Category Archives: Race

The White Working Class Vs The Southern White Working Class

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Kevin Drum, on a survey of white working-class voters.

Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, don’t really have a huge “white working class problem.” What they have is a huge Southern problem.…

in the West, Midwest, and Northeast, the white working class vote is fairly evenly split. Romney is slightly ahead in the West and Northeast, while Obama is slightly ahead in the Midwest. It’s only in the South that the white working class vote is overwhelmingly Republican, and this is what skews the national results, which show Romney ahead 48%-35%.

Applied Research Center Report: Nitty-Gritty on Green Jobs in the Hood

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If you’re interested in learning more about the nuts and bolts issues behind yesterday’s post — about what it would take to create green jobs that would help folks in poor neighborhoods get out of poverty — you should check out the Applied Research Center’s report, Green Equity Toolkit: Standards and Strategies for Advancing Race, Gender, and Equity in the Green Economy. Although it was written in 2009, it’s still one of the best summaries out there.

Radical Algebra and Ella Baker-Style Organizing

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After hearing a talk by civil rights veteran Robert Moses about the possibility of transforming the DC school system using a similar style of community organizing to the one he and other SNCC members used in the Mississippi Delta, I’ve been reading a book he cowrote, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, about an organizing project he helped develop to change the way math is taught in inner-city schools. In the book, there’s a great quote about the difference between education researchers and Ella Baker-style community organizers:

Working in the tradition of Ella Baker, the community organizer seeking an innovative breakthrough in education will use the principle of “cast down your bucket where you are.” The organizer becomes part of the community, learning from it, becoming aware of its strengths, resources, concerns, and ways of doing business. The organizer does not have a complete answer in advance – the researcher’s detailed comprehensive plans for remedying a perceived problem. The organizer wants to construct a solution with the community. He or she understands that the community’s everyday concerns can be transformed into broader questions of general import. The form of these questions and actions that follow from them are not always known in advance. I did not know that my concern for [his daughter] Maisha’s math education would lead to the Algebra Project’s raising questions about ability grouping, effective teaching for the children of color, experiential learning, and community participation in educational decision-making. I pulled these issues up flycast at my bucket. Finally, unlike the researcher, the organizer helps community members air their opinions, question one another, and then build consensus, a process that usually takes a great amount of time to complete.

This is a long journey and not a linear progression. It is a journey with zigs and zags, a process of push and pull, if you are successful in some classrooms, that gives you an opening to approach the community. In order to get into all the classrooms, however – to all the students – we need the community’s political commitment and clout. You have to work both sides of the street at the same time. You have to learn how to move effectively in all arenas. I have thought of the Algebra Project as a young child who is trying to stand up and teetering and falling down a little, then getting back up, falling down a little, and getting back up again.… It doesn’t really matter how many times young children fall down, they keep getting up, attempting to walk. Probably part of the reason that happens is that they have a lot of people around them who are walking. (pp. 112-3)

I’m not sure how this ties back to my framework. Clearly it’s got something to do with how you think about power and shaping the economy from a Movement Perspective, but beyond that I can’t put the connection in the words. But it feels like there’s something important in what he’s saying that goes beyond community organizing, that ties back in a deep and powerful way to how we should think about the economy. So for now, I’ll just let it simmer on the back burner.

Southern Grassroots Economy Project

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Over the holiday break, I ended up watching two very interesting videos from the March founding conference of the Southern Grassroots Economy Project. According to their website:

SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on not just getting a piece of the pie but developing cooperative business and making our own pies.


The folks who attended the Southern Grassroots Economy Project were from cooperatives or cooperative networks all across the South. And as you would expect from a founding conference held in the Appalachians at the Highlander Research and Education Center, they’re trying to do so in a way that is also focused on movement building.

Given the South’s rich history of cooperatives and fighting for social justice, it’ll be interesting to see what they’re able to pull off. Stay tuned for more info in the spring, when they’re getting together again in Epes, Alabama, at the Rural Training Center of The Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

"Occupy the Hood"

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Another good sign for Occupy Wall Street’s future: a new group called “Occupy the Hood.”

Founded by Malik Rhasaan, 39 of Queens, N.Y., and Ife Johari Uhuru, 35, based in Detroit, @OccupyTheHood has close to 3,500 followers on Twitter, the growing support of notable figures and a cadre of volunteers devoted to getting the word out about the cause of the protests to African Americans and Latinos.

Rhasaan told Loop 21, Occupy The Hood has six core volunteers, but he’s already seen “Occupy The Hood” carried by people he’s never met

Like many others, he was initially just curious about the protests.

“It was a news story and I’ve always been interested in what’s going on in our country,” Rhassan said via phone from the protests, where a police officer had asked him to move along. “I was just going down and really, just being nosy to see how honest it was. I realized there was a solid movement but that there weren’t enough black and Latinos.”

@OccupytheHood is Rhassan’s first Twitter account, and since he created it he has linked with thousands of followers, including Cornel West. He said he wants to use the account “as a springboard to address other things, whether it be crime or health issues in our communities. But we in the inner-city doesn’t know how this pertains to us. We don’t tie our issues to Wall Street.”

It’s depressing and infuriating that in 2011, our side still doesn’t take diversity & racism seriously enough that a group like Occupy the Hood was needed. But the fact that this early in Occupy Wall Street’s history two guys who are not, as far as I can tell, hard-core professional organizers could make something like this happen so quickly is an encouraging indicator of where this movement/happening might go.

Race and the Livability Movement

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The movement to create “livable communities” – communities where you don’t have to own a car to get around – is pretty white. But there’s no reason it has to be. DCStreetsBlog ‘s Tanya Snyder sums up a new study by the Centers For Disease Control:

The CDC asked people how “street-scale urban design policies” (read: sidewalks, lighting) affect their level of physical activity. Overall, about 57 percent of adults said these neighborhood features were “moderately” or “very” important – but people of color placed far greater importance on those factors in the built environment than the white people surveyed.

In fact, 50.5 percent of black respondents and 40.6 percent of Hispanic respondents said neighborhood features were “very important” in determining their level of physical activity. Only 26.9 percent of the white people surveyed gave that answer….

people of color are also more willing than white people to take civic action on neighborhood issues. It found that 58.8 percent of blacks said they were willing to write letters to elected officials about neighborhood livability issues, as well as 47.8 percent of Hispanics. Only 36.7 percent of whites were willing to write letters, though more of them were willing to pay more property taxes for better neighborhood design. Blacks were less willing to do that – but 6.3 percent of them (and 5.8 percent of Hispanics) were interested in running for office to support neighborhood improvements. Only 3.2 percent of whites were willing to go that far.

So if folks in the Livability movement want to reach out to a more diverse audience, what do they need to do? They could follow in the footsteps of Adolfo Hernandez, director of outreach and advocacy for Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance:

“We targeted five communities along Chicago’s west side,” Hernandez says. “And when we started this work, they were all pretty hesitant. At the time, we were the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, so it sounded like some cycling club.”

But it wasn’t just the name change that helped build trust and partnership with these groups. Active Trans went to community members where they were – at PTA meetings and block parties – and engaged them on the issues that were important to them. They realized that violence, or the perception of violence, was at least as significant a barrier as traffic in encouraging community members to use parks and go outside. They partnered with them on issues like housing access and jobs. And they linked all of these issues back to changes in the built environment that would improve their quality of life. “Now we have African-American and Latino community-based organizations going to their councilmen and alderman and asking for bicycle and pedestrian improvements,” says Hernandez.

In short, if Livability advocates want to create a more diverse movement, they need to go to where folks are and get to know their world – not bad advice, in general, for reaching out to other communities (e.g., folks in rural areas).

Krugman, Environmental Economics, and Racism

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I’ve been reading responses to Paul Krugman’s great piece last Sunday on Building a Green Economy. One of the striking things about these responses is that almost nobody seems to be talking about one glaring omission: environmental justice.

Krugman argues that when free markets do damage, there are basically two ways you can solve the problem. You can Just Say No — limit what comes out of car tailpipes, smokestacks, etc. That works pretty well for simple situations. But for more complex situations,

it does not offer any scope for flexibility and creativity. Consider the biggest environmental issue of the 1980s — acid rain. Emissions of sulfur dioxide from power plants, it turned out, tend to combine with water downwind and produce flora- and wildlife-destroying sulfuric acid. In 1977, the government made its first stab at confronting the issue, recommending that all new coal-fired plants have scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide from their emissions. Imposing a tough standard on all plants was problematic, because retrofitting some older plants would have been extremely expensive. By regulating only new plants, however, the government passed up the opportunity to achieve fairly cheap pollution control at plants that were, in fact, easy to retrofit. Short of a de facto federal takeover of the power industry, with federal officials issuing specific instructions to each plant, how was this conundrum to be resolved?

The answer: the 1990 Clean Air Act, which created a Cap and Trade system for sulfur dioxide emissions. Instead of a blizzard of mandates covering every type of plant and unusual circumstance, the government created a market in emissions. The end result:

over time sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants were cut almost in half, at a much lower cost than even optimists expected; electricity prices fell instead of rising.

Krugman says the Climate Crisis is a similar problem.

the very scale and complexity of the situation requires a market-based solution…. After all, greenhouse gases are a direct or indirect byproduct of almost everything produced in a modern economy, from the houses we live in to the cars we drive. Reducing emissions of those gases will require getting people to change their behavior in many different ways, some of them impossible to identify until we have a much better grasp of green technology. So can we really make meaningful progress by telling people specifically what will or will not be permitted?
…
A market-based system would create decentralized incentives to do the right thing, and that’s the only way it can be done.

But what about folks in Chula Vista who we met last week? They had to fight to block the expansion of a fossil fuel plant that would have been located 350 feet from folks’ homes and 1,300 feet from a local elementary school. In their community, a market-based system does not create “incentives to do the right thing.”

Krugman and I don’t have to worry about a fossil fuel plant being dropped in our neighborhoods. Zoning blocks those belching monstrosities. Even if it didn’t, the combination of government rules & desires price the land in our neighborhoods way out of a fossil fuel plant’s price range.

And then there’s our political power. In our neighborhoods, it’s a bear to get permission to build more housing. A fossil fuel plant near the school where kids go to? Politicians would fall over themselves to crush that project.

Ditto for a giant bus depot like the one spewing diesel pollution in WE ACT’s neighborhood. Some of my neighbors freak out when their kids’ food is exposed to plastic bottles or bags. How do you think they’d react to a depot that would send lots of our kids to the hospital with bad asthma attacks?

In short, Krugman’s market-based solution can work reasonably well for our neighborhoods. But it fails poor neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods where lots of poor folks of color live. The market puts a low value on these neighborhoods. Between their low market value and paltry political power, they’re going to end up on the shit end of the stick unless big changes are made to a market-based solution.

We don’t live in a perfect world. No solution to the Climate Crisis will put the same burdens on everyone. But there is something seriously wrong when a great liberal like Krugman advocates for a market-based solution without incorporating the need for justice.

Green Signs of Hope

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If you’re feeling blue about our side’s chances of getting its act together, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and several other environmental justice organizations from around the country just released a report you should check out: Environmental Justice and the Green Economy. The report lays out three principles for building a just, sustainable economy:

1. Strives for full democratic participation.

2. Builds capacity for a truly sustainable infrastructure and green economy.

3. Creates and share “green” wealth.

The rest of the report shows how groups around the country are fighting for this vision.

Take Harlan County, Kentucky. You probably know about the environmental devastation caused by strip top mining. At the same time, most folks in Harlan County are in a no-win situation.

There are few employment alternatives to coal-related jobs, even as coal employment in Kentucky is a third of what it was 30 years ago, largely due to the increased mechanization of the industry. Large absentee landlords and local land-owners are unaccountable to new forms of economic development. The local elite maintain tight control over politics, commerce, and public life in this region.

But folks are fighting back, in part through a statewide organization called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC). Continue reading →

Heck of a Job, Wired!

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According to Wired’s Spencer Reiss, Copenhagen is too little too late:

The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.”

But fear not — technology will save us!

Coastal communities, for example, will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising (it won’t). They’ll survive because they’ll learn to adapt—much as the Dutch have done since the Middle Ages.

I’ve got one word for you, Spencer: Katrina.

I don’t know how anyone could see how our country abandoned our poor brothers and sisters during & after Katrina and think technology will save us. Maybe it’s the “us” where Spencer is having trouble opening his imagination; guys like him don’t worry that our government would abandon them.

But it wasn’t just poor folks of color our country abandoned. Here’s how well we’ve “adapted” to Katrina’s lessons:

Three days before the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), a coalition of 17 advocacy groups today urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to honor President Obama’s priority in his budget and campaign “to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.”…

The severity of Katrina’s damage in Louisiana was caused, in part, by the fact that the state has lost 1/3 of its original wetlands – about 2,000 square miles — an area larger than Delaware.

“Scientists agree that these lost wetlands could have helped reduce Katrina’s storm surge,” said Charles Allen, assistant director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. “Wetlands are ‘horizontal levees’ that in many cases are more economical and effective at damage prevention than man-made vertical levees because they absorb storm energy, slow incoming waves, wind, and surge waters. It is widely recognized that we urgently need to restore these wetlands and coastal forests to prevent similar or worse storm damage in the future.”

Despite these facts, four years after Katrina, Congress has been unable to fund major coastal restoration projects it authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not completed the projects’ design and engineering.

In the face of these facts, how can Spencer write:

Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power.

Who does he think is going to pay for building a system like this for Africa?

Spencer isn’t completely clueless. At one point he hints at the bigger issue:

But won’t the transition to a warmer world be painful? The honest answer is that we don’t know. It depends on the resources we can bring to bear, technological and otherwise.

But that’s about it.

Look, I love Wired as much as the next geek. But it’s stunning that after decades of political deadlock over stopping global warming, Wired assumes politics will disappear when we try to cope with global warming’s aftermath.

Spencer’s article appeared in the same issue as Wired’s holiday gift guide; here’s my recommendation for Spencer.

Why Green for All Can Be Hard to Pull Off

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It’s not surprising most cities’ green plans are giving poor communities of color the short end of the stick. Many cities have basically written off these communities. But there are also unique issues that make a truly just green plan hard to pull off.

For starters, it’s hard to help folks in low income communities of color get access to green jobs when there aren’t many green jobs.

While these efforts are promising, by and large, most cities report that “green jobs” remain a concept — a target more than a reality. Some initial programs stalled, after cities discovered they were training workers for jobs that don’t yet exist. In Memphis, Tenn., officials were about to start adding solar installation training to a successful prisoner reentry program, which offers job training to low-level offenders. In the course of researching the program, however, they discovered that almost no one was actually purchasing solar systems in the city, leading them to focus instead on attracting solar companies before they start the job training program.

Ironically, Obama’s stimulus plan gives out a ton of cash for creating green jobs — a lot more than enviros had fought for the past. But, like the stimulus plan more generally, it’s nowhere near the amount of money we need to spend.

Even where green jobs exist, cities will have to change their strategy for economic development to fit these new green opportunities.

To attract jobs, traditionally, cities have focused on traditional business incentive packages, which favor largescale corporations, luring them to come or stay with promises of lower taxes, reduced utilities and developed infrastructure. That model may work for a large wind turbine manufacturer, but the green jobs sector in any given city is much more likely to rely upon dozens of smaller companies, such as contractors who do rehab work in homes or who install solar panels. The challenge for cities will be to adapt their existing strategies to the smallscale, dynamic green jobs sector.

The shift towards green jobs will also demand that cities rework traditional workforce development. This is a system that is typically uncoordinated and disconnected from local employers. Understanding the demand side will entail tremendous effort as these new green skills are just now being deciphered. Green jobs, like many other parts of the economy, demand different types of workers, from skilled carpenters and electricians to landscapers and mechanics, each with their own existing experience, and unique needs for new skills. And the potential employer will not just be a hospital chain or a school system but dozens or even hundreds of small shops and firms.

Another issue that makes Green For All tricky to pull off is that success, particularly smart growth-friendly “transit-oriented development” can ” propel gentrification, leading to skyrocketing rents in newly hip neighborhoods.” Cities are trying several strategies to avoid this problem.

In the Twin Cities, advocates, policymakers and funders are developing plans to ensure that neighborhoods along the corridor stay affordable for current residents. One idea they’re exploring is creating a land trust to preemptively buy up land around the corridor so it is secured for future affordable housing development. Similar efforts are underway in various neighborhoods in the Bay Area…. Advocates and funders elsewhere are exploring less costly strategies, including zoning rules, community benefit agreements, tax increment financing and other means to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its full potential to boost neighborhoods while not ignoring the fates of its poorer residents.

So yes, it isn’t easy. But that’s no excuse for not trying. It’s not like stopping global warming is easy either.

And if cities — and enviros — don’t work hard to ensure that everybody benefits it’ll make stopping global warming all that much harder. The single biggest argument against seriously stepping it up to stopping global warming is that too many folks will lose their jobs or will be financially crippled by the cost of stopping global warming. If you want to counter this argument, the best way is to show that you’re serious about making life better for everybody.