on August 28, 2005, but the years spent in denial over the stability of the levees, over the economic reality many New Orleans citizens were cursed with, over the casual callousness government had looked upon that population with, marked the beginnings of many developmental stages that touched down in the dome of New Orleans that August morning, laying bare the moment of truth that would define and destroy a presidency. But government alone wasn’t to blame. Our most trusted and dependable media outlets—which, thereafter, were quick to reach across their backs in selfcongratulation—helped promulgate, to incalculable measures, some of the lies sponsored by members of the former Administration to elude responsibility for the abysmal handling of the aftermath. Tales of unsubstantiated lootings, child-rapes, kidnappings, and other grotesque criminal inventions irresponsibly circulated the rolls of mainstream press to, however intended or not, present the narrative that those trapped in the Superdome and Convention Center weren’t innocent victims (as common sense may have suggested), rather unstable bums incapable of acting mannerly without intense police/military supervision. Wouldn’t you loot—if you didn’t have the loot? asked the mega-millionaire Rap star Jay-Z (far from a flaming Trotskyist) in 2006. Baby needed food and you stuck 147

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on the roof/ Helicopter swooped down just to get a scoop/ Through his telescopic lens, but he didn’t scoop you/.3 The media reengineered the machine of suffering operating non-stop, implying that their pain, their agony, their hurt was, in some aspects, perhaps fabricated. After all, as the lips of a former first lady candidly confessed, the residents were “underprivileged anyway,” so being housed—sandwiched—stuck—held hostage—in a football stadium, and exposed to toxic pollution and starvation, was “working very well for them.”4 It took the courageous conviction of another Rap star, Kanye West, to undress this racist and indifferent portrayal (I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a Black family, it says, “They’re looting.” You see a White family, it says, “They’re looking for food”), and call out the bloating of a military-intelligence budget at the expense of poor people (… [A] lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way), and expose the illegal antics of Blackwater (now XE) agents given “permission to go down and shoot us.”5 A year later, in a September 2005 CBS News poll, 54% of respondents believed “some National Guard troops and material [which] are currently in Iraq slowed down the federal government’s response to the hurricane and flooding in New Orleans.”6 Of all the important lessons the last six years have taught, most crucial might be that in the eyes of the influential and powerful—those whose thumbprints rest on every vital piece of legislation—the disposable are always regarded as such. Nothing more. Through these past years, as thousands were displaced and scattered countrywide, many ended up shoved into contaminated trailers which, reports revealed later on, were known to be contaminated before being provided to victims.7 That the trailers passed off to families as safe contained the inflammable toxic gas Formaldehyde, causing cancer and other respiratory ailments, appears to have weighed little on the consciences of the cronies hired to fill positions most were entirely unqualified for. And before taking time to settle in, arrange furniture, and decide who gets what room, the trailers were already being demanded back from helpless families whose lives had been turned upside down overnight.8 Government giveth; government taketh. Katrina’s victims have also since faced abrupt hotel evictions, many thrown out onto the streets, even while lucklessly seeking stable jobs and living arrangements. For those left behind—some of whom remained to make the best of the worst around—thousands were ejected in December 2007 from New Orleans’ four largest public housing projects, at the time serving over 4,500 units, to replace with middleincome abodes far above the tax brackets of the ejected. Despite protests—some quiet, some news-noted—the New Orleans City Council voted on December 20 that year to raze homes that served thousands already victimized by Katrina’s wrath and the ineptitude of their tax-taking government agencies.9 The USA Today reported March 2008 of a near-doubling in New Orleans homelessness post-Katrina, placing the count of citizens without houses to sleep, eat, and live in at 12,000 (4% the city’s population)—four times the national rate.10 Yes, the solemn wishes of some, flushed out from the tongue of a state representative, were finally granted: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”11 148

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Once waste: forever waste. Once disposable: forever disposable. “For something to be created, something else must be consigned to waste,” Zygmunt Bauman observes. “The wrapping—the waste of the creative act—must be torn apart, shredded and disposed of lest it clutter the floor and cramp the sculptor’s moves.”12 New Orleans, a city 70% Black before the storm, was dumping ground for the waste product of a Market Society: where some sell well, others don’t— thus dumped. In a Market Society, commodity is king. The best products need no promotion. While in print, demand never runs out. Very few meet this mark. Many don’t enjoy equal appeal in the eyes of potential patrons; but, in due time, with good salesmanship, with efficient marketing, consumers come by and swoop on them for whatever use fits the bill. A few items, however, never leave the shelf or window-front. Even after multiple discounts as low as possible to pull profit, and clearance sales practically offering up the items for free, shoppers still see no incentive in further cluttering their closets or driveways or living rooms or office tables. These items are, then, mostly shipped off to some remote non-profit outfit for distribution amongst less fortunate—thus, logic leads, less dignified— individuals. On seldom occasions, not even the non-profits can stoop low enough to accept what’s being presented them. Not even the poor Asian or South American countries are willing to wallow that beneath self-worth. The African countries are just as repulsed by the proposal. Thus, the dumping process assumes the only option left. Once products, now waste, they are dispossessed, ditched, dumped—outcast from society into relegated, reclusive zones the public is comforted into believing don’t exist at all. New Orleans’ poor residents shared that fate for many years. A people forgotten— dehumanized. A city off the map—unrecognized. Wasteland. Pre-Katrina: 46% of kids—high school dropouts.13 26% of adults—no health insurance.14 40% of children and 30% of households—poor. 30% (134,000) of families—carless. 10% of 5- to 20-year-olds, 24% of 21- to 64-year-olds, 50% of those 65 and older—disability-stricken. 67% of residents—African-American.15 Not even the annual Mardi Gras beer-fests that shipped in enthusiasts from all over the world sufficed in raising awareness of these realities. But the “sheer mass of waste,” Bauman informs, “would not allow it to be glossed over and silenced out of existence.”16 Katrina swept up from beneath the rubble of abandonment living testimonies of those society had rendered disposable, forcing into living rooms images that for decades many were told only found home in far, faraway lands where savages dwell. Disgust left its impression on the hearts of most, and they surrendered their hard-earned cash to erase as soon as possible what had become nightly news 149

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spectacle. Thus a large mass—50,000 in all—were hauled off and herded into twin repositories (the Superdome and Convention Center), and staved off for over five days without adequate food and relief supplies. Six years since, the wastes of New Orleans have faced even greater struggle returning home. Two years after Katrina, the once overwhelmingly Black majority had slid down 20 points to 46.3%, with the White population accounting for 43.8% (up 15 points since 2000). 60.3% of Whites have since successfully made their way back, while only 26.3% of Blacks can claim the same.17 After all, “where there is design, there is waste.”18 The design for the new New Orleans is an upper-class, majority-White cosmopolitan city, rid of the “shameful secret” it once harbored. In Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability, Henry Giroux chronicles this crisis in inhumanity, suggesting scenes of sinking bodies, floating bodies, deceased bodies, awoke a nation to conscience: that, even if for just a week, Katrina dealt a greater global blow than the Iraq and Afghanistan exploits—and exposed many to a reality their TV stations had convinced them for decades existed elsewhere. The “war of images” that spruce up life-and-death spectacle in the most facile form had been temporarily subdued by scenes of “dead people, mostly poor African-Americans, left uncollected in the streets, on porches, and in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheelchairs, and collapsed houses.”19 And they “kept reappearing in New Orleans, refusing to go away.”20 Just as the picture of Emmett Till’s disfigured, decomposed head (captured by Jet magazine cameras five decades ago) sparked the Civil Rights Movement into full-throttled determination, so did the images broadcast en masse by news media—of abandoned Black bodies stuck on rooftops and in muddied waters, decomposing like un-plucked fruits—resurrect the dead bones of a disposable society: “The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation’s citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of the past two decades demonizing.”21 To this drive was the damning of an “increasingly damaged and withering democracy … [and] new kind of politics—one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”22 For a state boasting the third-highest rate of children trapped in poverty, where many lacked cars, and whose illiteracy rate tipped 40%, those who wondered why parents and “responsible” adults didn’t simply “drive out” of the impending storm missed the sobering statistics. But that hardly convinces the Bootstrap Brigade, which began firing almost immediately on the lot they insisted deserved no help from the federal government. FOX News host Bill O’Reilly celebrated this concept early on. “Many, many, many of the poor in New Orleans … weren’t going to leave no matter what you did,” Bill bellowed. “They were drug-addicted. They weren’t going to get turned off from their source. They were thugs.”23 The Right-wing lunatics who find deep pleasure in vivid fantasies of disposability disagree wholly that the Bush Administration bore primarily the ethical burden of providing “adequate evacuation plans … [and] transportation for people [lacking] money, cars, or help to get them out of the city.”24 Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice counts amongst that core, refusing to even entertain the 150

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widespread, bipartisan criticisms of her “friend,” the former president, because no one “at any level of government” was “prepared for something of Katrina’s size and scope.”25 Dr. Rice wouldn’t find much use for Dr. Giroux who insists the Bush Administration’s insatiable preoccupation with neoliberal and hyper-capitalist interests exacerbated the damages of Hurricane Katrina, as cause for action had become calculable only with the currency of “short-term financial gains”;26 therefore, “[t]he question no longer seemed to be whether the government had an obligation to help those suffering from the harsh realities of economic misfortune and the overbearing vulnerabilities produced in a society marked by deep social, racial, and economic inequalities.”27 In Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Barton Gellman excerpts an August 29, 2005, meeting of the minds between Dick Cheney and George Bush (in attendance: Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Condoleezza Rice), in which Bush offered Cheney chance to join a senior-staff taskforce and go survey the New Orleans crisis. The former Vice-President, not the sentimental kind, turned it down flatly, as revealed by former Bush counselor Dan Bartlett: Cheney was the Master of Disaster, one of the government’s most capable emergency managers. “It would send a powerful signal of our level of concern” to put the vice president in charge, Bartlett said. Eventually, though, Bartlett came to see Cheney’s demurral “quite frankly as pretty good judgment.” Cheney “doesn’t do touchy-feely,” Bartlett said. “Understanding what people’s problems are and showing compassion—that is an important part of the job of being the representative of the president. ... He was not going to go down there and hug babies.”28 If, of course, war opportunities suddenly popped up in the Gulf Coast, not even Usain Bolt’s speed would have matched Cheney’s immediate leap. Fellow Republicans, to their credit, had clearer foresight. As human beings hung on rooftops and remained stranded in soused houses, conservative leaders went to work pimping “relief measures … to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies.”29 Pushing school vouchers, promoting private and federal contractors, demolishing public housing, weakening environmental regulations— Republican leaders saw an opening and drove through never looking back. A year after Katrina, Naomi Klein accounted for a snapshot of these pernicious policies promoted even while thousands still had no place to call home: [B]illions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on the construction of a privatised disaster-response infrastructure: the Shaw Group’s new state-of-theart Baton Rouge headquarters, Bechtel’s battalions of earthmoving equipment, Blackwater USA’s 6,000-acre campus in North Carolina (complete with paramilitary training camp and 6,000-foot runway).30 “It takes a shock, like Katrina, to tear up the veil that on ‘normal’ days hides from view the deep wounds carved upon our society by poverty, humiliation, and denial of human dignity,” Zygmunt Bauman suggests.31 This veil, torn up without permission, 151

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had hidden from public consciousness lives turned upside down and worsened because their government cared more for military expansion and tax cuts for superrich clientele than social betterment of the masses. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. warned four decades ago, “is approaching spiritual death.”32 Storms like Katrina are no ordinary ones. And the aftermath of apathy wears off worse than the actual event, for as the storm dies, and the bloated bodies are swept upon the sea for all to see, humanity is graded by these indelible images which for many years will find refuge in the renewed eyes of future generations. 19th century Russian poet Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov quipped: Rebellious, it seeks out a storm As if in storms it could find peace! But maybe, through this storm, we will find our peace. NOTES 1 2 3 4

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Chomsky, N. (2007). Interventions (p. 147). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts (p. 27). Cambridge, UK: Polity. Jay-Z. (2006). Minority report. In Kingdom come. Def Jam. Barbara Bush calls evacuees better off. The New York Times (2005, September 7). Online: http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07barbara.html Comments by Chicago-raised Rap star Kanye West at NBC benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina victims held on September 2, 2005. CBS News/New York Times Poll. (2005, September 9–13). The economy, gas prices, and Hurricane Katrina. Online: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/CBSNews_polls/poll_091405_Katrina.pdf Hsu, S. S. (2007, July 20). FEMA knew of toxic gas in trailers. The Washington Post. Online: http:// ww.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071901039.html FEMA taking back its hurricane trailers. The Associated Press (2009, April 7). Online: http://www. snbc.msn.com/id/30093926/ New Orleans police taser, pepper spray residents seeking to block public housing demolition. Democracy Now! (2007, December 21). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/21/new_orleans_ police_taser_pepper_spray Jervis, R. (2008, March 17). Homeless still feel Katrina’s wrath. USA Today. Online: http://www. usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-16-homeless_N.htm Babington, C. (2005, September 10). Some GOP legislators hit jarring notes in addressing Katrina. The Washington Post. Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/ AR2005090901930.html Ibid., Wasted lives, p. 23. Toppo, G. (2006, June 20). Big-city schools struggle with graduation rates. USA Today. Online: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-06-20-dropout-rates_x.htm Fox, A. (2009, February 16). Health care access in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina: A case study in the failure of a two tiered health care system. The Social Medicine Portal. Online: http:// www.socialmedicine.org/2009/02/16/uncategorized/health-care-access-in-new-orleans-followinghurricane- katrina-a-case-study-in-the-failure-of-a-two-tiered-health-care-system/ Fussell, E. (2006, June 11). Leaving New Orleans: Social stratification, networks, and Hurricane evacuation. Understanding Katrina. Online: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Fussell/index.html Ibid., Wasted lives, p. 27.

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18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

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Farmer, E. (2009, March 28). A possible change in the face and race of politics. The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. Online: http://www.nola09.nytimes-institute.com/2009/05/28/a-possiblechange-in-the-face-and-race-of-politics/ Ibid., Wasted lives, p. 30. Giroux, H. A. (2006). Stormy weather: Katrina and the politics of disposability (p. 8). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 9. Ibid. Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 10. Audio and transcript. (2005, September 15). Online: http://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/200509150001 Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 43. Linkins, J. (2009, January 29). Condi on Katrina: ‘Appalled’ by implications of racism. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/29/condi-on-hurricane-katrin_n_162264.html Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 46. Ibid., Stormy weather, p. 47. Waas, M. (2008, September 15). Former Bush Counselor Dan Bartlett unloads on cheney: ‘Doesn’t do touchy-feely’ or ‘Hug babies’. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/murraywaas/former-bush-counselor-dan_b_126383.html Ibid., Interventions, p. 149. Klein, N. (2006, August 30). Disaster capitalism: How to make money out of misery. The Guardian. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/30/comment.hurricanekatrina Zygmunt Bauman in reviewing Stormy Weather. Excerpted from “A Time to Break Silence: Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatime tobreaksilence.htm

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SOCIAL NETWORKING Privacy, Illiteracy, and the Future of Democracy

Privacy is costly, and literally so. Some people are forcibly deprived of it, and thus exposed to the relentless vigilance of external controls … [but] only the rich and the powerful may assume that the alternative of privacy is constantly available as a matter of fact. For the rest, privacy, even if a viable proposition, is problematic—a distant target, the goal of strenuous effort and sacrifice. —Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom1 After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges. The shift began ... when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media. —Nicholas Carr, The Shallows2 Technology, having provided the unity of the world, can just as easily destroy it and the means of global communication were [it] designed side by side with means of possible global destruction. —Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times3 There should be something immeasurably insidious about a government that spies on its citizens. And if one universal truth counts, it is that no country wields a monopoly on intrusive conducts. Whenever a ruling class, from whatever region, espousing whatever central political philosophy, feels increasingly threatened by the unforeseen, unpredicted emerging independence of its underclass, steps are immediately taken to monitor conversations, document strategies, and invade privacies—bearing witness to the fierce consequences of collective struggle. So it should surprise no one that In-Q-Tel, “the investment arm of the CIA,” enlisted late 2009 the services of Visible Technologies, a software firm notorious for monitoring social networking activities and accounts. Noah Shachtman, contributing editor to Wired magazine, reported this discovery, describing the process in good detail: Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. … Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is.4 155

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Later in a different forum, Shachtman elaborated: “Visible … takes Twitter updates and takes comments on YouTube videos and … sorts them out and decides which people have the most weight in the blogosphere, which people are the most influential.”5 And though admitting as of yet Visible does not “touch closed social networks, like Facebook,” news that Microsoft and Google around the time sealed deals with Facebook and Twitter to make public users’ status updates and news feeds fails to comfort the weary.6 Through the last year, the gurus at Facebook and Google have affirmed disinterest—if not outright disdain—for privacy. Once guardians of all signifying security, today they talk openly of lucrative deals with advertising companies to intrude user privacy. Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old co-founder of Facebook, assured a live audience January 2010—while addressing a December 2009 policy change granting web search engines access to the 350 million Facebook users’ every data—that privacy is but a bygone privilege in society today. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard,” recounted Zuckerberg, “the question a lot of people asked was, Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?” But within the last five years, his thesis rests, “blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services ... have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” That blogging shares many shades and sorts, and not every blogger discloses personal information, must have missed Zuckerberg’s epiphany-eliciting change of heart. Facebook, he told the crowd, would “constantly be innovating and be updating … to reflect what the current social norms are.”7 He revealed if Facebook were a new company commencing today, user data would be public by default. Two years ago, Zuckerberg was whistling a different tune; then, privacy control and user autonomy set “the vector around which Facebook operates.”8 In October 2010, The Wall Street Journal reported three of the top 10 Facebook apps had been “transmitting identifying information” to “dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies.” Users and their friends’ info fell to this leak, even with accounts set to the strictest privacy possibilities.9 How time—and money—changeth convictions. Eric Schmidt, current Google Chairman/CEO, fares worse. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” said Schmidt in a December 2009 CNBC interview, answering questions of browsing privacy with brashness Zuckerberg could only fantasize about. Schmidt then warned users against all illusions: “[T]he reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And ... we’re all subject, in the US, to the PATRIOT Act, and it is possible that … information could be made available to the authorities.”10 Facebook and Google are, of course, no lone rangers. The same month of Schmidt’s interview, it was revealed Sprint had handed law enforcement officials customers’ GPS data 8 million times. Officials could “log into a special Sprint Web 156

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portal and, without ever having to demonstrate probable cause to a judge, gain access to geolocation logs detailing where they’ve been and where they are.”11 Christopher Soghoian, the Indiana University graduate student who showered light upon these findings, connected more dots with a Freedom of Information Act request, and had to face down Yahoo! and Verizon lawyers who complained disclosure of company surveillance information would yield widespread outrage—from smart customers. Embarrassing information, of their customs, would be used to “shame” Yahoo! “and other companies—and to ‘shock’ their customers.” Customers may “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a question we cannot answer).” Verizon would rather not address the “tens of thousands” of requests intelligence agencies file annually for customer records and logs.12 Phone companies have also let intelligence agencies install listening chips— “roving bugs”—on to cell phones, to monitor suspected criminals (or general personsof-interest). “If ordered to do so, mobile telephone operators can also tap any calls, but more significantly they can also remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner’s knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call, giving security services the perfect bugging device,” reported the Financial Times in August 2005.13 It’s important to acknowledge these events provoke little surprise, as many have long-believed greater access to social networks and portable communication devices would usher an end to privacy (more so in the traditional sense); for while the internet does serve as a great resource for information sharing, partnership, and networking, it also situates users within a global community which immediately eliminates the possibility of secrecy—all allusions to anonymity notwithstanding. It’s also important to acknowledge that in no way do these events blaze trails. The deal between In-Q-Tel and Visible may indeed set precedents, but unaccountable surveillance of citizens marks no new phenomenon. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI did not need Visible’s services to invade the security and privacy of civil rights activists in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And even long after COINTELPRO earned smashing blows from the courts of law and public opinion, the Bush II Administration illegally, indiscriminately tapped the phones of journalists and ordinary citizens—compliments of immune telecommunication companies who cowered and sold their customers down the lake. With the PATRIOT Act, all limitations fell off the table. Portions of the bill let “U.S. authorities seek approval from a special court to search personal records of terror suspects from bookstores, businesses, hospitals and libraries, in a provision known as the library clause.”14 In many instances, not even proof “that the target is suspected of a crime or possesses evidence of a crime” requires submission before obtaining search warrants for library logs.15 Within four years of the Act, an American Library Association survey revealed, officials had put up “at least 200 formal and informal inquiries to libraries for information on reading material and other internal matters.” The survey, which swept through 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, discovered “137 formal requests or demands for information in that time, 49 from federal officials and the 157

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remainder from state or local investigators.” More refreshing, “66 libraries had received informal law enforcement requests without an official legal order, including 24 federal requests.” The “chilling effect” wasn’t unnoticed by librarians: “40 percent of … users had inquired about changes in practices related to the [PATRIOT Act], and about 5 percent said that they had altered their professional activities over the issues; for instance, by reviewing the types of books they bought.”16 Unlike the phony phone companies, however, librarians far and wide bound together to protect their readers’ privacies, to oppose the defilement of public resources, and to defeat the monitoring and militarization of knowledge. Many taped large-sized, bold-printed posters to the front doors of local libraries, informing users of how easily their privacy had been stripped clean: “WARNING. Under Section 215 of the federal USA PATRIOT ACT (Public Law 107-56) records of books and other materials you borrow from this library may be obtained by federal agents. This law also prohibits librarians from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you.” On September 9, 2005, a federal judge lifted gag orders placed on four Connecticut librarians who had sued the FBI, with the ACLU’s help, to prevent access to patron’s records.17 In a society prided on respect for liberty and freedom, the challenges for those who hope to make its promises real flourish limitless, more so when government employees easily lose all sense of legally binding privacy protections, an example of which reached headlines October 2009—of a Pittsburgh jail cell routinely taping phone conversations between inmates and lawyers, and, in some cases, turning over recordings to the U.S. Attorney’s office.18 For many, such stories devastate the mind. For others, they reach but the tip of the iceberg—the start of things far worse to come. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing nearly two centuries back, feared “[t]he arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good.”19 Emerson may today find his prophetic witness unheeded so flawlessly by millions worldwide who without handheld gadgets couldn’t live normally, even if “the development of technology and science, constructed according to the laws of capitalist rationality, has ushered in forms of domination and control that appear to thwart rather than extend the possibilities of human emancipation.”20 In Japan, a new generation of littérateurs is booming—cell phone novelists who compose entire tales on those miniature devices once thought of for communication only. Early on, many adults and academics condemned this teenage fascination which, it seemed, held little hope for longevity (let alone lucidity). Soon, however, their wailings checked out. Publishing houses began fixing sharper gazes, and young people, the same age of the authors, began storming bookstores, ultimately propelling, in 2007, creations from the genre among 5 of the 10 best-selling Japanese novels. Flat in character, shoddy in plot, fragmented in sentence structure; though they may be, readers secured the top three spots for first-time cell phone novelists. The consequences, of course, could be dour, as one rising author discovered, having dug open her flesh from incessant typing. For resolve, she switched to a computer, soon after realizing the magic of a “richer” vocabulary and “longer” sentence.21 158

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Gone are the days when children clamor for fruits from the “dead-tree media,” as one book futurist cheered in 2006.22 The world is a-changing, and the old souls better get on with it—or be left behind. “Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Brittanica [sic], Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel.” This, the bleating of another futurist who awaits eagerly the day when books would no longer be pressed out in physical form, but inhabit a dominant digital medium, with hyperlinks containing audio and video material embedded on each page. “Vooks,” they are called, better understood as a collection “of loosely-related pages.” Away with the bore of a “sustained narrative”!23 Our public libraries are in on the act, too. Young people are the heartbeat of the libraries, and to keep the pump going, all gimmicks are, these days, vulnerable. In February 2009, strategy+business, a management magazine, offered a portrait of the modern library. At the Bronx Library Center, a four-year-old branch of the New York Public Library, “The people using the computers are young and aren’t necessarily using them for academic purposes—here is one doing a Google search on Hannah Montana pictures, there is one updating his Facebook page, and over there a few children are playing video games, including The Fight for Glorton. Librarians answer questions and organize online gaming tournaments, and none of them are shushing anyone.”24 Books no more attract them, a profound truth which startles publishing houses, not unlike those in Japan which have in recent years flourished greatly from the eloquence of their young star authors. The future, then, must offer something attractive to a generation upon which the virtue (and practice) of solitary study is lost for good. This future, futurists cheerily assure, could feature 99 cents downloadable book chapters (farewell to cover-to-cover!), and, consequently, writers pushing straight for the narrow mind of today’s readers (young and old), like their musical counterparts who’ve all but abandoned their calling to make music, satisfied nowadays with recycling the same clichéd sounds and insights (if they may be called that) for radio play: and, inevitably, publishers fleeing from critical work since the 21st Century Reader is more interested in one-sentence paragraphs than “sustained” sentence styles, the likes of which, say, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer mastered adeptly. The future, if the present should have a say, is grim. Technological advancements merely reveal a society’s character, as Nicholas Carr instructs. And no new medium makes way for the old to catch up: By 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the time that the average American over the age of fourteen devoted to reading printed works had fallen to 143 minutes a week, a drop of eleven percent since 2004. Young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four ... were reading printed works for a total of just forty-nine minutes a week in 2008, down a precipitous twenty-nine percent from 2004.25 With less reading, space opens up for writing—more accurately, typing. “By the beginning of 2009, the average American cell phone user was sending or receiving nearly 400 texts a month, more than a fourfold increase from 2006. The average 159

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American teen was sending or receiving a mind-boggling 2,272 texts a month. Worldwide, well over two trillion text messages zip between mobile phones each year, far outstripping the number of voice calls.”26 Though the dangers of mobile technology may range from endless distraction to poor academic performance,27 social activists would swear to the good a portable camera, or audio recorder, or camcorder brings when used with caution and care— and for righteous causes. The ‘08 Barack Obama presidential campaign now earns widespread credit for unleashing the power of mass-based, advocacy-aimed social networking. With careful use of media like Facebook and Gmail, campaign staffers and supporters galvanized a movement in the millions to make history happen—however motionless the movement has since been. Oakland resident Oscar Grant’s videotaped death offers another noteworthy mark. For too long, arbitrary police power had operated unchecked, bestowing unmanageable and unaccountable authority in the hands of officers—occasionally to the detriment (and death) of unarmed, innocent (predominantly Black male) citizens. But the “justifiable homicide” bromide fell flat this time with millions exposed to raw footage—captured on a cell phone camera—of a police officer’s boot, in full Orwellian mode, pressed against Grant’s head, right before another officer discharged into his back. That police personnel reportedly seized several cell phones at the scene, following the shooting, yields even greater significance.28 The political realm also bears bloody scratches from the claws of new technology. The racist remarks of former Republican Senator George Allen at a 2006 campaign stop in Virginia come to mind, in which Allen acerbically berated an Indian-American student standing nearby, slurring him with a racist epithet, and imploring the audience to join the chant: “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. ... Let’s give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the Real World of Virginia.” A subsequent Washington Post report quoted Republican leaders convinced that single slip of sewage satire eliminated very strong chances of reelection and a 2008 presidential run.29 Arizona Senator John McCain’s captured April 2007 “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” chorus at a campaign stop in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, springs from the same loin. On September 26, 2008, at a presidential debate, then-Candidate Barack Obama seized a moment to remind his opponent who was more exuberant and irrational on foreign policy grounds. All events, good and bad, count for new media’s “centrality to democracy.” In chronicling the June 2009 “Iranian Uprising,” Henry Giroux argued the student protesters presented “new possibilities for engaging the new media as a democratic force both for critique and for positive intervention and change,” offering “some resources for rethinking how … certain pedagogical practices are employed in mobilizing a range of affective investments around images of trauma, suffering, and collective struggles.”30 Yet, the age of technology, for all its possible wonders, presents a viable threat to the privacy of anyone daring enough to plug in; so it’s rational, even understandable, 160

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following endless reports of global intrusion and government antics, to shut down social networking accounts, or surrender one’s scalp over the altar of self-censorship. And it’s just as easy to cower before the great walls of intimidation, as though paralyzing pessimism ever improves anything. But it’s key to reject the politics of fear, for fear, history reveals, has produced more crippled social movements than FBI factories. Fear of surveillance, of coercion, of arrest has extinguished all moral vigor from the most courageous men and women. The bold and daring are, then, called on to identify the stakes: a desperate attempt to keep track, and possibly mitigate, this most prestigious moment in history— when a growing, global citizenry has come to understand that information should never be funneled to fit any narrow interests; that, as Patti Smith once sang, people have the power to change the conditions surrounding them; that, without engaged activism, without accountability brought to bear, without demands, Power would concede nothing—not even the privacies of everyday people. NOTES 1 2

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Bauman, Z. (1988). Freedom (p. 52). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains (p. 77). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Arendt, H. (1968). Men in dark times (p. 83). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Shachtman, N. (2009, October 19). Exclusive: U.S. spies buy stake in firm that monitors blogs, tweets. Wired. Online: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-intwitter-blog-monitoring-firm/ CIA invests in software firm monitoring blogs, Twitter. Democracy Now! (2009, October 22). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/22/cia_invests_in_software_firm_monitoring Liedtke, M. (2009, October 21). Both Microsoft, Google seal deals with Twitter. The Associated Press. Online: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33418221/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/ Kirkpatrick, M. (2010, January 9). Facebook’s Zuckerberg says the age of privacy is over. ReadWriteWeb. Online: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_ of_privacy_is_ov.php Kirkpatrick, M. (2008, March 10). Mark Zuckerberg on data portability: An interview. ReadWriteWeb. Online: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mark_zuckerberg_on_data_portab.php Steel, E., & Fowler, G. A. (2010, October 18). Facebook in privacy breach. The Wall Street Journal. Online: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html Google CEO on privacy. The Huffington Post (2009, December 7). Online: http://www.huffington post.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_383105.html Stokes, J. (2009, December 1). Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times. Ars Technica. Online: http://www.arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/12/sprint-fed-customer-gps-data-to-leos-over8-million-times.ars Zetter, K. (2009, December 1). Yahoo, verizon: Our spy capabilities would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ consumers. Wired. Online: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices/ Odell, M. (2005, August 2). Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect and brother. Financial Times. Online: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4239e29e-02f2-11da-84e5-00000e2511c8.html?nclick_check=1 Sanders, C. (2005, August 25). Library sues over controversial Patriot act. Reuters. Online: http:// www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0826-05.htm Egelko, B., & Gaura, M. A. (2003, March 10). Libraries post Patriot Act warnings/Santa Cruz branches tell patrons that FBI may spy on them. San Francisco Chronicle. Online: http://articles.sfgate.com/ 2003-03-10/news/17480119_1_act-s-provisions-usa-patriot-act-library-board

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Lichtblau, E. (2005, June 21). U.S. demanded data from libraries, study finds. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/world/americas/20iht-patriot.html Alexandrovna, L. (2006, May 31). Gagged librarians break silence on Patriot act. The Raw Story. Online: http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Gagged_librarians_break_silence_on_Patriot_0531.html Ward, P. R. (2009, October 23). Jail taped inmate-lawyer calls. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Online: http:// www.post-gazette.com/pg/09296/1007757-53.stm From “Self-Reliance”; reprinted in Emerson, R. W. (1949). Selected essays (p. 57). New York: Peoples Book Club. Giroux, H. A. (1988). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning (p. 74). Granby, CO: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc. Onishi, N. (2008, January 20). Thumbs race as Japan’s best sellers go cellular. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html Albanese, A. R. (2006, May 15). The social life of books. Library Journal. Online: http://www.slj. com/lj/ljinprint/currentissue/866230-403/lj_qampa_the_social_life.html.csp O’Reilly, T. (2009, April 29). Reinventing the book in the age of the web. O’Reilly Radar. Online: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/reinventing-the-book-age-of-web.html Corwin, S., Hartley, E., & Hawkes, H. (2009, Spring). The library rebooted. strategy+business , (54). Online: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09108?pg=all Ibid., The shallows, pp. 87–88. Ibid., The shallows, p. 86. Rideout, V. J., Foehr, U. G., & Roberts, D. F. (2010, January). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. The Kaiser Family Foundation. Online: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf Miller, C. (2009, January 21). Do police have the right to confiscate your camera? Photography Is Not a Crime. Online: http://www.carlosmiller.com/2009/01/21/do-police-have-the-right-to-confiscateyour-camera/ Craig, T. (2008, February 6). “The ‘What If ’ of Allen Haunts the GOP race. The Washington Post. Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008020503237.html Giroux, H. A. (2009, June 19–21). The Iranian uprisings and the challenge of the new media. CounterPunch. Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/giroux06192009.html

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PROPHETS OF BAAL Religious Fanaticism, Christianity Inc., and the Recall of Reconciliation

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. —Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear1 How is it possible for corporate power, worldly, cynical, materialistic, not only to coexist alongside evangelical Christianity but to subsist, to be symbiotic with it? How have Christ and Mammon come to cooperate? —Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated 2 Recent revelation that, right before launching the Iraq massacre, George W. Bush sought to seduce former France President Jacques Chirac into war against the Iraqi people by invoking biblical text, particularly the demonic tales of Gog and Magog, should yield unassailable proof that religious extremism isn’t some antiquated custom relegated to the 13th century, but an intricate part of the present political paradigm.3 Why else did President Obama have to prove a million times his devotion to Christianity before many voters felt comfortable enough to accept him as anything but a secret Al-Qaeda operative? Speaking with French journalist Jean Claude Maurice, Chirac recounted this experience. In an early 2003 secret phone call, George W. Bush tried to explain how his plans for war coalesced into biblical prophecy, thus divinely inspired: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. … The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. … This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.” All this, pacing right behind allegations that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince operated4 his disgraced private mercenary outfit as a modern-day crusade battalion against the Evil Forces of Islam—dominant in Middle Eastern regions which, incidentally, hold vast volumes of oil; and just a few months after release of videotaped bible study sessions in Afghanistan showing soldiers urged to go “hunt people for Jesus” and “get them into the kingdom.”5 And with GQ magazine’s May 2009 exposé, of several biblical quotes former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld frequently laced his top-secret memos with (“Open the Gates that the Righteous Nation May Enter,” “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him to deliver their soul from death”)—the implications pour through.6 To sell a jaded citizenry the Iraq Invasion, a great deal of absolutist advances (beyond the inevitable Moral Imperative) had to be surrendered; but none better took repugnance to limitless lows as Bush’s professions, on countless occasions, and 163

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to countless foreign leaders, that “God” captained his war ship, that “God” instructed him to “go and end the tyranny in Iraq,”7 that his 2003 exploit was, essentially, “the lord’s will.”8 Any wonder that those most eager to share their “love” for “God” often end up likeliest doing the devil’s bidding? My firm Judeo-Christian background provokes appreciation for the roles spirituality and morality play in shepherding a young child with much needed guidance for navigating the tremulous terrains of life; but Religion misoverstood, as the Rap artist Nas cautioned, poisons. And religious fundamentalists (of the soft and hard kind), who’ve convinced themselves the only true path leading to Salvation is that they’ve chosen to pursue, pose no less a danger than the man who led the world into war based on conversations he imagined to be having with his “God”— proudly strutting a glaring “indifferen[ce]” to the “contradiction between ... upholding the word of God and imposing democracy on the largely Muslim population of Iraq through the rule of force and the barrel of a gun.”9 The esteemed Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick fired off in a popular 1922 sermon against the fundamentalists of his time who strove to “drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions.” Their message to converts was plain enough: “Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results.”10 Streamlining this acidic antiintellectualism was a sinister directive to honor uncritically St. Paul’s warnings that “Knowledge puffeth up”—thus no thinking allowed. Today’s fundamentalist leaders, Evangelicals mostly, pursue no less a theology of tyranny, with great political power to manifest their desires. “More people go to church in the United States every weekend than go to all the professional sporting events in a year combined,” admitted Ted Haggard, the disgraced former pastor of New Life Church, Colorado Springs, before the 2006 sex-and-drugs scandal that sent him packing. “In America, there is no group that has more people on radio stations, there’s no group that owns their own TV networks like Evangelical Christians do. The American Church is everywhere.” The 2004 presidential election, evidence enough, furnished full proof of Evangelicals’ ability to mobilize in the millions for or against issues they hold dear—with abortion, patriotism, and same-sex marriage leading the pack. Haggard was being filmed for a HBO documentary, Friends of God (2007), shot in different cities countrywide to capture the various forms of the Evangelical Movement, and the various seminars preparing pastoral battalions and kid brigades for media wars and Creationism vs. Evolution battles (respectively), which Haggard compared to the sales-pitch drills giant conglomerates put their employees through to promote “Coke over Pepsi” and “Chevy over Ford.” Friends of God featured various commercial campaigns and initiatives—from car shows, to wrestling matches, to miniature golf courses—purposed in spreading the “Word of God” and converting disbelievers. A drive-thru prayer chamber in Richmond, Virginia, enjoyed special showcase. On Mondays and Thursdays 164

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(6:00 P.M. – 7:30 P.M.), strangers can (literally) drive through a side-street, shaded windowpane where a pastor seats waiting to summon God’s mercy. More bizarre was a man, Reverend Potter, who hoped, and had already begun, to erect five giant steel crosses in every state of the union—each costing $25,000—to memorialize his “Lord and Savior” and be a “witness for Him.” The “give to the needy” charge, the “graven image” commandment—must have failed to impress Potter much. Let it be understood: Evangelicals deserve no less a right to vote and act their conscience than anyone else. What often gives, unfortunately, isn’t ballots cast in favor of certain moral principles aimed at making society better, but caustic witchhunts against politicians deemed too “secular” or too “liberal”—and inevitably charioting candidates like George W. Bush who should stand firmly in contradiction with the very values their spiritual text teaches. Islam or Catholicism or Judaism or Buddhism exploited for political and financial ends counts equally against a livable society, but so does any other religious tradition whose believers invest greater faith in tearing cultures, nations, peoples, and traditions down than in building up. The Right’s stranglehold on Christianity, and its obsession with the vilest vicissitudes of modern society, has received impressive review from many Left critics; but far too little has been recorded on the fundamentalism of Religion itself, and how critical the times call for greater understanding and unity amongst adherents of all faiths. Never before has the need been more nascent to tackle “the force of intolerance and bigotry, the refusal to recognize the multiplicity of religious, political, linguistic, and cultural differences—those vast and diverse elements that constitute the democratic global sphere at its best.”11 In the 21st century, no one should remain unsure whether Religion (and its struggle for supremacy) marks to-date the greatest splintering force in human affairs. The result—millions of lives lost (and counting)—presents plenty proof. Innocent blood has watered the earth, and will continue to for as long as Religion remains a rigid factor in the public spaces that govern our everyday concerns and careers. Through the last few decades alone, fanatical Evangelical leaders have wormed their way into mainstream discourse and gained following so strong they can now set public agenda at whim. The late Reverend Jerry Falwell, who for many years dropped and raised the political temperature of the Christian Right, showed just how obsequiously on the side of deceit he was willing to swing in a January 2004 column, “God is Pro-War,” comfortably written at a time many believers were growing increasingly at odds with the bellicose routes the Christians in the White House were taking. Falwell condemned “present-day pacifists” for extolling “Jesus as their example for unvarying peace,” before ultimately stamping out marching orders for the 21st century American Church: “One of the primary purposes of the church is to stop the spread of evil, even at the cost of human lives. If we do not stop the spread of evil, many innocent lives will be lost and the kingdom of God suffers.”12 But “evil,” in this sense, holds not a nickel’s worth to persistent poverty, racism, sexism, imperialism, discrimination, colonialism, or economic inequality. The church, Falwell ordered, has no business laying down its life for these Christly causes. It’s called, instead, to lock arms with Army units in exporting democracy to Muslim countries and other dark lands where Evil roams reckless. 165

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The God Complex that pushes men like Falwell to speak for their Creator again raised its serpent head not long after the January 2010 7.0 Mw Haiti earthquake which displaced millions and claimed over 200,000 lives. One renowned Christian minster, not a day after the crisis, blamed the “cursed” Haitians for their “pact to the devil,” which, from his high pulpit of unimpeachable authority, explained the natural disaster. “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” he educated concerned viewers. “They were under the heel of the French—you know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal’.”13 Following the equally devastating Hurricane Katrina, another Spokesman for God pushed to the pulpit with proof why it was wrong to feel sorry for the victims (in both cases (incidentally?) predominantly Black): “What happened in New Orleans looked like the curse of God. In time, if New Orleans recovers and becomes [a] pristine city, it can … be called a blessing. But at this time it’s called a curse.”14 No less corrosive is the Prosperity Gospel phenomenon which in short time has spread worldwide. It now weighs of no shame for preachers to stand before their parishioners and inform “God” wants nothing more for them than silver and gold. And in perfect tandem with the neoliberal order of the day, mega-churches now house Starbucks shops and other corporate services for customers to patronize before (or after) patronizing the feel-good, emotivism-engineered blatherings of (somehow) ordained ministers, who bully members into emptying their purses to reap good measure on their contractual investments with “God.” They have taken everything sacred and holy of the tithe-and-offering experience and made of it an opportunistic, casino-style, crap-table, all-or-nothing charade. One celebrated pastor, Leroy Thompson, leads his church in tactile chants of “Money cometh to me now!” (filled with fist-pumping and power-pulls), after which all leave their seats, rushing, to drop batches of cash at his feet. At a decade-old convention, held at Madison Square Garden, NYC, co-headlined with another prominent pastor, Creflo Dollar, both preachers sprinted—literally—over large stashes cast down by mostly indigent believers (struggling, without doubt, for a miracle), howling and reveling in ecstasy—to “put this anointing on it. … I placed my anointing on it: your bills are paid!” The next day, using his life as a model for God’s generosity, Thompson, with ghastly gall, bragged away his children’s affluent lifestyles: “My daughter drives a Mercedes. … I just bought my boy a new Lexus. … My little boy, he drives a convertible—17-years-old, he just got a new convertible.” At another event, he was more candid: “Churches should be so pretty when you walk in you should fall out. … God’s house should have the best. But it can’t have the best with a bunch of broke people crying everyday about, ‘How I’ma make it?’ Putting up $50 a month—you can’t do nothing with no $50 a month.” The havenots “should have a special seat for that 50.” Thompson is Black—and so is Dollar. A far fall from the Social Gospel tradition that founded the Black Church in the late 1700s, many Black preachers, particularly those of the prosperity principle, today refuse to use their pulpits for public advocacy and address the pressing issues inflicting their congregations. They more likely 166

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would be found, as the ‘04 presidential race greatly proved, genuflecting to Republican leaders in support of candidates who mean their communities harm.15 But when not genuflecting to White, southern aristocrats, their eyes stand set on the many poverty-weakened old ladies whose minds they have wrapped around a Billionaire God handing out lotto cheques each week to the most persistent spender. How these snake-oil salesmen can call themselves Anointed Men of God without falling flat on their backs from the thunderous rush of lightning bolts remains a mystery. There are, of course, exemplary leaders of the Christian faith in America worth keeping track of, lest the whole swath be tarred by the greed, bigotry, and insanity of a few super-rich sharks. Reverend Otis Moss III of Trinity United Church of Christ (Southside, Chicago), Pastor Ruth Lowery-Hawley (Michigan), and Reverend Father Michael Pfleger of Saint Sabina Church (Southside, Chicago), come right off to mind. These courageous Christians, in ideal emulation of the deity they serve, understand virtue isn’t stored in the number of limousines, mansions, or G4 jets a pastor can accumulate in one lifetime, but in service to the least of these, and in transforming lives through ministry. But the modern-day moneychangers, same as those against whom Jesus is quoted in the four gospels remonstrating, and whom the scriptures find him applying whips to, deserve no less if serious Christians hope to draw a clear line between their faith and the false prophecy pushing thousands away annually from the fold.16 As Sheldon Wolin points out, the past once promised greater outcomes: Once upon a time, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Great Awakenings helped to further believers’ democratic impulses and to urge them into the forefront of the fight to abolish slavery. Once upon a time, too, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelicals preached a “social gospel” and sided with the poor and the working class. Their fate seems intertwined with that of democracy itself.17 Today, intolerance is normalized unlike ever before. My faith (small f ) is private, as I wish to preserve it, for though it serves sufficiently, I find no desire to proselytize to anyone who walks my way, as though human beings are alike in all respects. I hold no one to lesser standards for refusing to commit to the same principles I adopted, and I find blessed assurance in prophetic theology, which puts unashamedly the burdens of the disenfranchised and displaced above all others, refusing to denounce atheists or agnostics as heathens whose special place in hell awaits them—should they not repent and turn from their wicked ways soon enough. At the National Press Club on April 28, 2008, Reverend Jeremiah Wright outlined the tenets upon which the much-misunderstood Black Liberation Theology rests. God desires, said Wright, “positive, meaningful and permanent change”—and more: God does not want the powerless masses—the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few—to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society. God’s desire is for ... radical change—or a change that makes a permanent difference, transformation. God’s desire is for transformation—

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changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders, and changed hearts in a changed world.18 I find equally refreshing the convictions of Jazz conqueror John Coltrane who in a 1966 Japanese interview took a step in the right direction for true tolerance and interfaith fellowship. “I am [Christian] by birth; my parents were and my early teachings were Christian,” Coltrane confessed. “But as I look upon the world, I feel all men know the truth. If a man was a Christian, he could know the truth and he could not. The truth itself does not have any name on it. And each man has to find it for himself.”19 Just as refreshing is the paradigm set by Reverend James Forbes, Senior Minister Emeritus of Riverside Church, NYC, who in wake of the 9/11 tragedy—while many others were rallying the troops for yet another high-mark xenophobic run—implored faith leaders of all creeds to ensure the moment does not peter out untapped, preaching: “It does not matter which of the traditions you come from. In those traditions there is a spiritual reserve, made especially for times like these.”20 With increase in church shootings, mosque bombings, and synagogue attacks, the need for interfaith dialogue ticks timelier than ever. Pastors, Imams, Monks, Rabbis, Priests, Agnostics, and all other conscionable leaders, must make concrete commitments, within the next decade, to broaden the discourse of faith to include all those who find inequality distasteful enough to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free. At core of each credible faith rests the belief—the presupposition—that reciprocity should eternally guide the believer’s actions, that no God is worthy of worship who lets injustice go unpunished or a good deed unrewarded, expecting worshippers to follow suit. “[W]hat does your tradition have to say about hope, about freedom, about justice, about compassion, and about the integrity of creation?” Reverend Forbes asked early 2002. So critical was the moment that “the world we live in requires beginning these conversations ... to pursue peace and respect for the various religious traditions.” Artificial interfaith dialogue won’t do, Forbes warned, for “the future of our world depends upon our learning to hear each other across these very serious divides.”21 For those who truly cherish life over death, peace over war, liberation over imperialism, this should mark common ground around which we can all gather. NOTES 1

2

3

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Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (pp. 87–88). New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Wolin, S. (2008). Democracy incorporated: Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (p. 127). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Haught, J. A. (2009, August 6). A french revelation, or the burning bush. Free Inquiry. Online: http:// www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5 In explosive allegations, ex-employees link blackwater founder to murder, threats. Democracy Now! (2009, August 5). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/5/in_explosive_allegations_ex_ employees_link

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Scahill, J. (2009, May 4). US soldiers in Afghanistan told to ‘Hunt people for Jesus... So we get them into the kingdom’. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/ us-soldiers-in-afghanista_b_195639.html Draper, R. (2009, June). And he shall be judged. GQ. Online: http://www.men.style.com/gq/features/ landing?id=content_9217 MacAskill, E. (2005, October 7). George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’. The Guardian. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa Cornwell, R. (2005, October 7). Bush: God told me to invade Iraq. The Independent. Online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bush-god-told-me-to-invade-iraq-509925.html Giroux, H. A. (2004, August 4). George Bush’s religious crusade against democracy: Fundamentalism as cultural politics. Dissident Voice. Online: http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/ crusade.htm 1922 sermon, “‘Shall the Fundamentalists Win?’: Defending Liberal Protestantism,” delivered by Harry Emerson Fosdick on May 21, 1922. Online: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5070/ Ibid., “George Bush’s Religious Crusade Against Democracy.” Falwell, R. J. (2004, January 31). God is pro-war. WorldNetDaily. Online: http://www.wnd.com/ news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36859 Terkel, A. (2010, January 13). Pat Robertson Cites Haiti’s earthquake as what happens when you ‘Swear a pact to the devil’. Think Progress. Online: http://www.thinkprogress.org/2010/01/13/ robertson-haiti/ Corley, M. (2008, April 23). Hagee says Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans because it was ‘Planning a sinful’ ‘Homosexual rally’. Think Progress. Online: http://www.thinkprogress.org/2008/ 04/23/hagee-katrina-mccain/ Bribes + Vouchers = Black Bush Supporters. The Black Commentator (February 3, 2005 - Issue 124). Online: http://www.blackcommentator.com/124/124_black_bush_supporters.html Meacham, J. (2009, April 4). The end of Christian America. Newsweek. Online: http://www.news week.com/id/192583 Ibid., Democracy incorporated, p. 130. Transcript of lecture. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/us/politics/28text-wright.html Quoted in Nisenson, E. (1993). Ascension: John Coltrane and his quest (p. 212). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Cited from transcript of NOW with Bill Moyers interview with Reverend Forbes (2003, December 26). http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript248_full.html Bill Moyers Journal. (2002, March 1). Father Neuhaus and Reverend Forbes. PBS. Online: http://www. pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives/forbesdebate_vid.html

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HOPE AND (SOME) CHANGE Barack Obama and the Audacity of Government

Power is self-sufficient, a replete possession, and must be maintained by whatever agency is required. —Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear1 Wars, especially undeclared ones, invariably boost the powers and status of the president as commander-in-chief. … A president, however feckless or imposing, is transformed, rendered larger than life. He becomes the supreme commander, the unchallengeable leader and the nation incarnate. —Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated2 On January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama received the mantle worn for eight years by George W. Bush, and thereupon swore a new course in domestic and foreign policies, calling in the Middle East for “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and assuring an economic model on the domestic front that “helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, [and] a retirement that is dignified.”3 It’s been more than two years now, and the tight rope upon which many balanced their hopes—for a truly different and transformative model of governance—has lost a good deal of fidelity, as the Obama Administration proves day after day a determined unwillingness to stray far from many of the policies that earned the ire of millions, the world over, while his predecessor held the fort. From the Justice Department, to the Money Department, to the War Department, promises delivered on the campaign trail that elevated the spirits of citizens, Left and Right, and inspired a political uprising—following eight harrowing years of hubristic, neoliberal rituals—haven’t met the early manifestation many expected with a new face and new mind manning the White House. So, now, one question widely abounds: Who is the real Obama? But to ask “is to drift towards the illusion of thinking there is one—as opposed to an infinitely mutable organism, endlessly adapting to political circumstance, with an eye eternally cocked to the main chance.”4 Asked often why he, then a one-term U.S. Senator, chose to run for a post many believed he lacked qualifications for, Obama invoked Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s exhortation, “the fierce urgency of now,” which King applied in a bold April 4, 1967, speech against the Vietnam War efforts of the LBJ Administration, refusing to surrender to “the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.” Nothing short of “a radical revolution of values,” King ordered, 171

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to force a rapid “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Societies on the brink of defeat against spiritual death need no pointing out, he said. They celebrate “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” as “more important [than] people.” They make like ants and cower before the trampling wrath of “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Not one jot or tittle of King’s words needs revision 40 years after, even with a Black president warming the highest seat of the land. And if Barack Obama would be remembered years later as a president with rare rigor to “go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism,”5 he would have to substitute strikingly different agendas for those currently underway in the first two years of his Administration. So far, the triple giants haven’t faced much opposition. RACISM

On the travails of communities of color, Barack Obama hasn’t put forth much. The Black community especially has been blessed with very little from the man 96% of its voting bloc threw weight behind—and shoveled through snowy, ice-cold weather to see sworn in on Inauguration Day. Of the disparate conditions afflicting Black and Brown people, the Obama Administration has found very little desire to address. On the campaign trail, and even before his February 2007 announcement bid for the presidency, Obama’s message to Black America differed little from conservative calls for Personal Responsibility, even with glaring institutional and structural barriers obstructing millions of Blacks and Browns from upward mobility. Obama chided poor Black women for feeding their kids leftover Popeyes chicken meals; in sweeping generalization, he scolded Black men for watching SportsCenter excessively (even though later admitting, on several accounts, SportsCenter was his favorite program); he bashed Black boys who fostered dreams of one day playing basketball professionally or making money as rappers. On economic inequity, nothing better to be said. His analyses find deeper solidarity in neoconservative circles than liberal enclaves. Speaking March 2007 at the historical Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, Obama offered a narrative no White politician could let slip off without facing indignation more fiery than hell harbors. He proclaimed the Civil Rights Movement had brought Black people “90% of the way” to equality, but “[w]e still got that 10% in order to cross over to the other side.”6 That Black net worth only equals 10 cents for every dollar of White net worth failed to factor into this strange interpretation of history and reality. That Blacks barely earn 62 cents for every dollar of White income found no vindication in his sermon;7 neither did Blacks, despite only 14% of the U.S. population, facing incarceration rates seven times higher than Whites.8 A month later, Obama lectured a group of Black South Carolina state legislators on how a “good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.”9 Not racist loan practices, not back-bending poverty, not unanswerable greed in government halls, but littering— pushes Black communities farther from self-sufficiency. 172

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Two years earlier, right after Hurricane Katrina had made landfall, Obama stood up to those—in one poll, 84% of the Black community10—who held without a shadow of doubt, based on overwhelming evidence, that Race and Class rendered the victims less concerning to their government. “There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American,” Obama observed in a statement. “I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind.”11 To great delight of many White centrists and conservatives, Obama repeatedly told the Black poor their conditions could be rectified if only they decided at once to put away childish things and pull themselves out of social and financial misery with the bootstraps of Personal Responsibility. Prominent White conservatives like George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, and William Bennett respectively commended Obama early on for refusing to “subscribe to a racial narrative of strife and oppression,” for choosing not to “run as a candidate of minority grievance,” for never bringing “race into it.”12 But White liberal elites also took great pride in the Black-bashing campaign Obama’s team tried to woo skeptical middle-class Whites with. Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter doled out a disturbing contribution in March 2008, suggesting Obama’s “most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community.” After all, he had achieved the impossible—telling them, above all else, “they need to stop being homophobic and anti-Semitic.”13 In governance, many of Obama’s racial philosophies have produced pernicious policies. Asked April 29, 2009, his 100th day in office, “what specific policies can you point to that will target … communities [of color] and what’s the timetable for us to see tangible results”? Obama clung to the farcical fantasy that a rising tide lifts all boats—“my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families (as opposed to the wealthiest) that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.”14 Not long after inauguration, Obama unveiled an education budget which cut $85 million for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)—of particular pain at a time when HBCUs, responsible for nearly 20% of undergraduate degrees for Black students, face steeper hurdles from the economic tumbledown. American Indian Tribal Colleges as well fell victim to the budget scalpel.15 Under Obama’s watch, Black men still swell up the prison-industrial complex at rates disproportionate to Whites, and often for crimes nonviolent. Very little address from the President and his Justice Department has attended this ever-expanding tumor. And while appointees like Timothy Geithner and Thomas Daschle faced no legal scrutiny for their tax troubles, Black men—as the tragic case of Detroit activist Reverend Edward Pinkney reminds—forever face the wrath of the court system for infractions like invoking biblical scripture to slam a judge.16 When his attorney general, Eric Holder, condemned the cowardly conscience of many who won’t acknowledge racial disparities, Obama admonished him coldly: “We’ve made enormous progress and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.”17 173

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In defense, Obama has enjoyed the acquiescence of a Black leadership in crisis (and denial), which for several reasons remains reluctant to challenge the president publicly on any matters. On the one hand, they should hate to grant the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Lunatic Right any additional ammo in blasting away at the president for just about anything; and on the other, they’ve convinced themselves any popular backlash from the Black community against the First Black President could seal the fate of all Black aspirants for at least another century—that White voters would be let off the hook and feel no more guilt-produced pressure to push another Black person in there, to make up for the past. The Black leadership elite and Black mainstream press don’t intend to hold the First Black President’s feet to the fire, even if his policies only further subjugate communities they claim to serve and represent. Ralph Ellison saw this storm blowing five decades ago. “I would like to see a qualified Negro President of the United States,” he confessed. “But I suspect that even if this were today possible, the necessities of the office would shape his actions far more than his racial identity.”18 These necessities, unfortunately, have stamped on them the trumpeting of neoliberal economic initiatives at the expense of communities of color. EXTREME MATERIALISM

Wall Street executives initially doubted Obama’s commitment to their financial health, but even before stepping into office, Obama assured, with the bank bailout, business-as-usual would mark tall order. And with neoliberal icons, Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner, firm on board, Wall Street was well-assured the incoming president wielded no big sticks. In September 2008, he cheerled the bailout that salvaged “too-big-to-fail” banks, executed as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). And while investment bankers, whose greed rattled the world economy, reveled in the satisfaction of having a friendly face attending their every need, millions toed the unemployment lines, middle-class communities saw more foreclosure signs hanging from neighbors’ lawns, and communities of color drowned further, further into the deep seas of depression. Of course the current economic conditions have more to do with his predecessors’ policies than any plans he proposed on the campaign trail, but no less devastating an impact has the Obama Administration’s response delivered to families struggling to survive in a world where uncertainty looms large. The taxpayer-funded TARP can only boast of stocking up the pockets of wealthy Wall Street tycoons, rather than rescuing families from financial freefall. Early 2010, 11 million homeowners still remained trapped underwater; and, in one year, only 10% of the homeowner pool had seen significant reduction or restructuring of their mortgages—as the Obama Administration tried to calm fears it cared more for Wall Street CEOs than the millions of citizens losing faith daily.19 For communities of color, the recession had long been a depression. While government officials and establishment pundits were celebrating dull drops in the national employment rate, the Latino and African-American communities were ex174

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periencing constant rises. The nearly 3,000,000 unemployed Latinos (13%) in January 2010 constituted 31% of the national unemployment index. For young Latinos, 16- to 19-year-olds, a whopping 37% were without jobs.20 For Black folks, the official unemployment rate tallied at 17%; and for young Black males between the ages of 16 and 24, 35% juggled joblessness, while unemployed young Black females of the same age group turned up 27%—maintaining a third of young Black people without stable income.21 A rising tide lifts all boats! This unwillingness “to focus on the most blighted segment of America,” explained journalist Joel Dreyfuss, “is directly proportional to how much Americans really believe that black Americans are somehow to blame for their own high unemployment.” And the Obama Administration sponsors this senseless narrative even while the future looks ever dim for Black and Brown communities. “After all, in the new ‘post-racial’ era nary a word is heard about affirmative action or reparations. We’re back to an ahistorical narrative of America; everyone has bootstraps; it’s up to you to pull yourself up. Government plays no role, or at best a minimal one.”22 Corporate Power has dominated the first two years of Obama’s presidency, and most explicit a validation was the healthcare debacle that tortured the White House for months, leaving lasting scars. From start, the long-promised public option flew out the window to temper the concerns of pharmaceutical giants. There would be no competition for their avarice, Obama’s team promised. Soon after announcing plans for “reform,” leaks of an $80 billion deal sealed between the White House and health insurance firms spread. A released memo detailed commitment from the White House to oppose the lowering of drug prices and the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada, and to oppose a repeal of the non-interference provision in the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (2003) granting insurance companies legal right to inflate prices at whim.23 In exchange, the companies participating would support the White House plan, and even run favoring ads. Locked out of this contract were millions without coverage—and millions more underserved by draconian insurance plans. Unaccounted for were kids like Alex Lange, a 17-pound, four-month-old toddler, denied coverage because an insurance firm, Rocky Mountain Health Plans, placed him at high risk for obesity in October 2009. “Your baby is too fat,” Lange’s parents heard from the healthcare humanitarians.24 Disturbingly, this sort of bottom-line, cut-and-dry, no-risk calculation marks motif for an industry the Obama Administration was forging alliance with. The employed can’t invest much faith in the Obama Administration, either. Those lucky to have jobs still wallow by the wayside, waiting for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a bill to guarantee unionizing if workers so choose. “If the majority of workers want a union they should get a union,” Obama thundered to cheering Pennsylvania union members in April 2008. “It is that simple. Let’s stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. … That’s why I’m fighting for it in the Senate, and that’s why I would sign that bill when 175

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I become president of the United States of America.”25 Two years later, workers still report intimidation if trying to unionize for fairer business environments and dignified wages; workers still face the brutal lash of bellicose chains like Wal-Mart, whose propaganda campaigns against EFCA met no resistance from the labor-lauding president in the White House. On an issue as bipartisan as lavish rewards issued to Wall Street CEOs whose firms taxpayers salvaged from fatal collapse, president Obama in February 2010 reversed his many calls for caps on bonuses. A month earlier, indignant citizens could sleep tight—their president was at ringside: “[I]f these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have.” These “fat cats” had chugged down one-too-many meals on taxpayer dime. “And my resolve is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices at some of the very firms fighting reform; and when I see soaring profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms claiming that they can’t lend more to small business, they can’t keep credit card rates low, they can’t pay a fee to refund taxpayers for the bailout.”26 Fast forward three weeks, and in response to JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon’s $17 million and Goldman Sachs frontman Lloyd Blankfein’s $9 million, Obama showered compliments: “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.” The choice was theirs to make: total immunity to do whatever pleased the soul with the toil and sweat of starving citizens because “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”27 MILITARISM

While calling for “spending freezes” and “fiscal responsibility” and extirpation of “entitlements,” the war budget surged. Obama’s first two years in office recorded no definite ideological shift from the war mentality George W. Bush gained the scorn of the world for—a “cowboy diplomacy” that privileged military intervention over all else. Inhumane programs like rendition—the kidnapping and exporting of accused terrorists to foreign countries for torture—still operate with efficiency under Obama. The Cuba-based gulag, Guantánamo Bay, scheduled to shut down within a year of his Administration, still welcomes newcomers—so does the lesser-known Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Afghanistan. Private contractors have lost no sleep over the ever-expanding War(s) on Terror—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya—for which their services, and the consequential exorbitant price tags, never run out. Waterboarding may have ceased as official policy, but equally tormentful torture techniques as sleep-deprivation remain parcels of interrogation procedure, while Obama’s Justice Department, like Bush’s, clamors about “State Secrets” to keep the public unaware of practices commissioned in its name. And with Clinton and Bush alumni like Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke, John Brennan, and Robert Gates gatekeeping, Obama’s wink to the Pentagon was warmly received. On October 2, 2002, then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama denounced the Iraq Invasion prospects as a “dumb war” of no moral or political merit. “I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances,” Obama guaranteed 176

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the anti-war crowd, quick to defend the ontological function of wars waged toward humane ends, yet defiantly resistant to one-sided imperial ambitions. Soaring in cadence, he sang: I don’t oppose all wars. … What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.28 Seven years after, Obama announced a build-up of troop level in Afghanistan— to the tune of 30,000: altogether now 100,000 troops stomping in the belly of the Muslim World. Obama sold the war ($4 billion monthly; $1 million annually per U.S. soldier)29 as imperative in addressing an “international security challenge of the highest order.” He also warned Pakistan to get in line or fall prey to more drone attacks by the hour. Over 1,000 troops dead, not to count thousands more civilians claimed, and the anti-dumb wars president still saw surge the only option to salvage a country ravaged by wars past and present. Liberals called for Dick Cheney’s head in March 2008 when the former VicePresident muttered “So?” to the two-thirds firmly opposed to the five-year long Iraq Invasion, but very little indignation was aroused as Obama pledged to accelerate the other onslaught, even while 63%, polled by Pew Research in November 2009, doubted victory of any sort could turn up in Afghanistan.30 The Obama Administration hasn’t relented in pursuing drone attacks to threaten terrorists suspected of hinging on the Afghan-Pakistan border. Predator and Reaper drones have killed over 1,800 people since 2004, according to a study by the New America Foundation released October 2010. His Administration had already authorized over 125 strikes—twice Bush managed.31 Yet, in July 2009, a Gallup poll could account for only 9% of the Pakistani population favoring drones,32 which they are told help keep terrorists at bay, but which they frequently see hit the wrong targets, with a civilian fatality rate of 32%.33 Under Obama, military generals deploy up to 12,000 autonomous killer robots, executing 33,000 missions annually. Soldiers can now seat serenely in air-conditioned rooms—thousands of miles removed from the battlegrounds upon which their machines roam locked and loaded for ample destruction—and push buttons that extinguish villages and shatter homes.34 The age of clean war is said to be only a couple of decades away—when troop casualty would be of no concern, when to enlist for battle would mean to earn warm seats at war factories and press “play” or “stop,” 177

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depending on how much damage iron-tough generals instruct. And the public, not having to fear for a son or a daughter or husband or wife or brother or sister’s life, could carry on tradition and lead lives unburdened by the savage brutality of imperialism. Worst of all, it seems, is the crushing inability of most to recognize the Obama presidency as but an extension of a set program—mere standby to a system running on autopilot. But more than any other president in modern history, Obama boasts the richness of experience to turn around this vehicle, and head toward safer and saintlier destinations. As a child, Obama endured the toxic wrath of White Supremacy. Called “Negro” at school, he was “teased more than any other kid in the neighborhood—primarily because he was so different in appearance.” A neighborhood friend recalled in 2007 how, as a young man, he was “built like a bull. So we’d get three kids together to fight him.” And while once tagging along a gang of young rascals, he was dumped into a swamp. “Luckily he could swim,” reminisced another childhood colleague. “They only did it to Barry.”35 Rather than channel these painful memories to address the ratcheting of xenophobia in recent years, he reaffirms Bush-era immigration policies and ideologies. Rather than remind society of potential psychological burdens barring many young Black children from embracing and loving and trusting each other, Obama instructs them to put aside video games and read. “No excuses!” he struck down July 2009: Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. That’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school.36 Obama grew up in the home of a welfare-receiving mother. On the campaign trail, he told the story several times of his 53-year-old, cancer-stricken mother on death’s bed battling bureaucratic buffoons from the health insurance industry who remained convinced her sickness was a pre-existing condition for which they could not be held financially liable. But when time came for strident healthcare reform to deliver from the claws of evil poor single mothers and middle-class families, the parsimonious insurance lobby walked off beaming—unscathed. Like no other presidential aspirant of recent, Barack Obama earned the admiration of millions who found great inspiration in the words of a man who emerged from circumstances just as crippling, if not worse, than anything they’d experienced. A rainbow coalition invested incalculable hope into this young Black man who promised Change hovering over the horizon. But now the euphoria has worn off, and many have just begun coming to harsh terms with the limits of politics—even when embodied in the personage of a charismatic and inspiring leader. “The thesis is after all not so mysterious,” Norman Mailer assures; “it would merely nudge the notion that a hero embodies his time and is not so very much better than his time,

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but he is larger than life and so is capable of giving direction to the time, able to encourage a nation to discover the deepest colors of its character.”37 It is now clear that the “dark times” Hannah Arendt wrote of have begun settling upon us, against little notable resistance. These are times when “the public realm has been obscured and the world become so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of politics than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty.”38 NOTES 1

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Soyinka, W. (2005). Climate of fear: The quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (p. 51). New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Wolin, S. (2008). Democracy incorporated: Managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism (p. 105). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Inaugural address delivered by President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009. Online: http://www. nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html Cockburn, A. (2010, February 12–14). The goat in the clearing. CounterPunch. Online: http://www. counterpunch.com/cockburn02122010.html Excerpted from “A Time to Break Silence: Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. Online: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatime tobreaksilence.htm Speech in its entirety. Online: http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/04/selma_voting_rights_ march_comm.php Dillahunt, A., Miller, B., Prokosch, M., Huezo, J., & Muhammad, D. (2010, January 13). State of the dream 2010: Drained. United for a Fair Economy. Online: http://www.faireconomy.org/files/SoD_ 2010_Drained_Report.pdf Ross, S. (2010, March 3). Incarceration for African-Americans 7 times higher. Scoop. Online: http:// www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00032.htm Bacon, P., Jr. (2007, May 3). Obama reaches out with tough love. The Washington Post. Online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202813.html Ford, G., & Gamble, P. (2006, January 5). Katrina: A study - black consensus, white dispute. The Black Commentator, (165). Online: http://www.blackcommentator.com/165/165_cover_katrina_study.html Complete text. Online: http://www.obamaspeeches.com/029-Statement-on-Hurricane-Katrina-ReliefEfforts-Obama-Speech.htm Paul Street. (2008, June 15). ‘No more excuses’: Putting Obama’s blackness to racist use. ZNet. Online: http://www.zcommunications.org/no-more-excuses-putting-obama-s-blackness-to-racist-use-bypaul-street Alter, J. (2008, March 22). The Obama dividend. Newsweek. Online: http://www.newsweek.com/id/ 128548 Transcript from Obama’s April 29, 2009, news conference can be read online: http://www.white house.gov/the_press_office/News-Conference-by-the-President-4/29/2009/ Pope, J. (2009, May 11). Obama’s education budget cuts $85 mil from HBCUs. The Associated Press. Online: http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/the_state_of_black_america_news/9229 Love, D. A., & Pinkney, L. (2007, December 20). Reverend Pinkney arrested for exercising free speech. The Black Commentator, (258). Online: http://www.blackcommentator.com/258/258_cover_ rev_pinkney.html Obama chides holder for comments on race. The Associated Press (2009, March 7). Online: http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/07/obama-chides-holder-for-c_n_172771.html Ellison, R. (1964). Shadow and act (p. 272). New York: Random House.

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Nasiripour, S. (2010, February 3). Obama administration knew foreclosure program wasn’t working right, did nothing. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/03/obamaadministration-knew_n_448597.html Latino and African-American Unemployment Remains Disproportionately High. The Americano (2010, February 8). Online: http://www.theamericano.com/2010/02/08/latino-and-african-americanunemployment-remains-disproportionately-high/ Cosby, F. (2009, November 30). Black unemployment up to nearly 35 percent. Black America Web. Online: http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles/news/moving_america_news/14575 Dreyfuss, J. (2010, February 7). Black unemployment is not news. The Root. Online: http://www. theroot.com/views/black-unemployment-not-news Grim, R. (2009, August 13). Internal memo confirms big giveaways in white house deal with big pharma. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/13/internal-memoconfirms-bi_n_258285.html Lofholm, N. (2009, October 10). Heavy infant in grand junction denied health insurance. The Denver Post. Online: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13530098 Kaplan, E. (2009, January 7). Can labor revive the American dream? The Nation. Online: http:// www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/kaplan Lee, J. (2010, January 21). President Obama: ‘Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is ‘Too big to fail’. The White House Blog. Online: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/ 2010/01/21/president-obama-never-again-will-american-taxpayer-be-held-hostage-a-bank-too-big-fa Goldman, J., & Katz, I. (2010, February 10). Obama doesn’t ‘Begrudge’ bonuses for Blankfein, Dimon. Bloomberg. Online: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&pos=1&sid= aKGZkktzkAlA Full text of speech. Online: http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/warspeech.pdf Tiron, R. (2009, October 14). U.S. spending $3.6 billion a month in Afghanistan according to CRS report. The Hill. Online: http://www.thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/63121-crs-calculatescost-of-us-troop-presence-in-afghanistan Public divided over Afghan troop requests, but still sees rationale for war. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (2009, November 5). Online: http://www.pewresearch.org/pubs/1400/publicdivided-over-afghanistan-troop-requests-still-sees-rationale-for-war Walsh, D. (2010, October 7). Obama’s enthusiasm for drone strikes takes heavy toll on Pakistan’s tribesmen. The Guardian. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/07/pakistan-dronemissile-obama-increased Abbot, S. (2010, January 29). Pakistan criticizes secrecy of US drone strikes. The Associated Press. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/pakistan-criticizes-secre_n_442421.html Bergen, P., & Tiedemann, K. (2010, February 24). The year of the drone. New America Foundation. Online: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/NAF_YearOfTheDrone.pdf Hari, J. (2010, January 22). The age of the Killer Robot is no longer a Sci-Fi fantasy. The Independent. Online: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-theage-of-the-killer-robot-is-no-longer-a-scifi-fantasy-1875220.html Scharnberg, K., & Barker, K. (2007, March 25). The not-so-simple story of Barack Obama’s youth. Los Angeles Times. Online: http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/chi-070325obama-youth-storyarchive,1,5751476.story?page=3 Full text of speech. Online: http://www.blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/07/obamas_naacp_speech.html Mailer, N. (1960, November). Superman comes to the supermarket. Esquire. Arendt, H. (1968). Men in dark times (p. 11). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

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AGE OF POVERTY Consumerism, Privatization, and the Cheapening of Life

We are/ Born like this/ ... Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/ Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/ Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed/ Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes/ —Charles Bukowski, “Dinosauria, We”1 To sustain consent for a market economy constructed upon enormous disparities in income and wealth, it is necessary to persuade people not to question but to consume. People need to be convinced that, regardless of their circumstances, the system is fundamentally fair. —Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism2 The new age we have stepped into resembles nothing of the past. Never before have all elements of public good and communal interest passed off to commercialism, privatization, and narcissism: to a romanticized, twisted Social Darwinism that convinces people competitive consumption reaches the highest level of human fulfillment. And most explicitly is this phenomenon seen in supermarkets across the country, preferably in times of holiday pre-dawn sales. Human beings, through television or internet advertisement, get word of a Special Discount bonanza taking place in the near future, and before dawn cracks, most fly out of their homes, speeding through the highways, half-awake and half-dressed, only to find long lines trailing the front doors of whatever department stores they plan to expunge their accumulated, hard-earned scraps at. The doors open, and each man and woman storms in, left to defend themselves against a horde which, with a stony look and heightened focus, seem to have morphed into zombie-like personas— strung along until arrival at the final destination. In this state very little critical thinking assumes position. The allure of the product sought after envelops all mental space that otherwise would restrain the consumer, and nothing—not life, not death— measures greater than the item of interest. Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old, 6-foot-5, 270-pound Haitian-born security guard, learned this lesson the hard way when, on November 28, 2008 (“Black Friday”), shoppers at a Nassau County, Long Island, Wal-Mart branch stomped and trampled his body, knocked flat from the shattered glass door, to snatch pieces of whatever items his humanity must have weighed less than. It was a few minutes before 5:00 A.M. when the raucous crowd, tired of waiting in line for hours, grew more cantankerous, until finally giving in to the speed-driven, competition-centered, all-or-nothing 183

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sensibility marketers had driven into their skulls for years. As customers stampeded their way through, even pregnant mothers wound up scraping the floor. Consumer activist Al Norman termed this rabble “lab rats,” merely “responding to a stimulus.” In a sense, When the door opened, they went after the cheese. In the past, it has been fellow shoppers who have been killed in the “savage” rush, as one onlooker at the Valley Stream store described the incident. Our culture of mass consumption has bred these “supershoppers,” who will show up for every clearance, every special, with one goal in mind: to be at the cash register first.3 Police officers who arrived shortly after to administer CPR to poor Damour’s failing heart faced equal disregard; and even when informed of the consequences of their actions, most still kept shopping, unmoved, protesting, “I’ve been on line since Friday morning!”4 A year later, on the same day, at the same store (though not the same branch), a Georgia couple ended up arrested for abandoning their nine-year-old son and ninemonth-old daughter in a shopping cart, beside a random aisle, while they swept the store in search of transient items.5 These are neighbors, friends, daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts— everyday folk. No mark-of-the-beast scars the forehead to separate them from the lot with whom we interact daily. We shake hands with them and engage them in healthy dialogue; some we befriend, some gave us life, some are us. Ordinary human beings hoping to make the best of life—love, be loved; give, receive; laugh, cry; dance, sing; work, rest; eat, drink—and die with dignity. But the corporate oligarchic forces in control of the world that surrounds them wish differently. Somewhere down the line, various forms of media informed them life would be empty, meaningless, and a bore, without a garage-full, house-full, office-full of toys (big and small). These channels sold the “freedom to choose one’s identity” as a “realistic proposition.” But nothing comes cheap or, heaven forbid (!), free: “There is a range of options to choose from, and once the choice has been made, the selected identity can be made real … by making the necessary purchases or subjecting oneself to the required drills—be it a new hair-style, jogging routine, slimming diet or enriching one’s speech with currently fashionable status-symbolizing vocabulary.”6 Consumers now have choices to make. No more do they have to stand at department stores bored by lack of diversity. Choice abounds—unlike ever before. And what once took hours, days, weeks to accomplish can, today, with the right purchase and the right application, spring to life in but a matter of seconds. From food, to music, to communication, to healthcare—Instancy dominates. Pills, creams, drinks, shakes, phones, mp3s—the world at our fingertips. “Easy money, easy health, easy beauty, easy education,” observes educator John Gatto—“if only the right incantation can be found.”7 It thrills most to live in a world so exciting, where life itself is a stimulus. But in a world operating on Instant Time, commitments fly out the window. And the endless Reality TV shows buttress the need to expend and cheapen any measure of commitment, solidarity, or loyalty—if the individual seeks survival. To each—her own. But the incantations are many. At the bottom of the 184

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bottle, at the neck of the needle—miracles make waves. “Lurking behind the magic is an image of people as machinery that can be built and repaired.”8 From Day 1, when kids enter the classroom, that first frontier where their worldviews take shape, the vision of a Consumer Society vies for their attention. And in an age when schools share more in common with Coca-Cola than Community, the new teacher—the “classroom manager”—pursues one purpose: “to legitimate through mandated subject matter and educational practices a market-based conception of the learner as simply a consumer of information.” The Etch-A-Sketch model of education emphasizes early on that learning should be pyrrhic, opportunistic, and ephemeral— moment-based. Kids walking into schools today learn knowledge only earns value with test-taking. Soon enough, grown men and women rise out of children, with pitiful conceptions of their world, lacking the will to just say No! to the demands of an insatiable market. If schools lag, Television reins in this conviction efficiently, with kids indoctrinated through commercials for brand loyalty: before they learn words, before mastering their ABCs, they can spot brands—and identify with them, and order their identities after them. Kids no longer have to wait to hit middle school to learn the privileges of consuming—and the punishments for those who don’t consume (enough). In late 2007, soda company PepsiCo crafted “DEWmocracy,” an initiative urging customers—no age too young—to submit concepts for a new Mountain Dew flavor. DEWmocracy is all about “harnessing the collective intelligence of the brand’s passionate fans,” and fostering “deep engagement with the brand, building up a robust online community of fans and creating more brand evangelists.”9 Democracy, as a practice, has hardly anything to do with equitable societies where leaders hold steady commitments to fairness and justice. On the contrary, democracy holds more in common with selecting flavors for sugar-saturated sodas marketed to kids. They can now contribute to their own demise. What could be more democratic than that? “Within this growing marketization and privatization of everyday life, market relations are viewed as a paradigm for democracy itself,” Henry Giroux wrote almost a decade back.10 With the rise of Conscience Consumerism—an insidious practice where corporations tie products to humanitarian causes, to provoke good-natured citizens—nothing could be more certain than the shifting of the ground from underneath our feet, more so with the Supreme Court lending some muscle early 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, letting loose the floodgates of corporate cash into local and federal elections.11 Nothing anymore seems too sacred to be defiled by privatization. From public schools, to universities, to churches—cash rules everything around. All products are for sale in the free market. Many public schools today employ not principals but CEOs; churches today commission not preachers but CEOs; universities today elect not presidents but CEOs. And the saints go marching in. Schools now speak openly of the bottom line—of balancing budgets, of tightening belts. School boards freeze or slash teacher pay; university regents clean out departments and eliminate Humanities courses to make way for more financially viable options. And in many churches greater attention goes to purchasing unneeded, excessive equipment than the saving of souls and giving to the needy—those too poor to put anything in the offering 185

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basket should expect long stares from fellow parishioners; some, to be called out from the pulpit. Where private interests dominate, public necessities crumble. Privatization of social services inevitably leads to erosion of those very services ostensibly on the brink of collapse without private intervention. One gives; the other lives. And Hannah Arendt saw the bridge coming down years back: This disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years— the decay of public services: schools, police, mail delivery, garbage collection, transportation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and water—are the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable.12 This unmanageable society can survive only so long before total disintegration sets in. Of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Peter Jovanovich, CEO of the multibillion dollar publishing powerhouse Pearson Education, gushed matter-of-factly: “This almost reads like our business plan.”13 And in September 2002, when asked by The New York Times why announcement for Invasion of Iraq stalled till fall, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. lectured: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”14 Indeed. For those in doubt over the depth of corporate gluttony, biotech giant Monsanto began patenting seeds over a decade ago, and has since sued hundreds of farmers, far and wide, for infringement of its genetically engineered seeds, many of which were carried by wind and blown over to the harvest grounds of struggling farmers.15 This, a lengthy stretch from polio vaccine hero Jonas Salk’s reply in 1960 to an interviewer asking who owned the patent to his life-saving invention: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When food is patented, health is patented. The poor and sick know their chances greatly slim out in a privatized world—where they stink up the joint, and don’t provide much return. In this sense, sickness takes form as a privilege only the well-to-do should have access to. Falling sick might mean loss of job, income, home, and benefits. Oligarchic corporations hate nothing more than sick workers. And with all the lobbying muscle money can buy, it is with great joy that they witness Congress tentative to act on behalf of millions of workers consigned to these hellish conditions. For as the erudite Congresswoman Virginia Foxx convinced herself July 2009: “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare. Everybody in this country has access to healthcare.”16 Health insurance companies not only co-authored the neoliberal commandments, they framed the biopolitics manifesto. Life and Death hold only as much worth today as a corresponding bank statement. For the rich, golden carpets unfurl: state-of-theart technology fill up operating rooms; doctors perform with extreme care. For the rich, insurance companies bend over sideways to authorize procedures; medical personnel go extra miles to make life one breath smoother. “The underlying population can be treated with lectures on responsibility.”17 The long and winded wait in office halls, alongside a dozen or more others, just to be interviewed for five minutes, confirms the worth of the poor. When staring death down in times of emergency 186

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operations, insurance company operatives lay down the free-market laws. Women like Stacie Ritter, mother of cancer-stricken twin daughters, hold no sway in the Big Boys, Money Talks league of privatization.18 The late 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, whose insurance company refused to cover a liver transplant, had no name in the streets.19 She was simply “Client #XXXXX,” whose burden the giant provider, CIGNA, declared too weighty for their financial backs. When citizens no longer see themselves as part of a community—part of a polity, as constituting intricately bound networks—but as consumers in a marketplace, where only a few can come out on the other side with the limited stock—the desired items—hostility inevitably builds up and forms the language through which communication is established. In a Corporate Society, the aim falls far from creating conditions in which human beings can lead lives of dignity and destiny, never having to go hungry for lack of money; just as indifferent is it to ensuring provisions for those cut short from the guarantees a prosperous society (by default) owes, and to lending a helping hand to those constantly knocked down by the traffic of hardship and exploitation. In such societies, where the next man, the next woman, boy or girl, might be the antagonist threatening one’s health and happiness, life looks more like an episode of Survivor or The Apprentice or Big Brother, than rewarding experiences filled with genuine, long-lasting joy and fulfillment. Even good-natured citizens would dare not respond to the suffering surrounding them, for they know it’s now all-against-all: Instead of offering poor and disenfranchised youth decent jobs, the militarized state threatens them with incarceration. Instead of providing the homeless with decent shelter and food, the state issues them fines and then arrests them for failure to pay. Instead of providing people with decent healthcare, the state passes legislation that makes it more difficult to file for bankruptcy when medical bills outstrip income and [it’s] easier to end up in a criminal court.20 Early 2009, ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain fell out of public grace upon discovery he had coughed up, amongst other features, $87,000 for an area rug, $28,000 for four pairs of curtains, $87,000 for a pair of guest chairs, $11,000 for Roman Shade fabric, $15,000 for a sofa, $18,000 for a George IV Desk, $16,000 for a custom coffee table—all together topping $1.2 million to remodel his office.21 Late 2009, a Phoenix, Arizona, United Methodist Church lost a court challenge to continue its weekly pancake breakfast for the homeless, following complaints from nearby residents of uptick in “undesirable” conducts.22 We’ve stepped into an age of poverty—a poverty of wealth only outstripped by the poverty of values, ethics, and conscience. Masses of living-dead stalk the streets, concerned only of their needs and desires—their wants, their fetishes. Rarely anymore does thought of the Common Good chime in the minds of everyday people. Ambitious politicians rail against deficit-loading “entitlements,” and most turn their heads away, too embarrassed to look into the faces of the single mother, the college senior, the elderly grandparent taking that final step into homelessness. The Century of Self is in full swing. Everyone owns a gun, and is prepared to put it to good use at the sound of a pin drop. Yes, the “threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world.”23 187

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Nightly news report of old ladies mugged in broad daylight, of children arrested for throwing tantrums, of kids attached to each other’s skulls, of jealous men pulling triggers into the faces of female lovers, of judges indicted for pocketing bribes to sell off young kids, of elected officials indicted for striking deals with Wall Street barons; of corporations profiting from child-and-slave labor, of investors looting billions of dollars in Ponzi schemes, of millions laid off while executives float from golden parachutes, of insurance firms swindling communities of color with subprime mortgages, of executives earning a thousand times the worth of secretaries, of insurance companies denying dying clients coverage, of pastors cruising around in Maybachs and brand-new BMWs while church members go belly-up from hunger and starvation, of presidents deploying tens of thousands of young soldiers to fight unwinnable and unnecessary and unconscionable wars. “Poverty is unnecessary and the clear result of greed and muddle,” W.E.B. Du Bois confirmed a century ago. “It spawns physical weakness, ignorance and dishonesty. … This strangle must be broken. It can be broken not so much by violence and revolution, which is only the outward distortion of an inner fact, but by the ancient cardinal virtues: individual prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, and the modern faith, hope and love.”24 NOTES 1 2

3

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6 7

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Bukowski, C. (1992). The last night of the earth poems (p. 319). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Jhally, S., & Lewis, J. (1992). Enlightened racism: The Cosby show, audiences, and the myth of the American dream (p. 74). New York: Westview Press. Al Norman. (2008, November 30). Wal-Mart Shoppers are trained to be ‘Savages’. The Huffington Post. Online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/wal-mart-shoppers-are-tra_b_147230.html Gould, J., Trapasso, C. & Schapiro, R. (2008, November 28). Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede. New York Daily News. Online: http://www.nydaily news.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html Parents accused of ditching kids at Walmart on black Friday. WSB TV 2 (2009, November 27). Online: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/21741519/detail.html Bauman, Z. (1988). Freedom (p. 63). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gatto, J. T. (2002). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (10th anniversary ed., p. 88). Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Ibid. “DEWMOCRACY CAMPAIGN OVERVIEW”. Online: http://www.dewmocracymediahub.com/ images/overview.pdf Giroux, H. A. (2004). The abandoned generation: Democracy beyond the culture of fear (paperback ed., p. 29). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bill Moyers Journal. (2010). Citizens United v. FEC. PBS. Online: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/ journal/citizensunited/index.html Arendt, H. (1970). On violence (p. 84). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Walsh, M. (2001, February 21). Pearson hopes to ‘Widen the definition of education’. Education Week. Online: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2001/02/21/23biz.h20.html Bumiller, E. (2002, September 7). Bush aides set strategy to sell policy on Iraq. The New York Times. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/us/traces-of-terror-the-strategy-bush-aides-set-strategy-tosell-policy-on-iraq.html?pagewanted=1 Barlett, D. L., & Steele, J. B. (2008, May). Monsanto’s harvest of fear. Vanity Fair. Online: http:// www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805?currentPage=1

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17 18

19

20

21

22

23

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Corley, M. (2009, July 24). Rep. Virginia Foxx: ‘There are no Americans who don’t have health care’. Think Progress. Online: http://www.thinkprogress.org/2009/07/24/foxx-americans-health-care/ Chomsky, N. (2007). Interventions (p. 131). San Francisco: City Lights Books. Mother speaks out on insurance giant CIGNA’s denial of healthcare to cancer-stricken twin daughters. Democracy Now! (2009, October 1). Online: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/1/mother_ speaks_out_on_insurance_giant Cancer Girl’s Lawyer blames CIGNA for her death. CBS2 (2007, December 20). Online: http:// www.cbs2.com/local/nataline.sarkisyan.CIGNA.2.615167.html Giroux, H. A. (2007). The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrial-academic complex (pp. 32–33). Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Gasparino, C. (2009, January 22). John Thain’s $87,000 Rug. The Daily Beast. Online: http://www. thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-22/john-thains-87000-rug/ Moriarty, S. (2009, November 12). Phoenix Church ordered to stop feeding the homeless. End Homelessness. Online: http://www.homelessness.change.org/blog/view/phoenix_church_ordered_to_ stop_feeding_the_homeless Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America (p. 206). Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co. Reprinted in Paschal, A. (Ed.). (1971). W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (p. 262). New York: Collier Books, Macmillan.

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THE SUBSTANCE OF TRUTH Uncovering the Present, Past, and Future of Society

Our brains, our hearts, and our habits of living have been going through such a revolution for the last fifty years. If our age deserves to be called an “age of anxiety,” it is not because we have regressed, it is because we are going through a painful transition: we are waging within ourselves a life and death struggle that spells the doom of the past and the emergence of new forms. —J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness1 Human history is not predetermined by its past stages. The fact that something has been the case, even for a long time, is not a proof that it will continue to be so. Each moment of history is a junction of tracks leading towards a number of futures. Being at the crossroads is the way human society exists. … The future differs from the past precisely in leaving ample room for human choice and action. —Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom2 Let there be no misunderstanding about this, no easy going optimism. … We are going to force ourselves in by organized far-seeing effort—by outthinking and out-flanking the owners of the world today who are too drunk with their own arrogance and power successfully to oppose us if we think and learn and do. —W.E.B. Du Bois, “Education and Work”3 At risk of appearing alarmist, it’s easy to ignore all the warning signs hanging around us that suggest the clock is ticking fast—real fast!—and that time left for due action is short. But if life for the next generation should contain some semblance of sanity—where life itself means more than shopping malls and commodities, where Power stands accountable to the demands of communities—all fear of coming across hyperbolic would have to give way to the realities staring us down. The risk also extends to coming across Pollyannaish, as though all the impurities and iniquities holding hostage society can be cured with essays or lectures. Neither is appropriate if we intend to work hard in making life as rewarding as it should be—a far cry from crafting a perfect society devoid of all disturbance; there’s a word for that: Genocide. We cannot afford to let this moment slip by unattended, unengaged. The problems number endless—and so do the possibilities. And at no other moment has a generation been more fortunate, with the ease of technology, to make miracles happen 191

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amidst frightening circumstances. At no other moment has the clarion call blared this clearly and loudly to “brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world.”4 On the education front, everything stinks. Schools sell their souls to make ends meet, and police officers storm-troop through hallways, authorized with full permission to harm kids who so much as protest unlawful commands. And when not being harassed by agents sworn to “serve and protect” their rights, chances of suspension and expulsion for infractions, petty and childish, abound. I should know: I once was suspended in high school for protesting the numbskull convictions of a police officer who accepted blindly a racist teacher’s theory that I was trying to jackopen the knob of a locked classroom door, and loot whatever I could set my hands on—the bandage I desperately needed to cover up a swollen, insect-bitten, blooddripping eyelid notwithstanding. To keep peace and order, school children as young as four end up tossed out on their faces—evicted for failing to sit quietly, expressionless and emotionless, fully obeying the orders of soulless instructors whose conceptions of education fall out of pages printed by McDonald’s, British Petroleum, and the Pentagon. No notion whatsoever of the value of a child’s mind, and how delicately anyone overseeing the education process must carry out classroom instruction to let the child come to terms with the world on her own and dream of richer realities. Little regard for the preciousness of every child that schools must acknowledge when drafting safety and security policies. Today, for just about anything—from scrawling on a school desk to throwing tantrums—children fall victim to brazen slaps from the All-Mighty, ten-fingered hands of the State; only, this time, not on the wrist but across the face. Many students, more so those touched by the terrors of racism and classism, end up abandoned in schools with underqualified and understaffed faculty. And when a 25-year-old single mother is expected to single-handedly, adequately, serve the emotional, educational, and existential needs of two dozen or more kids, who dares act surprised when her immediate resolve to any sign of chaos or disorder is to alarm the resident SWAT team to come swoop down on lively kids and drag them off, handcuffed, to local precincts. Schools across all corners lack vital resources that should ordinarily go to stuffing breakfast meals into the bellies of hungry kids, or providing books to scantily clad libraries, or reducing class sizes to alleviate teacher and student alike, or employing counselors and therapists in lieu of abusive law enforcement, or funding field trips to farms or lakes or museums or gardens to broaden the scope of kids born into environments expressive of social death and financial famine. The new, liberal Administration has refreshingly scurried to save the drowning ship. Its most compelling proposal yet is a “Race to the Top” initiative that infantilizes, privatizes, and commodifies schools, and forces districts to compete—as though children rank somewhere between commodities and consumers—for badly needed cash. Thus goes the refreshing vision of an Administration dealing with the greatest educational crisis in American history.

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When not beating their bodies into the ground for mouthing-off to cops who’ve made footstools of school grounds, the State beats students’ brains senseless with ridiculously narrow tests useless only in outing those with good memorizing skills. All critical thinking—outlawed. And if students come to good senses and put little value on the tests, anything ranging from firing principals to shutting schools down and busing students to far, far away (often dangerous) districts, stands strong chance—more so under the remarkable philosophies of the Education Secretary, Arne Duncan. Shafted from a future of endless possibilities are students, many of them poor and colored, whose humanities mean little to a society tap-dancing to the beating drums of neoliberalism. And just as dehumanized are teachers reduced to testgivers and peace-preservers. No more, in such society, would students return years later to credit the unwavering love and support of some teacher from way back when without whom the man or woman standing in this elegant position today could never have come to being. Now, teachers would enjoy the same prison-of-hate in the hearts and minds of students where uncaring police officers rot. They would be just as hated and identified as enemies. And if incidents over the years, of kids running into schools blasting away at teachers and administrators, should serve any sobering warning, perhaps the longer we wait to address these concerns concretely, the greater we endanger them against the fury of a young generation hit so many times it has begun hitting back. For kids who dare exhibit complex personalities, who for a second let slip out a whiff of emotion, the options are slim. Either they submit their tongues to the shoving of toxic drugs, or face months (even years) behind the iron bars of psychiatric wards and detention centers. Don’t they know the age when societies considered their young of divine importance is past gone? Don’t they know we now live in an age when every man and woman, and consequently every boy and girl, must shoulder burdens equally—age, class, income, disability, minority status aside? Kids—as young as however low the imagination inspires—face threats of incarceration and even life sentences, whether or not they can legally, at this age, obtain driver’s licenses or see R-rated movies or brand their skin with tattoos. But this soulless structure could care less of the stinging rebuke of hypocrisy. Its mind is made up, scheduled to waver no time soon. The Soft War deploys armies of corporations, lined with artillery ruthless enough to blow apart all opposition, while the Hard War can clean out communities with the innocent push of a button.5 Many adults find these events disgraceful, and of a nature sure to swallow up the credibility of any society considering itself civilized; but they know all too well the cost of speaking up and the price of dissenting speech (which is all but free). All hope of support (sympathy, no less) from the mainstream media appears infantile these days. Sure, many producers and hosts and correspondents and anchors would like to explore further these issues threatening to roll over all democratic institutions still standing, but with a machine bought and paid for, tagged by the logos of corporations (many of which share responsibility for the way things are), not much should ever be expected to come of the five-minute, all-you-can-watch Rage Rhetoric Riots that count for debate and dialogue in the 21st century news 193

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age—of 24 hours, on-demand entertainment. Dissident voices rarely find maps to the television screen, and when they do, nothing of substance passes through, beyond self-satisfying mantras that the Machine is “trustworthy” and “dependable” and “fair and balanced.” Lobbyists swing in and out of network studios, and not one mention finds tunnel into the viewer’s ear: that all she’s just been told—about healthcare, about war, about food and medicine, about bailouts and social security— came flying out of talking points written and stamped by press agents employed by mammoth corporations. The Establishment Media cannot afford taking on the beast of neoliberalism, for they are elements of it. No more do news agencies claim public service as highest of all obligations—not in an era when a half-dozen cast of multimedia conglomerates control virtually every major media landscape in the country and world. Thus, the rulers in high places, the masters of the universe, live high off the ignorance and idiocy of a deceived public which thinks the only thing wrong with government is too much spending, or that nothing extraordinary took place during the last decade: that the world hardly shifted an inch: that the financial troubles that rocked the global economy ended the day the bailout for the big banks took effect: that to assume something is afoot is to ally with enemy forces bent on seeing the destruction of one’s homeland—in short, unpatriotic and flirting with the seditious. Average, hardworking families sit glued to TV screens or radio boxes that transmit on banal frequencies—No problem is too big for a Small Government to fix. And a Small Government can only decrease in size by slashing open safety nets with which many families thrown off the deck of the social ship have kept from drowning for decades. Small governments lose their identities, these families constantly hear, if they take on the bloating task of regulating loose sectors of the freemarket system. Thus, from healthcare, to food ingredients, to marketing, to campaign finance, to defense contracting—the fingers of Big Government must be cut short, lest the nation be transformed into a clone of Socialism. Or Communism. Or Marxism. Or any other despicable -ism the blowhards passing for policy experts can thrust into sixty-second sentences whenever any topic of the Obama Administration lights up. At risk of sounding alarmist, it’s easy to ignore all warning signs; but time never stands still to protest inaccuracy. So close to the cliff ’s edge do we stand today that even inaction could spell doom, the past bearing great witness. The history of Black people on these shores surely shines bright on the quest for dignity at a time when dehumanization marked the tall order. For a people snatched up from their native lands, transported through grueling months on slave ships, auctioned like objects to curious owners, and worked day and night to fund a national economy, much less can a person endure and give up the fight for freedom or, more plausible, end such excruciating existence. But for Dignity’s sake, many fought stronger, bearing the terrible swift lash on their backs even while the prospect of freedom seemed a fleeting one. Dignity propelled many to take flights at early morning hours, and flee the dungeons of oppression White masters and mistresses had convinced themselves could be called home to human beings. Dignity made way to Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1849, when Henry Brown, a slave, shipped himself with express mail to Pennsylvania, entombed in a 194

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box through the turbulent 27-hour, 350-mile ride, still and silent, patient through the storm.6 One day a slave. The next, a free man. Dignity can push men and women to self-examination. Dignity can force clarity of mind through the foggy casts of self-doubt and confusion. “Hear the cries of your poor children! Remember the stripes your fathers bore. Think of the torture and disgrace of your noble mothers,” Henry Highland Garnet cried in his address to slaves on August 16, 1843.7 But if we have not the dignity to interrogate the past and trace our steps, very dim is any hope of restoration in front of frightening odds. The history of Black people, much like the history of Women, similar to the history of Native Americans, Brown people and working people—all share the painful and agonizing process of struggle before any breakthrough surrenders, for Power, as an institutional force, can only exist on the bent backs of oppressed populations; and all forms of power know better than to concede amicably to the demands of movements threatening their existence. But history shows men and women whose love of justice, whose hatred of evil, whose passion for fairness, outmatched the greed of the greatest institutions. “We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape,” cautioned Henry David Thoreau, “and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition. … In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening.”8 Nothing good comes, Thoreau knew, from romanticizing history, rewriting or revising it. No good deed finds value in informing people red seas voluntarily part under divinely guarded rods of righteousness. All movements for equality and liberation bear in detail a determined population prepared for battle against rationality. By logical standards, all bets crumbled. The chances slimmed out each passing second, and Opposition seemed to enlarge in number and power by the moment. But with rigid resolves—that one had her feet planted on the right side of history, that with each delayed strike or delayed march or delayed protest or delayed sit-in the future slipped farther out of reach—even the highest mountains moved to watch history happen. “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today,” Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. announced in 1967, at a time just as precarious as that we live in today: We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at the flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”9 Under King, the Civil Rights Movement held high this theme—in midst of calls, from liberals and conservatives, that things were moving too fast, that the winds of change ought not to blow so sudden, that Blacks should “slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem 195

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will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.” To this, King replied: “time is neutral.”10 Those under illusions of grandeur that no democratic society can undergo sweeping radical change—for the worse—and not self-correct in due time ought to open their eyes more widely to the past and present. Any condition can be adapted to. Good or bad. And any population can be coerced, tepidly or forcefully, to adapt accordingly. Years back, very few imagined genetically modified food products would rule supermarket shelves and find room at dinner tables—without much protest from an enlightened public. Years back, very few imagined corporations would receive Supreme Court VIP passes to walk in and out of government halls, bearing gifts, casting out of office unfriendly legislators, and handpicking replacements sure to satisfy the business class and undo the underclass. Years back, most would laugh at the suggestion that a government would go to war on OPENLY deceitful pretexts, and that a new Administration—ostensibly liberal—would take the baton and run faster with it, undaunted by an ever-rising deficit, an outraged public, and crumbling domestic infrastructures. Today, however, the doubts of many—and the fears of a few—loom large, as millions lose jobs, millions more graduate college with six-figure private loan debts, tens of thousands die annually from lack of healthcare coverage, children perish from hunger: and yet, the war budget expands indefinitely. The stakes are high; expectations low. Many don’t expect to break on through to the other side. Fewer even plan on tugging out till the bitter end. Nightly news document stories of men leaping to their deaths from hotel balconies, and women hanging from bed sheets in living rooms, of boys putting guns to their heads and pulling away, and girls chugging down vials of pills sure to put their lungs to sleep. Gloom marks the mood of a society under siege, of a society on the edge. Rarely do the words Hope and Future spring from lips anymore. Most just hope to live out each day and see what the future brings. Gravediggers have seen fortunes flourish as death thickens the air. Ailments only a few years back individuals would fight off— and come out on the other side refreshed from—now claim countless lives, young and old. The morale is low. The bills are high. Only the Super-Rich can afford sickness anymore. A flu-like symptom could mean the loss of a home or termination from a job. Masses of living-dead roam roadsides, just passing time till their coffins close and are lowered into the earth. In an age driven by greed and graft, when legalized corruption and normalized narcissism play hardball with the souls of citizens, the impulse to give in and give up gains ground even in the hearts of those thought tough-willed. When only few find promise in the future, the costs can spell widespread destruction. And despair catches on, like wildfire in California hills. Very little effort is put anymore into imagining a different world—a future free from the stranglehold of the different nooses of oppression hanging millions out to dry. Yet, people deserve more out of life, and must be implored to see something different for a change, to create critical utopias out of which rise fighting spirits to keep keeping on even while staring down overwhelming obstacles. At need is a “habitual vision of greatness” that refuses to settle for mediocrity, constantly luring the soul toward grander possibilities.11

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But it must be announced that nothing worthwhile will emerge from these perilous circumstances without strident action. A sense of what can be only emerges out of the hard work and diligence of those displeased with what is, and whose firm sense of the past promotes faith and hope that a dreamed-of-future counts in the realm of possibilities. Nothing would come without rigorous strides, but far less would be accomplished while despair guides the thoughts of the disregarded. The age which overshadows us today—where wealth is king and all sense of public value has all but depreciated to minimal worth—cannot be maintained for too long without social chaos, without an identity crisis that reduces the humanities of the poor and underclass to waste, and empties out all moral virtue from a people thought generous and good-willed. No available models exist through which to guarantee a neoliberal system can coexist with the public values that should make the world a special place—where those lacking resources can count on social programs to catch them before dropping too hard. Social Darwinism cannot consent to satisfying the educational, emotional, financial, and spiritual needs of those polishing the bottom of the social totem pole. In a Race to the Top World, the few, able and agile, find their way quick—right where they belong—while the many remain stuck upon the lower rungs of the ladder. All-Against-All, as a social policy, cannot look the other way while such crimes as handing out food stamps to single mothers, or feeding hungry schoolchildren, or dealing out social security checks to the elderly, or promoting universal healthcare for the underprivileged, or providing affordable housing to the homeless—go unpunished. In a Reality-Show Society, trust flies out the window, paranoia takes precedence, manipulation dominates, retaliation rules, and elimination (of friends and even family members) is executed emotionlessly—as but a mere act of expedience from a contestant with eyes on the prize. Such systems cannot, and will not, accept the assistance of a social democracy, for their reign is inviolable and cannot be shared with subversive ideologies. If we intend to stave off that takeover for the time being, utopias must not take on fantasy-fueled forms, rather legitimate visions and values a democratic society believes in and intends to keep forging toward until established as law of land. Those increasingly given to cynicism and fatalism need to see as realistic a time “when we shall attach as much importance to the love quotient as we do now to the intelligence quotient. … Forgiving fathers and loving mothers may eventually be recognized as equally necessary as human-relation experts and group therapists.”12 Never again would women have to work three jobs just to sustain poverty-level conditions in the home. Qualified Black and Brown men would never again be resigned to searching endlessly for livable jobs, turned down at every count. No more would millions of sick and hungry children be starved to death by the riches of a few. No more would more money in state budgets go to building prisons while millions of kids wallow in underfunded and decrepit institutions of lower learning. No more would states tear down homes to erect private infrastructures. No more would politicians submit to the wills of lobbyists for big industries, and sell out constituencies without whom they could never dream of Public Office.

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None of this would prove easy, of course. And Opposition surely wouldn’t sit back and submit to a new order. But the number rests, as always, with the people. For all the billions big corporations and big governments have to spare, money only picks up value bestowed on it. “Part of it consists in doing away with whatever traces of conflict and conflict-fostering tendencies we still countenance more or less consciously in our life,” J. Samuel Bois advised; “part of it demands that we give unalloyed love—the fundamental impulse of life—the freedom to transform each of us into a new type of human being.”13 The call to transformation should sound loud and clear. After 8 years of the last Administration, with ruthless assaults on all public institutions, executed by a Machiavellian hubris of tall shape, millions went along with legislations that undermined the very values they held dear. The Iraq Invasion, for one, educated greatly why when fear fills the air, values dissolve. Some who once championed diplomatic diligence and measured militarism were quick to call for all Arabs to undergo special screening at airports—once the towers fell and the World Trade Center crumbled. They rushed off the next morning to recruitment offices to enlist for an unannounced war. They joined in the chorus of xenophobia and sang the loudest, hitting all high notes with precision. Today, their outlooks differ greatly from only a few years back. They regret every minute of the frenzy that so enveloped and reduced their humanities to pawn pieces in an imperial chess game. Some were politicians duped into stamping legislations that burned down villages and sent thousands fleeing their homes. Some were mothers with sons delivered in flag-draped coffins. Some were fathers with daughters lost in the thick of battle. Some were soldiers with missing legs or missing arms, with brain disorders, with uncontainable fits of fury or shell shock. “People pay for what they do,” James Baldwin warned four decades back, “and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.”14 The cost of compliance often tallies higher than the deed itself. Who can argue that in the last five decades the psyche of society hasn’t undergone great transformation? How did five decades ago a mass movement stand up strong against inequality and discrimination, with, now, much of the progress rolled back, owing to a prison-industrial complex that stuffs full until forced to spit out the undigested? How in less than two decades did the presidency go from advocating social safety nets to crafting fictional narratives of abusive “welfare queens” whose thrones elevated the morale of lazy and shiftless moochers? Only four decades back, labor unions marched massively to demand equitable treatment for workers (many, immigrant and poor); today, immigrants forced (from economic blights) to cross borders get branded Illegal Aliens, and are worked like slaves to support the lifestyles of the very people who insist their presence blows over crime waves and transmits obscure diseases. The past and present forever clash, but who could imagine how great an edge the past should have over the present. In almost all sectors, almost all margins, life today fares far worse than yesteryears account. And at risk of freezing into a pillar of salt, it’s tempting to keep trooping forward with no sense of how far drifted from salvation the last few years have pushed us; but great rewards come from 198

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tracing missteps, to seek redemption before the clock runs out. The past intimidates many—like youth to the elderly—but from looking back we can glean a sense of purpose and principle that keeps our feet steady, even as all evidence suggests a grim future. How we go from here rests largely on clear appreciation for the past, precise reading of the present, and constructive anticipation of the future. Remaining oblivious to the road that led here only increases chance of repeating errors. “[If ] we don’t know where we are,” Ralph Ellison admonishes, “we have little choice of knowing who we are … if we confuse the time we confuse the place; and … when we confuse these we endanger our humanity, both physically and morally.”15 Would we, then, cower before the neoliberal gods of empire and let their spawns rule over our world? One wonders at a time when hope hangs like loosely taped wallpapers. The fighting spirit we once bore witness to no longer beats in the hearts of those who in little under a decade saw their liberties trampled upon and their values violated. After 8 years of an Administration high on the narcotics of cruelty and megalomania, considerable fatigue sets in. But that very few should be left standing on the other side—even as a Democrat Administration gives second life to its reviled Republican predecessor—even fewer could have suspected. In this inverted Gilded Age, coupled with a gaudy Garrison State, the conditions that sustain the souls of the multitude have all but faced death a thousand times. Cable newsreels never disappoint in chronicling the latest Wall Street executive lapping up millions in bonuses, even as thousands of employees battle to keep their homes from foreclosure. Trailing these reels are rumors of war, expansion of military bases, financial awards for private contractors, broken promises of troop reduction, and escalating death tolls in combat zones—a whirlwind of greed and guns amok. With growing sense of powerlessness—that votes are next to meaningless, and the ruling class gets it wishes always—much more is at stake than mere cynicism or pessimism. When a society conditioned to the thrill of participatory democracy continuously finds its causes counting little to elected officials sworn to represent its burning needs, the price might tally far higher than disgruntlement with the electoral process. It does seem likely bodies would drop to convey this feeling of betrayal. The emerging Right-wing sect—ridiculed to pity by unwise analysts—certainly drove home a sharp saber to the knees of the current Administration in November 2010. And just as crippling must be accounts of registered Democrats switching alliances and voting Republican, or giving Third Party candidates chances they never had. “If it is true that ‘men make society’,” Zygmunt Bauman observes, “it is also true that some men make the kind of society in which other men must live and act. Some people set norms, some other people follow them.”16 And no one wants to feel left out at the dance; no one wants to know their whole life lies in the hands of a few who determine in what directions the pendulums of education, economy, and environment swing. The bank bailout of 2008 confirmed a long-held, widely feared suspicion that, at the beck and call of corporations, their elected leaders genuflect; that the banks may be too big to fail but their homes aren’t too valuable to save. They saw with clarity the long-running game of Bait and Switch, and they needed no help identifying the winners and pointing out the losers. 199

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The winners never begged for bread. They could screw up and still earn pardons from the most powerful heads in the land. But the losers went wanting, each time, without even so much as crumbs of bread or drops of water to keep their bellies from crying out. The losers walked daily into schools where their humanities took blows from State security authorized to go upside their head, all to preserve Order. The losers rotted out like un-plucked fruit in desolate apartments, unable to meet high costs to cover life-saving surgeries. The losers faced immediate incarceration for infractions only harmful to themselves, while the winners, for the same acts, enjoyed the welcoming winks of those they put in office. The losers lost their homes to subprime mortgage schemes doled out by the same firms (a winning lot) rescued with swiftness by the current Administration whose focus, it was once said, would fall upon restoring the hopes of many for a change in political custom. The losers now see the full farce that passes for democratic governance when neoliberal forces set Law and Order to decide who gets what and when—cousin to who dies when and how. But without focused and faithful principles, this steaming rage, this bubbling anger, would only manifest in mindless fatalities and causeless rebellions and, as some elements of the Right-wing uprising suggest, racist predilections. The mature minds of the Left and Right blocs must see to it the rage is directed into constructive agendas for building institutions and policies true to the needs of the disposable and invincible of society—those locked out from all talks of “recovery.” To this end, we must “come swinging back with a much more persuasive and imposing rhetoric that speaks to the democratic issues of equality of opportunity, service to the poor, and a focus on public interest.”17 And true to this conviction is a firm acknowledgement of who we are vs. who we choose to be. The Blue and Red stripes of polarization that play true allies into warring enemies, while the rich and powerful lap up the titillating ritual, should come to the end it’s long-deserved. If the last two years carry of any substance, with the election of a youthful president who stirred in millions expectations that Change was to make early arrival, it must be that no one man, no matter how charming or charismatic, can steer a ship in profoundly new directions; that no one man can turn around generations of systems stacked against those cast out of public acknowledgment; that even if a woman had taken over as commandress-in-chief, not much change could be counted on. The dangers ahead only multiply when a Left vs. Right war escalates, while those for whom politicians fit their gloves rest in repose, unhinged, uninhibited by political affiliations. When the last guy showed up, howls filled the air. They had it made. When the new guy emerged, in no time the party continued. Unless for the next century generations to come should grant the desires of the ruling class, reality would have to make more headway into discussions of visions worth pursuing and routes best engaged. Since time immemorial conservatives and liberals have kept at each other’s throats, while little work advanced to salvage those at-risk to the trampling boots of egomaniac elites—and their representatives in government. But the threats we face are real and cannot be repelled with antiquated tools. The education system stands single-footed, one leap from self-disaggregation. The future left for tomorrow’s leaders looks bleaker than ever before, as laws go into effect making their lives more miserable than already is. The public pillars that 200

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support society, and give it identity, have all but toppled, as privatization sweeps through to erect mall-like cities, turning human beings into brands and logos and commodities and items in the boutique of life. The poor count today as an afterthought, the middle class get good mention but little action. The threats are real, and as fear overwhelms society—fear of the unknown, of the inevitable, predicted or prophesied—greater commotion can only be expected. And at such times, history holds out, the public submits to policies unreflective of its values. But the late comedian and social commentator Bernie Mac had a message of significance worth heeding: “Gas pipes burst, people rob houses, planes fly into buildings. So, what you gon’ do? You gon’ live in fear? You got to live your life. Have fun. Be yourself. Make mistakes.”18 No one can promise perfection in the days ahead, or that the ride would feature little turbulence. The very nature of Struggle, in fact, promises a great many disappointments. But through those barriers would we find the strength to fight further and harder. The future demands no less from us; so do young people, who deserve much better than the reality ready to accept them shortly. If, however, a decade from now, no noticeable change can be accounted for, the world would mark down this generation as one with all the resources and opportunities to make waves and rearrange the status quo—to set down the gauntlet for a new order of thinking and living—but lacking, shamefully, in courage and commitment. No sadder portrait can capture the affairs of humanity—that when history stood still to record the responses of a people to conditions unworthy of their dignity, little work got done: political factions kept at each other’s throats long enough to miss the Moment of Truth. It could well happen, and if recent trends proceed uninterrupted, the likelier outcome is an ongoing game where the losers always lose and the winners never lose. The past bears witness to these twin episodes: in one column, the persistence of multitudes of oppressed peoples refused to let even the most terrifying storms blow apart their fortitude, refused to let go of the moment their whole life’s work had built up: and set to seize that moment for its worth, and kept unleashing hell till the historic end. In the other, disagreements over the maps to follow or concessions to make or demands to table led astray well-meaning masses away from the site of destiny. At present, the same scene loops: for some, this moment must mark revolutions of never-before-seen magnitudes, where buildings must quake and crumble from the exploding devices of adolescent anarchy. Others can see these buildings as mobile, as but veiling a glorious future lurking behind, as vulnerable to the courageous convictions of a people unwilling to play ball anymore. But if this moment slips by, untapped, only our shameful faces would be visible once the buildings—the hopes of the future—give in. NOTES 1

2

Samuel Bois, J. (1973). The art of awareness: A textbook on general semantics and epistemics (p. 4). Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Co. Bauman, Z. (1988). Freedom (p. 89). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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