Harper & Canada’s ‘Indian Problem’

From Corvin Russell at rabble:

From the days of Jean Chretien’s White Paper in 1969, federal governments have dreamed of completing the process of colonization and assimilation through making Aboriginal rights disappear through a strategy of deceit: making Aboriginal rights disappear in the name of “giving” Canada’s Indigenous peoples the “same” rights as other Canadians.

[...]

Now the Harper government is trying to implement much of the same agenda through the back door. Harper’s American mentor, Tom Flanagan, thinks he knows what’s best for First Nations in his book, First Nations, Second Thoughts. And much of that has to do with the abolition of Aboriginal rights and the municipalization of First Nations, with a concomitant increase of dependence and “accountability” to Ottawa, instead of to Indigenous Peoples: as Flanagan says, “Call it assimilation, call it integration, call it adaptation, call it whatever you want: it has to happen.”

This leaked secret memo to cabinet and this memo sent to chiefs and councils suggest that once again, white bureaucrats and politicians in Ottawa are devising solutions to the “Indian problem” that will make life easier for the colonial government and business interests. This time, they’ve learned the lesson of overly public, overly explicit changes to First Nations governance — instead, they are pursuing a strategy of administrative reform whose main advantage, according to the memo to cabinet, is that it can be done without “the need for extensive or time-consuming engagement with First Nations or third parties.”

Read the whole thing here

Political Activism & Social Change

Ya can’t have one without the other:

FDR became a great president because the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged, farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would otherwise have avoided. He did not set out to initiate big new policies. The Democratic platform of 1932 was not much different from that of 1924 or 1928. But the rise of protest movements forced the new president and the Democratic Congress to become bold reformers.

[...]

Obama’s campaign speeches emphasized the theme of a unified America where divisions bred by race or party are no longer important. But America is, in fact, divided: by race, by party, by class. And these divisions will matter greatly as we grapple with the whirlwind of financial and economic crises, of prospective ecological calamity, of generational and political change, of widening fissures in the American empire. I, for one, do not have a blueprint for the future. Maybe we are truly on the cusp of a new world order, and maybe it will be a better, more humane order. In the meantime, however, our government will move on particular policies to confront the immediate crisis. Whether most Americans will have an effective voice in these policies will depend on whether we tap our usually hidden source of power, our ability to refuse to cooperate on the terms imposed from above.

From an article at The Nation by Frances Fox Piven here

The “Obama-Vegetative State”

Darren Hutchinson tries to rouse the Liberal Left from its “Obama-Vegetative State” (oh dood I love that!):

First, an election is not a social movement. Although many diverse people united to support Obama and to oppose the GOP, this does not mean that they shared a leftist political ideology. The invalidation of same-sex marriage in California — where Obama won by more than 20% of the vote — demonstrates this patently obvious point.

Second, progressives were so unnerved by Bush and the Clintons that many of them projected radicalism upon a moderate (or undefined) Obama in order to frame voting for him as a dramatic break from the past. Although “change” supports many meanings, for progressives, it symbolized liberal transformation of U.S. political life and policy.

Third, many liberals wanted so desperately to believe in the myth of a post-racial America that they treated Obama’s electoral success as the ultimate triumph of progressive race politics. Despite the fact that strong racial cleavages shaped the vote for both Obama and McCain, many commentators, nevertheless, argued that Obama’s victory would allow the country to move beyond race altogether.

Fourth, many self-described liberals are actually political moderates. They passionately support a set of symbolic liberal causes, but they do not favor more substantive societal transformation. Beating up Don Imus or Republicans who sing about a “Magic Negro” is a lot easier to do than creating good public schools that do not deprive poor children and children of color of a quality education. And passing the much-needed Ledbetter legislation does not resolve the substantive legal difficulties that civil rights plaintiffs encounter if they manage to overcome tough procedural hurdles. Yet, liberals cheered loudly for Ledbetter without even discussing (minus a few exceptions) the need for more progressive measures.

[...]

Progressives cannot blame Obama for his effort to straddle the ideological center. Instead, they must look inward and discover why they chose to treat a politician (as skillful in that role as he might be) as someone who is mythological or larger than life.

They should also canvass history, as [John] Judis has done* to learn about the critical role of passionate collective activism in the evolution of U.S. politics and policy. Moderate presidents have presided over great changes in the U.S., but they did so with the backing and agitation of engaged social movements.  True social change does not result from effusive adoration and acquiescence; instead, it arises from criticism, collective activism, strategic compromise and political opportunity.

Read the whole thing (From the ‘Duh’ Files: Effusive Political Adoration Does Not Lead to Social Change) at Dissenting Justice

Remembering Rosemary Brown

This is the first of my contributions to Black History Month.  I loved Rosemary Brown from the moment she hit the national scene in Canada.  I miss her voice so much and perhaps particularly now, when women’s rights are being sold out to an ailing economy by cynical politicians and economic inequality stemming from racism and sexism has created a great divide.

 

Rosemary Brown was elected to the provincial legislature of British Columbia in 1972, becoming the first black woman in Canadian history to be a member of a Canadian parliamentary body. A busy mother of three as well as an active member of the New Democratic Party, she ran for leadership of the federal NDP in 1975 but lost on a fourth ballot to Ed Broadbent. Rosemary served in the B.C. legislature until 1986, when she became a professor in women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

Born in Jamaica, Rosemary grew up on the tropical island. After emigrating to Canada in 1951 she studied at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, then pursued a career in social worker. A determined feminist, Ms. Brown worked throughout her life to promote equality and human rights. Her campaigns includes efforts to eliminate sexism in textbooks, increase female representation on boards and prohibit discrimination based on sex or marital status. Rosemary’s dedicated community service won her a multitude of honours, including honorary degreees from many universities and selection as an officer of the Order of Canada.

On the day of Brown’s death, the National Film Board of Canada completed work on a documentary/memoir of Brown and her “co-grandmother, Ruth Horricks-Sujir.  You can read a bit about it and view a clip here.  I’ve seen it several times – it’s wonderful.

There’s more about Rosemary Brown at the African American Registry and a great collection of remembrances by Penny Kome at section15.ca

Black, Queer & Here

From a book review of Thomas Glave’s book, Words to our Now: Imagination and Dissent:

“The word ‘faggot’ itself is to me as nasty a form of violence as the perennial spit-nastiness in that classic American word ‘nigger.’ As a black male who is also gay, I and my brothers and our black lesbian sisters are considered ‘disposables’ in our own black communities and in white ones.

To this day I’m still extremely wary and skeptical of those black men who in convenient circumstances glibly call themselves brothers… who then, in their own peculiar type of fear, loathing, and hypocrisy often inflict violence on black gay men and lesbians whenever we are found either not to be useful or, far worse, too close to home.”
—Excerpted from Chapter 1

If you think it’s tough enough being a black male in America, you might want to consider the plight of the gay black male. For as Thomas Glave describes it, he feels alienated not only from mainstream white society but rejected by blacks, too. Glave, a Professor of English at SUNY Binghampton happens to be particularly adept at describing that sense of isolation in Words to Our Now, a series of essays which condemn a variety of prejudices which have persisted not only in the U.S. but around the world.

Although he weighs in eloquently on an assortment of international concerns from ethnic cleansing to Abu Ghraib, the author is most effective when reporting on or recounting incidents of gay bashing, a subject with which he is well acquainted. For one cannot help but empathize when he recalls from childhood the “wicked pugnacity” of “boys my age and older.” He describes the daily slamming of fists into his face unleashed by the meanest hoodlums, beatings invariably accompanied by a long line of harsh expletives which began with the word “faggot.”

There is something truly touching and deeply saddening about a book which has to make a case for the embracing of black homosexuals by their own community, when acceptance has been the prevailing theme around which the rest of African-Americana has rallied for generations. Who knows, perhaps it is a holdover from mistreatment during slavery which causes his own people to exhibit such severe intolerance for a minority within their own minority.

As a consequence, guess who now has the highest AIDS rate transmission, due to so many scared brothers on the down low choosing to work both sides of the sexual-preference street?

Glave’s intriguing answer to the crisis arrives in the form of a clarion call for social change, arguing that we are at a critical crossroad, that we must all put our bigotries behind us, and that time is of the essence. If nothing else, in emerging from the shadows via such a compelling, well-written opus, he has succeeded in humanizing the issue by lending his face to it, and by proudly putting a personal spin on ACT-UP’s unequivocal, defiant anthem of liberation.

“I’m here! I’m black and queer! Get used to it! “

This evening, Glave launched his latest book, The Torturer’s Wife, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.  From the TWB website:

Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire and intimacy.

THOMAS GLAVE is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now:Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Komunyakaa

From a reflection on the personal politics of race written by Yusef Komunyakaa on the eve of Obama’s inauguration:

One of the earliest memories I have that directly regards skin color and racism takes me back to another family of blacks who were almost white. The Lorence family had light hair and eyes — mother and father, two girls and one boy. We children weren’t close friends, but sometimes we’d play together. I remember most vividly one summer when I was about 9. It was a Saturday afternoon. Leonard, the brother, wasn’t with us. His two sisters and their cousin visiting them from Detroit were there.

Three of my brothers were with me. All seven of us were sitting in the back of the public bus where “colored” people sat during those Jim Crow years. Maybe we were talking about Superman or a soul music group called Little Anthony and the Imperials. I remember that we were going to see a matinee at the State Theater — maybe “Hop-a-long Cassidy.” And I also remember the bus driver hitting the brakes and leaping to his feet. He charged to the rear of the bus, yelling, “You little girls gotta come up front.” The bus sat on the side of the street, pulsing like a big, striped turtle. The girls sang out all at once, saying: “We have to sit back here with our cousins, our friends.” I remember the driver’s face turning scarlet. I remember him stomping back up to the front of the bus, mumbling cusses and throwing himself into the driver’s seat. I remember him leaving rubber on the August pavement. I remember feeling hurt inside. I remember a jolt of anger, and I remember not knowing why.

Read The Colors in My Dreams

via Silliman’s Blog

More “Funny & Satirical” Stuff

From The Guardian:

An offensive, racially tinged song entitled Barack the Magic Negro has become an issue in the battle for the leadership of the Republican party.

The song was included in a CD distributed by Chip Saltman, who is seeking to be elected the next party chairman.

Saltman, former campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who fought unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination this year, sent out the CD as a Christmas present to party members. It is a compilation of songs critical of liberals entitled We Hate the US.

He defended his move, saying that anyone listening to it would know it was intended to be light-hearted and satirical, and the row had been created by the liberal media.

The racist dogwhistle has been replaced by an airhorn, as my friend mattt put it.

Post-Race America – Sigh

From The Times Online:

Barack Obama’s election as America’s first black president has unleashed a wave of hate crimes across the nation, according to police and monitoring organisations.

Far from heralding a new age of tolerance, Mr Obama’s victory in the November 4 poll has highlighted the stubborn racism that lingers within some elements of American society as opponents pour their frustration into vandalism, harassment, threats and even physical attacks.

Cross burnings, black figures hung from nooses, and schoolchildren chanting “Assassinate Obama” are just some of the incidents that have been documented by police from California to Maine.

There have been “hundreds” of cases since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

The phenomenon appears to be at its most intense in the Southern states, where opposition to Mr Obama is at its highest and where reports of hate crimes were emerging even before the election. Incidents involving adults, college students and even schoolchildren have dampened the early post-election glow of racial progress and harmony, with some African American residents reporting an atmosphere of fear and inter-community tension.

Unfortunately, the rest is here, if you have the heart for it

Adam Mansbach on “post-race-ism”:

Soon after Obama’s much-parsed speech on race, The New York Times ran a lengthy article (link) on the front page of its Sunday Arts section about artists in ‘post-race’ America.  It may be worth pointing out, given the brevity of the national attention span, that only a few months ago the notion of a black president flew in the face of all conventional wisdom about the biases of American voters.  And now the Newspaper of Record is musing about art in a world beyond race?

Well, not quite: the article was, in fact, solely about black artists (everyone else, it would seem, has been ‘post-race’ for awhile) and despite the titular catch-phrase, it offered no evidence to suggest that race is immaterial to the work of practitioners like Kara Walker and William PopeL – or, more importantly, that racism fails to figure in.

This distinction begins to illuminate the dangerous flipside of suggesting a ‘post-racial’ landscape. While the term suggests, perhaps correctly, that we are moving toward an acceptance of the multifaceted nature of identity — learning to grapple with the idea that a human being can be both Kenyan and Kansan, in Obama’s case, or black and female and interracially married, in Kara Walker’s, or wear any number of ethnic/religious/sexual/political hats simultaneously, as is the case for each and every one of us – post-race almost inevitably seems to imply post-racism.  And while the complexity of human identity is certainly cause for celebration, and undoubtedly contributes to Obama’s appeal with some voters, his candidacy no more heralds an end to racism than Bob Dole’s heralded an end to discrimination against the handicapped.

There is the shifting politics of selfhood, and then there is structural racism, and confusing one with the other is a deadly mistake.  I witnessed a dramatization of this confusion recently at a public talk on race I gave in Minneapolis.  A woman in the audience stood up to explain that racism would be vanquished without any concerted effort on our part, and cited the baby on her hip as proof.  She was Korean, she said, and her husband was black and Irish.  Their son was all three.  He would break the machines that attempted to categorize him.

Although I appreciated her optimism, I had to explain that no such thing would happen.  Rather, her son would be forced to choose a box —and this, in fact, is the particular insidiousness of race.  It is a construct, not a question of biology.  It will not vanish in the face of multi-ethnicity, because it exists for a purpose, and that purpose is hierarchy, division, separation. 

This is also why the enthusiasm for President Obama as the leader of a ‘national dialogue’ on race is misplaced.  Not because we don’t need one – we surely do – but because few people are in a position to move the country toward a state of post-racism, and the president is one of them. 

Talking our way toward healing is a crucial, Herculean task, but it is not the task of a president.  Addressing structural racism on the level of policy is, whether in the form of dismantling a system of racist policing and biased judiciary that has lead to the epidemic incarceration of black men, or revamping a dysfunctional educational system that reinforces racial and economic disadvantage.  Post-race is an idea; post-racism is a moral imperative and a longstanding battle that is far from over.  We must not mistake the one for the other.

It’s all right here

“Against Diversity”

Walter Benn Michaels in New Left Review:

The importance of race and gender in the current us presidential campaign has, of course, been a function of the salience of racism and sexism—which is to say, discrimination—in American society; a fact that was emphasized by post-primary stories like the New York Times’s ‘Age Becomes the New Race and Gender’.1 It is no doubt difficult to see ageism as a precise equivalent—after all, part of what is wrong with racism and sexism is that they supposedly perpetuate false stereotypes whereas, as someone who has just turned 60, I can attest that a certain number of the stereotypes that constitute ageism are true. But the very implausibility of the idea that the main problem with being old is the prejudice against your infirmities, rather than the infirmities themselves, suggests just how powerful discrimination has become as the model of injustice in America; and so how central overcoming it is to our model of justice.

From this standpoint, the contest between Obama and Clinton was a triumph, displaying, as it did, both the great strides made toward the goal of overcoming racism and sexism, and the great distance still to go towards that goal. It made it possible, in other words, to conceive of America as a society headed in the right direction but with a long road to travel. The attraction of this vision—not only to Americans but around the world—is obvious. The problem is that it is false. The us today is certainly a less discriminatory society than it was before the Civil Rights movement and the rise of feminism; but it is not a more just, open and equal society. On the contrary: it is no more just, it is less open and it is much less equal.

Read the rest here

via wood s lot

Race & Economic Inequality in America

From Robert Zimmerman at Z Magazine:

Over the past week, Americans — and people around the world — rightfully celebrated the breakthrough election of an African-American to be President of the United States.

Barack Obama’s election signals a significant shift in U.S. racial attitudes, especially among younger people. Obama received a higher portion of the white vote than Democratic candidate John Kerry did in 2004 — in fact, he won a higher share (43 percent) than any Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Obama won a strong majority of white voters under age 29 (beating McCain 54-44).

Such a performance by a Black candidate was very hard to imagine even two years ago.

But as epochal as is Obama’s victory, celebrations of racial progress — especially among Whites — need be tempered by an acknowledgement of other racial realities.

The United States has not reached the promised land of racial equality and justice.

Consider this set of extraordinary statistics:

* The U.S. unemployment rate for Whites in October was 5.3 percent. For Latinos, it was 8.8 percent. For African-Americans, 11.1 percent. [1]

* African-Americans’ median income is about 80 percent of Whites. Latinos make about 72 percent of Whites’ median income. [2] The median White household income in 2007 was $54,920. For Blacks, it was $33,916. For Latinos, $38,679. [3]

* White households have 10 times more wealth than Black households. Median household wealth for Whites is $118,300; for Blacks, it is $11,800 (2004 data). [4]

* Whites have more than 100 times the financial wealth of Blacks. Median financial wealth for Whites is $36,100, for Blacks $300 (2004 data). [5]

* The African-American poverty rate is three times higher than the rate for Whites. Poverty rates: Whites, 8.2 percent; Blacks, 24.5 percent; Latinos, 21.5 percent. [6]

* Child poverty rates track the overall poverty ratios. About one in 10 White children live in poverty (10.5 percent). For African-Americans, the figure is 33.2 percent. For Latinos, 28.9 percent (2004 data). [7]

* Three quarters of White families own their home. Less than half of Blacks and Latinos own their home. [8]

* The percentage of Whites with a bachelor’s or more advanced degree is 30.5. For African-Americans, it is 17.7. For Latinos, 12 percent. Two-and-a-half times more Whites have PhDs or professional degrees than Blacks or Latinos. And education is among the social indicators where the Black-White disparity is closing fastest. [9]

* The African-American infant mortality rate is 2.4 times the rate for Whites. [10]

* African-American children are exposed to unsafe lead levels two-and-a-half times the rate for White children (2002 data). [11]

* The incarceration rate for African-Americans is 4.8 times higher than for Whites. For Latinos, it is 1.6 times higher than for Whites. [12]

The economic crisis will make almost all of these numbers worse. Unemployment and poverty rates will go up for everyone, but jump the most for Blacks and Latinos. African-American wealth is being decimated. While they don’t have much in the stock market, on average, African American wealth is concentrated in housing stock that is declining in value, and African Americans were disproportionately lured into predatory and unsustainable subprime loans. Cutbacks in social services will disproportionately hurt Black and Latino families.

What can be done to close these gaps, so that the remarkable story of Barack Obama signals not just a cultural shift, but helps drive a reduction in wealth and income inequality?

The good news in this story is that the best hope lies in many of the policies needed to address the economic crisis and economic insecurity. A massive increase in government spending in public works, energy efficiency and renewable energy will create good jobs employing people of all colors. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will enable workers to join unions without having to face employer intimidation. Unions raise up worker wages (and improve quality of worklife, among other crucial benefits), thereby reducing inequality. And adoption of a single-payer health system — a Medicare for All plan that provides every person with access to quality healthcare while eliminating costly bureaucratic waste — would reduce healthcare disparities.

Will the Obama administration deliver on these policy goals? Unfortunately, while Obama has promised healthcare reform, he has not supported a single-payer plan. There are very hopeful signs that he will push a massive public investment plan. And he supports the Employee Free Choice Act, though passage is definitely not assured.

Perhaps a better question than asking whether the Obama administration will deliver on these policy goals is: Will the outpouring of civic energy that elected the first African-American President in the United States now be channeled to overcome the forces of reaction and the status quo?