Fresh Examples of Inverted Totalitarianism

June 24, 2011 10 Comments

It’s uncanny, but it’s very difficult to keep up with the numerous examples of inverted totalitarianism appearing daily in our popular media. That these events are routinely covered by the popular media without question and concern should give us pause.

Yesterday, in Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election,  I gave the following example:

The NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.

Today, we learn that the US Supreme Court has given pharmaceuticals twin wins:

In one case, a First Amendment decision, the court, by a 6-to-3 vote, struck down a Vermont law that barred the buying, selling and profiling of doctors’ prescription records — records that pharmaceutical companies use to target doctors for particular pitches. And in a second, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the makers of generic drugs are immune from state lawsuits for failure to warn consumers about possible side effects as long as they copy the warnings on brand-name drugs.

The US Supreme court ruled that the State of Vermont was infringing on the pharmaceutical’s first amendment rights. “The amendment prohibits the making of any law “respecting an establishment of religion“, impeding the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.”  This is untrue, the State of Vermont is not trying to restrict the first amendment, rather they are trying to restrict pharmaceuticals from getting private information concerning different drug protocols doctors use for specific patients.

“Basically, it’s going to allow the drug companies to have more influence on doctors’ prescribing practices, to manipulate their prescribing practices, and to promote the use of more expensive drugs. Almost certainly, health care costs are going to be driven up,” said Dr. Gregory D. Curfman, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Information privacy experts also criticized Thursday’s ruling. “One of the practical consequences of the court’s decision will be to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies and data-mining firms and marketing firms to get access to this very sensitive information,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The states are going to have to go back to the drawing board.

Ever since the Bush v Gore election, we’ve learned quite a a bit about where the US Supreme Court stands. The Court is aligned with right – wing conservative government and big business, this we know. The appointment of Justice Roberts, adding to the Court’s extreme conservatism, demonstrated a move to activist justices for the right.  The Court thus becomes the legal thread essential for big business to control government.  The  Court is the “bag man,” if you will.

In Eduction a story from the mainstream, Republican Challenges Administration on Plans to Override Education Law.  I’m no fan of Arne Duncan and Obama’s education policy, but what we find when we look under the hood of Representative John Kline’s, the Republican chairman of the House education committee, forceful attack on Duncan policies and maneuvers is an attempt to move closer to the privatization of education.

“He’s not the nation’s superintendent,” Mr. Kline said of Mr. Duncan, who assumed powers greater than any of his predecessors when, in 2009, Congress voted $100 billion in economic stimulus money for the nation’s school systems and allowed the secretary to decide how much of it should be spent.

Kline wants control of outcomes and we know that the outcome sought by the right is privatization. This move, by conservatives, is linked to a greater effort for student vouchers, creationism and an anti-gay agenda.

Imagine if all these efforts are also supported by the US Supreme Court.

And now we can look at the Obama withdrawal from Afghanistan proposal — 10,000 soldiers this year (roughly 7 percent of the occupation force) by the end of the year.  No one in the main stream press is covering what’s likely to happen:

“There’s going to have to be an accompanying increase in private security for all the activities of the new soldiers going in,” says Jake Sherman, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan who is now the associate director for Peacekeeping and Security Sector Reform at New York University’s Center for International Cooperation.  ”It’s ludicrous. It’s completely implausible.”

The mainstream media is stuck wondering why the usually war hungry Republicans — except for McCain — is going along with the withdrawal. The real story is that as we withdraw — and as the French and the British withdraw as well — there will be a void.  Private sector security companies will fill this need — and they’re the darling of the right, a pay for service military force.

Up and down the economy and culture — pharmaceuticals, energy, education and defense — we see the big reach of business; more importantly, though, we can readily see how government is stepping in and doing the bidding for this new world order. That it’s happening right in front of our eyes and that the mainstream media is simply going along suggests that the media is yet another arm of this move.  The media is not, as pundits would argue, a liberal enterprise; it’s just the opposite and simply looking at who owns the media should tell anyone that story.

Filed under arne duncan, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, global health, jonathan kozol, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, Phamaceuticals, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Public Health, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Constitution of the US Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nothing Will Change: the 2012 Presidential Election

June 23, 2011 13 Comments

Whether Obama retains the White House in 2012 or a Republican wins, nothing much will change. The evidence is overwhelming.

It no longer matters who sits in the Presidential seat or in Congress — unless, of course, the Republican is Newt Gingrich, the extremely nasty former Speaker of the House who wrote a doctoral dissertation excusing the brutal colonization of the Congo, or the absolute dizzy opportunist, Michele Bachmann , who is convinced that CO2 is a natural byproduct of nature.

But even if the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin were to win, all candidates will succumb to the law of the land: the state and the corporation are the main sponsors and coordinators of an “unprecedented combination of powers distinguished by their totalitarian tendencies, powers that not only challenge established boundaries — political, moral, intellectual, and economic — but whose nature it is to challenge those boundaries continually, even to challenge the limits of the earth itself,” says Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The Kock Brothers’ exertion is a perfect example. Thus, all candidates — in the White House and Congress — must adhere to the demands of this imbalance of power that invents and disseminates “a culture that taught consumers to welcome change and private pleasure while accepting political passivity,” argues Wolin.

We live in less democratic times; we wallow in a “collective identity” that is imperial rather than republican. The consequence is that we interiorize an artificial vision of civilization created by the political coming- of – age of corporate power and its concomitant myth making apparatus.

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation.

Let’s take a look under the hood at the engine that runs the inversion of power in our current ideological state apparatus.

The top 5 contributors to the 2010 campaign committee of Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, are:

  • Comcast Corp, who actively lobbied “net neutrality” legislation, FCC programming issues, and general telecommunications issues. In 2010, Comcast focused its lobbying efforts on a getting a merger between Comcast and NBC Universal approved by the federal government. People and political action committees associated with Comcast Corp. together generally favor Democrats when it comes to political campaign contributions. The monopolization of expression.
  • McGuire, Woods, et al –recently represented BVT Institutional Investments in the sale of 10 shopping centers located in Florida, Texas and Georgia. The $130 million transaction was one of the country’s largest retail real estate transactions of 2011 and marks the conclusion of McGuireWoods’ representation of BVT in connection with its U.S. Retail Income Fund VIII portfolio & in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the whistle blower provisions in Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) do not protect employee leaks to the media. Rather, the statute’s plain language protects only disclosures made to federal regulatory and law enforcement agencies, Congress and employee supervisors. McGuireWoods, defending Boeing, moved for summary judgment on the grounds, among others, that SOX does not protect complaints and disclosures to the media. The District Court agreed and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
  • Dominion Resources — Electrical Utilities, Gas and Electric
  • Goldman Sachs — we know who they are, all the way to their involvement in the Obama administration and their creation of financial instruments that lead to the recession, the demise of the American economy
  • Blue Cross and Blue Shield, through its 45 local chapters, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association provides health care coverage to more than 80 million people. Blue Cross/Blue Shield also has a contract with the federal government to review and process Medicare claims. The association proved to be particularly active lobbying Congress during the health care reform debates of 2009 and 2010. It has also lobbied Congress to make it harder for the government to penalize companies if their employees defraud the Medicare program and process false claims. Local Blue Cross chapters have paid about $340 million to the federal government to settle Medicare fraud charges since 1993.

The next 15 contributors to the Cantor camp follow the same pattern — KKR & Co, which sees itself as the leading global alternative asset manager, Guardian Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance, McKesson Corporation, pharmaceuticals and health products, and so on. We get the picture: insurance companies, lawyers, financial firms — banks too big to fail — tobacco (Altria Group, the world’s largest), pharmaceuticals. Representative Eric Cantor has reported a total of 2,849 contributions ($200 or more) totaling $3,057,540 in the current cycle.

Who is Cantor listening to? Cantor is an example of the “tendencies of our system of power that are opposed to the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy. Those tendencies are, I believe, totalizing in the sense that they are obsessed with control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin.

Let’s look at another leading figure, John Boehner, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, elected to represent the Eight Congressional District of Ohio for an 11th term in November 2010, raised $9,796,947. His five leading contributors are AT&T, Murray Energy, First Energy Corp, American Financial Group and the Boehner for Speaker Committe. The top industries contributing to the Boehner effort are: Retired, Securities & Investment, Insurance, Electrical and Health Professionals.

Boehner’s portfolio is just about identical to Cantor’s. Major international companies have their hold on the two top leading Republican leaders. The tragedy we are currently living is that we seem unaware of the deeper consequences of these relationships. “We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia,” Wolin tells us. “Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today succeeds change. The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation.” If we take a look out our front doors, take a walk down the block, in our cities and in our villages, we can taste “undercut consolidation.” It’s everywhere — city and state workers, public institutions, the NBA, the NFL; neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are; hope is on a tightrope, the future bleak.

The Democrats don’t fair much better. The top Democratic donors are ActBlue (composite of many, many small, grassroots donations), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Laborers Union, Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union, EMILY’s List (composite of many, many small grassroots donations), Plumbers/Pipefitters Union, National Assn of Letter Carriers, Ironworkers Union, United Auto Workers, United Transportation Union, American Postal Workers Union, UNITE HERE, AmeriPAC: The Fund for a Greater America. This suggests that unions are the primary donors.

But a closer look tells a different story. Let’s take Harry Reid, the Majority Leader of The US Senate. In the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, his re-election committee raised $24,815,104. The top 5 contributors were MGM Resorts International, Weitz & Luxunberg, mesothelioma and asbestos lawyers, Girardi & Keese, trial lawyers, Simmons Cooper LLC, also specializing in mesothelioma and Harrah’s Entertainment, hotels, resorts and casinos.

The top 5 industries contributing to the Reid campaign are lawyers, Securities & Investment, Lobbyists ($1,052,801 total!), Real Estate and Health Professionals. Reid is a carbon copy of Cantor and Boehner — so what, in fact, is the difference,  unions under attack because we need change?

In American’s Future After an Obama Victory, which I wrote in 2008 during the presidential campaign, before turning to Wolin, I was already suggesting that the Obama Administration was going to be challenged forcefully by the extremes in our culture. The last 3 years give us plenty of evidence. Obama has followed, even energized Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan (think drones), education and healthcare (think privatization and insurance lobbyists), energy and, sadly, race.

Obama’s victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fund-raising success. Since the start of 2007, his campaign relied on bigger donors and smaller donors nearly equally, pulling in successive donations mostly over the Internet. After becoming his party’s nominee, Obama declined public financing and the spending limits that came with it, making him the first major-party candidate since the system was created to reject taxpayers’ money for the general election.

The top supporters of Barack Obama were the University of California ($1,591,395), Goldman Sachs ($994,795; note the connections to his staff: Summers [World Bank, President of Harvard that nearly bankrupted the endowment], Rubin [spent 26 years at Goldman], and Paulsen [former CEO of Goldman], all of whom influenced Geithner [worked for Kissinger, IMF Director of Policy Development and Review Dept, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York]), Harvard University ($854,747), Microsoft Corp ($833,617), Google Inc ($803,436).

This list of contributors to Obama continues unabated — and all other contenders pale by comparison: Citigroup (who laundered Mexican cartel money), JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner (Patrick Leahy, another top Democrat, was Time Warner’s largest recipient, 2009-10, $61,400). Of the top 20 contributors to the Obama effort, 4 are universities, and the rest fall in step with the ongoing search, by the corporation, for opportunism (which is not to suggest that the new corporate university is not after the same). “Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what is exploitable, and soon (following a trajectory since WW II), that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human well-being,” says Wolin. “Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.”

This is where we find ourselves today — in the name of change we are unchanging in the face of an uncompromising corporate will. The corporation owns the House and the Senate. These folks, our elected officials, are spokespersons for the corporate elite. If we wonder why CEO’s make so much money, this is why. If we want to know why education is being dismantled and privatized, benefitting the upper classes, this is why. The dissolution of collective action is here, too. The privatization of schools. And the increasing gap between the wealthy few, the middle class and the poor is here. Our forgotten communities, Newark’s South Ward, the South Bronx, Compton, others — it’s all right here in this negotiation between corporations and our officials.

And since we’re now on the verge of a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, private security firms are smiling. Is this the world we want? It’s already just about out of our hands.

Though I’m speaking to deaf ears, knowing full well that I write to no one, as I speak, the NRC (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), that boasts it’s “protecting people and the environment,” in an unprecedented move, voted 3 – 2 to advise the Obama Justice Department to intervene on behalf of Entergy Nuclear in the company’s lawsuit against the state of Vermont. Vermont wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, the aged nuclear power plant.  A government agency that is solely responsible for the nuclear safety is extending its sphere of influence and advising the Federal Government to intervene in a state’s negotiations with a private entity.  How is that not inverted totalitarianism?  What about us, the people of Vermont?

The tragic story is that this inversion of power is happening while citizens go on with their lives not conscious of the consequences.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, education, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Miller Street Struggle: Part 3

March 16, 2011 4 Comments

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“You have to see what we do here,” Maria Ortiz, the literacy coach at Miller Street, said to me.  “Only by experiencing their frustrations can you possibly understand. You have to get involved.  It doesn’t take much to care.”

I was there to chronicle the Miller Street struggle and lend a hand.  Maybe she was right, and this is what it will take – more of us, PhDs at schools like Miller Street.  Nothing else is working – not high stakes testing, not the approximately $84 billion in Education Recovery Act grants, not Obama’s Race to the Top, which unfortunately links “race” with “learning.”

Learning takes quite a bit of time, especially when we consider the developmental stages of children – it’s not a race.  And learning is not about getting to “the top,” but rather, about understanding one’s place in the world, about finding an emotionally and spiritually satisfying place to work so as to give the imagination full use.  Race to the Top is the antithesis.

I wasn’t sure how to begin to unravel the disorder I was experiencing.  On my first visit to Miller Street in March of last year, 10 out of the 39 teachers were absent, and most hadn’t bothered to make sure a substitute covered for them, a contractual requirement.  If an absent teacher doesn’t replace herself, then an automated “subfinder system” is supposed to kick in.  But the system was broken – and it remains broken.  Office personnel had to go to the phones to find last minute subs, and Principal Shakirah Miller had to orchestrate new class configurations, pairing two grades into one, for instance.

Amalia Dejeno, one of the absent teachers, was scheduled for observation that day.  Ms. Dejeno, a stout Puerto Rican woman in her early 50s, told me that she was “legally sick,” meaning that “illness” – flu, a sudden cold, fever – is an acceptable excuse. Amalia Dejeno is “Tier 1,” a final stage after all other reviews – Tiers 2 and 3 – had already been exhausted for her and she was consistently found “unsatisfactory.”  Tier 1 is where teachers are about to lose their license.  It can take anywhere from 3 to 5 years to dismiss a teacher, if documented properly.  In Amalia Dejeno’s case, it’s taken over 20 years, which is more along the lines of how this really works.  Some unsatisfactory teachers are never dismissed, but rather, moved from one school to another and never given an unsatisfactory rating.  Critics of education blame the teacher’s union for the collusion, a “blue flu” – an internal, never discussed protectionism.  For twenty-nine years Amalia has received “satisfactory” ratings – until she came to the Miller Street School.  She’s been marred by a system that’s refused to qualify her “unsatisfactory” early on when she might have been able to turn her performance around; she’s never been given guidance either, she told me.  Instead, she’s just been moved on.  Ms. Dejeno is harsh on the kids, always short and angry, scolding them at the slightest infraction, like speaking while walking in line to lunch.  She knows very little about teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), her presumed area of expertise.  In personality and knowledge of her stated field, she is unqualified to be in a classroom.

“She’s trying to get rid of me,” said Ms. Dejeno, in a halting English, referring to Miller Street’s principal.  “I’m fighting it.”

When I first looked into Shakirah’s office, prominently displayed on her desk was a long wooden plaque that read: John 3:16: For God so Loved the World that He gave His one and only Son.  Shakirah lost her father to a drunk driver when she was thirteen, which in part has made her who she is – strong, driven, intense, physical.  (She plays basketball, volleyball, runs track, and goes to the gym several times a week.)  Her mother became a drug addict soon after her husband died, relinquishing all responsibility for her 13-year-old daughter.  A car hit her mentally handicapped younger brother at the age of ten.  In four months, Shakirah lost five members of her family – a father, an aunt, her brother and two male cousins, 19 and 22, shot dead in the streets.  Yet her fondest memories are of Newark, growing up in the 17th Avenue projects and attending the 18th Avenue School.  Although life in Newark was not easy for her, she did well in school.

“I guess you could say that my mother was in the house,” Shakirah said.  “Some of my aunts helped me then.”

Now Christian Love Baptist Church in Irvington, New Jersey, is her respite; prayer gives her clarity, a sanctuary that gives her peace.

“The job is emotionally draining,” she told me.  “I take on everyone’s energy.”

She spends endless hours documenting poor performance — probation, withholding pay, no advancement—and creates teams for each grade, pairing weaker teachers with stronger ones and moving weaker teachers to lower grades from the higher ones where higher order thinking is required.  It’s like a military operation.  She estimates that 10-15% of the school’s teachers are incompetent. Maria Ortiz, Miller Street’s literacy coach, estimates much higher, more like 30-40%.

“Dejeno isn’t going to make it,” Shakirah informed me.  “We have all the documentation we need.  Now I can turn to others. “

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Socio-Economic insecurity, The Miller Street School

Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian and the Dismantling of American Schooling

March 4, 2011 1 Comment

Five Irvington New Jersey teens are charged with dragging an eighth grade math teacher, Muideen Oladoja, from his classroom and beating him. A month ago, the Crips gang marched on to the campus of the Rafael Hernandez Elementary School, in Newark, New Jersey, and beat up a student who had allegedly said some words to a child of the Crip leader.

In Providence, Rhode Island, 2000 teachers serving mostly African American and Hispanic students — approximately 90% — are about to lose their jobs. In Wisconsin, the same. In Indiana and Ohio and New Jersey, here too, the dismantling of education is taking shape. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg, taking control of the Department of Education, began the break up — and break down — of education some time ago, moving towards charters and privatization.

And yet, it’s uncanny that as violence in our schools is a daily occurrence — mostly unreported by mainstream media — and our infrastructure deteriorates and our schools are carefully and forcefully being dismantled, American eyes — one million last count — are on Charlie Sheen, and Kim Kardashian’s, arguably the most popular reality TV star, release of her debut single, Jam.

What’s wrong with this picture?

According to the Economic Policy Institute, one in five American children lives in poverty and nearly 35 percent of African-American children are living in poverty.   And the figures are getting worse: In 2008, 39.8 million people were in poverty, up from 37.3 million in 2007 — the second consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty.  In 2008, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites (8.6 percent in 2008 — up from 8.2 percent in 2007), Asians (11.8 percent in 2008 — up from 10.2 percent in 2007) and Hispanics (23.2 percent in 2008 — up from 21.5 percent in 2007). Poverty rates in 2008 were statistically unchanged for Blacks (24.7 percent).   The poverty rate increased for children under 18 years old (19.0 percent in 2008 — up from 18.0 percent in 2007).

When we venture into politics, we find that no political figure of color comes from any social movement. These political figures have usually joined their party of choice during college; they have moved quickly up through the ranks, and they are not race rebels, as we witnessed about 40 years ago. This is Obama; it’s also Corey Booker of Newark, Michael Steele, Alan Keyes, Deval Patrick and others. None of these politicians represents a threat to the power structure of America. These politicians, as are all, black and white, male and female, are beholding to a new paradigm: a corporate – government alliance.

What am I suggesting?

I am following the notion of “racism lite,” found in Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Instead of relying on name calling (niggers, Spicks, Chinks), and lynching and black/white bathrooms, color-blind racism “otherizes” softly (“these people are human, too”).  It suggests that blacks and minorities in general have fallen behind because they’ve not worked hard enough.   This form of racism, a new ideology, which is in compliance with inverted totalitarianism — the corporate – government alliance — aids in the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare, without naming those it subjects and those who it rewards.   In this world, whites can even claim, “reverse racism.”   The Tea Party Movement, small as it is, is replete with this kind of language.

Where are we?

Kenneth Clark, back in 1965 – that’s 45 years ago – in his seminal work, Dark Ghetto said the following:  “The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and – above all – economic colonies.  Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.”

This is the world we’re still creating, not realizing that the resulting tragedy of this always-ongoing story is that fellow citizens – fellow Americans and in some cases immigrants, legal and not, lured by the promise of prosperity – are disenfranchised and relegated to a life where hope is indeed on a tightrope.  What’s more, children, by the thousands, have no cultural armor to protect them while navigating the terrors and traumas of daily life.

Even an extreme conservative doesn’t seem able to understand how fiscally costly this is, never mind the human cost. In fact, it’s cheaper to send a student to an elite liberal arts college, costing over 45K a year, then it is to send this same person, usually Black or Latino (but mostly Black), to prison.

President Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo, December 11, 2009 said the following: “It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive.  It does not exist where children cannot aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.”   He was speaking to the world about the world outside the United States.  He was speaking as the Commander-in-Chief.

Yet closer to home, in the communities in which I work and learn – Newark’s South Ward and Washington Heights, Providence, R.I., Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio, Compton – families and their kids live in “despair,” which is a word that parents and teachers share with me to describe their condition.   Young people need a community to sustain them, and these days, we’re in deep trouble because we’re dismantling education, ensuring deep divides in our society based on access to the language of social mobility — some can still find hope, while other are relegated to a bleak and dark future.

In the beginning of his powerful work on American Education, The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol sits and talks to an elementary student, Pineapple. In this exchange, Kozol is drawn to Pineapple’s use of “over there” when she points to the Manhattan island:

“What’s it like,” she asked me, peering through the strands of her cornrows that cam down over her eyes, “over there where you live?

“Over where?” I asked.

“Over — you know …,” she said with another bit of awkwardness and hesitation in her eyes.

I asked her, “Do you mean Massachusetts?”

She looked at me with more determination and a bit impatiently, I thought, but maybe also recognized that I was feeling slightly awkward too.

“You know …,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Over there — where other people are, ” she finally said.The moral of the story is that Pineapple has little contact with white people, Kozol explains, except for her principal and teachers. Racially, kids like Pineapple are totally cut off; they have “little knowledge of the ordinary reference points that are familiar to most children in the world Pineapple describes as ‘over there,’” says Kozol.

The violence in Irvington New Jersey and the Rafael Hernandez Elementary School is, in part, a consequence of this lacking in reference points — desperate acts always follow.

The dismantling of education by proxies of corporations, as are the governors of Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and New Jersey, is the dramatic sign that the way business has been done in the past is over and that a new world order, beginning here in the United States, is taking shape.  The dominant class — those closely aligned with the corporate state — marginalizes class and race , breaks up collective bargaining, and dismantles education because the last thing inverted totalitarianism needs is an educated class, so our focus is kept on Charlie Sheen and Kim Kardashian. What a world.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Freedom of Speech, Fundamentalism, Gangbangers, Inverted Totalitarianism, jonathan kozol, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with ,

Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter, Wisconsin and the Uncanny Tyranny of Inverted Totalitarianism

February 27, 2011 2 Comments

What do Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin have in common? Each is a sign — a result, if you will — of the large scale cohabitation between the corporation and the state.

Anthony, Jeter and Wisconsin are metaphors for a culture that welcomes change and private pleasure, while accepting political passivity that is a consequence of how power is invented and disseminated, primarily through the corporate-government alliance that, by its very nature, challenges boundaries and limits — even the limits of resources.

Carmelo Anthony, Derek Jeter and Wisconsin are the reification of a managed democracy — the specter of inverted totalitarianism, as defined by Sheldon S. Wolin in Democracy Inc. (2008):**

Inverted totalitarianism … while exploiting the resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power. (also see here)

This relationship — corporate power and government — is obsessed with “control, expansion, superiority, and supremacy,” says Wolin. It is therefore natural that, given these changes that mean to displace “existing beliefs, practices, and expectations,” there will be those who will try to strike a blow against totalitarianism. These loud outcries, muffled by popular media — the voice and most vital instrument of the corporate state — are signs of a new age dominated not by national pride, but by branding and accounting practices, tools usually conforming to vituperative ideologies.

Our metaphor is the athlete’s body. In its limitations — duress and age, much like our own — its value is set and owned. The athlete’s body is his or her body of work, much like a teacher’s is or a pipe fitter’s or a government employee’s. But the athlete’s body inhabits another domain: it is a canvas for our fantasies, made more grandiose by media’s hyper-narrative that concentrates solely on the surface structure. “Who owns this body, this body of work?” asks David Shields in Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. As we fantasize and watch athletes perform, we are blind to the location of the athlete in our culture; we thus fail to see how far removed we our from our fantasies, yet we persist and acquiesce to the domination of media, sports and the corporation over our collective identity. This is how hope begins to whither.

The plight of Carmelo Anthony and Derek Jeter’s recent scolding, by Yankee co-owner Hank Steinbrenner, for being too busy building mansions rather than thinking about a World Series victory, sets the tone for our condition: collective bargaining is dead, or nearly so, thus athletes — union workers everywhere — have to find alternative ways to increase their value and protection; and in Jeter’s case, you’ll be returned to your place in the world if you style too loudly. At relatively high socioeconomic standings athletes are routinely humiliated and disciplined into positions of servitude — and if further challenges occur, the rules of the game are changed, as NBA Commissioner David Stern is doing by re-examining this new “dominance” by teams that can afford the highest payrolls in a league that perpetually losses money.  The NBA Commissioner and the governors of Wisconsin and New Jersey are interchangeable proxies for the corporate state demanding a high degree of control over labor, as well as control over government policies that may be leveled against the corporation’s need to expand by any means necessary.

Inverted totalitarianism suggests that some corporations will dominate, others will not. So controlling labor is essential. Commissioner Stern faces this challenge. Players will build coalitions — the Heat, for instance, the Celtics, now the Knicks — and compel change from within, thus altering how the system functions. But the primary facility of a predatory corporate system is its ability to adjust, moving and changing to switch one piece of a limited pie for another. This is what we’re witnessing in sports writ large; it’s what we’re witnessing in states, such as Wisconsin and New Jersey . It’s a throwback to the plantation model.

The black athlete — and all professional athletes for that matter — is located in a culture that has yet to dispel the horror of slavery. The consequences of slavery still linger. As Wolin suggests, “…that close to a century after women won the vote, their equality remains contested; or that after nearly two centuries during which public schools became a reality, education is now being increasingly privatized.” In other words, while the public yearns for change, not much has changed. Athletes may earn 40 Million Dollars, as the title of William C. Rhodan’s seminal study suggests, but they are still slaves, their identities governed by a plantation model. And when athletes —  union workers — gain some success, the rules are changed, once again ensuring that corporate power comes of age.

The black athlete that “threw punches we couldn’t throw,” writes Rhodan, “won races we couldn’t run,” represented “time-worn responsibility,” always “representing”, and our sense that, nationally, we were moving away from identity politics; however, upon closer examination, we come to realize nothing has changed. Salaries are high, living styles far better, judging from Derek Jeter’s 30, 875 square foot compound in the Davis Island section of Tampa, but corporate power has increased its dominance over a citizen’s inalienable rights, from the NBA to the NFL to Wisconsin. It’s an all out attack on labor and collective bargaining rights because resources are limited and the corporation can only stay alive by shifting its means, not creating something new and different that may challenge the status quo.

In the United States, we’re shutting down — unless we bring back the  Civil Rights Movement. Citizens are asleep, even unconscious, lulled into a deep slumber — and indifference — by the likes of the Koch brothers, representing the largest bloc of oil and gas donors, exceeding even Exxon Mobil in donations to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and politicians’ service to corporate dominance, best expressed by President Obama’s silence about Wisconsin (the community activist President never went to Wisconsin to show solidarity with working people), even with all his talk about human rights and change.

It’s an incredible world we have here — confusing, bifurcated and  moving towards hopelessness, which occurs when education is gutted, dismantled and given to the elite so as to ensure continued corporate domination. Schools across the country, from kindergarten to the University, are being turned into clones of the corporate system, as suggested early on by Bill Readings in University in Ruins (1998), one of the first intellectuals to chronicle this shift in mission and perspective, and brought to a new interpretation by Chris Hedges in Empire of Illusion (2009), and now in his The Death of the Liberal Class (2010).

It’s an incredible world we have because, given the lessons of history, we are moving away from wisdom; rather, we are moving towards despair and annihilation and nothing short of a full out Civil Rights Movement can turn this around, otherwise, we will continue to experience rising food prices, rising fuel prices, poverty and disenfranchisement, war and violence as resources, controlled by very few hands, shrink.

Hedges is right:

The most ominous cultural divide lies between those who chase after these manufactured illusions, and those who are able to puncture the illusion and confront reality. More than the divide of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.

And since he is right, dead on, the only way to change this is to join Carmelo Anthony, and the like, and form coalitions, only these have to be formed, not with those that can slam dunk, rather they must be formed among us, the citizenry — the suffering in Wisconsin, Egypt and Libya, Newark, New Jersey, and the South Bronx. And we must form a new and collective Civil Rights Movement that takes as its cause enlightenment and the pursuit of wisdom because, after all, it’s the only path available to us that leads us to freedom with responsibility. Those that govern, it is obvious, are totally irresponsible and the evidence is indisputable — the mindless are leading the blind.

Pascal said that “Those who indulge in perversion tell those who are living normal lives that it is they who are deviating from what is natural. They think they are following a natural life themselves. They are like people on a ship who think it is those on shore who are moving away.” But we are moving away — from each other; and power is ever more concentrated. A new and invigorated Civil Rights Movement concentrated on challenging the stranglehold coming-of-age of corporate power has on our reality is our only way out.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, baseball, Citizenship, Class, climate change, corruption, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, sport in America, the University

The Uncanny Decline

July 28, 2010 1 Comment

It’s uncanny, but one quick view of the headlines can make anyone’s head spin — Afghanistan is a chaotic shambles, a fog, Wall Street gains, Main Street loses, education is heading in the wrong directions (NY just reported record low test scores) and many schools opting out of the dubiously title Race to the Top.

What else?

WikiLeaks, the Russians want more biotech corn, an 88 year old former Nazi is charged with the mass murder of Jews, health insurance is in disarray–everywhere–and states want Fed help, no energy legislation, muscle flexing — South Korea and the US began their largest joint war games, Sunday, which includes a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and North Korea threatens retaliation.

And less we forget, Sheryl Sharrod’s story — the bogus notion that we’re somehow in a post-race America, whisked in by Obama’s magic carpet ride.

No one can make this up! This is who we are.

It’s no wonder we want to put our heads in the sand — or into a tall Vodka! There are no jobs and Americans continue to suffer. There is no future, and Americans are worried sick. There is no leadership, and congress continues to bicker, schoolyard kids arguing for who gets to control the swings, each side trying to bully the other. A great example being set by our alleged leaders.

We are definitely and assuredly spiraling downward.

The first to make us aware was Paul Kennedy, in his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987!). Readers balked, but, nevertheless, were glued to his chapter, “The United States: The Problem of Number One in Relative Decline”:

the United States … cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the ‘number one’ position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realm, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation’s perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments; and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of ever-shifting patterns of global production.

Of course, the United States has not been able to adjust to the “ever-shifting patterns of global production.” This is obvious. As Kennedy points out, the “decision-making structure that permits a proper grand strategy to be carried out” has to be robust. It’s not, we know this now too. Why? Because, historically, the United States has relied heavily on the mechanisms of “piracy” and protectionism in its development, ensuring the world view of the United States as a predator. It’s not by chance that the single most problematic piece of military hardware is the predator drone.

What we are experiencing in this global paradigm shift is a crisis in Education, writ large. That is, we are having problems synthesizing information, siphoning through the wreckage that is mass media induced information, communication, and, most importantly, we are having great difficulty analyzing and putting into practice our historical antecedents. We forget them, toss these out. We are therefore in a global crisis of knowledge, lead by the United States — we shun it. I mean, let’s be real, Sarah Palin is a character that can sway people, even perhaps elections and she doesn’t even know Geography, for God’s sake. How can we blame children for not succeeding in school when someone such as Palin can become a mouth piece for democracy (lower case) and our political system?

In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges, says that, “The multiple failures that beset the country from out mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of our institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite.” Elite institutions do only a “mediocre job of teaching students to question and think”; their focus, instead, is “on creating hordes of competent systems managers.” All creativity vanishes and hierarchies with clear parameters and highly rewarded specialists blossom. “It destroys, the search for a common good,” says Hedges. In this world, we want TV wrestling and pornography, a reality based on illusion and the notion that consumption is an inner compulsion. The corporation has won.

In 1995, John Ralston Saul already saw this, too, in his The Unconscious Civilization: “What is more contemptible than a civilization that scorns knowledge of itself.” Saul told us that, “The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.” Historically, then, we have shifted from an American culture of production to a culture of consumption; with it, our values and philosophy — community, self-reliance, equal rights and justice — have vanished and we find ourselves in a new a quite harrowing world that embraces, as Saul says, a dominant ideology: corporatism — junk culture and junk politics.

Where do we go from here?

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, Media, Militarism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, the University Tagged with , , , ,

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – PM)

June 6, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

In the afternoon and final session  for me, I went to a documentary, Muslim Cool:

Muslim Cool

Themes: Citizenship, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Fundamentalism, Freedom of Speech, Militarism, Homeland Security, The Constitution of the US, the Environment, Love and Marriage, Gangbangers, Drugs and Violence, Class, Socio-Economic insecurity

You name it, this movie asks that we re-think our tendency to over-classify the Other; thus the dominant class evolves a narrative contracdictory to the Other’s lived experience.  New Muslim Cool defines hotpoints in a changing and (hopefully) evolving society that pits race, ethnicity and class against the perceptions of a dominant class that willingly enables surveillance and force as means of negating the narrative of the Other, those people that look and behave differently then what’s mythologized as the norm: the answer to happiness is a wide birthed consumerism that externalizes those that can’t.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, corruption, cultural studies, education, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Socio-Economic insecurity, war on drugs

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day 4 – AM)

June 6, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

Day 4
10:30-noon
Magnolia 2/ Hotel Level 2

Special Feature Presentation

“Hip-Hop and the Politics, Hip-Hop and Race“
Bakari Kitwana –Public Intellectual, assisting what academics are doing; runs “Rap Sessions”, www.rapsessions.org, and organization trying to go back to “old school” – scholars, activists, artists that travel the country

(Note: an interesting conversation about the intersection of hip-hop culture and attempts to engage youth politically.   Hip-hop – non mainstream, not what we hear on the airwaves – provides avenues for engagement, ways of talking to youth.  Kitwana’s RapSessions are interesting too because these bring together artists, journalists and rap performers.)

Intro

•    works with hip-hop artists and scholars, a way of changing the equation
•    showed clips first, then an interview

Q & A

Q.: Is hip-hop relevant?  Commercial hip-hop only pushes people to be sexually active.

BK:  Yes, because nothing else has evolved that is not totally controlled by “some” aspect of the mainstream. Hip-hop could be a random way of communicating with each other.  Chuck D said that hip-hop is Black America’s CNN.  Globally, hip-hop is being used creatively.

Q.: Why do white kids love hip-hop?  It’s said that 80% of all hip-hop is bought by white kids — what is their responsibility?

BK: It’s never been documented that 80% is the number.  No one really knows.  Currently, there’s a rise of hip-hop activism on college campuses. I see it. I visit many campuses year ’round; they’re usurping political action committees. This is a multiracial movement.  Hip-hop exists as a political vanguard right now.

Q: The National Hip-Hop Convention, how did it come about?

BK: It started when students began working and protesting against apartheid in South Africa.  That’s the era of the Third World Press and the advent of Henry Louis Gates and I knew that I knew more, much more about hip-hop then Gates could ever.  It was also the era of Dan Quayle and his “American Values” campaign.  When I went to The Source, I began working and writing on closer relations between artists and politics.  I wanted — we wanted — to bring a closer relationship and political awareness to the new generation through hip-hop.  This was the beginning of an idea about convening a national convention.  At first, no one thought the idea good — but then things changed and we sat around a table — journalists, political activists, muscians, and the idea gained traction.

Q.: How is hip-hop used for political activism?

BK: the actual political organizing of youth happened around the Kerry run for presidents and it evolved, 2004-06.  The crux of my new book is about this so I went and interviewed young political organizers to see how this is done and where we might go from here. The problem now is that you have a Black man in office and young people might say, “What now?”  The time is crucial now and we only have a small window to keep  young people’s heads in the game.  The questions now are — “where are young people today?” and “how do we keep them engaged?

We have to turn to people like Mattie Weiss and Adolph L. Reed, Jr (see his: Is Obama Rewriting his Resume?)

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (Day1-PM 2)

June 3, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

5-5:45 (Potomac Ballroom A and B/Convention Center, Level 2)
Afternoon Conference Pleneray Session
“Teach the Children, Free the Land: The Political Economy of Public Education”

Mari J. Matsuda, J.D., Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawi’i—Mãnoa, Hawai’i ( pioneer in critical race theory; top, most influential Asian Americans)

Intro

•    Loves coming to the conference – she can tell it’s NCORE.  It is a convention of people who are dedicated to the heart and spirit of the country, rich in its diversity. It’s not a convention in Arizona
•    Currently working on a book on the state of public education – history, economy, race and subordination and class
•    3 worlds: (1) greed is good: plow orchards and build macmansions to people that can’t afford them; bail out too big to fail ponzi schemes that are too large to fail, the $ coming from the workers; experts say that this is not suppose to happened; (2) greed is good lite: a modest national health care system, leaving all intact –pharmaceutical, hospitals, etc; business as usual; give cash for clunkers; what you can pull together for yourself will be yours – up and down and malaise: (3) just beyond our grasp: expected to work hard, but the market does not make rules, we do it under the Constitution and build a democracy – we choose how to regulate markets; we will impose reasonable regulations on the food industry; we will propose reasonable regulations on oil and coal so that they can’t kill our oceans and our land.
•    Topic: if we could take hold of our government, we can start investing in our needs – education, health care, homes, etc., everything that’s as important as militarism. This place is imperative, because our nation’s survival dependents on an educated citizen that can build our future.
•    We’re losing minority enrollment because of the economy.  As a critical race theorist, I ask what race has to do with it and I consider all forms of subordination intersecting in our schools.
•    No more orchestra, no glee club, no more play – it’s all gone from public schools.
•    What happened?

Talk

•    In DC, in public schools, mouse feces in closets, no heat, so students have to learn to write and ware mittens
•    To avoid social problems (critical race theory) is to place them on the shoulders of a disenfranchised group
•    Reagan cut social investments using images of poor, homeless people of color, although most recepients were white
•    What does it mean when we say, “They just can’t learn?”  We have to keep “our” students from “their” students
•    Most schools are “black”—black teachers, black students, etc. – all coding, encompassing all ethnic groups of color
•    Derek Bell – when people say urban, we mean “black”; it happens at the uncoscious levels: “We can’t just throw money at the problem because it will be waste.  The problem is waste and inefficiency.”
•    The presuption that they will fail is racist—they don’t have what it takes to succeed
•    No form of subordination is without cause: everyone can read, write and succed
•    Where is the interconnection of forms of subordination that cause this
•    Gender is less obvious: look for gender where it’s hard to see: we swim in the objectification of women. Where is gender of subordination in education?
•    Second wave feminists were involved in practice, though what they asked for became theory, one such area is public vs private, so women originally entered the public in private sphere jobs
•    Ideology of separate spheres carried over, after the second wave
•    Post New Deal Era marked a sharp decline in women wages – short paying women and unfunding schools; we have decreased the total amount of money put into the infrastructure
•    Broken systems generate costs, inefficiencies generate costs – it sends a message to students, which is education is not important.  Feminist take: education of children is woman’s work; in the middle class, women still pick up the work. Women are doing the job that the state is suppose to do.
•    Well endowed private schools do spend money on infrastructure, things are fixed
•    Poar New Deal generation have the same sense of entitlement, but now the parents have to pick up the slack: what will it take to stop accomadating and resisting all efforts to divest the public sector
•    In deep economic era, there is no public outcry at the abuse of the working class
•    Capital will make consessions to the worker if it has no choice; it responds with just enough to quiet it down
•    During the last depression, people did fight back – people marched, 20,000 strong, on to capital hill (unemployed veterans of WW1, run out by tanks and Army personal on horseback) – this image gave us the New Deal (note: we never hear this narrative)
•    Three decades later, poor women, stood up demanding demanding for their children
•    Power concedes to the demands of the poor; we have models of multiracial divesting and as educators we need to retrieve them
•    Now we see public education as expendable: the country belongs to us and we have the power to make the country strong
•    We need a new deal for education
•    DuBois: a deep hunger for learning among those we consider the outcasts
•    We have protoypes of multiracial, small schools that work
•    We know what works; it’s not a mystery, so it’s proof that we are making a deliberate choice to have urban schools fail. Charters, etc., words that supplant the kind of integration that’s needed
•    We have become unknowing survilists in terms of education; we’re taking on education as a personal problem.  But people must be called back to the table to re-do what we’ve left behind
•    Every child is our own – feed, teach, shelter, embrace every child with the love human beings are entitled. This is when we’ll see peace.  An investment has to be made – and it’s a big investment
(note: we do make this investment, but it separates those that can afford it from those that can’t; standardization is what we do when we’re aiming low)

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, arne duncan, cultural studies, education, education stimulus package, jonathan kozol, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, technology and education, the University

Preliminary Notes NCORE (day 1/PM)

June 3, 2010 Leave a comment

NCORE

NCORE

In-between sessions, I usually take a 10-15 walk out on the harbor, where’ it’s always hazy and very humid.  Can’t see the Washington Monument behind the wall of haze.

Another note: I’m totally surprised that at such an expensive conference about Race & Ethnicity, several systemic realities give me pause:  in the conference center, internet access has to be purchased (I don’t); coffee is put out twice a day, then quickly removed; no water anywhere, except near bathrooms; the food in this disneyesque place is very, very expensive (I’ve heard from people counting pennies) and, other than last night, nothing in terms of food is provided (most people have out of pocket expenses and we’re not all exactly rich; besides, this really hurts all organizations that are vanguard, on the margins, that might contribute to these conversations — who is being left out? I wonder).  This note/thought makes me think critically about the role of NCORE in the work towards a more equal world along race and ethnic lines.

Anway, on the way to 90, let’s get going…

2:30-4:0 (Potomac Ballroom C/Convention Center, Level 2)
A Conversation with Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spelman Faculty for 39 years)
“Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, I am Your Sister: Selected and Unpublished Works of Audre Lorde”

Book: Who Should Be First (released in August)

Intro

•    Not possible to do anything with Audre Lorde without having her words in the the room
•    “Reflections”, by Audre Lorde (papers held at Spelman College); Alice Walker wrote a piece called, “Audre’s Voice.”  bell hooks, “Lorde of the Imagination of Justice.”
•    A “reading” (Sheftall read from Lorde) notes:
*Affect change for a livable future.  Black, feminine, socialist poet, lesbian, mother – defined as inferior or just wrong
*Opression has no hierarchy.  Heterosexism: superiority of loving of one form over another.  Racism – one race over other and believes in its right to dominate
*No aspect of the self can profit from oppression, particularly when seeking the right to peaceful existence
*Whether there is oppression, black people can be victims
*Any attack on the black community is an attack on gay and lesbian, because “I am” both
*Anti – black is anti gay : cannot fight only one form of oppression; when they appear to destroy me, they appear to destroy “you”
•    Lorde looms large b’cause she understood that there are no hierarchies of oppression
•    Guy-Sheftall: wants to start with a convesation. Lorde was the first “out” black feminist.  First Lorde visit to Spelman was very controversial, and the Woman’s Center was asked whether it was prepared to be always be associated with lesbianism.  Before 1996, had never had an African American female president.  Spelman was founding in 1881.  President Cole was progressive – global and anti imperialist, anti oppression, and a self-identified feminist.  Cole established a reading at her home and invited Audre Lorde to the campus – a controversial gathering.  First person to come to the campus to speak about all her identities.  A student began to cry during Lorde’s talk.  Audre asked her to come and sit with her and hugged her.  Audre’s visits to Spelman helped transform the school and give power to the Woman’s Center.  Radical, black feminist work has not always been embraced, even at a woman’s college, Spelman.  Still operationalizing the work of Audre Lorde.  Work of Lorde is groundbreaking and still very important and relevant.

The Conversation

•    Over the past 30 years, women’s studies have been transformed.  Theorizing has not made its way to the public sphere. Hillary Clinton is categorized as a woman, not a white, middle class woman. Obama was constructed as an African American, primarily.  The 2008 presidential debates was one of the most contentious moments among feminists; hostility took place in women studies program; forced many of to raise the question, “what happened?”  30 years of theorizing seemed not to make its way to the media, to even feminists in the classroom.  Kimberly Crenshaw and Guy-Sheftall and Gloria Steinem convened a meeting in NYC. The Nation published overview of the meeting. Douglas and feminist debate that took place over the 15th Amendment needed to be revisited.  Media does not get intersection theories.  We seem to slip into old paradigms to talk about race.
•    Connection btwn Audre’s essay and what happened to presidential candidate?  Very few groups that are fighting for liberation are progressive on all fronts.  Groups can be radical about one issue, i.e. race movement was strong on issues of racism, but totally oblivious to issues of feminism.  Nothing peculiar about feminist. They have to be pulled, too, into an intersection or areas about race.  Disappointing when people are committed to only one issue, rather than all the issues pertaining to liberation. Progressive black folks were willing to support a totally unprogressive Clarence Thomas.  Lorde attacked all issues of oppression.
•    2008 debate and the national media: press keen on highlighting the split btwn students who supported Clinton, in Spelman, and those that supported Obama.  Where are these students now?  Students have yet to internalize the intersectional approach.  Obama was almost a taboo subject to speak about; could not speak about what might happen or emerge should Obama be president. This could not be talked about.  Racism, at the time, was on the internet, circulating in disgusting ways and never made it to the mainstream.  People are now surprised about racism, particularly in the Tea Party.
•    Michele Obama experienced racism and sexism in obvious ways.  She experiences tremendous commentary about her body, particularly her butt.  Over referencing of the first lady’s body, who can’t escape the gaze.  References to skin color, hair clips, etc.
•    How did “Precious” end up in the movie theaters?  Why Lee Daniels chose to do “Precious”?  Movie would have been a sleeper if it wasn’t for Oprah.  Has to be factored into analysis.  We all share incest, survival narratives.  The “obsession”, almost, that majority white audiences have with the film, “Precious.”  The Bush women had parties in their homes to show the film: if you want to understand black life, look at this film.  Coverage of Precious is quite obsessive in mainstream media.  It’s an old pathological black family narrative. Every imaginable pathology is in that film.  In the novel, Precious does not weigh 350 pounds.  Lee Daniels chose the character: we have to raise questions of Daniels, Tyler Perry, Oprah and the white woman who raised money for it?
•    What does it mean to have the Obamas in the White House and Precious?  What does it mean that a a gay African American male is associated with Monster’s Ball and Precious?  We have to also add the black and white consumer public.  Commercial success came when Oprah endorsed the film.  These are not pathological narrative being created outside the community; the issue is the persistence of these narratives that have no counter narrative.  (A mother daughter incest is very unusual.  The monstrous black mother is another persisten theme, the quintessential horrible mother in the public’s mind. In the novel there is no root to this behavior. Safire, the author, doesn’t help us see who she is.)
•    Back to Lorde’s visit to Spelman: the school is a very gentile place.  There has been some critique among progressive African Americans around ways in which the Obama family gets constructed in the media as the perfect heterosexual couple – perfect wife and two children reinforces the dominant heteropatriarchal family, which eliminates us from having the freedom to see other black families, constructed in different ways.  Obama represents any antithesis that anyone may have about men.  Relieves women from the notion that there are “no men out there.”  What is the impact within the black community of this overwhelming notion that Obama is this quintessential man?  Media coverage makes it impossible to think of families in any other way – privileges heteronormaty.  A more nuances, complex analysis creates problems – but it’s almost impossible for us to think about it right now.
•    When did we as a race (black Americans) move away from our own measurements?  People have made a lot of Obama’s skin color and his biracial background – but if he was not married with two perfect children, he would never have been in the White House.  Obama fits the normative that Lorde is always railing against.  Michele had to play the role of the traditional wife – unfortunate that you have to be a particular kind of wife: she is no longer the career woman; talks about the importance of her role as mother.  The discourse had to be recrafted: supportive wife that follows very traditional gender roles.  Even the issues she’s taken up – gardening, childhood obesity, not violence against women, for instance.  Feminists believe that this is crafted. Early on she was henpecking Obama; she was toned down, even in body language.  Her aggressive, black woman’s speech had to be toned down.  Lorde would say that these are the only options as first lady.  Michele was willing; she had to become something else, givent he negative PR she was having.   Negative, particularly among average white women.  She had to be recrafted to be more palatible. Gender – race issues around this issue that are very problematic.  Cultural narrative as black women as ball busting, controling – not a construction that’s around from white women.
•    Lorde would be saying that there is a “norm” out there that have to be adhered to – and we have to think about this.  She would be paying attention to what Obama is saying about race, gender and sexuality.  She would be looking at all the progressive issues Obama’s has taken up; she’d be placed on some, not pleased on others, such as Obama’s position on Afghanistan.  Bothered about the long term stay in Afghanistan and militarism.
•    Back to Michele and her agency in dealing with her image: are moments of agency resistance?  There’s no question about Michele’s agency; however, anyone in the White House cannot operate their radical politics because of constraints.  Obama is the Commander in Chief and Michele will stay away from highly controversial issues that can get Obama in trouble; she’ll exercise her agency in areas that won’t create controversy.  There are positions that they cannot publicly annouce.
•    CLOSING: Audre Lorde’s Oberlin Speech (1989), a Reading

Filed under cultural studies, education, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics Tagged with , , ,

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