An episode of The PJs (1999-2001) is on my list of must-see Christmas specials. Eddie Murphy was a creator of this cartoon which is easily one of his most underappreciated works. The special is a hood version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and, like the other episodes in the series, is a hilarious take on life in a high-rise housing project during the 1980s/1990s era. For those of us who lived that life, the show is able to generate laughter and positive memories of community to coincide with depictions of the difficult circumstances that experts came to label as “failed housing policy”. For …

An episode of The PJs (1999-2001) is on my list of must-see Christmas specials. Eddie Murphy was a creator of this cartoon which is easily one of his most underappreciated works. The special is a hood version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and, like the other episodes in the series, is a hilarious take on life in a high-rise housing project during the 1980s/1990s era.

For those of us who lived that life, the show is able to generate laughter and positive memories of community to coincide with depictions of the difficult circumstances that experts came to label as “failed housing policy”. For me, and no doubt others, living in The PJs was my earliest lesson in how little black lives can matter in communities across America.

My family lived in San Francisco’s Geneva Towers, a high-rise low-income building similar to those in other cities including the infamous Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. These complexes shared similar challenges rooted in failures to properly fund maintenance and upkeep–irregular access to basics like power and water, filthy common areas, frequently broken elevators with several flights of stairs to climb, diminished safety measures linked to elevated crime, and the isolation that comes from living in a part of town that most members of the larger community are too fearful to visit.

I, and possibly many of the other black children in urban high-rise projects, was left to make sense of the world and to ask the question of “why do I deserve to live this way?” My guess is that most didn’t have a nuanced answer to that question, just hurt. Scars were created that run deep and that may never fully heal.

But the nation eventually made a course correction. HUD took action–for example it foreclosed on the private owners who were receiving government subsidies to run Geneva Towers. And, in 1989, Congress created the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing which led to important reforms. The federal Hope VI program helped tear down dilapidated housing with the goal of deconcentrating poverty and creating mixed-income properties. The good models that were created moved the dial in a positive direction. Bad public housing still exists in some communities but the housing world is drastically different than it was in the 1980s.

As these events unfolded, I pursued secondary and higher education and eventually became an advocate for the poor. At which point, I was bearing witness to an important new chapter in the urban housing story–black families with children being seven times more likely to live in homeless shelters than their white counterparts.

It was evident that the reforms designed to address the problems impacting my childhood had, by the 2000s, contributed to at least one new and significant challenge–increased family homelessness. The nation did not replace all the public housing units it tore down. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition has estimated that Hope VI resulted in a loss of more than 100,000 housing units.

Other factors have compounded this problem, including skyrocketing housing prices over the last couple decades. Increasing numbers of people were in need of affordable housing as the number of available units was on the decline. As a result, in 2012 there was a shortage of 7.1 million affordable rental units for extremely low-income households. The nation’s public schools enrolled 1.3 million identified homeless children and youth during the 2012-2013 school year.

Homelessness is the “new PJs” for this generation, or the new type of housing situation that is unacceptable for children. Young people live in homeless shelters, motels, or with an ever rotating list of family and friends. They are more likely to miss school, experience food insecurity, and have health problems. Frequently on the move, they worry about where they’re going to sleep tomorrow or the next day which leads to toxic stress and negative impacts on mental health and physical development.

My guess is that these children also wonder, “What did I do to deserve to live this way?” In short, homelessness is creating scars that run deep and that may never fully heal.

Creating housing policy that doesn’t traumatize small children should be a low bar to meet, but somehow it has been a struggle. Recent Obama Administration action will finally fund the National Housing Trust Fund (after six years of effort) via contributions from the reconstituted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an extremely important step. But vigilance over its implementation, and other means of expanding the availability of affordable housing, must remain a priority if America truly believes that all its children matter.

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Upgrading Black Children From the Projects to Homelessness?

On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense stood in front of the California state capitol and read Executive Mandate #1. Seale and others were protesting the state legislatures’ decision to pass a bill to disarm the Panthers. However, Seale did not view the treatment of the Black Panther Party as a singular issue. In fact, it was quite the opposite. In Executive Mandate #1 Seale was clear that what was happening to African Americans was connected to colonialism, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war in Vietnam. Seale argued that collectively, these actions showed that the “racist power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror, and the big stick…

On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense stood in front of the California state capitol and read Executive Mandate #1. Seale and others were protesting the state legislatures’ decision to pass a bill to disarm the Panthers. However, Seale did not view the treatment of the Black Panther Party as a singular issue. In fact, it was quite the opposite. In Executive Mandate #1 Seale was clear that what was happening to African Americans was connected to colonialism, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war in Vietnam. Seale argued that collectively, these actions showed that the “racist power structure of America has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror, and the big stick.” The black community had “begged, prayed, petitioned, and demonstrated to get America to right the wrongs which had been perpetrated against black people.” But all of these efforts had been answered by “more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy,” Seale declared.

Bobby Seale consistently argued that these issues were inextricably linked. He knew racism played a role in the atomic bombings, war in Vietnam, and of course the treatment of African Americans at home. Now almost fifty years later, all of these issues are again at the forefront. With the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the country has exploded in protests and acts of civil disobedience. At the same time, the world found out just how bad the U.S. tortured people during the Bush years and remains at war. And as these events unfolded, over 800 delegates from approximately 160 nations gathered in Vienna for the third Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons with strong support from Africa and Latin America. Of course the common denominator in the use of nuclear weapons, torture, and police brutality is the victims were nonwhite.

Bobby Seale understood how these issues were connected. Of course he was not alone. Since 1945, many inside the black community have consistently argued that the black freedom movement, peace, and nuclear weapons were part of the same fight. Sadly, one cannot possibly be shocked that the police, who are agents of the state, would shoot unarmed black men and then describe them as “it” and “demons” when one reads the grotesque ways in which the U.S. tortured nonwhite people abroad, and have repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons on nonwhite people around the world.

What recent events show is that now, just like in the 1960s, activists need to fight on multiple fronts. While President Obama banned torture his second day in office, activists need to make sure in his last two years Obama eliminates nuclear weapons, ends military engagements in the Middle East, and creates a division in the Justice Department to investigate police shootings and misconduct.

Like many, I am not sure how these things will play out. I don’t know if these protests will evolve into a new movement or when these wars will end. However, what I am sure of, and what has become increasingly clear over the last few months is that Malcolm X was right: “it’s not an issue of civil rights, but human rights.” And however activists proceed in 2015, Malcolm’s words should be the guiding principle for all actions to come.

Vincent Intondi is an Associate Professor of History at Montgomery College and Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. His forthcoming book, African Americans Against the Bomb examines the role of black antinuclear activists.

Link:  

On the Connections Between Police Brutality, Torture, and Nuclear Weapons

In a recent New York Times article, Taiye Selasi offers this resonant insight on nationality and identity in relation to the recent Michael Brown case: “that we don’t hear of American-on-American violence as we hear of black-on-black crime suggests that the identity ‘American’ does not, as advertised, imply a single community.” The phrase “American-on-American violence” describes aptly the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the too many unarmed black victims — men and women — of police violence since 1999. This hyper-racial (as opposed to post-racial) moment, overflowing with examples of lethal police brutality, harkens back — as Alice Walker meditates …

In a recent New York Times article, Taiye Selasi offers this resonant insight on nationality and identity in relation to the recent Michael Brown case: “that we don’t hear of American-on-American violence as we hear of black-on-black crime suggests that the identity ‘American’ does not, as advertised, imply a single community.” The phrase “American-on-American violence” describes aptly the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the too many unarmed black victims — men and women — of police violence since 1999.

This hyper-racial (as opposed to post-racial) moment, overflowing with examples of lethal police brutality, harkens back — as Alice Walker meditates on in her recent poem, “Gather” — to those horrific practices of American-on-American violence historically known as lynching. Lynching involved citizen-led, ritualistic acts of public violence sometimes witnessed by large throngs of people, including children. An estimated 3,445 blacks died at the hands of lynch mobs between 1882 and 1968. Lynched bodies, the “Strange Fruit” Billie Holiday memorializes in her haunting and iconic recording, swinging from tree limbs or otherwise grotesquely displayed in full view, spoke the terror — the racial terrorism — that would come to others if they, too, stepped “out of line.”

In Without Sanctuary, collector James Allen catalogs photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout the United States. The images collected in Without Sanctuary reflect what the historical record indicates: that the majority of victims of lynching were African American men, though it is also important to note that African American women and women and men of other ethnicities (for instance, Irish and Italian immigrants) were also lynched. Lynching, then, was a set of violent rituals used to police and punish the “Other,” and to set clear boundaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

One postcard in Without Sanctuary is inscribed with this note: “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe.” Repeated references to “barbecues” and “main fare,” Allen notes in Without Sanctuary, are found often in lynching-related correspondence. This particular postcard also features an advertising stamp, “katy electric studios temple texas. h. lippe prop,” revealing that, at times, these events were planned ahead, and professional photographers were hired to photograph them. Photographers would then produce and sell prints (in the hundreds and occasionally the thousands) as souvenirs.

Attendees and participants in lynchings would often mail these photographs and postcards through the United States Postal Service to friends and family in the same spirit as one might post photographs on Facebook today: as a general update or as a way to share the experience with those who could not attend. On one postcard, for instance, the sender wrote, “All ok and would like to get a post from you. Bill, This was some Raw Bunch.” The postcard’s front border reads, in handwritten script, “LYNCHING SCENE, DALLAS, MARCH 3, 1910.” One of the most complex postcards includes a portrait of the victim, Will James, surrounded by four images showing the stages of his lynching and the burial of his ashes.

On occasion, such images were sent to other possible victims as warnings. Mailing these images meant that the results of lynchings were witnessed not only within the communities in which they occurred, but also were replicated, transmitted, and amplified for viewers sorting, transporting, and receiving these pieces of mail, effectively broadening the reach of these events. By 1908, the practice of mailing postcards or other visible forms of lynching images was so popular that the Postmaster General of the United States, through an addition to the Cromstock Laws, banned the mailing of the written messages that often inscribed these images.

There are certainly important differences between the ritualistic acts of violence called lynchings and the most recent yet systemic violence at the hands of police against black people. In terms of image transmission in particular, rather than sent through the United States mail, personally recorded video of police brutality and its aftermath is now recorded by smartphone and transmitted to millions through social media outlets — evidence of the disease of American racism gone viral. The intent of sharing these images, of course, is starkly different from the intent of those who sent lynching images through the mail. People sharing, for instance, the Eric Garner video, seek justice for the victim, a purpose resonant with Mamie Till’s decision to allow her son’s mutilated, lynched body to be viewed at his funeral, and photographs to be reprinted in national newspapers and magazines. Today, videos, memes, hashtags, recordings of a victim’s final pleas, post-Grand Jury explanations, protesting and all the forms protesting takes — all of it is part of the spectacle and sonics of 21st century lynching, the spectacle and sonics of a New Jim Crow.

Yet there are parallels between the violence of the past and the perpetual violence we are witnessing in the present. While the intent might not be such, while these killings may not be illegal, the message repeatedly in these instances of violence and death is that black lives don’t matter. When we watch an officer aggressively hold a man in a chokehold until he can no longer breathe, and that same officer on a second video moments later nonchalantly peering into the camera, it looks like black lives don’t matter. Or when a black teenager’s body is left out in the open for public view for at least four hours in the high heat of August, it looks like black lives don’t matter. Or when our judicial system doesn’t seem to know how to adequately speak to these instances of American-on-American violence, we can’t help but think that while the intent may not be such, the message communicated is that black lives don’t matter in the larger fabric of our society. As difficult as it is to contend with, the history of lynching and our contemporary moment of violence against black people reminds us that the devaluation of black life in America is as old as this nation. And it still exists, daily resuscitating the need for us to utter in chorus the otherwise muted truth that should be self-evident: Black lives do and have always mattered.

As we wrestle with two Grand Jury decisions not to indict police officers for murder and United Nations concerns regarding a “pattern of impunity” concerning victims of color in the American judicial system, as demonstrators of all hues flood the streets here and abroad in protest, I am reminded of anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells. Wells, an African American journalist who often sent detectives to investigate individual lynchings and published their reports, explained that she published these findings “to give the public the facts, in the belief that there is still a sense of justice in the American people, and that it will yet assert itself in condemnation of outlawry and in defense of oppressed and persecuted humanity.” It is this sense of justice that now must compel this nation and its law enforcement agencies towards acting justly. Or are we living in a moment without sanctuary?

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Without Sanctuary?: On Lynching in the 21st Century

Racism is one of those unique words in our lexicon that embodies a slippery slope of understanding, belying a comprehensive definition. One says it, what do they mean? Another hears it, what did they hear? As a result, charges of racism can sometimes intersect with absurdity. If reports are accurate, a number of law students at UCLA are the latest example of applying an absurd standard under the rubric of racism. In the aftermath of the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri that decided not to charge officer Darren Wilson of shooting Michael Brown, constitutional law professor, Robert Goldstein queried his students whether Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, should face indictment for shouting “burn this b—- down!” The crux of the issue was whether…

Racism is one of those unique words in our lexicon that embodies a slippery slope of understanding, belying a comprehensive definition.

One says it, what do they mean? Another hears it, what did they hear? As a result, charges of racism can sometimes intersect with absurdity.

If reports are accurate, a number of law students at UCLA are the latest example of applying an absurd standard under the rubric of racism.

In the aftermath of the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri that decided not to charge officer Darren Wilson of shooting Michael Brown, constitutional law professor, Robert Goldstein queried his students whether Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, should face indictment for shouting “burn this b—- down!”

The crux of the issue was whether Head’s comments, which were captured by a CNN cameraperson, incited the subsequent violence that occurred in Ferguson? Goldstein asked students to write a memo advising whether the prosecution should bring charges against Head.

This was not an ethics course asking moral questions, but rather a constitutional law class with legal inquires. Somehow the wound was too fresh, the tragedy too severe for some students to ponder the legal questions raised by the events in Ferguson.

In what appears to reasonable persons as a First Amendment issue, was quickly thrown into the caldron of racism. Some students objected to the question and Goldstein later apologized.

Let’s assume momentarily (and I do mean momentarily) that racism was the basis of Goldstein’s question, how does it prohibit students from grappling with the constitutional implications?

Did Head’s words meet the standard provided by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1917 that free speech does not protect one who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater? More germane to the situation in Ferguson would be the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

For the first of half of the 20th century the Court wrestled with the ramifications of free speech. In 1969, the Court ruled in Brandenburg the limits of free speech; and that remains the standard today.

Though inflammatory, did Head’s remarks incite, as the Court defined in Brandenburg as, “imminent lawless action?” Can the prosecution establish a link between what Head said in the video footage and the violence that followed?

If not, then his speech is protected, and the prosecution would have no grounds to charge him with a crime.

Ironically, Brandenburg, a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, made a speech at a Klan rally and was later convicted under an Ohio criminal syndicalism law. The Court ruled 8-0 in his favor, which included Justice Thurgood Marshall, who 15 years earlier successfully argued before the Court in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned 58 years of constitutionally protected Jim Crow laws.

Understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution cannot be encased on the narrow parameters of one’s feelings. Fundamentally, the Constitution that sits under glass at the National Archives is an amoral document. Its morality is infused by the ongoing commitment of “we the people.”

It was a teachable moment that was squandered. Rather than engage in the complexities of the Constitution, a group of students at one of the nation’s prestigious laws schools opted to hide behind the arrested development of racial essentialism.

A term coined by researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University, racial essentialism reduces creative thinking by making people more closed-minded. It is to view the world with the anvil of racism around one’s neck.

Tadmor’s findings suggest racial groups possess underlying essences that represent deep-rooted, unalterable traits and abilities — and creativity. They hypothesized that, once activated; an essentialist mindset would lead to reluctance to consider alternative perspectives, resulting in a generalized closed-mindedness.

But racial essentialism is not something that merely infects the individual. Those unwilling or unable to consider the nation’s ongoing struggle with its original sin prefer examples like that at UCLA when charges of race are intertwined with absurdity as representative of the larger discussion.

As recent events indicate, the racial fault line in America remains a tenuous one. It can ill-afford to be bogged down by the trivial pursuits of the privileged, regardless of race.

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When Racism Intersects with Absurdity