Faithful Boardwalk Empire viewers are familiar with the story line: violence, corruption and greed in a Prohibition era port city. One of the subconflicts to emerge this season centers around the series’ lone black lead, Chalky White (played by Michael Kenneth Williams) and the show’s centerpiece, the ever duplicitous Nucky Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi). They are, in a sense, business partners. Nucky supplies Chalky with access to liquor and protection; Chalky supplies Nucky with easy access to the black electorate. As season 2 begins, White, the de facto Mayor of black Atlantic City, and his bootlegging associates are ambushed by the KKK. Chalky is effectively put out of business, though not before fatally shooting a Klansman, which in turn incites a mob of angry whites to seek revenge. In order to protect his associate and/or his interests, Nucky is forced to arrange Chalky’s arrest. Once released, Nucky prevails upon an enraged and humiliated Chalky to lay low. Nucky can’t be bothered to explain the finer details to Chalky but nonetheless expects his loyalty and trust. Chalky senses Nucky’s insincerity and resents his paternalism, but restrains himself — for the time being at least — because Nucky is his meal ticket and Nucky has the power to dispose of him at his leisure.
I thought about the Chalky-Nucky dilemma after speaking with three African-American friends who, on separate occasions, made essentially the same appraisal of Occupy Wall Street: ‘No, thank you. It’s not my fight.’ Read the rest of this entry »
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
MLK, Letter from Birmingham Jail
A few days ago I returned to Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The last time I’d read the letter in its entirety was high school. I suppose I was moved to return to the letter by the recent opening of the King memorial. But I also heard echoes of King’s upbraiding of the “white moderate” in Patricia Turner’s measured critique of The Help in The New York Times as well as Martha Southgate’s eloquently acerbic Entertainment Weeklycover story. Like Mississippi Burning and To Kill a Mockingbird, the story advances a view of racism and the civil rights era that is incompatible with the facts. That the central function of these stories is to soothe the psyches of good whites who do not consider themselves racists or having benefited from racism is troubling. That they evidence the persistence of the white savior complex in American cinema is nauseating. That they do so at the expense of people who felt and continue to feel the brunt of racial bias is morally inexcusable.
But this has all been exhaustively and perceptively rendered already. What I found myself wondering was why there is such a disconnect in our American realities and how in 2011 this particular story can stir up such dissimilar emotions? Read the rest of this entry »
About a month ago I was in line at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport waiting to enter the terminal when I noticed one of the TSA’s new Advanced Imaging Technology machines looming ahead. Currently, the two types in use are the “Millimeter (Wave) Unit” and its more unfortunately named relative, the “Backscatter Unit”. The Millimeter bounces “harmless” electromagnetic waves off the body to create a black and white three-dimensional image. The Backscatter projects “low level” X-ray beams over the body; thereafter a reflection displays on the monitor. Mine was a Millimeter.
The Millimeter Unit (left) and the Backscatter Unit (right)
This was my first time going through one of the devices and since no one else seemed to have a problem with it, frankly, neither did I. It didn’t even occur to me that I could or should refuse this procedure. And when my turn came I casually walked into what looked like a Star Trek transporter and assumed an unfortunately familiar legs spread, hands-above-head position. My image captured, I proceeded out of the unit. Done and done, right? Not exactly. This is where things got sticky. The officer standing at the exit of the until suddenly halted the line, curled his head into the transmitter attached to his shoulder and began speaking to someone somewhere. Then he looked at me. I knew the look. Knew it well. I’d been flagged. In just a moment I was going to be asked to step off the line and submit to a special pat down. Sure enough I was directed to a special seating area and told to wait. Shortly thereafter a second officer — interestingly enough, an African-American man — appeared. He asked me to have a seat, which I did. But I also politely asked him what was the problem. This is usually where the law enforcement officer ignores me until he’s good and ready to tell me why I’m being detained. And where I start to ask over and over again until he realizes I’m not going to stop until I’m satisfied. He spared us both the aggravation and told me the deal. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, I had moved while I was inside the unit, causing my image to blur. He now needed to perform an enhanced body search in lieu of the screening device. Now, I may be a lot of things, but a fool it not one of them. First of all, the only time I’d moved inside the unit was when I, like everyone before me, lifted my arms above my head. Second of all, if my image didn’t render clearly then why not simply send me back through? That is, after all, the way the old screening process worked: if you set off the system, you simply removed whatever typically metal object you were still carrying on your person and re-entered the unit.
“That’s not possible,” the officer told me. He had to perform a search. And search he did. Read the rest of this entry »
If the Dallas County District Attorney contest hasn’t registered on your radar yet, then it should. In the past month the race between Democratic incumbent Craig Watkins and his Republican challenger Danny Clancy has morphed from perfunctory formality to a hotly-contested school yard brawl replete with all of the finger pointing and name-calling one would expect from a local election. Clancy has repeatedly called Watkins a “celebrity politician” with a taste for the high life. In response to a question about he and his adversary’s fundamental differences at a recent debate, Watkins bluntly said, “I have a backbone, and I have a brain.” Don’t be fooled by the seemingly pedestrian dispute, though. This isn’t your typical local Democrat vs. Republican dog fight. On one level it can’t help but be about race. After all, Clancy is white, Watkins is black and Dallas is still the Deep South. As Lebron James astutely noted this week, “It’s always, you know, a race factor.” These two particular candidates couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. Clancy is as non-threatening as they come–a pudgy, middle-aged family man without any clear political virtues other than the tried and true “experience and integrity” rigmarole. Watkins is a large, dark outspoken black man with a massive chip on his shoulder and unapologetic ax to grind.
But race, I submit, is just a subtext, a side show, a secondary issue. This is one local election that has national policy implications.
Four years ago then 38 year-old Craig Watkins became the state’s first ever African-American District Attorney. He was part of a class of fresh-faced, post-civil rights era politicians that included then Senator Barack Obama, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty. Almost as soon as he took office, Watkins established the nation’s first Criminal Integrity Unit in conjunction with the Innocent Project of Texas. In the past four years the unit has overseen more DNA-based exonerations — 20 — than any other county in the nation. He’s become a celebrity, a prominent face in the justice reform movement, and an inspiration to frustrated lawyers and lay people alike. He’s received numerous awards from a range of organizations. He’s been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on “60 Minutes.” In 2009 Investigation Discovery launched “Dallas DNA,” a weekly show featuring Watkins and his team of ADAs working in the Conviction Integrity Unit.
Additionally, Watkins has leveraged his so -called “celebrity” status to secure more than $8,000,000 in grants to the county. His efforts in Dallas County have also instigated systemic reforms. The Texas Criminal Appeals Court established the Texas Criminal Justice Integrity Unit a year after Dallas rolled out its integrity unit and this year newly elected Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance launched a comprehensive Conviction Integrity Unit in order to “re-examine closed cases where claims of innocence have been made and to establish standard procedures for new cases to prevent wrongful convictions.” Most importantly, perhaps, the unit’s success has opened the door for the review of non-DNA cases, three of which have resulted in exonerations, the latest of which, made headlines this past week.
This past summer I had the chance to sit down with Watkins for a candid, off-the-record interview about his work. It became clear to me during our conversation that his vision extended well beyond merely freeing those who have been wrongfully convicted. Exonerations are the tip of the iceberg. As I interpret it, his mission is to combat the culture of hyper-incarceration that have disrupted countless families and destroyed millions of lives. While his mission is by no means racially exclusive, he did readily acknowledge his concern about the state of black families and black males.
The spike in incarceration rates correlates with the War on Drugs. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, drug offenses account for roughly 2/3 of the increase in federal prisons and 1/2 of the increase in state prisons.
Michelle Alexander’s research has also yielded the following:
*There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
After 1990 crime fell dramatically and yet the number of prisons and prisoners continued to climb at alarming rates
Even as drug prices fell, suggesting more availability and an abject failure of the War on Drugs, rates of incarceration of drug offenders escalated precipitously, suggesting a limitless supply of street-level drug dealers ripe for imprisonment. Special note of thanks to Dr. Glenn Loury, whose Tanner Lectures I plucked these stats from.
The challenge is convincing Americans whose only contact with courts is through voyeuristic, sensationalized television shows and movies and who honestly believe justice is meted out fairly and equitably that our system is fundamentally fractured at its core. The dismantling of the mindset that acquiesces to and the institutions that support the furtherance of mass imprisonment is delicate work. I equate it to an intricate surgical procedure to remove a degenerative tumor deeply embedded in our national psyche. In order for the tumor to be successfully exorcised, the anesthesia has to be administered appropriately and the surgical team has to work together seamlessly. Any disruptions in the surgical process can result in disaster. Likewise, any disruptions in the justice reform movement opens the door for its critics to cast doubt, which in turn threatens the legitimacy of the movement itself.
Danny Clancy has a fighting chance to unseat D.A. Watkins in part because the Democratic Party has stumbled, in part because Americans have cooled on the idea of post-racial politics and in part because the chip on Watkins’ shoulder can at times block his ability to make decisions that will preserve and extend his important work. Just a few days ago the Dallas GOP launched the CaseAgainstCraig.com. The site is nothing more than a bare bones anti-Craig Watkins clearing house. And while many of the most damning claims being made — “soft on crime,” “hardly working,” “unethical behavior,” and “questionable character” — 1) are being levied by the Fox affiliate in Dallas and 2) steeped in hackneyed racist stereotypes ( ie. shiftless, lazy, and untrustworthy), they are hardly baseless.
These are a few of the more damaging charges:
1. Family members on his campaign payroll.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins has paid family members or businesses they own more than $85,000 from his campaign funds, according to Unfair Park’s review of his campaign finance reports.
Is there anything illegal about hiring family members or paying them for services rendered? No. Given the social and political climate in Dallas, is it a good idea? No. It’s one thing if you’re an athlete or entertainer. You can hire whoever you want and the worst that’ll happen is people will call you a fool. Politics is different. Paying your brother’s company $25,000 for campaign sweat shirts and hats offers the opposition easy ammunition. Watkins may very well feel he should be entitled to hire whoever he chooses, especially considering Texas’ history of political nepotism (Bush I and II for starters), but when you’re trying to transform an entrenched and systemic culture of mass imprisonment in the heart of the South, you don’t have ammunition to spare. Martin Luther King donated his Nobel Peace Prize earnings to the charity as did Barack Obama. They understood that they could not take the money and do with it what they wished, not when the world was watching and waiting for them to slip up. Watkins has to understand this as well, as does his family.
2. Conflict of Interest
In July of 2008 Fox’s Dallas affiliate reported that Watkins renewed his escrow officer’s license after taking office. Texas law forbids prosecuting attorneys from engaging in the private practice of law. Watkins contended that his wife continues to run the couple’s title business, however he was seen at the business on several occasions and sometimes remained there all day. Watkins’ critics argued that because his escrow license is dependent upon his law license he is, in fact, engaging in the private practice of law. Moreover, because his wife is not an attorney, her license is also dependent on his. Watkins countered by insisting that “owning a title business and closing real estate deals is not the practice of law, especially since he doesn’t represent anybody. No formal charges were ever brought against the D.A., but the brief scandal the allegation produced was bad enough. Again, an alternative would have been to either shut the business down or sign the business over to a third party.
3. Selling Access to his office
At the close of his first year in office, Watkins threw a birthday party for his staff that included donated elaborate door prizes from several corporations — American Airlines, Blockbuster and Coca-Cola among them — and at least one criminal defense attorney. Again, Fox investigated the situation and alleged that the District Attorney’s solicitation of gifts in exchange for “face to face” interaction with him was tantamount to a public servant asking for or accepting gifts from someone subject to an investigation. Even though none of the corporations listed in the reports was actually “subject to an investigation” at the time, critics suggested that they may be in the future and therefore the gifts could create a conflict of interest. Watkins refused to admit any wrongdoing pursuant to the receipt of the gifts and proceeded to point to an exemption that allows staff members to solicit and receive gifts so long as they are given “because of a relationship independent of the official status of the recipient.” Again, the allegation eventually died down and no formal charges were brought against the D.A., but the stain remained. Rather than have to rely on a specious exemption, Watkins could have avoided the entire scandal by simply throwing a modest shindig.
4. Refusal to prosecute:
No one expects a police chief to be out chasing down criminals or conducting interrogations or school superintendent to be in the classroom teaching lessons, so why would we expect a D.A. who has no previous experience prosecuting felonies but does have a staff of 242 experienced prosecutors (not to mention 72 investigators and 128 support staff) to be in the court room prosecuting cases? By and large, the D.A.’s job is to ensure that his staff has the resources to carry out the mission. And arguably at least, Watkins’ work outside of Dallas benefits the county by highlighting the progress the county is making, supporting other counties in pursuing their own reform policies and generating money for the expansion of his programs, all of which he’s done admirably.
On their own these and other allegations appear nit-picky and racially motivated. However, taken together — and there are more — they begin to paint a less than stellar picture of a man who, on the whole, has done incredibly important work in a very short time. And while Watkins has always readily acknowledged his shortcomings, the concern I have now is that the mounting criticism and pressure to win re-election are conspiring to turn a visionary into yet another politician:
1. Change in Death Penalty Stance
When Watkins took office in 2007 he stated that he was personally opposed to the death penalty on moral and religious grounds. Now he’s had a change of heart.
“I came in with a certain philosophical view. I don’t have that anymore,” Watkins told The Dallas Morning News recently. “From a religious standpoint, I think it’s an archaic way of doing justice. But in this job, I’ve seen people who cannot be rehabilitated.”
Frankly I don’t understand what he’s trying to say. It sounds equivocal, like he’s saying that he doesn’t agree with capital punishment but understands why it exists. But if he’s not implementing his values into his job, what’s he being guided by? What’s also troubling is that he uses the word “philosophical” when in fact he originally opposed capital punishment on moral and religious grounds. I’m willing to accept a change in heart, but when the change occurs in the midst of a heated campaign I have to wonder about its motivations and the sincerity of the candidate.
2. Failure to participate a televised debate
After initially agreeing to participate in the debate with his opponent, Watkins elected not to participate due to a “scheduling conflict.” I don’t know whose decision this was, but it only makes it appear as though the D.A. either has something to hide or is intimidated by his opponent.
3. Questionable indictments
Earlier this week Watkins was questioned about the timing of the Stephen Brodie exoneration. Now he’s being questioned about the timing of the indictments his office handed down to the officers involved in the beating of a motorcyclist that was caught on video:
Key lines from the story:
Usually it takes six to eight months for a grand jury to even hear a case. It’s unusual for indictments to be handed up so quickly.
There are other cases of officers facing serious charges that have yet to go to grand jury, so Watkins — who faces re-election next month — was asked if politics played a role.
“If politics played a part in this, then we wouldn’t pursue cases for the whole year,” he said. “This is an election year, but just because it’s an election year, we can’t stop the justice system.”
Watkins may be being honest and in all fairness, he’s doing the right thing in pursuing the indictments. But it’s hard to argue that at least a hint of political jockeying isn’t taking place, especially when earlier this year it was revealed that Watkins’ office delayed an investigation of two Democratic county constables for two years. The constables allegedly used their positions inappropriately and maybe even illegally but Watkins, whose office had jurisdiction over the matter, dragged his feet on the investigation, leading his critics to wonder if he wasn’t looking out for his political mentor who, happened to be representing one of the constables. Watkins eventually handed the matter over to a special prosecutor.
Ultimately, perception can be more damaging than reality. Every single one of Watkins’ choices in recent weeks may be on the up and up. Believe me, I want to see the man succeed. I want him to continue to do his part to dismantle the culture of extreme punishment plaguing communities of color that we’ve grown so blithely accustomed to. But I want to challenge him to make better choices; to not fall back on the excuse that he’s being treated unfairly because of his race; to live up to the ideals that guided him to this point. As important as D.A. Watkins has been and should continue to be to the criminal justice reform movement, he is not indispensable. No one is. If he’ just going to devolve into another embattled politician who can’t get anything done because he owes too many favors and is more concerned with maintaining power than making the system work, then he may as well step aside now. (Robert Penn Warren already wrote the story of the idealist lawyer turned corrupt politician; we know how it ends.) At least he will have set a course that others can follow, nurture and advance.
How Did a Small Jewish Sect Nearly Sweep a Nationwide Contest?
And What Can the Rest of Us Learn from Them?
Nearly two months ago Kohl’s Cares launched a $10,ooo,ooo “What would your school do with a half-million dollars?” contest. The company officially called it a celebration of 10 years of community giving and volunteer programs. Sounded good. But the lawyer in me has a thing for small print. The smaller the better.
» The contest was open to any public school, grades K thru 12, in the United States, and any not- for- profit private or charter school grades K thru 12.
» To win,a school had to finish among the top twenty vote getters on the Kohl”s Cares Facebook page.
» You or I or anybody we know 13 or older with an e-mail address and a Facebook account could’ve voted. Pre-teens aren’t allowed on Facebook.
» Eligible voters were alloted 20 votes and the freedom to use them however they pleased. Only one catch: up to five of those votes could be used on any one school. This raised an eyebrow. Seemed odd. I slowed down. There was more.
The top 20 eligible vote getting schools will be declared the potential contest winners.
What does “potential” mean?
Kohl’s Department Stores will provide funding up to $ 500,000 for each winning school.
Schools will receive funding needed to complete only the projects they have outlined in their project summary and budget overview paperwork.
The way I read it, “up to $500,000” can mean something totally different than “$500,000”. Meaning a lot less.
Over the two months of voting an interesting trend emerged: nearly all of the top vote getting schools were private and well-resourced. But they weren’t just private; they were religious. Of the final top twenty list — that is, as of this posting at 3 AM on September 3rd — eighteen were either Jewish (12) or Christian (6). In coinage terms, that’s up to $6,o00,000 of the $10,000,000 pot going to one religious group. Out of the twenty-one to twenty-five group, four were Jewish. Three of those were Chabad schools. That’s thirteen Chabad schools in the top twenty-five finishers in a nationwide contest.
Northridge, California’s Darby Elementary and Millbury, Ohio’s Lake High were the only public schools to finish in the top twenty. Why Northridge? I don’t know. What I do know is that Lake lost its building in a tornado early this summer. I saw pictures of the destruction. How could I not vote for them? What kind of person would I be if didn’t vote for the school that was destroyed by a tornado? I gave them the full five. And afterward, I felt beneficent; like I’d just done a good deed. Knowing I wouldn’t get any tangible reward made it even better. It felt an act of pure generosity. It occurred to me then that this must be how philanthropists feel. They give out money to whoever they feel like giving it out to. I think that was part of the contest’s allure was the sense of power it bestowed upon voters. We are a nation, if not a world, obsessed with voting. We love to share our opinions, the more so when we have the power to do some good. The stakes were real. People’s lives were going to be affected. Do you choose the school that wants a new swimming pool? The school that needs a sewer system upgrade? The school that was destroyed in a fire? Every school in America had a compelling case. Then they all started to run together and I became a snob about. I found myself sifting through gut wrenching vote pleas like the junk mail in my inbox until I found the one that moved me. Something didn’t feel right about that.
But that’s a different story.
The story that caught my attention is that five of the top ten and ten of the top twenty finishers are affiliated with an Hasidic branch of the Jewish faith called Chabad-Lubavitch. On its headquarters’ website, Chabad is described as “a philosophy, a movement, and an organization,” and “the most dynamic force in Jewish life today.” Based in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn,New York today, “Lubavitchers”, or “Chabadniks” originated in Russia 25o years ago. After the movement swept through Russia, it spread through surrounding countries, providing “scholars with answers that eluded them and simple farmers with a love that had been denied them.” The movement’s original aim was to break down social barriers between Jews of different classes by revealing the “oneness unique to Jewish people.” Today, the Chabad global network of institutions extends all over the developed world. However, there are only (thought to be) around 200,000 total adherents.
Which makes the nearly 1,500,000 votes the top ten finishers garnered in just two months even more impressive. Exactly how did the Chabad network manage to pull this off?
I have some theories.
Theory #1: They wanted it more. The votes speak for themselves. The top vote getter, Los Angeles’ Cheder Menacham, has all of 22o students but gathered more than a 130,000 votes. Long Island’s Silverstein Hebrew Academy, the seventh overall vote getter, has a whopping 110 students but brought 127,000 votes. How do you explain this if not by desire and hunger?
Theory #2: They were organized. Although the contest rules prohibit winners from using the funds or religious purposes, there is no rule against using the religion-based network to vote for winners. Moreover, the voting process lent itself to real-time viewing. People in the network could see which Chabad schools showed promise early on and allocate their votes to the most effective end. In effect, each school had a tryout before either being cut or making the squad.
Theory #3: They were committed. It’s one thing to jump out to an early lead or to rally down the stretch; it’s something else to sustain momentum for two months. You would think that just given the modest number of Lubavitchers around the globe, other more populous groups would catch up and even surpass them. I watched the voting closely. It didn’t happen. Those in the network used their votes to support one another.
While Chabad-Lubavitch’s main Facebook page has more than 13,000 fans and an additional 3,000 onTwitter, the combined social media network (or as Facebook refers to it, social graph) of local Chabad emissaries [people who spread the philosophy and grow the movement] carries much more.
Theory #5: They were creative. One school raffled off free iPads on a weekly basis starting in early August. Several schools made Youtube videos:
Others loaded banner ads on online Jewish web sites:
Blogger Jacob Berkman wrote about one school’s really creative tactics on his Fundamentalist blog:
In a In Charlotte, N.C., Chabad’s 220-student Charlotte Jewish Day School used an inside-out approach to garner 45,000 votes by Tuesday, earning it 14th place in the Kohl’s challenge, according to spokesman Rabbi Bentzion Groner, director of the Friendship Circle of North Carolina.
The elementary school has a relatively small base, but it tapped into alumni now in their teens to hold a vote-a-thon. The school, which was started in a basement in 1984 with just a couple of students, enlisted 50 teenagers to bring their laptops to the school, where they spent an afternoon reaching out online to as many of their friends as they could, soliciting votes one by one. And of course the school invited three television stations and the local newspaper in to check out the event.
My hat goes off to all of them.
Now, I know a few of you reading this may think I’m being naive here by not mentioning other obvious factors, so I will:
» The better access and resources argument. Certainly, we can make the argument that low income people don’t have access to computers and that often community members aren’t connected to their neighborhood schools or that the smaller, more concentrated Chabad communities had an advantage because of their cohesion. The thing is, access and resources didn’t stop people from hitting up Obama rallies back in 2007 and 2008. People wanted Obama to win and went out to support him. This was even easier. You didn’t even have to go out. All you had to do was press a button a few times. It was that simple
» The school equity and social justice argument. Simply stated, not one single school that primarily serves students of color and low-income students made the top 20. Mark Federman, the principal at East Side Community High School in downtown Manhattan and a dear friend of mine made this argument in an appeal he sent out to school supporters several days ago:
We are the only school in the top 40 that primarily serves students of color. (Our school is 55% Latino, 35% African-American, 5% Asian and 5% White) and we are the only Title I school (a school where vast majority of students live below the poverty line) in the top 40. We are the only NYC neighborhood public school in the running and one of only a few public schools nationwide. We are at an extreme disadvantage in this competition because almost all of the top schools are private and/or wealthy parochial schools that are getting votes using tremendous sums of money and resources we do not have.
This is not just a contest. It is an issue of equity and social justice.
To draw interest to East Side Mark slept in a tent outside of the school for several days, wrote letters to supporters, granted interviews and appeared on radio. His efforts paid off. East Side finished just outside of the top thirty. Mark did everything in his power to raise awareness and generate support. I admire him for this. As a teacher at East Side I witnessed his commitment to students, families, staff and the community up close. He’s one of the most committed leaders I’ve ever been around. East Side could’ve done transformative things with the money. East Side will continue to do transformative things without it. As for the point Mark raised, it’s a valid one. The Jewish School of the Arts, one of the top vote getters and a Chabad institution, is located in affluent Palm Beach, Florida. Rabbi Shlomo Ezagui describes the school as one that offers “high-tech, high quality education” in a “beautiful, 11,000-square-foot building, newly renovated with a brand new playground and gymnasium.” One would hope that a school that already boasts such abundance would want to spread the prosperity around a bit.
Or is that just me being an idealist again?
Nevertheless, I don’t want to see social justice being used as a crutch or an excuse. Making this as a social justice issue begs more difficult to answer questions. Which children are more deserving? Who decides? What are the standards? Ultimately, this was a contest and to win people had to vote. Not enough people voted for schools serving students of color and low-income students. That may or may not be a social justice and equity issue. It may just be a geographical issue–it’s easier to rally around the only school in town; East Side isn’t even the only school in its building. It is definitely an issue of organization; an issue of commitment, an issue of creativity, an issue of savvy, and sheer desire. Five-hundred grand was on the line. The Lubavitchers found a way to get more than half of it.
So what lessons have we learned from this contest?
1. Strategize and mobilize early. Get your story out there. Build your brand. Be creative. Be proactive. Be vigilant.
2. When it comes to getting things done, the number of Facebook friends you have doesn’t matter … unless they are active and aware.
3. Glenn Beck might have a point, after all. Two days before his controversial “Restoring Honor” event, Beck told his radio audience:
People will gather and see this. And hopefully, we will mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. At least we will begin to look at those things, start to maybe challenge that we haven’t valued those things high enough — honesty, integrity, merit, personal responsibility, family and God.
If nothing else, the Lubavitchers’ commitment to ensuring the success of their young people should show the rest of us how sacred our young people are.
4. Al Sharpton dropped the ball. As the final week of the voting began, Al Sharpton was gearing up for a “Restoring the Dream” rally to combat Beck’ by launching an online petition denouncing Beck’s appropriation of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that garnered 30,000 votes in two days. Sharpton later led a rally and march that allegedly drew 30,000 supporters. At the rally, one speaker after another got on stage and made crowd-stirring but ultimately redundant tirades against Beck. NAACP President Ben Jealous said “we have to revitalize jobs and schools”; Jaime Contreras, president of SEIU-32BJ, said those gathered at the Mall with Beck “represent angry white people and hate-mongering” ; Avis Jones DeWeever, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women, told onlookers not to “let anyone tell you that they have the right to take their country back.” She said, “It’s our country, too. We will reclaim the dream. It was ours from the beginning.” A steady stream of speakers also bemoaned the persistent societal inequities facing black people. It took Education Secretary, Arnie Duncan, to address the salient issue: “We have to stop making excuses … We’ve been too satisfied with second-class schools.” When the speaking was all done, the attendees did what they always do–marched.
When I checked Sharpton’s National Action Network web site the day after the rally, all I saw was one picture of Sharpton after another. I wasn’t surprised. But I was disappointed. If he could get 30,000 people to sign a petition, he could’ve chosen a handful of schools across the nation and encouraged the same supporters to vote for them. It would have been that simple.
5. Too many of us missed the boat this go round. The other day I was speaking with a public school administrator here in New York about the contest. She didn’t know anything about it. She’d never even heard of it. But she suggested something that gave me pause. Money isn’t always the problem or the solution at public schools. Often, it’s money management. Schools, she said to me, are incredible perpetrators of waste.
6. Kohl’s got way more than $10,000,000 worth of publicity and good will. As someone who can say with confidence he’s never stepped foot in one of their 1000+ stores nationwide (and didn’t even know what they sold), I now know. This year the company added nine stores in six states – Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania – and plans to open a total of approximately 30 new stores before the year ends. It also announced remodeling plan for 85 stores this year, a 66 percent increase from 2009. For a company that is aggressively expanding its business and upgrading its image, this kind of positive publicity is priceless. The Kohl’s millions will now know will be associated with positive values.
That being said, I will suggest this to Kohl’s brass: If you plan on giving this much money away in the future, come up with a better strategy for doing so. At a certain point, basing the distribution of this much money on what is ostensibly a glorified popularity contest is plain irresponsible.
That is, unless, by awarding participants 20 votes you were aiming for a particularly lopsided outcome in the first place. I won’t go there, though
7. Facebook users beware. Our information is officially for sale.
If your name was Michael Jordan and you were a benchwarming basketball player in high school that never made it to a D1 program, would you tell people that you played basketball for the UNC Tarheels in college or the Chicago Bulls in the mid 90s?
What about if your name was Michael Brown? Would you try to pass yourself off as another Michael Brown? No, you wouldn’t because the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of your statement can be easily verified. So why would Brown, a DC Councilman tell a reporter that he was an All-Metro basketball player in 1983 when he clearly was not? I think its because he’s an arrogant doofus. This isn’t even a slip up – its a lie that the councilman has maintained to the reporter on several occasions over the years.
This is disappointing on several levels. The first rule of basketball etiquette is that you always tell the truth. You receive – or are denied – props based on what you’ve accomplished. Men lie, women lie, but numbers don’t. If you say that you played with certain people, or on certain teams, you had better be telling the truth, or else that lie will come back to haunt you one day, as it is doing to Councilman Brown right here, right now.
Secondly, this man is an elected official who has been vested with the public trust. If he is running around DC, lying about whether he was All-Metro as a high school player, what else has he lied about? Can he be trusted? Asking whether a politician can be trusted is like asking a Black man if he trusts the police. Did Brown tell DC residents that he was All-Met on the campaign trail to get more votes? He probably did. This lie propagated by Brown could very well have contributed to his election win. He disgusts me.
Third, DC’s basketball legends often stay local because when they do, they are treated like GODS. You may not have ever heard of them outside of the metro area, but trust me, these guys have it made if they stay home after achieving basketball greatness. There is always a job waiting for them somewhere and they can kind of skate by unnoticed and under the radar without having too much scrutiny being paid to them. Everybody loves them. We will overlook their addictions and bad habits because we have a special place in our hearts for hometown athletic heroes.
I hope that his opponent exploits this situation for all that he can. We can’t allow a lying, non basketball playing, fuzzy memory having, councilman to continue representing the residents of DC. It just wouldn’t be right.
In the last several years, there have been quite a few healthy tomes written about hip hop culture. Unfortunately, a large portion of that bunch tends to place hip hop culture outside of Black culture. Much of what is written about hip hop culture seems to remove it from the context of Black history particularly. Of course they point out how hip hop is a Black and Latino manifestation of an oppressed creativity but they leave it at that. There is no connection made to the Black Arts movement or the Black Freedom Rights struggle of the fifties, sixties, and the seventies. Dax Devlon Ross, a prolific and independent writer, brings it all home in The Nightmare and the Dream.
In one book, Ross summarizes points made in Harold Cruse’s classic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, and Dean E. Robinson’s Black Nationalism in American Politics. What makes The Nightmare… stand out is how Ross connects the dots to Black Nationalism and hip hop culture. Using the Hegelian dialectic, Ross uses Nas and Jay Z as his subjects when discussing the internal conflict in Black America between Black Nationalism and assimilation. Like Robinson, Ross does a careful deconstruction of Black leadership in the United States. He does a wonderful job of explaining DuBois’ double consciousness, but Ross does not stop there. Read the rest of this entry »
“The Nightmare and the Dream charts new ground in analyzing the impact of hip-hop on African-American political culture. By going beyond a mere inquiry into the dynamics of hip-hop in the post-Civil Right era-a limiting perspective that a majority of contemporary hip-hop works fall prey to-Ross goes back in time to the nineteenth-century and locates a recurring phenomenon that has continued into the twenty-first century. The Dyad Syndrome of dual conflicting political leaders has plagued black communities from the era of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany to the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. According to Ross, this syndrome haunts the Weltgeist, or world-spirit, of hip-hop as well, whether we talk of the tensions between Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur, East Coast and West Coast rappers, or artists such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown. Ross provides a moving narrative that weaves in and out of well-known black figures in addition to musicians and politicians whose lives have been disavowed in historical memory. Select figures represent archetypes of a “Dream” vision full of the Horatio Alger story in blackface, while others embrace a nihilistic conception of the “Nightmare” reflecting the realities of rampant injustices facing black agents since the founding of the American republic. So where do we go from here? With Du Bois’s ideas of double-consciousness and second sight serving a mediating role, Ross details the tensions and ultimate public reconciliation between Jay-Z and Nas as a prime example of how hip-hop, like black politics, can progress forward positively, in solidarity, despite the obstacles. Ross’s final tale is not a nihilistic one such as that of the mythical Sisyphus, bound forever to repeatedly push rocks up a hill only eventually to fall down. The Nightmare and the Dream uniquely spells out a radical existential injunction made famous recently by Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and Barack Obama: hope can result after we come to terms with the dialectics of partisan conflict. Dax-Devlon Ross’s brilliant textual achievement is a must read for anyone concerned with the future of hip-hop, African-Americans, and new directions in late modern America as a whole.”
-Neil Roberts, Williams College
Co-Editor of the CAS Working Papers Series in Africana Studies
The Education of an American Revolutionary, 1946-1968
Author: Nelson Peery
Publisher: The New Press, 2007
Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary follows author Nelson Peery’s journey as a political revolutionary in the post-World War II era. The memoir is the sequel to Peery’s award-winning memoir Black Fire, which, among other things, told the story of Peery’s experiences during the Depression and his political awakening as a soldier in the South Pacific. First off, it was a pleasure to read something so earnest, so forthright and unpretentious. If one thing shines through in Peery’s writing it is his style of presentation. Irrespective of his commitment to revolution, Peery’s writing comes across as belonging to someone who genuinely devoted his life to a higher cause—in this case, serving humanity.
One has to appreciate the book’s sense of balance, which, again, says something about the writer. Peery doesn’t just say he is dedicated to the working class or even live his life among the working class — though he had opportunities to live otherwise — he writes his story from the perspective of a common individual (AKA proletariat). It would have been easy for Peery to have written solely about the Communist Party or about the various social movements of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. He could have written heroically about himself, inserted himself into the sweep of history; instead he resists the compulsion to self-aggrandize in favor of the simple, quite often unromantic reality of fighting for change. Revolution, the one Peery lived through between 1946 and 1968 — the period the book covers — involves all of the peculiarities and particulars of everyday life: marriages, divorces, childbirths, deaths, prosperity, action, inaction, depressions. To be a revolutionary, according to Peery , is to be a human being willing to hold steadfast to his/her faith in peace and plenty for all, not just a few. In Peery’s world being a revolutionary requires nothing special. Anyone willing to acknowledge the shortcomings of the present — their own included — and continue fighing for a better world anyway (which we all do!) has the revolutionary spirit already in them.
As history, Black Radical offers a ‘People’s History of the Cold War and the Black Revolution.’ The rise of McCarthyism, the rumblings of the civil rights movement, and the apogee of the Watts Rebellion are all told through the humble eyes of a communist who made his living laying brick. This is not a story written from above the fray or in the warm mist of victory. This is a clear-eyed odyssey through the “Black Bottoms” of mid-century Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Through it all we see Peery’s family torn apart, the wilting of his first love, the disintegration of his first marriage, the disappearance of comrades, the painful defection of others and the countless untold casualties of the repressive Red Scare regime. We see Peery bumping against the currents of the historical moment not only as a working person, intellectual and black man but as a serious radical, all of which, consequently, placed him at odds in practically every social setting he found himself in. In Black Radical the whole tangled mess of this nation’s troubled growth spurt from the precipice of fascism to the edge of revolution unravels against a single, simple man’s life, and it is better for it.
As a meditation on life, BR offers us all important lessons about what it meant to be a revolutionary. It meant keeping your mouth shut even when you’ve been belittled by a condescending ranking white comrade or a bigotted southern cop, getting on a bus to go underground at a moment’s notice, living long periods without a name or a connection to the world you loved, being tracked and trailed by the FBI and its army of informants. We often picture the revolutionary in a romantic light. Doing so feeds our need to believe life can be lived on a grander scale, even if that life is brief and fraught with pain. Revolution, though, is organizing people, educating people, creating consensus among people. It is retreating when your heart longs for a fight, pausing at the critical juncture where the personal risks clouding the political. Revolutionaries bide their time the same way prisoners learn to. They discipline themselves. They don’t waste time pitying themselves. They look forward even when the weight of the past is bearing down on them. In many respects revolutionaries are fanatics and zealots. They must be. History depends on their madness to propell us all forward.
At the same time theirs is also, quite clearly, a life worth living; for the revolutionary ideal, the vision of a future free of exploitation, feeds the revolutionary’s spirit with something that capitalism’s promise of prosperity simply can not. Peery’s life is instructive here. By choosing to be a part of the events of his day — to be accountable for his time here — his life flowed in the direction of the momentous. Leadbelly, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X — these are just a few of the well-known names that pass through the pages of Black Radical. But while Peery acknowledges these heroes respectfully, he does not indulge in sychopantism in order to make himself appear more important by association. He would rather tell us about the nameless and faceless, the few who hold up the wall of resistance while the rest of us wait for the ‘right’ time to join the revolution. In fact, though Peery dedicates this book his late wife, it could easily be read as a memento to a generation of unsung heroes who kept the beat of resistance alive when its pulse teeterd on the brink of flatlining.
As literature, BR picks up where Ralph Ellison’s hero in Invisible Man leaves off. The parallels between Invisible and Peery should not be overlooked by any serious reader. Both stories concern thoughtful and articulate young black men from the South who are attracted to the Communist Party. Both stories culminate in a riot. But rather than give up on both his people and the class struggle the moment he feels betrayed by both, Peery chooses to fight on, and to work to build the party and the movement that he wants. Whereas Invisible virtually accepts his disinherited status, Peery refuses anyone else’s claim of right to struggle for human freedom. BR’s response to IM is that communism isn’t the problem. The people who become communists — middle-class whites who choose to fight alongside blacks who have no choice but to fight, for example — are the problem. As an historical footnote, it is important to remember that Invisible Man won the National Book Award at the height of the anti-communist mania. Despite Ellison’s professed allegiance to art above all else (and the book’s literary brilliance), we can not overlook IM’s politics if we hope to understand its critical success.
As a writer, Peery is more than capable. He does not try to dazzle us with his style. His prose is fluid. His stories at once effectively capture his inner emotion and the spirit of the age. When he dons his polemicist cap it is always within the context of the story itself, always in stride. Peery’s true gift as a writer is to make the complex concrete. He brilliantly bridges the gap between the political theorist and the blue-collar worker as only someone who has lived in both worlds can. Like any skilled craftsman he focuses on the doing the work correctly so that it serves its purpose. All of the bells and whistles that too often mar otherwise important books are, for the most part, left in the bag. As refreshingly straight forward as BR’s style is, however, it is also a luxury: Nelson Peery has a story to tell. He does not have to unearth it or manufacture it or invest it with filler (gatuitous sex scenes, stereotypical signifyin’ scenes, romanticized standing up to the Man scenes) to make up for the life he didn’t lead but would like to tell others about nonetheless. Unlike many, too many, Nelson Peery actually has lived a life worth writing about.
I was up late restless and unable to sleep when I stumbled on this really cool, really edgy site created by an artist by the name of CRO. It’s called Go Tell Mama I’m For Obama. The artist is taking a unique look at the campaign and using his talent to raise awareness about a candidate he believes in. Below is just one of the many posters he creates and distributes himself. Check it out!
Black Radical: 
The HNIC Report 