Dr. Patricia Hill Collins quoting Public Allies CEO Paul Schmitz in her talk Answering the Call to Community Service. (via sexartandpolitics)

A microcosm of one of the fundamental issues with the non-profit industrial complex.

(via myflagisblackandred)

I’d never thought about it like that before.

(via hereidreamtiwasablogger2)

This is why I’m proposing that at the school where I work, maybe the teachers (almost all white & mostly suburban) are the ones who need Community Service Day more than the students (almost all latino and/or black and inner city).

(via girl-germs)

Rep. Fleming, cry me a mothafucking river:

During an MSNBC interview to discuss why [John] Fleming opposes President Obama’s tax increase on those earning more than $1 million per year, host Chris Jansing said that Fleming has an income of more than $6 million. Fleming quickly corrected her, saying he actually takes in a fraction of that gross amount—about $600,000.

“The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million,” Fleming explained. “So by the time I feed my family I have, maybe, $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment.”

…

Jansing went on to tell Fleming that his annual personal income of $200,000 from those ventures was “not exactly a sympathetic position” from which to make the case for lower taxes on the wealthy.

“You do understand, congressman, that the average person out there who’s making maybe 40, 50, $60,000 out there, when they hear you only have $400,000 left over, it’s not exactly a sympathetic position,” she said. “You understand that?”

 “Class warfare’s never created a job,” Fleming responded.

A little more context for that quote (in the above excerpt) that was going around yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s still absurd when seen in context.

When did “class warfare” re-enter popular lexicon? And how has it gotten so twisted around? Fox News ran a headline that Obama “declares class warfare” (of course totally out of context; they were referring to someone’s criticism of him as though he himself had said it). I wish we understood class in a way that made it clear that that is impossible. One individual politician cannot wage class war. Where’s his army? Where’s the mass working class movement to back him up, if that were even what he were interested in? So much energy during the Cold War went into vilifying communism that very few people can even recognize something that resembles Marxist ideology—and so they look like buffoons thinking this is class war, and no one knows well enough to call them out on it.

THIS IS NOT CLASS WAR. Just y’all wait, it gets so much dirtier than raising taxes!

By John Byrne Clout Street

2:10 p.m. CDT, September 1, 2011

People breaking into abandoned buildings in Chicago would face stiffer fines under a proposal headed to the City Council.

Aldermen and Fire Department officials have sought ways to give more teeth to city ordinances governing abandoned buildings, which often become havens for crime and dangerous fires.

Ald. James Balcer’s plan seeks to deter homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes, gang members and others from breaking into the buildings by increasing to $200 the fines they could face. The Zoning Committee approved the plan today, and it will head to the full council next Thursday.

The proposal is the latest response to the December 2010 deaths of two Chicago firefighters when a roof collapsed as they searched an abandoned laundry business in the 1700 block of East 75th Street. The building, where homeless people were known to seek shelter, had caught fire. Another 17 firefighters were hurt.

Yes, that is a shame that firefighters were killed and hurt putting out a fire. That is the risk that’s always present when you become a firefighter, though. Definitely try to prevent fires from happening, or from happening in a way that might be a bigger risk to the firefighters—but a measure like this to keep homeless people from having a safe, warm place to stay is going to hurt and kill a whole lot more people. Chicago gets damn cold in the winter—there’s usually a spell in January-February that doesn’t go above 0°F for about 2 or 3 weeks. People freeze to death. People’s health conditions are compromised greatly by the cold. Keeping people out on the street, exposed, is a massive death sentence.

Not to be too callous, but the lives of two firefighters are worth how many homeless people’s lives?

Chicago’s battle against youth mobs, Elizabeth Fiedler, NewsWorks Staff on Yahoo News

Focusing on who really matters here. So blatant.

If poor urban people of color rioted in the areas they live in, in cities in the US, in a serious huge way, what fraction of property destroyed would be their own? What fraction of people rioting would be destroying property of their own, their friends and families, people they’d ever even met? A tenth? A hundredth? What must that look like in the UK right now—whose property is being destroyed?

I’m wondering this because of the argument that people are destroying “their own neighborhood,” which has always come off to me as being steeped in a middle-class misunderstanding of other people’s poverty. Who owns the house they live in? In New Haven, almost all the houses in the POC neighborhoods are subdivided to be rented as separate floors. I literally know 3 couples in the city who own the house they live in; 2 of those couples are either my past or present landlords. If my block rioted, for the most part we would not be destroying our own property.

Are the riots destroying more than the police do? (They’re the only ones within this story who have killed someone.) Are they destroying more than unemployment and hunger do? Are they destroying more than developers would; are they doing the developers’ work for them anyway? What about the community being destroyed when people are evicted, when people hide out or move away because of racism or xenophobia, when people are convicted of crimes and locked up under a penal system built on oppression, when people are taught collective self-loathing in school, when people are forbidden to speak their own languages?

And what does that mean, “their own neighborhood?” What does ownership of the place you live mean, if you don’t even have the money or skin color to own it? What does ownership mean if you live in public housing and know that, any day now, the city can sign it over to real estate holders who will tear it down and build condos with no remorse? What does ownership mean when there is no longer a place to get sufficiently healthy food in your neighborhood, or there is but the only people who shop there come from other parts of town, or there is but only because the white people moving in aren’t being ignored the way your family was for generations?

How can you force ownership, from afar, onto communities that have been made this deeply alienated from where they are and how they relate to the people and places around them, if they have never before been allowed or encouraged to own anything, property or otherwise?

If you loot a shoe store of a company run by a white man overseas that makes billions of dollars, that cuts costs by using sweatshop labor of people of color and then marketing them back to a different demographic of people of color; if you steal a pair of pants from a clothing store that won’t hire people of color from the neighborhood and follows them around the store when they come in; if you break the window of a multi-billion dollar fast food chain restaurant whose $1 meals are, on a bad day, all you have money and time to feed your kids, knowing that the food you are feeding them is damn near toxic but having no alternatives; are you doing anything to your real community? Will you ever meet the people who actually own all of that?

firesandwords:

“It’s not Styrofoam or cellphones or tobacco that are killing us.

It’s poverty.

A report released Friday by the American Cancer Society echoes a 1989 statement by Dr. Samuel A. Broder, then director of the National Cancer Institute, who said that poverty is a carcinogen.

The society’s report said that the lower a person’s socioeconomic status, the greater the risk of cancer. That’s especially true for lung cancer, the report said, “for which death rates are 4 to 5 times higher in the least educated than in the most educated individuals.”

As for why, the report said that people who are lower on the economic ladder are more likely to engage in risky behavior —- partly because marketing for products such as tobacco is aimed specifically at them, and partly because of barriers —- societal and otherwise —- to opportunities for exercise and healthy food.

And then impoverished people don’t tend to engage in preventive medical care, which they can’t afford, so that by the time they seek treatment, it’s too often too late.

The costs to society are huge. The National Institutes of Healthestimated that last year, medical costs associated with cancer were $124.6 billion. Estimates are that by 2020, those costs could reach $158 billion.”

But this same middle class manifests a sense of superior group position in regard to race. This class wants “good government” for themselves; it wants good schools for its children. At the same time, many of its members sneak into the black community by day, exploit it, and take the money home to their middle-class communities at night to support their operas and art galleries and comfortable homes. When not actually robbing, they will fight off the handful of more affluent black people who seek to move in; when they approve or even seek token integration, it applies only to black people like themselves—as “white” as possible. This class is the backbone of institutional racism in this country.

Thus we reject the goal of assimilation into middle-class America because the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist and because that class as a social force perpetuates racism. We must face the fact that, in the past, what we have called the movement has not really questioned the middle-class values and institutions of this country. If anything, it has accepted those values and institutions without fully realizing their racist nature. Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative.

Stokely Carmichael & Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power p. 41. Found this at my parents’ house and am rereading parts of it for the first time since high school.

positivelypersistentteach:

cheatsheet:

Detroit has been ordered to close half the city’s public schools and consolidate students as part of an emergency plan that would eliminate the district’s $327 million deficit by 2014. The plan also means that class sizes in Detroit will jump to 60 students per class.

60 kids per class???  Does this include primary classes?

Will teachers be given more planning time and compensation?

OH MY GOD. Having more than 18 of my kids yelling at me at once pushes me towards flipping out. I cannot imagine 60.  This is fucked. For real, teachers better be getting huge raise for that amount of added difficulty.

Indeed, as Mandi Isaacs Jackson documents in Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven, the policies of the Democratic establishment of the 1950s and 1960s were met with militant contestation from pockets of organized community members. Organizations like the American Independent Movement and Hill Neighborhood Union constructed alternative cartographies of neighborhood improvement and waged protests against tenant removal and intrusive “public safety.” Mayor Lee, like New York urban planning magnate Robert Moses, conducted urban renewal by way of forcing consensus and delegitimizing dissenters. Jackson exposes New Haven’s Redevelopment Agency as a puppet organization that could fulfill the necessary citizenship participation requirements under federal law while bypassing activist demands in the community. Citizens were recruited to parade in celebration of redevelopment and to build a temporary “Progress Pavilion” where architectural plans could be showcased, but were excluded from important decision-making meetings. The mayor partnered with IBM to design an Urban Management Information System, which sought to make poor and resistant neighborhoods “knowable” to the public, in an effort to maintain “very minimum” opposition to slum clearance. The fragility of public opinion following the start of the 1967 urban riots gave the administration a decisive opportunity to appropriate renewal for its own ends. Seven hundred people were jailed, community organizers were accused of communist affiliations, and the police covered up the role of suburban vigilantes in provoking the majority of the violence in the Hill neighborhood. If only, Lee seemed to say, the suburban population would move in and take over. And if only the community would stop objecting to being rent in half and scattered to the fringes of the city.

I know the kid who wrote this, we work on some of the same stuff. I’m still reading through the article, but I like it so far. The majority of it is about New Haven Promise, another in a series of programs around the US where the biggest property-holder/moneymaker in town sets up a foundation to give local kids college scholarships. There are similar programs in Pittsburgh & Kalamazoo, and some other similar cities.

My school was excited when it passed, but no one has been talking about the fact that our kids are not all ready to go to college when they graduate; the programs don’t do anything that I know of to get kids ready for college or capable of getting into colleges. In fact, I’ve been skeptical all along that it will be a lot like a small scale No Child Left Behind, in that it sets a universal goal, gives you no resources to get to that goal, rewards you if you happen to make it there but forgets about you and gives you nothing if you don’t meet that goal.

And I don’t know if this is the case in other cities with Promise programs, but in New Haven, because Yale is considered a nonprofit, their property holdings—I’ve heard it’s as much as about 1/4 of the property in a city of 120,000 people—are almost all zoned as tax-exempt. Connecticut’s public schools are funded primarily by property taxes, but the gaps between funding in rich districts versus poorer ones ($13,000 per student per year vs. $6,000 is pretty standard) are so huge that the state has a program to fill the gaps somewhat. In the mean time, people have been pushing Yale to pay that tax money to put into the school system (Yale’s operating budget is over $1 billion a year). The amount they would be paying is taxes each year is about the same amount that’s missing from our city budget this year, so instead the city has to layoff dozens of teachers and school staff, among other things. But Yale refuses to pay the tax money, and has refused for at least ten years, except for when they can do it all at once in a big public way, such as setting up New Haven Promise. And then standing aside as teachers are getting laid off.

Anyway, that is some more context for this article, and I will have more about it when I finish reading it tomorrow.

Reblogging this post from newwavefeminism this way since there’s no question reblogging:

just wanted to say, in regards to the manners question, i recommend reading “conspicuous consumption” by thorstein veblen. he talks about how etiquette is a set of rules set forth by the leisure class in order to exercise their wealth. highly encourage you to read it. the book also has feminist implications that are pretty interesting. girlwithantlers

that actually sounds like something i’d love to read… thanks!

Also, look up the documentary “people like us” it’s a really interesting documentary about class in america. VERY INTERESTING. it also hits on the issue of food and class.

I’m interested in checking out this movie and the book mentioned. This is something I think about a lot. I definitely noticed it more than ever before when I went to college. My college is super-fancy, and the assumption is that anyone going there must be really rich. This assumption is made by both people outside of the school, and by rich students at the school; “townies” assume anyone from the college must be a rich asshole, and rich assholes at the school assume everyone must be just like them if they’re worthy of being at the school. But the school secretly has good financial aid (because of student pressure for the most part).

So anyway, spending 4 years in that environment and on heavy financial aid, I started noticing these very bizarre manners and politeness-cues I was expected to know and navigate, that I had never encountered in my life. The fact that I couldn’t navigate those things meant I was immediately outed as not being One of Us. My partner at the time was poor but had grown up around rich people, and had been let in on high society manners, and was able to fake his way through it. Seeing him basically pass as wealthy, and in the fairly specific white, managing- and leisure-class, prep-school strain of wealthy that dominates the school, made me see class as something a lot less cut-and-dry than I had always thought it was. But if you’re privy to the right manners, the right clothing brands, the right cars to drive, the right prep schools, etc., it can be possible to pass. I guess kind of the same way as Old Money outs and shuns New Money.

Anyway, pretty interesting stuff. And I’ll definitely try to find this documentary.

Reading this article right now, pretty sure I might vom. Eugenics like everything else has been “modernized” so that it carries all the signs of the times: technology, vouchers, and the nonprofit industry mindset.

Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK), a non-profit based in California, will give $200 cash to any drug-addicted man or woman willing to undergo sterilization. And they offer a more lucrative option for women: they will pay clients $200/year to take long-term birth control like Depo-Prevara or Norplant.

Barbara Harris, the founder of CRACK, established the organization after having adopted four children born to drug-addicted parents—something she claims her critics should try before they oppose her organization. Her mission: “Save our welfare system and the world from the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer for each drug-addicted birth” by offering “effective preventive measures to reduce the tragedy of numerous drug-affected pregnancies.”

…

The organization offers a solution that smacks of eugenics. In the 1930s Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate and early eugenicist, was interested in birth control’s usage possibility for population control.  While Sanger believed that birth control was a tool for all women, she was also a product of her time—a time when eugenics was popular—and she thought birth control should be used to reduce the population of “feeble-minded” people and the mentally ill. In the same spirit, CRACK is offering money to a highly vulnerable, economically depressed population it deems undesirable for reproduction.

CRACK’s website includes numerous letters from substance-exposed children who support her program, apparently trying to prevent people like themselves from being born.  Harris recounts that when she first became involved with the issue of protecting substance-exposed children, she sought the punishment of addicts who had children. “I started calling district attorneys’ offices and police departments, asking whether there was anything I could do as a concerned citizen, perhaps make a citizens’ arrest. I got nowhere. I was told there was nothing I could do,” she told People magazine.

…

Other criticisms of CRACK, as highlighted by the organizations Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) and the Black People’s Project (BPP) in their work with the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment include the following:

1. CRACK ignores the interrelation of rape, abuse, and homelessnes with substance addictions.
2. CRACK lacks a complex analysis of substance-abuse issues (such as the social justice issues that contribute to substance abuse) and fails to demonstrate any comprehensive or supportive drug-treatment plan to help their clients end their habits.
3. CRACK’s program relies on coercion, financial manipulation of economically vulnerable communities and guilt. 

While guaranteeing access to safe and affordable abortions for all women is the most common refrain of the mainstream reproductive rights movement, we must consider other aspects of reproductive justice, say activists like Loretta J. Ross of the reproductive justice organization SisterSong.  In her essay, the Color of Choice, Ross writes that “in short,” true, comprehensive “reproductive justice can be described as reproductive rights embedded in a human rights and social justice framework used to counter all forms of population control that deny women’s human rights.” (The Color of Violence, edited INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, 2006)

And for some historical perspective, the wonderful (but no longer active) blog Mississippi Appendectomy, about the history of forced/coerced sterilization of women of color.

a-n-a-r-c-h-a:

reclusiveobscenities:

gonnaruinyrshoes:

forestfirecity:

Coming Out Crazy is a zine for self-love, fighting ableism, and breaking the silence around ‘disordered’ minds and mental health issues.

We are seeking written (personal narratives/rants/poetry/etc) and visual arts (comics, photographs, illustrations..) submissions about your experiences with mental health issues. 

In particular, we are looking for submissions about:

• Personal narratives
• How your mental health affects and/or is affected by other aspects of your identity and social position
• Medicalization of mental health and encounters with health care professionals
• Stigma and silencing
• ‘Coming out’ stories
• Self-love and support

Submissions are due January 17.

Please email submissions to comingoutcrazy@gmail.com

For visual art submissions, please ensure they are no less than 6” at 300dpi.

Please forward widely!

Link for the event on facebook - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=181799711830118

Please pass it around.

I might write a submission for this. I have spent this entire year working almost exclusively on my mental well-being. I go to therapy at a state-run clinic, and even though I have had a really positive time there, I don’t know that I’ve been in too many situations that lay out classism so starkly as that place does. We go through metal detectors to come in the door & our bags are searched; on-duty cops are usually around; we basically aren’t trusted at all.

Add to that the fact that I am there for PTSD, from things that are directly about gender & sexuality, and less directly about race. It is a really interesting & strange experience, one that I am still making sense of. Again, my experience has been positive but I would not be surprised to hear people’s negative experiences there; it’s the kind of place where it’s possible to feel uneasy but mostly okay, but you also expect something really fucked up might happen, like the cops getting involved, or having meds pushed on you hard, or some other bullshit.

One of my friends is studying to be a clinical psychologist and had a school project where he had to interview a person who’s been in therapy & is of a different race (most other kids in the mostly white program were stumped, oof). So there is actually a tape of me rambling for about a half hour about race & gender & PTSD. And women of color & mental health is the theme of the issue of my zine I’m working on right now.

(via fuckyeahradicalliterature)