ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE 5

Sunday, November 15, 2015

RACISM ON THE CAMPUS: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Harry Targ

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Frederick Douglass

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. W.E.B. DuBois

What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Mitch Daniels

All across the country students, black and white, hit the streets and the campus malls to protest racism; structural and interpersonal. One thousand students rallied at Purdue University on Friday, November 13, to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and to announce 13 demands they were making to address racism at Purdue; a racism that the university president says no longer exists.

Of course nationally and locally the struggle for social and economic justice is historic. Rev. William Barber, leader of the Moral Mondays Movement, points to the “Three Reconstructions” in post-Civil War American history. The First Reconstruction occurred in the 1860s and 1870s when black and white farmers and workers came together to write constitutions and to create a new democratic Southern politics. The hope this first reconstruction raised for a truly democratic America was dashed by a shift to the right of the federal government, the reemergence of the old Southern ruling class, and the rise of a brutal violent terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Racist policies, coupled with terrorism, instilled formal racial segregation in the South and subtle forms of institutionalized racism throughout the rest of the country.

The Second Reconstruction, Barber asserts, was inspired by the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With militant sectors of labor, a grassroots Southern civil rights movement revived all across the country. In the 1960s, it culminated in civil rights legislation that outlawed racial segregation and guaranteed voting rights. Also the “war on poverty” was launched. Shortly after these victories, the Republican Party presidential candidate Richard Nixon employed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to shift federal and state politics to the right. The forerunners of today’s Tea Party rightwing reaction expanded their political power at the federal and state levels.

Rev. Barber believes that, with the movement that elected President Obama, there has emerged a Third Reconstruction. It features the mobilization of  masses of people--blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, blue collar and white collar workers, young and old, people of faith and those who choose no faith--coming together to reconstitute the struggle for the achievement of a truly democratic vision. This vision is of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and economically and psychologically fulfilling.

The resurgence of protests on college campuses, although narrowly focused, represents the contemporary form of the kinds of struggles for social justice Frederick Douglass talked about.  For example, on the campus of Purdue University, the struggle for racial justice has a long history. For the first 60 years of the twentieth century the African American population was less than one percent of the student body.  The numbers of African American students grew to a few hundred in the 1960s. And in the context of the Second Reconstruction and activism around civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, some students organized a “Negro History Study Group”(which later became the Black Student Union). In 1968, to dramatize what they saw as institutional racism coupled with an environment of racial hostility, more than 150 Black students carrying brown bags marched to the Executive Building. At the building they took bricks from the bags. The bricks were piled up and a sign “Or the Fire Next Time,” was set next to the bricks. The students submitted a series of demands including the development of an African American Studies Program and a Black Cultural Center. 

The demonstration was dramatic. The demands clear. The justice of their motivation was unassailable. Administrators and faculty set up committees to discuss the protests. And in the short run, only minor changes were implemented, such as Purdue’s 1968 hiring of the first African American professor in Liberal Arts.

One year later, after an African American member of the track team was castigated for wearing a mustache and his verbal response led to his arrest, Black students launched another protest march with more demands. This time the Administration and the Board of Trustees authorized the establishment of the Black Cultural Center, which today is an educational, social, and architectural hub of the campus. In 1973, Antonio Zamora, educator, accomplished musician, and experienced administrator was hired to lead the campus effort to make the BCC the vital embodiment of the university that it has become.

One of the leaders of the 1969 protest, Eric McCaskill, told then President Hovde by phone during the protest march and visit to the Executive Building: “We are somebody. I am somebody.” Forty-six years later one thousand similarly motivated students rallied together on Friday, November 13 on the Purdue campus. They expressed outrage at the systematic violence against people of color throughout the society and the perpetuation of racism in virtually every institution. On the Purdue campus they protested the lack of full, fair representation of African Americans on the faculty and in the student body, a climate on and off campus that perpetuates racism, and the continuation of all the old stereotypes of minority students that has prevailed for years. They also shared their solidarity with the students of the University of Missouri and they made it crystal clear their disagreement with the statement by the Purdue University President that the Purdue campus was different.

The organizers provided thirteen demands including:

-an acknowledgement by the President of Purdue University that a hostile and discriminatory environment still exists at Purdue

-the reinstatement of a Chief Diversity Officer with student involvement in the hiring process

-the creation of a “required comprehensive awareness curriculum”

-the establishment of a campus police advisory board

-a 30 percent increase of underrepresented minorities in the student body and on the faculty by 2019-2020

-greater representatives of minority groups on student government bodies

Frederick Douglass was correct.  Progress requires struggle. DuBois is still correct about the twenty-first century as he was about the prior one: the problem of our day remains “the color line.” And many of those who observed, participated in, and applauded the organizers of this latest protest at Purdue believe that the struggles are long, the victories sometimes transitory, and each generation of activists is participating in a process of fundamental change that will move society in a more humane direction. The generations of Purdue students of the 1960s and the second decade of the twenty-first century are linked in a chain for justice.

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE:4

Friday, October 24, 2014

4.RACISM, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, AND CIVILIAN POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

Harry Targ                         

Over the last several years the criminal justice systems at the federal, state, and local levels have threatened the basic rights of citizens, particularly people of color and youth. These violations of equal treatment under the law have included:

-a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African American men, for example Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio, Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles

-the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported in her recent book, The New Jim Crow, more African Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

-the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

-and the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat.

On August 9, 2014 unarmed nineteen-year-old African-American Michael Brown was shot multiple times by a Ferguson, Missouri policeman. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and the threatening of street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city was heightened by the killing of Michael Brown.

Significant events since the police murder have been protests, the visit to the Ferguson community by Attorney General Eric Holder and national mobilizations in Ferguson and around the country. Subsequent to that police killing, many more African American men have been killed by police officers across the nation.  However within the last few days “testimony” leaked from the grand jury investigating the police crime has appeared in the St Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post that promotes a narrative that the police officer who murdered Brown was acting in self-defense.

Along with police killings other police abuse occurs regularly. In Hammond, Indiana, on September 24, 2014, an African American women, who was the driver of a car and mother of two children in the back seat, and an adult male friend in the front passenger seat, was pulled over by a police officer for a seat belt violation. Fortunately nobody died, but the policeman drew his weapon and shattered the automobile’s front side window. The policeman had ordered the male to roll down the window, tasered and then arrested him while the seven year old daughter of the driver cried in the back seat. Subsequently Hammond authorities have defended the conduct of the police officer.

In a recently released study, journalists discovered that between 2010 and 2012 young Black males were shot to death by police 21 times more than young whites. Their data was limited to those two years because earlier information accumulated by the FBI was incomplete. Prior to that time police departments had not filed required reports when police used force.

Even though data is partial, Professor Colin Loftin, co-director of the Violence Research Group, University of Alabama, said, “No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system.” (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones an Eric Sagara, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,” http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white, October 10, 2014).

A growing body of evidence suggests that the criminal justice system administers justice in an unfair way--from general police/community relations, to trials and incarceration, to the use of violence and deadly force against minority youth. 

While police are supposed to serve the interests of the communities in which they work, compelling evidence suggests that, to the contrary, force is used to stifle dissent and challenge assertions of political and cultural autonomy. The data overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that police systems are institutionalized forms of racism. 

In response to racist police violence the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a branch of the National Alliance founded in 1973, has been working to “stop police crimes,” establish “prison reform,” and to oppose the incarceration of persons wrongfully incarcerated including political prisoners.

The CAARPR has proposed the establishment of a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) for the city. According to the plan, the city would create an elected CPAC which would oversee the personnel and policy of the police department. CPAC would appoint the Superintendent of Police, revise rules for police practices, investigate police misconduct, investigate all police shootings, and provide for transparency in investigations. The central premise of the CPAC idea is that the police exist to serve the community not oppose it.

Real community control of police and the criminal justice system is basic to any democracy. Along with the generalized declining perception by Americans about the legitimacy of political institutions, minorities and youth see the police more as an occupying army than a force for protecting the safety, security, and independence of members of their community.

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE 3

Angela Davis featured at National Forum on Police Crimes at University of Chicago

Police repression and ideological mystification are the glues that maintain structural violence.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | May 19, 2014

Stop Police Crimes!

End Mass Incarceration!
Free All Political Prisoners!

(Rally with Angela Davis, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois, May 17, 2014).

CHICAGO — It was inspiring and informative attending the rally with Angela Davis and the celebration of the lifelong political work of Charlene Mitchell, the founder of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). The rally and award ceremony honoring Davis and Mitchell capped a two-day National Forum on Police Crimes at the University of Chicago.

The National Forum held workshops highlighting police crimes against undocumented and other immigrant workers, the labor movement and all workers, the LGBTQ community, women, peace, and solidarity activists, and people of color.

Central themes reflected in the workshops and the rally included the current condition of police misconduct in the United States, an analysis of the fundamental role of the police and incarceration in the United States, the interconnectedness of forms of repression and the struggles against them, and the twin roles of repression and ideology as the glues holding together a global political economy in crisis. Last, the celebration of the 41 years of the NAARPR illustrated the possibilities of struggle and victory.

The call for the National Forum highlighted the contemporary crises of civil rights and civil liberties including:

§  a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African-American men, such as Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant;

§  the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported, more African-Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

§  the targeting and deportation of millions of immigrants;

§  the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

§  the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat;

§  and the continued persecution of political prisoners from the recently convicted Occupy Movement activist Cecily McMillan, to the 30-year listing of exiled Assata Shakur, living in Cuba, as one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, despite the fact that her original conviction for murder was based on faulty evidence.

Several speakers during the rally made it clear that the primary purpose police forces play in the United States is to protect the stability of the existing economic and political system. In short, the police in virtually every community serve the interests of what Occupiers call the one percent in opposition to the 99 percent.

While laws and police often come to the aid of aggrieved members of communities, their primary function is to protect the unequal distribution of wealth and income and political power. The physical presence of police, with larger numbers in poor and Black and Brown communities than others, constitutes a threat to the physical survival of people, particularly young men. For most people in poor communities of color, the police represent an occupying power.

Police repression in the United States is embedded in the history of slavery, institutionalized racism, the legitimized use of violence, and the interconnectedness of violence against African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays, transgender people, and workers.

Further, police repression on a global basis serves to impose policies in keeping with neoliberal globalization, including the privatization of public institutions, cutting back on social safety nets, opposing demands by low-wage workers for economic justice, and extracting larger shares of the value of the labor of workers.

Since the embrace of neoliberal policies virtually everywhere in the world, economic inequality has grown dramatically. With growing protest activities, police and military repression has increased as well.

Speakers suggested that the criminal justice system — the police, prisons, and laws restricting political participation — is a form of direct violence.

Speakers suggested that the criminal justice system — the police, prisons, and laws restricting political participation — is a form of direct violence that is seeking to create pliant behavior by force or the threat of force. Further, the criminal justice system is an instrumentality of structural violence; protecting the various forms of exploitation and oppression embedded in the society at large.

In addition it is replicated in the broader culture. Mass media romanticize police behavior, courts of law, even vigilante forms of violence. Police programs, the portrait of scientists engaged in uncovering crimes, and even police comedies pitting bungling but wise police investigators against incorrigible criminals give credence to the necessity of police, prisons, oppressive laws, and the need for order. Consumers of pop culture are rewarded for their willing acceptance of the systems of control as they exist for an hour or two of entertainment. Besides, most people think, what are the alternatives to armed police, laws, prisons, and the right-to-bear arms?

The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression successfully struggled to free Angela Davis and many others falsely incarcerated and inspired mobilizations of activists everywhere to protest police violence, prisons, the death penalty, and Stand Your Ground laws. The Alliance in Chicago continues the struggle and has demanded civilian control of the police.

Angela Davis posed the vision of an unarmed police force administered by the community and the elimination of prisons entirely. While these proposals cannot be achieved in the short run, she and the Alliance believe, as the World Social Forum suggests, “Another World is Possible.” To make these visions reality they say, “a multi-racial, multi-national and multi-cultural broad-based movement” is needed to create “united democratic action.”

 

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE:2

Sunday, August 21, 2016

THE MEANINGS OF FERGUSON AND MILWAUKEE

(Portions of this essay, “The Meanings of Ferguson,” appeared on August 20, 2014 in Diary of a Heartland Radical).

Harry Targ

In addressing violence, researchers, educators, journalists and religious leaders have usually concentrated on its most visible forms: murder and war. The central features of such violence include physical assault and killing. In our own day terrorism has joined war as the most popular common subject for study.

Over the years, peace educators have developed intellectual tools to uncover more diverse meanings of violence, their differences and their connections. Structural violence has been distinguished from direct violence. Researchers continue to analyze direct violence, physical assault and killing, but also study structural violence, the various forms of human suffering that take more time; impose pain, sickness, depression, and death on populations; and are perpetuated by leading institutions and relationships in society. Structural violence includes economic inequality, low wages and poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, and the psychological damage that economic suffering causes. These injustices, the concept of structural violence suggests, are embedded in economic, social, and political institutions.

It is possible to disaggregate further the structural violence that is embedded in institutions. Institutional violence refers to unequal distribution of power and influence in major societal institutions: political, criminal justice, and educational, for example.

Finally, cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others. Culture refers to the public consciousness of history, traditions, and popular narratives that describe people. Stereotypes are short-hand representations of a culture.

In total then violence is direct, structural, institutional, and cultural. These kinds of violence may occur separately but in most cases are inextricably connected. It is this fourfold conception of violence that is relevant to the crisis that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ferguson, Missouri 2014      

The tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri came to national attention because of direct violence. A Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed young African American male. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and threatening street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault, parallel to Israeli bombings in Gaza and United States targeted air strikes in Iraq. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city escalated since the killing of Michael Brown.

Beyond the threat of direct violence in Ferguson is structural violence, less visible but as important. Brookings Institute researcher Elizabeth Kneebone (“Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” brookings.edu, August 15, 2014) reported that the community of Ferguson experienced a qualitative economic decline over the decade before the shooting. The city’s unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent by 2010. Earnings of community members declined by one-third. One-fourth of the population was living in poverty. 

Kneebone indicated that poverty rates have doubled in suburban neighborhoods surrounding the 100 largest cities in the United States. “By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents lived in the neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.” Of course, poverty is highly related to declining schools, inadequate access to health care, lessened prospects for jobs, and large-scale youth unemployment.

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. Professor Clarissa Hayward, Washington University, said: “The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years.” She pointed out that St. Louis geographically was at the nexus of the South, the Midwest, and the West and added: “The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week.” (Puneet Kollipara, “Wonkbook: The Social and Economic Story Behind the Unrest in Ferguson,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2014). 

In terms of the Ferguson political system, two-thirds of the community is Black and the local government has been almost all white. At the time of the shooting of Michael Brown, five of six city council members were white, the Mayor was white, and six of seven school board members were white. And fifty of 53 police officers were white.

Finally, cultural violence addresses the issue of ideology, consciousness, images of the other, and additional ways in which whites see African-Americans. Racist culture socializes the dominant class and race to reflect its superiority. For example, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said shortly after the shooting: “That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.” The mayor of Ferguson declared that his community was free of racism.

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, police and politicians organized a campaign to demonize the victim of the police killing. The tall young man, an African-American, was a robber, a drug consumer, and violence-prone. Also, the days of protest in Ferguson were framed to privilege the peaceful, religious, mourning adults and to explain night-time violence not as police violence but violence perpetrated by outside agitators from New York, Chicago, and California. The fact that young African Americans left their houses at their own risk could not, the frame implies, engender outrage.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 2016

And in August, 2016 Milwaukee, by many measures the most segregated and racist big city in the United States, experienced the police shooting of Sylville K. Smith followed by two days of frustrated rebellion by some residents of the Sherman Park neighborhood. State violence, poverty, and racial segregation have created a tinderbox of frustration and anger in that city. According to a 2015 NPR report, the state of Wisconsin invests more in prisons than education, incarcerating a higher percentage of Black men than anywhere in the country. “…in Milwaukee County more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s have served time.” In one zip code alone 62 percent of Black men have been incarcerated for some time by the age of 34. The prison population of the state has tripled since 1990.

NPR also quoted a study finding that Milwaukee has the second highest black poverty rate in the country with an unemployment rate four times higher than whites (Kenay Downs, “Why is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?” NPR, March 5, 2015). A Madison, Wisconsin group,  the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition, after defining the idea of a “neighborhood,” found that 31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black neighborhoods are jails and an additional 21 neighborhoods are apartment complexes or section 8 housing or both. Prisons and poverty dominate the life of Black communities (YGB, “31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black Neighborhoods are Jails,” ).

Summing up the situation in Milwaukee, Alderman Khalif Rainey said: “The Black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their life.” (Tanzina Vega, “Milwaukee’s Staggering Black-White Economic Divide,” CNN Money, August 17, 2016, money cnn.com).

So from police violence--killing, gassing, beating--to economic despair, to lack of political representation to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered. And once again, the victimization of people of color, as well as workers, and women, suggest the following conclusions:

--the root cause of exploitation, racism, and sexism is structural violence (capitalism).

--physical violence is used to crush rebellion against class exploitation and racism.

--unrepresentative political institutions are dominated by the wealthy and powerful.

--dominant cultural stereotypes and specific narratives about society reinforce the economic system, the political system, and justify the police violence in the St. Louis area, Milwaukee and all around the United States.

Black Lives Matter

But between Ferguson and Milwaukee a new social movement has emerged, Black Lives Matter, led by young women and men representing over 60 organizations around the country. Recently they issued a powerful programmatic statement “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice, The Movement for Black Lives (POLICY.M4BL.org). It presented six demands, each with detailed recommendations:

-End the War on Black People

-Reparations

-Divest-Invest

-Economic Justice

-Community Control

-Political Power

These demands represent African Americans, Women, Workers, and all oppressed peoples. They address direct violence—Stop the Killing—and structural violence—Redistribute Wealth and Income, Political Power, and Opportunity for Human Development for All. The struggles continue.

ESSAYS ON RACISM AND VIOLENCE

Harry Targ

 Now  is a good time to revisit the reasons for the original establishment of police foces in the 19th century to put down slave revolts and worker strikes. We should rethink the whole idea of policing. This probably would lead to the abolition of police which probably would lead to less violence and criminality in society. Instead communities should fund Community Help Forces, much like firefighters who would be available in cases of personal emergency. It is clear that police forces today have a license to kill with little or no consequence. In societies characterized by racism and class exploitation, police are obliged to serve special interests and prejudices, not the public. Another World is Possible.. (HT, May 30, 2020).

1.The forms of violence and the meanings of Ferguson

From police violence to economic despair, to lack of political representation, to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered.

By Harry Targ | The Rag Blog | August 21, 2014

In addressing violence, researchers, educators, journalists, and religious leaders have usually concentrated on its most visible forms: murder and war. The central features of such violence include physical assault and killing. In our own day terrorism has joined war as the most popular common subject for study.

Over the years, peace educators have developed intellectual tools to uncover more diverse meanings of violence, their differences and their connections. Structural violence has been distinguished from direct violence. Researchers continue to analyze direct violence, physical assault and killing, but also study structural violence, the various forms of human suffering that take more time, impose pain and suffering on populations, and are perpetuated by leading institutions and relationships in society.

Structural violence includes economic inequality, low wages and poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, and the psychological damage that economic suffering causes. These injustices, the concept of structural violence suggests, are embedded in economic, social, and political institutions.

It is possible to disaggregate further the structural violence that is embedded in institutions. Institutional violence refers to unequal distribution of power and influence in major societal institutions: political, criminal justice, and educational, for example. Cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others.

Finally, cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others. Culture refers to the public consciousness of history, traditions, and popular narratives that describe people. Stereotypes are short-hand representations of a culture. 

In total then violence is direct, structural, institutional, and cultural. These kinds of violence may occur separately but in most cases are inextricably connected. It is this fourfold conception of violence that is relevant to the current crisis in Ferguson, Missouri.

The tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri, came to national attention because of direct violence. 

A Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed young African American male. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multiday barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, threatening street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles.

The images on television screens nationwide have been of a people under assault, parallel to Israeli bombings in Gaza and United States targeted air strikes in Iraq. The fear that young African-American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city have escalated since the killing of Michael Brown.

Beyond the threat of direct violence in Ferguson is structural violence, less visible but as important. Brookings Institute researcher Elizabeth Kneebone (“Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” brookings@edu, August 15, 2014) reported that the community of Ferguson has experienced a qualitative economic decline over the last decade. The city’s unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent by 2010. Average earnings of community members have declined by one-third. One-fourth of the population lives in poverty.

Kneebone indicated that poverty rates have doubled in suburban neighborhoods surrounding the 100 largest cities. “By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents lived in the neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.” Of course, poverty is highly related to declining schools, inadequate access to health care, lessened prospects for jobs, and large-scale youth unemployment.

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. 

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. Professor Clarissa Hayward, Washington University, said: “The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years.” She pointed out that St. Louis geographically was at the nexus of the South, the Midwest, and the West and added: “The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week.” (Puneet Kollipara, “Wonkbook: The Social and Economic Story Behind the Unrest in Ferguson,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2014.)

In terms of the Ferguson political system, two-thirds of the community is Black and the local government is almost all white. Five of six city council members are white, the mayor is white, and six of seven school board members are white. Fifty of 53 police are white.

Finally, cultural violence addresses the issue of ideology, consciousness, images of the other, and additional ways in which whites see African-Americans. Racist culture socializes the dominant class and race to reflect its superiority. For example, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said: “That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, is that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.” The mayor of Ferguson recently declared that his community was free of racism.

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, police and politicians have organized a campaign to demonize the victim of the police killing. The tall young man, an African-American, was a robber, a drug consumer, and violence-prone. Also, the days of protest in Ferguson were framed to privilege the peaceful, religious, mourning adults and to explain night-time violence not as police violence, but as violence by outside agitators from New York, Chicago, and California. The fact that young African Americans leave their houses at their own risk could not, the frame implies, engender outrage.

So from police violence — killing, gassing, beating — to economic despair, to lack of political representation, to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered. And once again, the victimization of people of color, as well as workers, and women, lead to the following conclusions:

▪ The root cause of exploitation, racism, and sexism is structural violence (capitalism).
▪ Physical violence is used to crush rebellion against class exploitation and racism.
▪ Unrepresentative political institutions are dominated by the wealthy and powerful.
▪ Dominant cultural stereotypes and specific narratives about society reinforce the economic system, the political system, and justify the police violence in the St. Louis area.

In sum, in addressing violence, its multiple forms should be taken into consideration.

MICHAEL JORDAN IN THE ERA OF NEOLIBERALISM AND TRUMPISM

Harry Targ


Michael Jordan, regarded by many sports fans as the greatest player in the history of the National Basketball Association, played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1993 and 1995 through the 1998 season. After that he spent a less stellar career with the Washington Wizards, 2001-2003. His NBA records include the highest  regular season scoring average per game of any player in NBA history, the highest average points scored in playoff games, seven scoring titles, the Most Valuable Player in the NBA five times, and the leader of the Bulls six championship seasons. 

A former Chicagoan, I had not followed the Bulls in 1990 when I attended an academic conference in Cuba. I told a Cuban friend that I was born and raised in Chicago. He was surprised to learn that I was not familiar with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. He said that even in Cuba, blockaded by the United States, he was a follower of Jordan and the Bulls. When I returned to the US, I became an avid NBA/Chicago Bulls/Michael Jordan fan, particularly since I had been a longtime suffering fan of the Chicago Cubs baseball team which had not won a world series since 1908.

Thirty years after being introduced to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in Cuba, I spent five corona virus Sundays watching “The Last Dance,” a ten-hour Ken Burns-light documentary about the 1990s Bulls. The centerpiece of each one-hour episode was the world-renowned star and entrepreneur Michael Jordan. As to his business acumen, Jordan had lent his name to a gym shoe produced by Nike, named the “Air Jordan,” in 1984. By the 1990s the shoe was coveted by young aspiring basketball players everywhere.

The documentary included  an historical narrative about the Bulls from the late 1980s through the dynasty’s last season in 1998. The use of film footage had to be approved by Jordan. Episodes were engaging as drama, as comedy, and as historical remembrances for old NBA and Bulls fans. Also, the massive ESPN viewership was stimulated by a sports deprived citizenry suffering from the Covid 19 stay-at-home shutdown.

Each week, sports commentators on the radio and in print media evaluated the prior Sunday’s two one-hour editions of the series. Each episode in multiple ways revolved around the exploits of Michael Jordan. While time was given to the owner and General Manager of the Bulls, Bull’s coach Phil Jackson, some of Jordan’s teammates, and selected “enemies” of Jordan, the documentary was really all about Michael Jordan. (Jordan’s production company was involved in the series and the star had approval rights over the footage that was used in the documentary).

A centerpiece of the Jordan documentary was the athlete’s unbridled, uncompromising, dogged competitiveness. Viewers saw him belittling and harassing his teammates for their inadequate performances in practices as well as games and his consistent efforts to publicly demean and denigrate other teams and players (particularly those billed by the media as possible competitors of his). Scenes show him pursuing domination at card games, on golf courses, and even throwing bottle caps at designated targets. Jordan is presented, by his own admission, as a ruthless competitor. Winning was the only way to be for a star like Jordan.

This competitive passion proudly defended by Jordan, was all consuming. For him,  defeating adversaries would not countenance simple acts of compassion. This almost ruthless drive was only tempered by his love of his father who was brutally murdered in 1992. A sub-text of the documentary was Jordan’s remembrance of his father but even that remembrance was manifested in even greater competitiveness.

Most sports commentators, on radio and in print, spent these five weeks of the series deconstructing every episode, every segment, every interview, and most importantly every word of remembrance and commentary spoken by the iconic Jordan. As to the latter he belittled his adversaries, from the Bulls General Manager, to players he competed against. All was about winning. And the sub-text was: winning requires unbridled competition with friends and adversaries. To paraphrase another sports film: “there is no compassion in basketball.”

Jordan made it crystal clear that his motivation for being in athletics, in business, and in life was competition. And he is alleged to have commented when he was urged to endorse Democratic Party senatorial candidate Harvey Gantt who was running against incumbent racist Republic Jesse Helms in 1990 that “Republicans buy gym shoes too.”

A very small coterie of critics, including the perceptive sports analyst Dave Zirin, pointed to the negative consequences of the ethos of competition that Jordan so frankly and proudly articulated. After all, Zirin suggested, the competitive spirit is the root passion that makes the capitalist economic system possible.  But for most commentators, even if they spoke critically of one or another egregious Jordan act, such as pushing around Steve Kerr or laughing at journalists who at the time praised some defenders against Jordan, his competitive spirit was what made the Bulls and him winners. And, after all, winning is what sports and by implication life is about.

Critics of the political culture of possessive individualism, market fundamentalism, social Darwinism, and the unregulated pursuit of markets and profit find the Jordan persona problematic. And perhaps even more important than the philosophy of life of Michael Jordan is the way that commentators today excuse his celebration of competition and themselves celebrate the implicit assumption that success, personally or socially, is contingent upon ruthless competition. In this trope there is no room for cooperation, solidarity, and altruism.

This lionization of Michael Jordan should be seen as a political and cultural backdrop to the messaging of the Trump Administration today. “Making America Great Again” is not about helping the needy, overcoming inequality, challenging discrimination. It is about being the best in a heartless world.

In the end, struggling to achieve a more humane world requires analyses of and challenges to the consequences of our most cherished cultural narratives in film, music, television, the internet, as well as sports.

THINKING ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE TIME OF THE PANDEMIC

Harry Targ

Sometimes we wake up with a multiplicity of ideas swirling around in our heads. Today I thought about the rich and diverse debate going on in discussion groups at universities around the country. Among the issues that interest me, particularly from my own research and writing agenda include:

-the nature and purposes of 21^st century higher education (for society)
-the work forces necessary to achieve the goals of the university
-how decisions involving education are made
-the role of the citizenry, students, faculty, staff in decision-making
-funding higher education
-metrics for assessment: profits, richness of educational experiences, student well-being, contributions of education to society
-curricula: STEM, humanities, social sciences, and/or a model of knowledge that sees them all as interconnected.
-impacts of the funding of higher education by the public, corporations, the military, religious institutions
-connections between universities and the communities in which they reside: public spaces, residences, businesses.

Perhaps having these conversations now is appropriate, given the crises, short and long-term, we face. If we do not address some or all of these questions now, decisions might be made for us, or decisions will occur, almost inadvertently as administrators respond issue by issue.

As a graduate student in the 1960s I remember the excitement, vitality of debate, and chaos that was occurring on college campuses. It was a time of unbridled growth in higher education (in some ways the opposite of today), emerging criticisms of the university connections with war and militarism, and growing self-reflection on race and gender in higher education. 

Paradoxically a full embrace of a growth-oriented economic model of higher education (that paralleled growth in the economy at large) generated discourse and debate that challenged the growth dynamics. Discussion in some classrooms or in “free universities” proceeded in a non-traditional way while   much of higher education continued on a path supporting corporate globalization, the full realization of the national security state, and the achievement of the promise of “American exceptionalism.” What was exciting and important about those days in the university was the vibrancy of the debate about the dominant  ways of thinking about higher education. The spreading debates  engaged citizens of states, students, faculty, staff, and politicians. (Some of these reflections are described more extensively below). 

As difficult as its seems today, that debate about the nature, purposes, and vision of higher education in the 21^st century needs to proceed or decisions about the immediate future will be made by small bodies of decision-makers with very selective stakes in the outcomes. Task forces of faculty, students, staffs, and citizens need to begin conversations now or the future will be decided accidentally or by those with limited visions and interests.