The Significance of Baby Doc’s Return to Haiti
(This article was written and submitted by Joe Spaulding.)
In 2004, the Bush Administration committed an egregious act against Democracy that was so well hidden and efficiently executed that when Eric Alterman and Mark Green wrote The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, their 400 page, thoroughly well-researched, and extremely accurate hit job highlighting the negative consequences of policies championed and enacted by Bush and his cabinet members during his presidency, they completely overlooked it. Respected scholar and law professor Ilan Peleg also failed to mention it in his critique of Bush’s foreign policy The Legacy of George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy: Moving Beyond Neoconservatism.
These were books written by skilled researchers that were looking ferociously for information to paint George W. Bush in a negative light. On February 29, 2004, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti was kidnapped at gunpoint by U.S. agents, forced onto a U.S. jet, and flown to the Central African Republic. During the flight the lives of his family and the people of Haiti were threatened if he did not sign a slip of paper claiming he willfully abdicated his office. On the plane he used a smuggled cell phone to call Rep. Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson (a man who struggled to get the U.S. to enact sanctions against South Africa during Apparthied) and inform them that he was overthown by a U.S. backed coup. He has not been allowed to return to Haiti since, and his Lavalas Party is banned from elections.
Jean-Claude “Baby-Doc” Duvalier was the president of Haiti from 1971-1986, when he was overthrown by a popular uprising. He was a drug-running thug who used fear, torture, rape, and assasinations to maintain order in Haiti. The Tonton Macoute, his father’s death squad/secret police answered to his every call and executed people he percieved as threats. His presidency was tolerated and even supported by the Reagan and Nixon Administrations because he vocally denounced Communism. The aid the U.S. sent to Duvalier to help the Haitian people not starve to death was stolen by Baby Doc and used to let him live comfortably in Paris when he was exiled after 1986. On January 16, 2011, Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti without being arrested.
The media coverage of Baby Doc’s return has been abysmal, and this potentially has serious consequences for Haiti. Mac McCelland at Mother Jones has writen a short article that makes no mention of Aristide, and only has a brief mention of Baby Doc’s human rights abuses, which implies Haitians are welcoming Duvalier back with open arms. An AP article at NPR.org makes brief mention of the Tonton Macoute’s human rights abuses but also ignores Aristide completely.
The BBC World Service tried to construct Baby Doc as harmless and also failed to mention the Aristide or the Lavalas Party. Jacqueline Charles at the Miami Harald mentioned neither Duvalier’s crimes nor Aristide’s kidnapping, but she did make it sound like Haitians were very receptive to Baby Doc’s return. Clarens Renois at the Sydney Morning Herald actually writes the word “Aristide” once, but overlooks his specific story to simply point out he was another exiled president.
On the ground in Haiti, the people are mostly interested in the return of Baby Doc in as much as it takes away the government’s ability to justify the continued exile of Aristide. This is not a narrative that entities interested in the spread of neoliberal structural adjustment policies want the world to hear, because it brings into question the idea that opening up free markets in developing countries is the only way to lead them to democracy.
Duvalier has more than demonstrated his willingness to siphon aid funds from the U.S. and IMF while imposing policies on Haitians that allowed their exploitation by American and European corporations. The U.S. has demonstrated it’s bipartisan willingness to extend aid to regimes that will not try to raise the minimum wage, provide access to education and health care for all citizens, or nationalize industries like Aristide did.
The same corporate interests that control the majority of the mainstream media (and in the near future all of the media if we do not get some real net neutrality protections soon) and influence our politicians have a lot to lose if Aristide is allowed to return to Haiti. They will be trying their hardest to convince the global public that Haitians do not want him back.
About 300 people walked silently in the cold today at the GVSU Allendale campus to kickoff a week of events commemorating the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As people wove through the campus they walked past signs that provided a chronology to the life of Dr. King. Some signs also included statements from Dr. King while others highlighted actions that he participated in during his short lived 39 years.
The silent walked ended and people filed in doors to hear the words of one of the founding members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Judy Richardson. Judy was a graduate of Moorhead College is a co-producer of the Eyes on the Prize series and author of the recently released book Hands on the Freedom Plough: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC. The civil rights activist is also the director of the documentary Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968.
After making a few opening comments, Richardson then shows a clip from the film, a clip which provides a context for the community of Orangeburg where the students massacre took place in 1968.
According to Richardson, the majority of the population in the area was Black, but White people controlled all the power, both politically and economically. This White Supremacist power structure was threatened when students began to confront the owner of a segregated bowling alley.
Students began asking questions about how a local businessman could exclude people from his business. After four days of protests the campus was under lockdown, with local and state police, along with National Guardsman. Police open fire without warning killing 3 college students, one high school student and wounding 28 others. Journalists that Richardson interviewed for the documentary said that all the students were shot in the back.
During the interview process they came across two White journalists who wrote a book about the massacre. One went into the hospital to interview those wounded and told the hospital personal that he was with the Bureau. The hospital thought he was with the FBI, when in fact he was the Bureau chief for the LA Times in Atlanta. Gaining access to the medical reports proved that students were shot from behind, suggesting they were all running away when police & National Guardsmen opened fire on the demonstrators.
Richardson said that the film premiered at the annual event to commemorate the massacre at South Carolina State College. She also spoke about the film production process and particularly the interview they did with Bill Barley. Barley was with the Governor’s office at the time of the shooting and was willing to talk about what had happened. When the film crew arrived at his house Barley was somewhat embarrassed since he didn’t know Judy was a Black woman. Matters were complicated when Barley told them he collects Confederate Flags. However, Richardson said that he was very forthright with what he had to say, which was to tell the truth about what happened that day in 1968.
Richardson also talked about how this event was history that had been hidden and until recently rarely talked about as part of the freedom struggle of the 1960s. She said that the Orangeburg massacre was never part of the larger public consciousness in the same way that the 1970 Kent State shootings were. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young did not produce a song about Black students being shot in the back.
The filmmaker also talked about how the current Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, when asked about race relations at that time said he didn’t remember it being “that bad in the 1960s.” Barbour also stated that the White Citizen’s Council were a “positive force in the community.” Richardson pointed out that the White Citizens Council were the ones bankrolling the activities of the local KKK chapters.
For instance, in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where Medgar Evers was doing organizing work, Blacks who had signed a petition had their names published in a newspaper ad, along with death threats and job loss. “This is why,” Richardson said, “it is so important to remember history and to recover it. If we don’t we end up with people learning about the civil rights struggle through films like Mississippi Burning.” Mississippi Burning was a 1988 film that depicted FBI agents as the real heroes and risk takes of the freedom struggle in Mississippi.
After her comments Richardson listened to comments and questions from the audience. Several people asked the speaker “what they could do” or “what lessons should we learn from this history about the struggle for civil rights?” This is always a difficult question for anyone to answer, since it assumes they can tell people what to do. However, Richardson did a great job of getting people to think about the importance of becoming educated about this part of history. She also felt that it was important for people to act, to organize, to start something for change or seek out groups that are already doing that work. Richardson really stressed the importance of popular education or study groups and cited A People’s History of the United States as a great text for reclaiming that history.
There were also several GVSU students who talked about being punished for skipping class to come to this hear Richardson, since the university does not give students the day off or have a policy of allowing students to attend events, even if it means missing classes. Someone from the university responded and invited students to be part of a committee to address this matter, but this writer had visions of students having a sit-in or occupying the administrative building to demand that the school have a clear and committed policy on celebrating MLK Day. Such an action would be a “lesson learned” from the kind of history that Judy Richardson shared with people on this day.
Radical Journalist, Author, Activist, Friend – The Loss of John Ross
Today I read the sad news that John Ross, writer, poet, activist and chronicler of the Zapatistas, died today in Mexico.
It is hard to believe, since just 10 months ago he sat in my living room, warming himself next to the woodstove. I remember listening to John share stories about his political battles, music, sports, social movements and his writing, all in that manner that people who spent time with him came to know.
John was a no bullshit kind of person, an at times in your face kind of person, but also an extremely compassionate person. When I say compassionate, I don’t mean the fluffy kind, I mean the kind that mixes rage and justice. John was a fighter and his compassion was reflected in his writing, his spoken word and his never-ending commitment to stand with those who stood for something.
I first came across John Ross’s work when he wrote about the Zapatista uprising in Mexico with his book Rebellion from the Roots. Ross followed up that book with The Annexation of Mexico and two more books on the Zapatistas; The War Against Oblivion and Zapatistas: Making Another World Possible.
John also wrote an incredible book called Murdered by Capitalism, which is part autobiography, part reflections on the US Left. His last book, El Monstruo is sort of a “people’s history” of Mexico City.
People in Grand Rapids were fortunate to hear John speak and read from his work on two different occasions in Grand Rapids. We brought him to town in the fall of 2004, just prior to the US Presidential election and John (who had just come back from Iraq) was calling on people to engage in mass demonstrations against the war no matter who won the election. John knew all to well that electoral politics in the US was just a shuffling of people that represented power.
I ran into John in the Zapatista community of Oventic, a small village perched in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico in 2001. It was during the New Year’s eve celebration and John was in his element, not just because he was chronicling the EZLN struggle, but because he was part of the struggle providing international solidarity for those the neoliberal henchmen of the world would like us to forget about.
John was in Grand Rapids again last year while on tour with his last book. He spoke on campuses and at community events and even in his late seventies could make you tired with his passion for intellectual sparing and sarcastic humor.
We are grateful for his humanity, for his passion and his notorious smile. We will miss you John, but your memory will live with us.
(John Ross read some of his poetry last year at Hugo Claudin’s space in Grand Rapids. Lindsay McHolme enshrined his persona in this short video where he reads the poem The Revolution is not like a faucet.)
New Type of Ads Trick Viewers, Help Circumvent DVRs
(This article is re-posted from PRwatch.)
Advertisers are using a new technique to trick DVR users and people who mute TV ads into watching their ads. The new ads, called “interstitial ads,” “podbusters” or “DVR busters,” are designed to look and feel just like the shows viewers are watching. They often feature the same actors, in character, and may use brief, insipid out-takes from the real show to lure unsuspecting viewers into watching them.
Advertisers run podbusters late in the show, around the time that cliffhanger-endings are keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. Examples of DVR busters include Tina Fey starring in an ad for American Express during her show, 30 Rock, and commercials seen near the end AMC’s Mad Men that feature actors from the show in an office environment and wearing 60’s fashions, to make people think the show has started again. By the time people realize they are really watching an ad and not the show, the commercial is almost over.
Mike Rosen, an executive with a media agency, explains that ads that mimic shows viewers really like help transfer the positive feelings people have about those shows to the products being advertised on them.
Which Dr. King will you celebrate?
Today is the 25th anniversary of the US government’s decision to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday a federal holiday. During the past twenty-five years the memory and legacy of Dr. King has at times been honored, misunderstood and even co-opted.
Quite often both government and commercial media reflections on King are limited to recycling his “I Have a Dream” speech or simply focusing on his position dealing with racial justice. Last year GRIID posted a piece that highlighted the last few years of Dr. King’s life, which advocated a more radical transformation of American society. King not only called for racial justice, he was also highly critical of US militarism and the economic system of capitalism.
“We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry….Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism…here must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism.”
Dr. King clearly evolved from his work in the south in the 1950s to his work in the North in later part of the 1960s, culminating in his denunciation of the Vietnam War, his work on the Poor People’s Campaign and his support for the sanitation workers strike in Memphis where he was assassinated in April of 1968.
Over the years Grand Rapids has celebrated the holiday in a variety of ways, some which truly honor the legacy of Dr. King, while others co-opt his legacy. For instance, every year there is a “march” that begins at GRCC and walks downtown to Fountain St. Church. The “march” is often led by students who are members of JROTC, a program that is fundamentally a recruiting tool for the US military, which disproportionately targets minority students. Considering King’s denunciation of war/militarism and his commitment to non-violence it seems to this writer that having JROTC students lead a march in his honor bastardizes King’s message.
This year there are numerous events planned in Grand Rapids this year that seek to “honor” the legacy of Dr. King, but one that is a clear example of attempting to co-opt his message. Monday morning the Grand Rapids Urban League is hosting its 11th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Corporate Breakfast. Besides the complete contradiction in the idea of King with a corporate breakfast, the event will honor the legislative career of Vern Ehlers. This raises the question, “how could the GR Urban League honor a man that supported war, unbridled capitalism and did not make racial justice a priority during his time in Congress?”
This irony was played out at the national level as well when the Defense Department’s general counsel Jeh Johnson recently stated that Dr. King would probably support the current US War on Terror. Johnson specifically mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan in a speech at a Pentagon celebration of Dr. King. Fortunately the folks at Rethink Afghanistan have produced this video as a sharp response to such a gross misappropriation of the message of Dr. King.
Media Alert: MetroPCS is a Net Neutrality Violator
(This Media Alert is re-posted from the group Save the Internet.)
When we access the Internet on our phones — as more of us do every day — we expect to be able to go wherever we want, whenever we want.
But a terrible new service plan from MetroPCS — the fifth-largest U.S. mobile phone carrier — is the latest phone industry attack on Net Neutrality. The company is limiting users’ ability to access certain websites and services, unless they pay extra for the privilege.
Free Press just alerted the FCC to this blatant violation of Net Neutrality.1 Please click here to tell the FCC to launch an investigation.
Here’s what MetroPCS’s new pricing scheme looks like:
- Customers purchasing the most expensive plan will have to pay extra to access Netflix, Skype or any website using “advanced HTML” on their phones.
- Those with the cheapest data option won’t be able to access any of these online services, except for YouTube — despite its similar data usage.
It gets worse. MetroPCS’s plans disproportionately affect people of color and urban communities, whom the company recognizes as a major portion of its customer base, and who largely depend on mobile phones to access the Internet.2
There is a way that we can stop MetroPCS’s discriminatory practices. Last month, the FCC adopted weak rules that leave mobile Internet users virtually unprotected from these types of abuses, with two big exceptions: They prohibit the blocking of websites and competing video and voice communication applications on mobile phones. Yet that’s exactly what MetroPCS is doing.
The FCC must now take action to protect the public and enforce these new rules. If the agency does nothing, we could see a domino effect in which larger carriers like AT&T and Verizon introduce their own forms of mobile blocking and discrimination. We can’t let that happen.
The FCC must take MetroPCS to task before other carriers follow suit. Tell the FCC: Enforce your new rules. Investigate MetroPCS’s outrageous, anti-Net Neutrality practices.
Mobile Internet users should have the freedom to access any sites or services they want. The FCC must respond to our concerns3, protect our online rights and investigate MetroPCS now.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these books are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
What Would It Mean to Win? – This book is a collection of essays put together by the Turbulence Collective and deal primarily with issues around current anti-capitalist and social change movements. The authors deal with a variety of aspects related to movements and movement building and raise questions around the idea of winning. Are the movements that are fighting against globalization, war, global warming winning and what would it even look like if they were winning? The essays are thought provoking and important for anyone who is serious about wanting to make radical change in the world. An added bonus is many of the graphics included involve lego characters.
Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now, by James Cockcroft – Cockcroft, author of numerous books on Mexico in both English and Spanish, has put together a short text that makes the argument that Mexico is faced with very similar conditions today as it was one hundred years ago just before the revolution of 1910. The author looks at themes such as class conflict, Neo-liberalism, immigration, imperialism and resistance. For anyone interested in learning about both the 1910 revolution and the current political climate this book is a great introduction.
Policing America’s Empire: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, by Alfred McCoy – Like his book the Politics of Heroin, Policing America’s Empire is ground breaking work by Al McCoy. This 650-page volume looks at the kind of colonial system that the US set up in the Philippines after the 1898 invasion/occupation. The detail that the author provides is impressive, but more importantly McCoy argues that what the US was able to accomplish in the Philippines was a test case for policing, intelligence gathering and black-operations that would be used in other countries around the world.
This Land Is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons, produced by the Media Education Foundation – This new documentary is an important contribution to understand the idea of what the commons are and how the current corporate/capitalist economic model threats its very existence. With an excellent historical overview, this film not only helps us understand the origins of the notion of the commons, it also provides important analysis of how it has been taken over in recent decades and how people and communities are fighting back to reclaim the commons. This is important for anyone concern about public space and the rights that people have to water, air, land and food.
On January 12, the Grand Rapids Press posted an article by Shandra Martinez plus an update by Chris Knape about an important announcement from Steelcase: the closing of the Kentwood East seating plant and two other manufacturing facilities. The loss of 750 jobs, including 400 in Kentwood. And the moving of these jobs to two sites in Mexico: Tijuana and Reynosa.
The article included a statement from Steelcase president and CEO Jim Hackett, who said, “”We continue to make improvements to our industrial system, which have left us with excess capacity to support current and anticipated future demand.” He added that the company had to be “as fit as possible in the highly competitive environment in which we operate.”
Steelcase spokeswoman and apologist Jeanine Holquist then tidied up with additional quotes in both the article and in an explanatory update, reiterating that Steelcase had excess manufacturing capacity, “so our space continues to exceed the need.”
Since Steelcase just announced a month ago that it had stronger sales and earnings than expected in its third quarter, Holquist also had some tap-dancing to do. Explaining that the shifts to Mexico will save the company $35 million annually, Holquist threw out this bone to workers here: “West Michigan will remain the most significant node in our manufacturing.”
Here are five things that the reporters for the Grand Rapids Press could have, but didn’t, ask or include in its initial reporting of the situation:
1. An explanation of “excess manufacturing capacity.” An obvious choice would be to challenge this statement, particularly from a local point of view. Steelcase has closed a number of buildings in the past few years, including its pretentious pyramid office building and, more importantly to workers, its 206-acre manufacturing campus adjacent to the headquarters building. At the same time, it has established manufacturing facilities in Mexico, among other locations. Suddenly, the facilities here have become “excess.” The Press reporters could have asked “why?” but they didn’t.
2. Examining the NAFTA factor. Pinning Holquist down on the “excess manufacturing capacity” quote could have led to interesting revelations about how NAFTA may have led to Steelcase’s abandonment of the West Michigan area. It fits as part of a general deindustrialization of the United States.
Since NAFTA was initiated in 1994, net manufacturing employment in this country has declined by more than 5 million jobs. Companies have also used the threat of moving jobs across borders to undercut union negotiations. NAFTA has authored other disasters, such as the decimation in Mexico of the ejidos, communal land holdings by villages, which have crumpled under U.S. capitalist acquisitions. It’s caused destruction of the country’s agricultural system by agribusiness. Although Canada initially seemed to enjoy gains from NAFTA, it too is feeling the trade agreement’s downside as U.S. corporations, greedy for larger profit margins, are pulling jobs from Canada and moving them to locations with cheaper labor forces and fewer regulations. NAFTA is also seen as a way of undermining Canadian control of Canada, lowering demand for Canadian-made products and weakening the country’s social programs.
But from a purely capitalist viewpoint, NAFTA’s elimination of tariffs makes shifting jobs both possible and profitable. Since Steelcase states it is going to reduce its costs by $35 million a year, and it has facilities in place in Mexico, are those gains going to come from the cheaper labor, the elimination of benefits, and fewer manufacturing regulations made possible by NAFTA? This question went unasked.
3. Questions about Steelcase’s resistance to unionization. Since the Steelcase scenario all through the last decade might have played out very differently had workers been unionized, the corporation’s role in discouraging and breaking up union organization activities could have cast a different light on the current situation. Exploring this issue was an obvious, but overlooked, piece of the puzzle by the Press reporters.
Most notably, in 1993, a strong effort to unionize among the manufacturing workers at Steelcase was squelched, partly with threats of massive layoffs by then-president Jerry Myers. Myers, the first CEO of the company who was neither a family member or a longtime Steelcase employee, was highly unpopular for his vision of a “leaner, internationally competitive company.”
Prior to his advent, both white-collar and blue-collar employees had been used to relative transparency in the way that their wages, benefits, and information about the company’s planning were handled. But Myers began implementing harsh work rules in the manufacturing sites, cutting back on benefit packages, and slashing profit-sharing checks. Workers initiated meetings with the Teamsters and the UAW to protect their job security.
Myers retaliated with threats of widespread job cuts, and did not reveal that the company was actually showing signs of emerging from the recession of the early 90s, an upswing that then continued through most of the decade. The entire stand-off came to an end with the firing of Myers in 1994, termed a “resignation.” The layoffs that came afterward were minimal and most were short-term. Plant employees felt this was a sign that they did not need to unionize after all.
What most workers did not realize at the time was that they may have been played. The company was weathering a crisis due to a death in the family that released nearly 1 million shares of the company’s privately held stock, shares which were sold to “outsiders,” or non-family members. This ultimately led to the company going public in 1998—and a public stock offering would have been much less profitable if the company had a unionized work force.
To replace Myers, Steelcase brought in Jim Hackett—who went right ahead with Myers’ plans, taking Steelcase “‘back to basics’ through a number of Myers’s cost-cutting and international expansion initiatives [that] were left in place.”
4. Pinning down Steelcase’s actual intentions for its West Michigan work force. It’s pretty hard to see Steelcase’s presence evaporating from the West Michigan scene and still choke down the idea that it will remain “the most significant node in our manufacturing,” as Jeanine Holquist stated.
Significance is relative. Once the largest employer in the area, Steelcase has led its now-skeletal work force through one shock wave after another in the past 10 years. In 2001, the company eliminated 1,100 jobs from its Grand Rapids operations, including a full 10 percent of its manufacturing workers. Wages and salaries were “restructured” and mostly reduced. Later that same year Jim Hackett approved a 5 percent raise for himself and other top executives in the firm.
More layoffs for the area followed. In 2002, 150 jobs here were cut. Six years later, in 2008, the company announced the elimination of 300 jobs in the area. In between, these numbers have apparently been augmented by ongoing job eliminations and terminations at the company which have flown mostly under the media radar. After today’s announced job eliminations, the company will have “just under 3,000 employees” in both blue- and white-collar positions here in Grand Rapids. That’s down from over 9,000 employees a decade ago. The math shows that the job-loss bleeding has been ongoing.
The Grand Rapids Press reporters could have asked the hard question: Will Steelcase even be here in five years? Ten years? And just how much more will the company disrupt the lives of residents here in its endless quest to provide investors with increasing profits year after year?
5. Including the voice of the workers. As is the case with most of the Grand Rapids Press’s reporting, the article contained only the corporate point of view, the capitalists’ rationalizations for their decisions, and the barest information about the company’s future plans.
The coverage of this announcement is silent about the workers themselves—both those who will be losing their jobs and those who will be expected to continue working in an environment of distrust and insecurity. The Grand Rapids Press needs to give these folks a platform or at least present their side of this story.
Soon there will be more unemployed workers, more families without incomes, added to the thousands of people in this area who have lost good-paying jobs over the past years because of Steelcase’s corporate gamesmanship. They must have something to say, and it would be valuable to reach beyond the corporate double-talk and let them speak.
Can “Tattoos on the Heart” Erase Injustice in the ‘Hood?
Fr. Gregory Boyle SJ, Jesuit priest and executive director of Homeboy Industries, delivered the Jan. 12 January Series presentation, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.
With the wit of a wizened comedian and an obvious heart for his work, Boyle shared a series of anecdotes that illustrated his ministry to people involved in gang life in Los Angeles, California.
The first observation made upon entering the Ladie’s Literary Club, one of the remote locations broadcasting the talk live, was that all but one person attending was White. Perhaps attendance at the main auditorium and other locations was more representative of other ethnicities. This left the writer to wonder if this ministry, like many other outreach programs to African American youth, was more focused on helping individuals find a way to “be productive citizens” of our White dominated society rather than addressing the systemic causes of gang activity.
Homeboy Industries is the largest such outreach to people involved in gangs in North America, serving more than 1,000 people each month. According to its Web site, it provides wrap-around support services that include “case management, education, job training, employment counseling, legal services, mental health counseling, twelve step meetings, and tattoo removal … Many gang members have visible tattoos that inhibit their ability to secure employment, thus we offer free tattoo removal.”
Because of the difficulty in placing people who have been involved with gangs or have felony records, Homeboy Industries employs hundreds of clients in its screen print, merchandise sales, bakery and restaurant, the Homegirl Café.
“We stand at the margins with the powerless, the voiceless, those who have burdens more than they can bear, those to whom dignity is denied, the easily despised and readily left out, the demonized so that the demonizing will stop,” Boyle said. “No kinship, no justice. No kinship, no peace. If kinship were our (world’s) goal, we would no longer be promoting justice, we would be celebrating it.”
While Boyle’s whole heart is obviously in his work and his presentation left no doubt that he has real love and concern for those he works to help, his use of gang dialect and specific anecdotes to elicit laughter from the predominantly white audience seemed to perpetuate a paternalistic “us-versus-them” mentality.
Why do young people join gangs in the first place? According to Boyle, it is because of a “lethal lack of hope.” He did not go further during this talk to cite where that lack of hope originates. Neither does the Web site mention systemic issues such as racism, white privilege, classism, lack of employment offering a living wage, lack of access to nutritious foods, environmental racism or lack of access to quality education. In addition, there is the whole issue of a prison industrial complex that makes huge profits on the backs of our minority populations.
GRIID made a call to Detroit community organizer, Yusef Shakur, to discuss these omissions. A former gang member, Shakur returned to his Detroit neighborhood after serving a prison sentence. He has since worked not only as a community organizer but also as a Head Start teacher, youth mentor and business owner.
“I always heard people condemn me for being a gang banger but no one asked me ‘Why?’ For the most part, gang culture is the by-product of social decay, the social let-down of human beings. It’s a reflection of family breakdown. All those aspects we find within our communities, we find within ourselves,” Shakur said. “We are imitating the society we live in. Most young men growing up in a hostile urban environment take on the characteristics of their environment. (An environment with) a lack of consistent resources: social, economical, political and cultural. The fundamental answer is creating a strong foundation. After years and years of indoctrination, you become immune to being shot. You see your homeboys get shot . . . Trauma occurs psychologically. It spiritually damages to the point they grow up in a hopeless environment and that hopelessness takes root in their souls.”
(Shakur recounts his journey from gang member to community organizer in his autobiography, The Window to My Soul.)
Greg Boyle no doubt is doing great work in Los Angeles. In his talk, he mentioned that Los Angeles is home to 86,000 gang members. Turning around 1,000 lives a month could be called a miracle. However, we need more than a miracle. We need to build movements that confront the systems engendering classism, racism and all the other “isms” creating this “lethal lack of hope” within our nation’s urban centers.
IWW to host screening of The Corporation in Grand Rapids 1/20
The Grand Rapids branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) we be hosting a screening of the documentary film The Corporation.
Provoking, witty, stylish and sweepingly informative, THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Part film and part movement, The Corporation is transforming audiences and dazzling critics with its insightful and compelling analysis. Taking its status as a legal “person” to the logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask, “What kind of person is it?” The Corporation includes interviews with 40 corporate insiders and critics – including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Milton Friedman, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva and Michael Moore – plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.
The screening will be on Thursday, January 20 at 6pm in the IATSE Labor Hall located at 931 Bridge St, NW in Grand Rapids. The screening is free and open to the public. There will be a discussion after the film.
