Bill Ayers

1984 is not some random hypothetical notion, or some abstract and distant possibility, or simply a fascinating metaphor—1984 is a reality; it’s upon us; Big Brother is watching you, and everyone knows it.

And now comes Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, and Anonymous (among others) to provide an indispensable service: they are representatives of We, the People, delegates of the sovereign citizenry. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are our people watching them watching us.

As we work to stop the growing militarism and the steady descent into barbarism, to dismantle the surveillance nation and to annihilate the carceral system and the garrison state—it’s the hackers and the whistle-blowers, the leakers and the truth-tellers who help us to wake up, open our eyes, pay attention, and, yes, to act upon whatever the known demands of us.

Thank you Bradley Manning! Thank you Edward Snowden!

Military justice joins the list of The Most Ridiculous Oxymorons Ever, next to army intelligence and  just war, edging ahead of anarchist organization, business ethics, devout atheist, jumbo shrimp, and Justice Scalia.

 The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

*George Orwell

The Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement after Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison:

We are outraged that a whistleblower and a patriot has been sentenced on a conviction under the Espionage Act. The government has stretched this archaic and discredited law to send an unmistakable warning to potential whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish their information. We can only hope that Manning’s courage will continue to inspire others who witness state crimes to speak up.

This show trial was a frontal assault on the First Amendment, from the way the prosecution twisted Manning’s actions to blur the distinction between whistle blowing and spying to the government’s tireless efforts to obstruct media coverage of the proceedings. It is a travesty of justice that Manning, who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators of the crimes he exposed are not even investigated. Every aspect of this case sets a dangerous precedent for future prosecutions of whistle blowers—who play an essential role in democratic government by telling us the truth about government wrongdoing—and we fear for the future of our country in the wake of this case.

We must channel our outrage and continue building political pressure for Manning’s freedom. President Obama should pardon Bradley Manning, and if he refuses, a presidential pardon must be an election issue in 2016.

Military Justice and the Value of Human Life, or Just Do the Math:

Prison time served by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi: 0

Prison sentence (in months) given to Sgt. Sabrina Harman, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs-up next to al-Jamadi’s body, and in another photo smiling next to naked and hooded Iraqis stacked on top of one another, for maltreating detainees: 6

Prison sentence (in months) given to Spec. Armin Cruz for abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and covering up the abuse: 8

Prison sentence (in months) given to Spec. Steven Ribordy for being accessory to the murder of four Iraqi prisoners who were “bound, blindfolded, shot and dumped in a canal” in Baghdad in 2007: 8

Prison sentence (in months) given to Spec. Belmor Ramos for conspiracy to commit murder in the same case: 7

Prison sentence (in years) given to Sgt. Michael Leahy Jr. after the military granted him clemency from a life sentence for committing the four Baghdad murders: 20

Years served after which he will be eligible for parole: 7

Prison time served by Marine Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich for negligent dereliction in the massacre of 24 unarmed men, women and children in 2005 in the Iraqi town of Haditha: 0

 Prison time served by the seven other members of his battalion who were charged in the murders: 0.

Prison sentences (in months) given to Marine Lance Cpl. Jerry Shumate and Lance Cpl. Tyler Jackson for the aggravated assault (and death) of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a father of 11 and grandfather of four, in Al Hamdania in 2006: 21

Prison sentence (in years) given to Bradley Manning by a military judge for releasing to Wikileaks “the largest-ever cache of classified documents in the nation’s history,” otherwise known as simple truth-telling: 35

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

** Ella Baker

David Brooks, the moderate “human face” of the plutocrats and the dangerous fang faction, used his New York Times column to trumpet the need for “a national greatness agenda” and managed to evoke a grotesquely mangled and romanticized image of the Black Freedom Movement of 50 years ago in an attempt to rally people to a left/right social movement of all the politically disaffected built around the goal of broad revitalization: “Like the civil rights movement, this movement will ask Americans to live up to their best selves.” And our “best selves” is easily summed up: “Love of country.” Yes simple patriotism will, in Brooks’ cosmology, allow Americans to see that sacrificing Social Security benefits “at a time when soldiers and Marines are sacrificing their lives for their country in Afghanistan,” or giving up pensions as an investment in “America’s future greatness,” represent the sensible unifying path forward.

Most Americans (and the whole world besides) think that the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have been and continue to be catastrophic. The vast majority of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan (not the “insurgents” or the Taliban or the “jihadists”) have overwhelmingly opposed the US military presence in their respective lands practically from the start. Any ethical person would tell the government to end its senseless wars for a start, bring those Marines and soldiers home now, and spend those squandered billions on education, health, and the common good.

But Brooks sees the hand writing on the wall: US power is in deep crisis, and the American empire is coming to an end; his solution is to mobilize a nationalistic movement and shred any expectation of a common commitment to human welfare: line-up, re-load, and march. Or as he puts it, his social movement will have one simple and unapologetic goal:  “preserving American pre-eminence.”  He asserts that “American ‘supremacy’ is a gift to our children and a blessing for the earth.” To Brooks the US Century must continue and the echoes of Rome and London and Berlin and Tokyo—pick your century, pick your conqueror—are unmistakable. The world will be a far, far better place if everyone will accept the obvious fact that the US makes a great ruler and that it should simply be allowed to run the whole show forever.

People around the world can’t possibly agree with Brooks’ assessment, and most never will no matter what the cost. Most people think the US (less than 5% of the world’s population, but capable of acting as if it’s some sort of entitled aristocracy or super-majority) has some noble traditions and hopeful rhetoric but it is also a misguided and menacing cowboy, the largest mercenary force ever created, benighted and armed and dangerous, and more than a little out-of-control much of the time.

The problem here, as always, is whether ordinary people can be counted on to support the long war, pay the price, avert their eyes, become participants or accomplices in conquest and occupation and war without end. Brooks and his patrons in power and privilege are worrying about the pesky and unpredictable home front (US!!!) and he’s calling on us to close our eyes to injustice everywhere and build nothing less than a patriotic/nationalist popular movement to resist “national humiliation, diminished power in the world, drastic cuts and spreading pain.” “American Exceptionalism” inflamed, American supremacy triumphant, America uber alles and of course war after endless war—this is the deadly response from the big thinker of the “reasonable” right.

This is precisely where a focus on education—on reason and evidence and argument—becomes essential. This historic moment, this epoch, could surely be increasingly violent and horrifying or it could be a time of new hope, beauty, and unforeseen possibilities. This is in part up to us: it depends on how we think and how we act. In education, this moment challenges us to reconsider every assumption and to reexamine first and fundamental principles.

An essential step is to re-imagine the project of schooling, teaching and learning, curriculum and instruction, in radically new ways. Education at the end of empire is inevitably where our identity and our destiny will be developed and worked out.  Education is one of the key pillars of the superstructure of capitalist society, the arena of politics and ideology, where humans become conscious of class conflict and fight it out. Education is a site of class sorting, the development of ideological hegemony, and the debate over what it means to be human, where we are on the clock of the universe, and what kind of future we mean to create.

Education at the end of empire is education in crisis and contestation. The outlines of the agenda of the powerful are increasingly apparent: privatization, drastically lowered expectations for students and families, the demonization of teachers, zero-tolerance as a cat’s paw for surveillance and control, sort-and-punish curricula, a culture of obedience and conformity, a narrowing definition of learning as job-training and education as a product to be bought and sold in the market, the school-to-prison pipeline. On the other side there is a growing fight-back based on the principle that all human beings are of incalculable value and that life in a just and free society must be geared toward and powered by a profoundly radical idea: the fullest development of all human beings regardless of race or ethnicity, origin or background, gender identity, ability or disability is the necessary condition for the full development of each person; and, conversely, the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. On this side are those who recognize that access to education, the development of skills and critical capacity, make citizens and residents not just “college ready” or work-prepared, but also ready to become leaders of struggles for a humane future. 

This points to the importance of opposing the hidden curriculum of obedience and conformity in favor of foregrounding and teaching initiative, questioning, doubt, skepticism, courage, imagination, and creativity. These are central and not peripheral to an education based on principles of equality, justice, and basic human rights. These are the qualities educators must struggle to model and nourish, encourage and defend in our communities and our classrooms.

In a free society students are able to think for themselves and develop minds of their own, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, and to build capacities for exploration and invention. They are encouraged then to ask the most fundamental and essential questions that are, like the young themselves, always in-motion, dynamic, and never twice the same: Who in the world am I?  How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices and my chances? What did I learn that the teacher didn’t know? What’s my story, and how is it like or unlike the stories of others? What is my responsibility to those others?

Teachers and students who long for schooling as something transcendent and powerful find ourselves locked in institutions that glorify sorting students into winners and losers, reduce learning to a mindless and irrelevant routine of drill and skill and teaching to a kind of glorified clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested (and often false) bits of information. This is unlovely in practice and it is unworthy of our deepest dreams.

The dominant neo-liberal metaphor of the rich and powerful posits schools as businesses, teachers as workers, students as products and commodities, and it leads rather simply to thinking that school closings and privatizing the public space are natural events, relentless standardized test-and-punish regimes sensible, zero tolerance a reasonable proxy for justice. This is what the true-believers call “reform.”

The hijacking of school reform by the neo-liberal corporate planners, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, US government strategists and the education elites intensifies an attack on teachers, unions, teacher education, schools, and the kids themselves. The aim is to recreate the privileges of the powerful while forging a generation of technicians and passive followers and disciplining the lower classes to accept their place in the matrix. The gravitational pull of this narrative is so great that even radical reformers find themselves re-voicing the deceptive goals and the phony frames. If we are to take a thorough and honest look at the educational landscape before us, we cannot accept the standards and benchmarks established by the elite, from the acceptance of capitalist development, meaningless and wasteful work, and ecological depredations as the only way forward, to the normalizing of white, middle class discourse as the gold standard of excellence, anointed with titles like Standard English or Academic English. 

Schools for obedience and conformity are characterized by passivity and fatalism and infused with anti-intellectualism and irrelevance. They turn on the little technologies for control and normalization, the elaborate schemes for managing the crowd, the knotted system of rules and discipline, the exhaustive machinery of schedules and clocks, the laborious programs of sorting the crowd into winners and losers through testing and punishing, grading, assessing, and judging, all of it adding up to a familiar trap, an intricately constructed hierarchy, everyone in a designated place and a place for everyone.  In the schools as they are, knowing and accepting one’s pigeonhole on the towering and barren cliff becomes the only lesson one really needs. 

Educators who are today oriented toward justice and liberation and enlightenment as living forces and powerful aspirations focus their efforts not on the production of things, but on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens and residents who can participate actively in public life, people who can open their eyes and awaken themselves and others as they think and act ethically in a complex and ever-changing world. This kind of teaching encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name and constantly interrogate the world, the wisdom to identify the obstacles to their full humanity and to the humanity of others, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education, then, is changed from rote boredom and endlessly alienating routines into something that is transformative, always opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

Teaching in this political moment is both a challenge and a gift, for this moment embodies what educators, beginning with early childhood teachers, have always called “a teachable moment.” Teachable moments are times of disequilibrium and dislocation, times when lesson plans are thrown into doubt and newness can enter, times when the predictable and the common-place are recognized as inadequate and fresh and startling winds can blow, for teachers no less than for students. The teachable moment aligns neatly with a certain kind of pedagogy, one that doesn’t know the answers and is compelled to improvise with the unfinished, the contingent, and the surprising/unforeseen.

In the schools we need, education is constructed as a fundamental human right geared toward the fullest development of the human personality, and the reconstruction of society around basic principles of joy and justice, equality and recognition, peace and love.

Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

** Ella Baker

A dominant narrative in contemporary school reform is once again focused on exclusion and disadvantage, race and class, Black and white. “Across the US,” the National Governor’s Association declared in 2005, “a gap in academic achievement persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their white counterparts.” This is the commonly referenced and popularly understood “racial achievement gap,” and it drives education policy at every level.  Once again, whether heart-felt or self-satisfied, the narrative never mentions the monster in the room: white supremacy. 

It’s true, of course, that standardized test scores reveal a difference between Black and white test-takers: 26 points in one area of comparison—fourth-grade reading—20 points in another, 23 in a third.

 But the significance of those differences is wildly disputed. Some argue—as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein did in their popular and incendiary book The Bell Curve—that genetic differences account for the gap, and there’s little that can be done to lift up the poor inferior Black folks. An alternate theory—popular since the 1960’s with progressives and liberals—holds that Blacks are not inherently inferior to whites, but merely “culturally deprived,” and that fixing the “massive pathologies” in the family and community will require social engineering on a grand scale. 

Each of these explanations has its large and devoted following—the first, while difficult for many whites to endorse publicly, carries the reflected power of eugenics and the certainty that what they’d always secretly suspected (that whites are indeed superior beings in so many intimately experienced ways—“I did nothing wrong, and I feel great about being me!”) is true. The second has the advantage of giving a bit more than a pig’s eye for the well-being of Black people while disturbing none of the pillars of white privilege. Either theory can live comfortably beneath the obsessive focus on the so-called achievement gap.

Clearly the second theory is in ascendency: the guys with all the money, the media, the armed forces, and the super-sized megaphones are the autocrats and the authoritarians, the plutocrats, the patricians, and all their various professional political allies—the troglodytes in Congress and the Broad Foundation, of course,  but also the smart liberals and data-driven “scientific” progressives (Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rahm Emmanuel) who are absolutely certain of their righteousness and their own beneficent intentions, who swell with pride when considering the gleaming architecture of their own specific talents that they are so generously willing to share with their inferiors in the service of general betterment, and who are always a bit taken aback and then deeply resentful when the objects of their attention and affection don’t have the good sense to comply with their plans for social uplift (school closings, a longer school day, privatization, cutting sports and arts).

Gloria Ladson-Billings upends all of this nonsense with an elegant reversal: there is no achievement gap, she argues, merely a glancing reflection of something deeper and more fundamental—America has a profound education debt.  The educational inequities that began with the attempted annihilation of Native peoples and the enslavement of Africans, the conquest of a continent and the importation of both “free” labor (in chains) and serfs, has transformed into apartheid education, something anemic, inferior, inadequate, and oppressive. Over decades and then centuries the debt has accumulated and has passed from generation to generation, and it continues to develop and pile up. Jonathan Kozol has documented that the debt—far from being ameliorated—grows year by year: Chicago serves 86% Black and Latina/o students and spends around $8,000 per pupil per year while a few miles away in the tony suburb of Highland Park, 90% white, the school district spends $17,000 per student; New York City, 72% Black and Latina/o, spends around $12,000 per pupil annually while suburban Manhasset, 91% white, spends over $22,000.  In most states the highest-poverty districts receive far fewer resources, and, according to Ladson-Billings, in “30 states, high minority districts receive less money for each child than low minority districts.”

Ladson-Billings imagines what could be done if the political powers took the “achievement gap” seriously: immediate reassignment of the best teachers in the country to schools for poor children of color, guaranteed places for those students in state and regional colleges and universities, smaller classes, a Marshall Plan-type effort to rebuild school infrastructure. 

Ladson-Billings argues that the US also owes a moral debt to African-Americans, a debt that “reflects the disparity between what we know is right and what we actually do.” 

Will America educate African-American youngsters?  In 1933 Carter Woodson published The Mis-Education of the Negro, and he answered the question this way:

When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.  You do not have to tell him to stand here or go yonder.  He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it.  You do not need to send him to the back door.  He will go without being told.  In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.  His education makes it necessary.

Woodson had in mind the way education serves the social order, the way American schools satisfy a society with identifiable structures of privilege and oppression based on race, and reflect and promote that racial stratification perfectly.  When there is, for example, a pervasive sense that there is nothing about the presence of African-American youngsters, especially Black boys, that is deemed valuable or desirable or important—their presence always a problem, a deficit, an impediment—that gets manifested on the street and in the classroom. 

Education, of course, is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics.  Education—teaching and schooling—either reinforces or challenges the existing social order. The largest, most generous purpose of education is always human enlightenment and human liberation, and the driving and undergirding principle is the unity of all humanity: every human being is of incalculable value, entitled to decent standards concerning freedom and justice and education, and any violations, deliberate or inadvertent, must be fought against, testified to, and resisted.

But because schools serve societies—in fact, in many ways all schools are microcosms of the societies in which they’re embedded—every school is both mirror and window onto a specific social reality.  If one understands the schools, one can see the whole of society; if one fully grasps the intricacies of society, one will know something about how its schools are organized.  In a totalitarian society, for example, schools are built for obedience and conformity; in a kingdom, the schools teach fealty; in a racialized society, educational privileges and oppressions are distributed along the color line. In an authentic democracy we would expect to find schools defined by a spirit of cooperation, inclusion, and full participation, places that honor diversity while building unity.

And that takes us to the necessary and challenging task of naming our moment—necessary because if we fail to analyze our conditions concretely we are rudderless; challenging because this moment, like every other moment, is dense with possibilities and packed with energy—it refuses to stand still and it will not be nailed down. Every analysis is partial, contingent, and unfinished. But without at least an attempt to understand in a systematic way the world around us—the apparent as well as the hidden forces at work—we are at sea.

The word “moment” is itself elastic, wobbling at the edges between a sense of the airy and the ephemeral, on one hand, and a claim to the momentous on the other. The moment is passing and profound, transient and memorable: it can be an event or a happening and it can, as well, define an epoch, a period, or an era. So we must try to name and illuminate with uncertainty and humility. We reach for the magnificent, knowing that we can never capture it and pin it to the board and, if we did, we would kill it.

We are living in the midst of an historic sea change—a dramatic and irreversible cultural, economic, and political shift—in terms of global power. The financial crisis and the cyclical economic adjustments of the day grab the headlines and draw most of the attention but just below the surface, roiling and churning, more profound upheaval is well under way: the decline of US empire and the eclipse of the “American Century” which in all likelihood (but not necessarily – it depends in part on us) will be as messy as the end of the British, French, Japanese, or Spanish empires; the turn from an economy with industry in the imperial centers to one where major production is in the colonial and post-colonial regions, which may well be (again, not inevitably) as murderous as the great leap from agriculture to industry; an unprecedented ecological dislocation that is already re-drawing all existing maps and propelling millions of environmental refugees out of their homes and into a shrinking world. The center cannot hold, and we are—each and all of us, whether we recognize it or not—in the mix and on the move, witnessing and participating in the end of empire and the creation of a new social order in one way or another.

When the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc collapsed in the 1980’s the US proclaimed itself the unrivaled leader of a uni-polar world and moved even more aggressively to dominate global resources, labor, and markets, with profits flowing exclusively toward the metropolis. Wealth poured in and businesses boomed. The export of industrial production to the Third World forced millions from rural areas to cities in Asia, African, and Latin America and drove down wages for workers in the imperial center, resulting in even greater spikes in profits. These realignments reduced metropolitan economies to service and branding, information and entertainment, credit and financial management and were accompanied necessarily by a bloated military establishment built to keep these unjust relationships intact and relatively stable.

Today however the imperial dream of an unchallenged and grotesquely lopsided world is coming to a painful end. This is not the heralded “end of history,” that weird ideology manufactured by the intellectual servants of power to explain and justify the imbalance and the injustice; rather it is the end of the arrogant hope for a thousand year Pax Americana. The evidence of terminal rot at the center is everywhere and the accompanying collapse is all around us: an economic and financial emergency based on deep structural problems; an environmental crisis which cannot and will not be ignored; the demographic changes caused by globalization and immigration leading to the fateful narrowing of a European-American majority in the US and challenges to white supremacy in Europe and elsewhere; the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy” openings combined with the stalemate and impending defeat of western military forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the entire region; and the various challenges to US hegemony from a number of directions including Europe, North Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and oddly jerry-rigged entities such as the BRIC alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China).

Another world is possible, as the hopeful slogan from the World Social Forum has it, and in fact another world is inevitable. But will it be a better world? Not necessarily—a world of permanent war and sprawling work camps, massive prisons and constant control, environmental disaster on an even more gargantuan scale is also a possibility. Nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is settled once and for all. Everything is dynamic, in motion, on the move and on the make, incomplete, unfinished. As Randy Newman sings, “The end of empire is messy at best/ and this one is ending like all the rest.” And as we must continue to remind ourselves: “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

** Ella Baker

Summer, 2013, Part Two

And let’s take another look backward to understand a bit of falseness then and now: on October 26, 1992 the US Congress designated Monroe Elementary School, one of the segregated Black schools in Topeka, Kansas, a National Historic Site because of its significance in the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education.  The National Archives includes several documents from the case in its digital classroom.

Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessey v. Ferguson and heralded the legal termination of racially segregated schools; it’s become an icon in the popular story America tells itself about its inherent goodness and its inevitable upward trajectory: America the beautiful; Brown as icon.  Americans are devoted to Brown, myth or symbol, just as we’re dedicated to Superman’s motto: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

Brown was decided in the wake of World War II, in the wash of that reenergized sense of freedom, and, critically, with the return of young Black veterans from Europe and Asia. Whenever you read or hear that Brown unleashed years of struggle for civil rights, flip the script and remind people that years of struggle for civil rights resulted in Brown. The decision followed incessant and increasingly intense demands and mobilizations by African-Americans that the country live up to the promise of full citizenship encoded in the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And Brown coincided with clear white interests that had nothing to do with Black well-being: avoiding a revolution led and defined by subjugated African-Americans; transforming the feudal South and integrating it into a repositioned capitalist juggernaut; removing a blatant hypocrisy and an embarrassing fact of American life that was effectively wielded against the US in the UN and other international forums as an escalating Cold War raged on. White people needed Brown—but only a bit of Brown. 

The language of Brown includes the language of justice.  It repudiates racial segregation and says—correctly—that separate is inherently unequal.  It affirms the full humanity of African Americans.  It endorses core principles of democracy.  It cries out for equality. 

To take Brown to heart would require a hard look at the racial landscape we inhabit—a system with institutions operating at every level to construct Black “inferiority” and to deny full participation in social and political and economic life.  That hard look could lead to an iron commitment, then, to smash the institution of white supremacy. No such luck—yet.

Brown also embodies a fundamental, even a fatal, flaw that runs deep in the American racial narrative. The argument in the case turns on the harm suffered by Black children and the feelings of inferiority that are a result of segregation, rather than  the despicable, immoral, and destructive system of white supremacy itself.  Black people—not racism—became the exclusively acknowledged concern; Black pathology, not white privilege, was the focus of action. 

And so Brown, the widely celebrated and lofty statement of principle, was followed immediately by its lesser-known brother, the betrayer and assassin, Brown II.  Brown II was the implementation phase of the decision, and here again—consistent with the long tradition of all things racial in America—the remedy fitted neither the crime nor the injury. In fact Brown II gave local school districts, the parties defeated in Brown, the power and responsibility to construct the solution—to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.”  The fox—far from being banished from the hen house—was given the only set of keys. 

The Supreme Court had never in history issued an order to implement a constitutional right that was so vague, and “all deliberate speed” turned out in practice to mean “never.” The activity in the courts over the decades following Brown went decidedly south: racially isolated communities of color were denied the right to draw students from adjoining white suburbs; children were denied the right to equal school funding; the concept of “neighborhood school” was reinforced and strengthened even if the result was re-segregation; on and on and on. Recently the Supreme Court ruled against voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville in which race was one of several factors used to maintain a diverse student body in public schools. Almost 60 years after Brown, school segregation is alive and well, more firmly entrenched than ever, and each year schools are more segregated. Brown is all but dead, and the structure of white supremacy rules.

As usual white supremacy is hiding in plain sight. The most dissembling hypocrites argue that anyone who sees race is a racist, that race-conscious integration is the equivalent of Black-hating segregation—because both are based on skin color. This is an invented and wholly fictitious symmetry.

The problem in America is not and has never been race consciousness per se; the problem has always been white supremacy in fact. Anything that undermines white supremacy and fights for inclusion and equality sides with humanity; anything that excludes, segregates, or subordinates is on the side of oppression and exploitation.  And so, using the lofty language of Brown, ordinary white supremacists continue to herd Black children into unnatural and inferior schools, build walls, and lock the gates. 

Monroe Elementary—that iconic temple in Topeka elevated as a National Historic Site—may as well be turned into a mausoleum: here is one more place where African-American aspirations and the on-going struggle for justice and liberation were laid to rest. 

It’s time for all of us to rethink and recommit, to decide which side we’re on in the ongoing struggle for human rights and liberation, and then to dive into the wreckage on a mission of repair. Now more than ever we need a popular mass movement for justice; entrenched power concedes nothing whatsoever fire from below.

Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

** Ella Baker

1). Summer, 2013

I felt the double blow to my gut before my head could reasonably catch up: the 1965 Voting Rights Act—a crowning achievement of the classical phase of the Black Freedom Movement—was emasculated on June 25 by the Supreme Court, 5-4, in Shelby County v. Holder, and Trayvon Martin—the young Black man who by all accounts had done nothing wrong and was unarmed, walking home from a trip to the store for snacks on the night he was stalked, confronted, and shot to death by an armed vigilante—was denied any semblance of justice on July 13 when his killer was acquitted in a Florida courthouse.

This summer a friend sent me the abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ angry and stirring 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the 4^th of July?”—something worth re-reading every Fourth of July—and he circled one passage with an urgent marker:

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Let’s look to the past: Trayvon Martin joins the long list of young Black men cut down by agents of the state or lynched by self-appointed enforcers: Emmett Till, Oscar Grant, Fred Hampton, Amadou Diallo—each a complex human being whose life was infinitely precious to himself, each singled out, sometimes randomly, as symbol and threat, each an open wound and an unresolved crime. None will be forgotten.

Go further into the past: the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1870 at the height of Radical Black Reconstruction, stated that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This was a powerful victory brought about by decades of abolitionist action, the self-activity, resistance, and general strike and flight of enslaved people, and finally a great Civil War, a War of Liberation, a reminder—and we need to be reminded in good times as well as bad—of another provocative and incendiary statement from the incomparable Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” With the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 (the rotten compromise that won Rutherford Hayes the presidency, lost the Republican Party its soul, and plunged the nation backward as it reversed the gains of that long and bloody Civil War) combined with a range of new laws and legal sanctions as well as the opening of a mass campaign of terror against recently liberated Blacks, white supremacy reasserted itself with a vengeance.

Political power and the vast system of white-skin privilege it upheld rested firmly on the broad back of white supremacy, and cold reality made restricting the Black franchise a top priority and an urgent goal for the establishment. Whites built a broad and complex structure designed to maintain and strengthen white supremacy: the infamous “Black Laws,” chain gangs, poll taxes, literacy tests combined with semi-official and sanctioned violence against the whole community—lynchings, arson, banning and black-listing—all played their roles in the campaign. And the law followed suit: in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court found segregation constitutional and enshrined the doctrine of “separate but equal” as settled law; in 1898 in Mississippi v. Williams and again in 1903 in Giles v. Harris, the Court upheld laws that disenfranchised African-Americans. And the results were predictable: in 1896, there were 130,334 Blacks registered to vote in Louisiana; in 1904 there were only 1,342. Black turnout in the 1904 Presidential election in Virginia and South Carolina was exactly zero.

America is false to the past, and she is false to the present: there are millions of African-American men today (as well as growing numbers of African-American women, and men and women of various races, ethnicities, and backgrounds) who have been barred from voting or seeking elective office or serving on juries or qualifying for some kinds of housing and student loans or seeking employment in specified professions based on their status as convicted felons. This is the system of mass incarceration which the brilliant lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander has named “the new Jim Crow.” She points out that mass incarceration is a defining fact in the US today, whether acknowledged or not, just as slavery was the fundamental reality in the 1800’s. In fact, there are more Black men today held in prison or on probation or parole than there were held in slavery in 1850; there are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million folks—than inhabited Stalin’s Gulag at its height; the US, less than 5% of the world’s people, holds over 25% of the world’s combined prison population; on any given day tens of thousands of men, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, are held in the torturous condition known as solitary confinement; and in the past 20 years the amount states have spent on prisons has risen six times the rate spent on higher education. I could go on, but I’ll stop.

Mass incarceration and felony disenfranchisement constitute broader, more all- encompassing, and more complex restrictions on voting rights and on the dream of justice than the Black Freedom Movement reckoned with when mass direct action resulted in the passage of several far reaching federal laws, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2006 Congress overwhelmingly re-authorized the Act, and named it the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Reauthorization Act and Amendments Act in recognition of the activism that created the law in the first place: Power conceded something because of a demand.

And now in Shelby County v. Holder the Supreme Court binds herself to be false to the future—it has gutted the Voting Rights Act and returned to form, aligning itself once more with Mississippi v. Williams and Giles v. Harris. It can’t hold.

Another world is surely coming; whether that world is a better world depends more on our collective action for more democracy, more participation, more peace and justice now than it does on the good intentions, wisdom, or sense of justice from any high bench or lofty quarter. An authentically democratic society is as threatening and unacceptable to the establishment today as emancipation was in generations past.

It’s time for all of us to get busy, because power concedes nothing without a popular movement from below and nothing whatsoever without a demand.

Nelson Mandela was referred to as a “civil rights leader” on NPR yesterday. Let the “Revise-All-History-to-Your-Liking-Festivities” begin!
Mandela was a fierce freedom fighter and a loving revolutionary who led the forces that toppled apartheid. He never called himself a “civil rights leader.” He was officially a “terrorist” according to the US government until long after the fight for freedom had been won. And as usual, those who opposed him and refused support when it would have counted, will invent a safe story of his life—one palatable to easy-listening Americans who want to be good, but not if it takes too much effort—and love that story to death.
If interested in the real reason Nelson Mandel went to jail for those many years, read his opening statement at the Rivonia Trial (Google it!)
Joy and Justice…Nelson Mandela Lives!

Patriotism includes the manufactured and sometimes imposed capacity to see similar sets of facts in dramatically different ways. Torture, rendition, imprisonment without trial, extrajudicial killings, assassinations, drone strikes and the bombing of civilians—all of this and more is condemned as evil or embraced as good by the governing class and nationalist/patriots depending on only one item: who does the deed.

“American Exceptionalism” is the magic potion patriots drink in order to justify these specific atrocities and other human rights violations when carried out by the US state: the American cause is always just, we are assured, the American heart always pure, and “our” side always righteous. Not only does the idea that the US is the “one indispensable nation” permit Americans to approve of bad behavior in our names, it mostly puts us to sleep, only dimly aware of happenings that are excruciatingly experienced and acutely perceived in other parts of the world.

Media Advisory

Pundits vs. Edward Snowden

Informing public of government spying ‘self-indulgent’ and ‘grandiose’

6/11/13

Journalism attracts whistleblowers. In fact, some reporters need whistleblowers in order to do their jobs.  But there are plenty of people working in the media who don’t have much use for whistleblowers–and they’ve been having a field day going after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Washington Post columnist Matt Miller (6/11/13) explained that “what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.”

Or to put it another way, it’s a program that’s secret, that the nation’s top spy lies to Congress about, and the Supreme Court refuses to review–because, being secret, no one can prove they’re affected by it.

Miller went on:

Daniel Ellsberg says Snowden is a “hero.”  Let me suggest a different prism through which to view that term. Somewhere in the intelligence community is another 29-year-old computer whiz whose name we’ll never know. That person joined the government after 9/11 because they felt inspired to serve the nation in its hour of need. For years they’ve sweated to perfect programs that can sort through epic reams of data to identify potential threats. Some Americans are alive today because of her work.

As one security analyst put it this week, to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack. If we’re going to romanticize a young nerd in the intelligence world, my Unknown Coder trumps the celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call any day.

It’s hard to imagine seeing Snowden sitting down with Sawyer anytime soon, but Miller’s certainly not alone in speculating about Snowden’s motives or psyche.

New York Times columnist David Brooks (6/11/13) writes that Snowden “could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.” And he “has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years.” But it’s bigger than that; like Miller, Brooks sees a real threat from people who don’t respect authority:

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret NSA documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

He elaborated:

He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

By that logic, it’s hard to see how anyone could possibly ever divulge anything that the government claims to be secret–which might suit Brooks just fine.

In the Washington Post (6/11/13), Richard Cohen managed to insult both Snowden and columnist Glenn Greenwald, referring to “a remarkably overwrought interview conducted by the vainglorious Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian.” In response to Greenwald writing that Snowden wears a red hood when he types passwords into his computer, Cohen inventively sneers that Snowden will “go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.”

Cohen doesn’t understand the fuss anyway, since private companies like Google have all sorts of intelligence on him. He concludes:

Everything about Edward Snowden is ridiculously cinematic. He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic. He jettisoned a girlfriend, a career and, undoubtedly, his personal freedom to expose programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever googled anything. History will not record him as “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers.” History is more likely to forget him. Soon, you can google that.

And the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin  (6/10/13) wrote that Snowden is “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison,” and that

any marginally attentive citizen, much less NSA employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications.

If you know that an agency intercepts communications, why wouldn’t you assume that it intercepts every communication, Toobin seems to be arguing.

Appearing on CNN (6/10/13) , Toobin explained that there’s a proper way to blow the whistle, and this sure isn’t it: “There are channels for whistleblowers inside agencies, through Congress, through the courts, not through Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian. That’s not what you’re supposed to do.”

What’s the right way to inform the public, then? Toobin says:

Well, the public has a right to know, but the way to bring it to public attention is not to commit crimes. And, yes, it is possible he wouldn’t get as much attention if he simply went to the senators, like Jeff Merkley, like Senator Udall, who cared deeply about this issue and are doing it the right way. Instead, he just threw this stuff out to newspaper reporters at the Washington Post and the Guardian, who were more responsible than he was, who actually didn’t publish everything they get.

Sure–go to a couple of senators who have long warned that they aren’t allowed to say what they know about government surveillance programs, and tell them that you want to share top secret NSA documents about those programs. That would have worked–if Snowden’s goal was to be arrested immediately.

There were others, like Time’s Joe Klein, who didn’t go after Snowden like this–he merely argued (6/10/13) that this was all old news: “First of all, we pretty much knew everything that has ‘broken’ in the past week.”

And in the Washington Post, Walter Pincus (6/11/13) sounded the same notes. He ran through the history: USA Today reported a very similar NSA story in 2006 (5/11/06), the Bush administration responded, public opinion polls seemed to support government policies. In 2008, Congress passed amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and last year there were solid reports by veteran reporter James Bamford (Wired, 3/15/12) about the massive NSA storage facility being built in Utah. So, Pincus writes:

Was there any follow-up in the mainstream media to Bamford’s disclosure, or anything close to the concerns voiced on Capitol Hill this past week? No.

That’s because the American public at large is more accepting of the government’s involvement in their lives — along with Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple–than is Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old who leaked the highly classified NSA documents. He appears to believe the public is unaware, and, as he told the Guardian, knowing “what’s happening, you [meaning the public] should decide whether we should be doing this.”

So if media don’t pursue a given story, it’s because the public has decided it’s not interested, or tacitly approves of a government policy of indeterminate scope? It’s a surprising revelation that this is how the media decide what stories to report.

As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan writes (6/11/13), journalists “have to acknowledge that Edward Snowden did something quite admirable.” He notes, “Without Snowden’s act, the public’s knowledge of what is being done to them in their own name would be much poorer.”

That’s true, unless you think the public either already knows all of this–or that they shouldn’t.