Afro-Netizen

Invisible Capital and Why We Need to Democratize Entrepreneurial Opportunity

By Chris Rabb

Republished courtesy of The European Business Review

Invisible capital is the toolkit of our skills, knowledge, networks, experiences and other resources, along with the set of assets we were born with.

Invisible capital is the toolkit of our skills, knowledge, networks, experiences and other resources, along with the set of assets we were born with: our race and gender, our family’s wealth and status, the type of community in which we were raised, and the education we had as children.

Some of these assets are fixed—we cannot change who our parents are. Others are in our power to acquire or modify. What makes them “invisible” is that our society rarely acknowledges that entrepreneurial opportunities—and thus entrepreneurial outcomes— are greatly influenced by these assets.

You can predict which entrepreneurs will succeed with a fairly high degree of probability if you know some basic facts about them. And on the surface, race, gender, and the educational attainment and/or household income of their families seem like pretty obvious factors. It’s simply easier for some people to succeed. The playing field is not level.

If you want to become an entrepreneur, or help other entrepreneurs succeed, you have to be familiar with the terrain of the playing field because it is neither smooth nor level. Additionally, you have to understand the rules of the game. Those rules are not written anywhere. A rulebook has yet to be written by the institutions’ most vocal and influential regarding the cause of entrepreneurship.

To understand the lay of the land and be able to effectively navigate the often hidden obstacles on a playing field, you have to learn how the unseen forces that shape entrepreneurial opportunity work, in ways that even the “winners” in business may not fully appreciate.

Platforms to access versus proxies for success

When we limit “success” to such things as occupational prestige, higher education, income, and so on, too often we discount the impact of strong networks and other forms of access that correlate to increased upward mobility for successive generations. As the saying goes, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know!” Of course, this expression is overly simplistic—and good connections alone rarely are enough for prolonged success in any field.

The truth is that there is a range of invisible factors that give some an unequal advantage on the entrepreneurial playing field. Successful entrepreneurs in the U.S., the data show, have a toolkit that tends to be more broadly valued in some communities than others, but the all-important mix of these assets is the invisible capital (or lack thereof) that helps or hinders entrepreneurial viability.

“Invisible capital is not a proxy for racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, or heterosexism. Invisible capital is also no substitute for the entrepreneurial trinity of hard work, ingenuity, and positive attitude. But these qualities are often prerequisites rather than predictors of sustained viability in business.”

Let me be clear: invisible capital is not a proxy for racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, or heterosexism. People who are on the receiving end of one or more of these “isms” are not powerless, nor are they devoid of invisible capital. Indeed, they have the capacity to build invisible capital strategically despite the clear social liabilities they may bear through no fault of their own. Invisible capital is also no substitute for the entrepreneurial trinity of hard work, ingenuity, and positive attitude. But these qualities are often prerequisites rather than predictors of sustained viability in business.

Invisible capital is not simply how big your Rolodex is or how many times you’ve traveled abroad. It is not just knowing that EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, knowing how to dress when meeting a loan officer, what degrees you’ve earned, or the level of your digital literacy.

It is all of those things and more.

Invisible capital revealed

Anyone can acquire invisible capital. Depending on the entrepreneurial opportunity, which aspects of invisible capital you need and in what proportion may change dramatically. If Woody Allen is right and just showing up is indeed 90 percent of success, then some portion of that must be attributed to the invisible capital that informs us where, when, how, and why we must show up in the first place.

Without equality of opportunity, we don’t know what (or who) represents “the best”. We can only safely know what the best is based on the rickety system we have inherited—along with those rare but highly visible exceptions society uses to validate the rule.

To fully acknowledge the importance of invisible capital in expanding opportunity for entrepreneurs, it’s vital to understand more about the different types of capital that constitute invisible capital.

At first glance, capital is just a synonym for money. But it’s not.

Read more here.

Want an Equitable Economy? Start Building One Based on Abundance

By Chris Rabb

Guest Contributor

Colorlines.com

Something’s gone horribly wrong economically in this country, so highly regarded across the globe for its spirit of enterprise and golden opportunity. And while it’s true that from the greatest challenges arise the greatest opportunities, it is also true that things are getting objectively worse for already struggling communities, who for generations have known unemployment and poverty as norms.

Still, even though fewer Americans than ever before are likely to achieve the promise of upward mobility for themselves or their kids, Americas cling to the mythology of meritocracy—or, as comic provocateur George Carlin once quipped, an American Dream that one needs to be asleep to believe in. Entrepreneurship is the most celebrated version of that dream.

“From our first days as a nation, we have put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity,” Obama declared as the opening premise of his deficit-reduction plan in April. “More than citizens of any other country, we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people.”

If you work hard enough, have a good enough idea and a positive attitude, you have the recipe for success—or so the narrative of American wealth goes.

It’s simply not true.

Read more here at Colorlines.com.

Troy Davis: A Death Row Inmate’s Chance to Prove his Innocence

By Benjamin Todd Jealous

Courtesy of NAACP.org

On Wednesday the saga of death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis will begin its last chapter. In an extremely rare ruling last summer, the United States Supreme Court ordered a federal judge in Georgia to grant Troy an evidentiary hearing to prove his innocence.

The ruling is unusual in that the Supreme Court has not granted this writ of habeas corpus in more than 50 years. Their decision is a strong indication that they are concerned about the constitutionality of executing the innocent — as am I.

Although much work still must be done in our justice system to ensure the innocent do not pay the price of the guilty, the granting of this evidentiary hearing is a major step for Troy Davis and for many other likely innocent prisoners sitting on death row; Troy Davis will have an opportunity to tell his side of the story and new evidence will be considered in this nearly 20-year-old case.

The hearing will allow the testimony of witnesses who have recanted or contradicted their original eyewitness testimonies to be heard and examined in a court of law. At long last, the courts will hear critical testimony that they were prevented from hearing in the original trial.

Troy’s journey to death row began in the summer of 1989, when he was arrested in connection with the killing of an off-duty police officer outside a Burger King restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. Two years later he was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime many believe he did not commit.

I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Davis almost a year ago, and I was convinced of his innocence. My sense of his innocence is impressionistic, but a close examination of the case indicates there was no physical evidence that tied him to the crime, no weapon was ever recovered and seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted or changed their original testimony in sworn affidavits, citing alleged police coercion.

One of the witnesses, a teenager, said the police threatened to hold him as an accessory to murder, warning that he would “go to jail for a long time” and would be lucky to ever get out because a police officer had been killed.

Since that trial, several members of the jury have delivered sworn statements to the court, indicating that their decision was based on incomplete and unreliable evidence. Given the murky timeline of the events in the dead of night, eyewitnesses who changed their stories, the pressure placed on the Savannah police department to promptly arrest and convict a “cop killer,” and the alleged coercion of witnesses, it is easy to understand why some jurors have admitted their uncertainty.

For nearly twenty years, Mr. Davis’s life has hung in the balance. Despite the prevalence of evidence and thousands of people rallying to save him from execution, including the NAACP, Amnesty International, former President Jimmy Carter, actor/activist Danny Glover, former FBI director William Sessions and conservative Congressman Bob Barr, the courts stubbornly refused to hear Davis’s claims of innocence…until now.

It is the unjust reality of the death penalty that in our nation that there are more than 3,300 people withering on our nation’s death rows, men and women who are almost universally poor, disproportionately African-American and in some cases innocent. Since 1973, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 138 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. Executing an innocent person is a mistake that cannot be rectified.

We still have a long way to go before Troy has a chance at life off death row. The standard of proof in the evidentiary hearing turns our criminal justice system on its head. Mr. Davis will be expected to prove his innocence rather than for the state to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is especially challenging given that the crime happened more than 20 years ago and there is no physical evidence, such as DNA.

The Troy Davis case is the most compelling case of innocence in decades and on June 23, 2010, I will join leaders from NAACP, Amnesty International and other faith and community organizations in Savannah, Georgia, lending our support to Troy and his family and offering prayers for a favorable outcome at the hearing. We continue to work tirelessly on behalf of Troy and the MacPhail family to bring the real killer of Officer Mark Allen MacPhail to justice and to bring closure to both families.

Whatever the outcome of the hearing, we will be in the trenches, knocking on doors and holding prayer vigils in the churches of Georgia and across the country until justice prevails for Troy Davis and for all Americans who have been caught in the painful web of injustice.

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Black Atheists, Urban America

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door:* Black Atheists, Urban America *

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Guest Contributor

Late Saturday afternoon, like clockwork, the street corner preachers on Crenshaw and King Boulevard in South Los Angeles take to the “stage.” Decked out in flowing robes and dreadlocks, they fulminate into their mikes about the universe, God’s will and “unnatural” homosexuals to a motley audience waiting for the next express bus. Members of the Black Israelites, they are part of a long tradition of performative religiosity in urban African American communities. This particular corner of black America is a hotbed of social commerce. Kids who’ve just gotten out of school mingle jubilantly as pedestrians flow past fast food places, mom and pop retailers, street vendors and Jehovah’s Witness’ hawking Watchtower magazines. The Israelites have become a fixture of this street corner’s otherwise shifting tableaux. Exclusively male and virulently sexist and homophobic, they are tolerated in some African American communities in part because of the lingering visceral and misguided appeal of Black nationalism.

While the Israelites’ millennialist “racial uplift” ethos ostensibly fits right in to the bustle of this prominent South L.A. street, other belief systems are not as easily assimilated. Since 2006, the L.A.-based street philosopher Jeffrey “P Funk” Mitchell has been documenting his conversations with everyday folk on questions of atheism and faith. Using the handle “Atheist Walking,” Mitchell also conducts free-ranging inquiries into Christianity’s contradictions with a rolling video camera and a satirically raised eyebrow. Adopting the role of the bemused urban flaneur, ala the commentator- pedestrian immortalized by French poet Charles Baudelaire, he delves into “atheist spirituality,” biblical literalism and the paradoxes of faith.

Mitchell is a member of the L.A.-based Black Skeptics, a group that was formed earlier this year to provide an outlet and platform for secular humanist African Americans. The Skeptics are part of a small but growing segment of African Americans who are searching for humanist alternatives to organized religion. In May, the Washington DC Center for Inquiry’s first annual African Americans for Humanism conference drew over fifty participants. Chat groups and websites like the Black Atheists of America have sprung up to accommodate the longing for community amongst non-theist African Americans who feel marginalized in a sea of black hyper-religiosity. Organizations such as the Institute for Humanist Studies cultivate African American secularist scholarship and advocacy.

With over 85% of African Americans professing religious belief, black religiosity is a formidable influence. Racial segregation, the historical role of the Black Church, and African American social conformity reinforce Christianity’s powerful hold on black communities. Indeed, I was recently told that I’d been deemed an unsuitable culmination speaker for a bourgie philanthropic organization’s young women mentees because of my decidedly unladylike public atheism (Perhaps the Israelite’s Old Testament shout-out to silent prostrate women would be more acceptable).

Proper role models for impressionable black youth are, at the very least, skillful church lady pretenders with ornate hats in tow. Secular organizations that seek to build humanist community with a predominantly African American base and social justice world view are challenged by the association of charitable giving, philanthropy, poverty work and education with faith-based communities. For many, successfully emulating the strong social and cultural networks that have sustained church congregations is an elusive goal.

And then, there is the deep and abiding desire for belief in the supernatural, the ineffable faith-passion that propels some through the trauma of racial indignities and personal crisis. Yet, humanism asks why we should cede enlightenment and the potential for restoration to the supernatural. Humanism challenges the implication that the sublimity of the natural world, and our connection to those that we love, admire and respect, is somehow impoverished without a divine creator.

In one of his bus stop monologues, Mitchell comments, “I want people to look at each other with the same reverence that they look at God and realize that ‘we’ did this, we made this happen.” The “we” represents will, agency, and motive force; qualities that many believers would attribute to God as omniscient architect and overseer. Non-believers are compelled to ask whether individual actions (for good or ill) are determined by God, or whether human beings simply act on their own volition in a universe overseen by God. Since time immemorial, non-believers have questioned whether God exercises control over those who commit evil acts or whether hell is the only “medium” for justice. By refusing to invest supernatural forces with divine authority over human affairs, humanism emphasizes human responsibility for the outcome of our pursuits. Morality is defined by just deeds, fairness, equality and respect for difference; not by how blusteringly one claims to adhere to “Godly” principles.

However, in communities that are plagued with double digit unemployment and a sense of cultural devaluation, notions of self-sufficiency and ultimate human agency may be perceived as demoralizing if not dangerously radical. As a child preacher steeped in the fiery oratory of the Black Church, writer James Baldwin recounted his growing cynicism about spreading “the gospel.” Lamenting the grip of religion on poor blacks, Baldwin said, “When I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to…tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize.”

In Baldwin’s view organized religion’s requirement that believers suspend disbelief and submit to “God’s will” is a liability for working class African Americans. Religious dogma anesthetizes as it bonds, a dangerous combination in an era in which the proliferation of storefront churches in urban black communities is a symptom of economic underdevelopment.

Echoing Baldwin, Chicago-based Education professor and atheist Kamau Rashid argues that “Freethought is an extension and expression of the struggle that African Americans have waged for self-determination. In fact it represents a heightened phase of such a struggle wherein one of the final stages of ‘conceptual incarceration,’ the belief in a God or gods, is discarded for a belief in the human potential, for a belief in ourselves.”

And why, in a heritage steeped in the revolutionary thought of such dirty outlaw skeptics as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, A. Philip Randolph, James Forman and Alice Walker, would this be so viscerally frightening?

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of BlackFemLens.org, a member of the Black Skeptics Group and the author of the forthcoming book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

*With apologies to Bob Dylan

Obama-Era Education Policy: The Evidence of Things Not Seen

By Ronald E. Chennault

Guest Contributor

Originally published by Education Week

One of the education innovations President Barack Obama seems to be enamored of is the extension of the school day or school year (or both). Whether he means providing more after-school programs, creating more learning opportunities during the traditional summer break, or literally adding hours to the school day and days to the academic year is not clear, though he appears to be in support of all of the above.

But what the president actually means matters, because requiring students to spend more time in school—even more than was envisioned over 25 years ago when A Nation at Risk promoted the idea—is a policy we in fact know very little about. And what we do know suggests that adding more time is not worth the effort.

Among Mr. Obama’s promises to the nation was that, under his administration, science would be brought back into the White House, and the primacy of decisionmaking supported by evidence would return to government. When it comes to education policy, though, my reading of what has emerged during his first year in office suggests that he didn’t really mean what he said.

"Large-scale experimentation requires caution and needs to be informed by theory and practice, not just promoted by strong rhetoric."

For starters, he selected a former chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan, to lead the way. This was a disappointing though not surprising choice, given that the president’s relationship with Duncan predated the election, and was based in part on bonding around a favored American sport. Duncan’s experience as the head of the country’s third-largest school district was surely a major factor as well. In that capacity, he oversaw for seven years one of the most dynamic, intricate, and challenging districts in the nation.

What disappoints, however, is that Duncan doesn’t seem to have developed much wisdom from that experience. There is no indication of a broad or deep understanding, or at least an appreciation, of the complicated relationship between education and larger societal forces. Nor was his tenure as Chicago’s schools chief an unmitigated success in any of the popular ways politicians and presidents define success, such as increased test scores and lower dropout rates.

Duncan’s debut on the national stage has been quite remarkable. Since the creation of the position in the Carter administration, the U.S. secretary of education has primarily been a “quiet” player. The one notable exception was William J. Bennett, during the Reagan administration. Given the nature of Duncan’s service as CEO of the Chicago schools under Mayor Richard M. Daley, it seemed likely that he would fit quite well into the “quiet player” pattern. Quite the opposite has happened, however: Secretary Duncan has been one of the most visible and vocal Cabinet members thus far. He has offered a series of bold declarations about the state of schooling, and aimed a barrage of highly critical barbs at educators and schools of education.

Education in America, particularly what takes place in many urban and rural schools, cries out for our most creative thinking and sustained attention. And having a prominent, empowered figure leading the way could help us accomplish some of the reforms that educators themselves have long supported but felt hamstrung in their efforts to put in place. Sadly, instead of “racing to the top,” reform in the first year of the Obama administration has been hastening down a much too narrow-minded and unsupported path. Which brings us back to the question: What of this reclaimed era of evidence-based decisionmaking?

For some of Duncan’s biggest ideas so far—more mayoral takeovers of local school districts, more performance-based-pay programs for teachers, longer school days or school years, increased routes to teacher certification, larger numbers of charter schools—there are at best limited or inconclusive findings regarding their success. And at worst, there are serious causes for concern or bodies of evidence that on balance point away from their success, not toward it. Lack of certainty does not need to be an impediment to action. But large-scale experimentation requires caution and needs to be informed by theory and practice, not just promoted by strong rhetoric.

The case of alternative certification illustrates this point. Secretary Duncan has on many occasions, such as in a major speech last fall at the University of Virginia, extolled the benefits of what he calls “high-quality alternative pathways” to teacher certification (such as Teach For America). In that same speech, he criticized traditional teacher education programs and called for them to be, among other things, “more rigorous and clinical.” Yet Duncan wants to have it both ways: to lambaste schools of education for not offering enough preparation to future teachers, while praising alternative-certification programs that inherently accelerate the process and offer less clinical preparation.

Instead of an evidence-based approach, what this sounds like is an administration that emphasizes the evidence that supports its educational agenda and downplays or ignores that which doesn’t. The unfortunate result is that, after one year, President Obama’s education agenda is, broadly speaking, indistinguishable from that of his predecessor. Sure, Mr. Obama, unlike George W. Bush, has not expressed support for federally funded voucher programs, for example. And it is nearly impossible to imagine that President Bush would have thought seriously about schools’ needs in his allocation of billions of stimulus dollars. But for anyone who might have expected the current president to move in a new direction in education, there is not much about which to be hopeful.

"Sadly, instead of 'racing to the top,' reform in the first year of the Obama administration has been hastening down a much too narrow-minded and unsupported path."

President Obama has claimed that Arne Duncan “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with [our] precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” But what works for whom? In what context(s)? According to what indicator? More to the point, with regard to many of the ideas that Secretary Duncan has promulgated so far, we don’t even know yet what works. So, by his own standards, the president is being less than honest.

The truth of the matter is that President Obama has a particular vision of the role that public schools should play in our society, and his secretary of education’s job is to promote that vision. But education is a value-laden enterprise—inescapably so—and while evidence should be driving our educational decisionmaking, the field is too complex to have these matters decided by research alone.

The reform of education in American has to be connected to a vision of what kind of society we want to have and how education can help us get there. So far, President Obama’s corporate-minded approach has led him (and Secretary Duncan) to speak of the role of education in very narrow terms. Judging from their comments, they see schools as existing primarily to develop in young people the skills they need to compete for jobs in a global economy. Such rhetoric is relevant at the moment, given the unemployment numbers the nation is facing, but ultimately we deserve—actually, we need—to have a president with a more expansive and hope-filled view of the functions of education than that.

If the administration were more truthful about its education agenda—that is, by admitting that it’s not about what works but what those in charge want to work—then we could discard this pretense of evidence-based decisionmaking and get to the real battle at hand.

Ronald E. Chennault is an associate dean of education and an associate professor of educational policy studies and research at DePaul University, in Chicago.

Easter Season, Capital Punishment, and the “Drum Major for Peace”

By Margaret Summers

Guest Contributor

During Easter season, Christians worldwide celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It occurs in the early spring, a season rife with anticipation and the promise of new beginnings; of the shoots of green plants pushing their way through soil warmed by the sun, thawed after a long and frozen winter; of new leaves opening on trees and bushes; of blossoming flowers upturned to the rays of a welcoming sun.

This year, in a tragic historic coincidence, Easter Sunday fell on the 42nd anniversary of the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil and human rights champion, a self-described “drum major for peace.”   Dr. King was shot dead on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel with friends and fellow activists. They were in Memphis to support economic justice for striking sanitation workers, a majority of whom were African American.

Uprisings exploded in several urban U.S. cities in reaction to the murder – expressions of uncontrollable grief, rage, and hopelessness, now that the man who had led millions up figurative mountaintops where all could share in his vision of a promised land where races could live together in equality, respect and love, was so violently and brutally taken from them.

Undoubtedly such anger and anguish back then prompted many to call for the execution of whoever was responsible for killing Dr. King. But neither Dr. King nor his immediate family had ever supported capital punishment. For Dr. King, a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, whose massive nonviolent demonstrations brought down British colonial rule in India – a tactic that Dr. King later used with great success in the sit-ins, pray-ins, and other anti-segregation protests in the Deep South – it was impossible to simultaneously believe in nonviolence as a way of life and also believe in the death penalty.

Dr. King felt the punishment effectively writes off human beings as forever irredeemable and unforgivable. “Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality,” he said. “As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.”

“I do not think God approves the death penalty for any crime - rape and murder included,” Dr. King asserted. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

Dr. King’s family, suddenly left without a husband and father 42 years ago, nevertheless agreed with his views that the death penalty perpetuates violence.

 “As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses,” his widow, Coretta Scott King, once said. “An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.”

Such sentiments have been echoed by two of his children. “Having lost my father and grandmother to gun violence, I will understand the deep hurt and anger felt by the loved ones of those who have been murdered,” Reverend Bernice King, recently named President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was once led by her father, had stated. “Yet I can't accept the judgment that their killers deserve to be executed. This merely perpetuates the tragic, unending cycle of violence that destroys our hope for a decent society.”  His son, Martin Luther King, III, who was named for his father and grandfather, was quoted as saying, “I should be on the front line for those advocating the death penalty, [but] we have always been consistently against the death penalty.”  

The King family’s beliefs are not unusual. They are shared by many murder victims’ families. Among the members of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s Board of Directors, three individuals – New Hampshire State Rep. Robert “Renny” Cushing, Bill Pelke and Bud Welch – lost family members to murder. Rep. Cushing’s father was killed by gunfire through the family home’s screen door. Pelke’s grandmother was killed in the course of a robbery of her home by four teenaged girls.  Welch’s daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

The three are active in organizations working to rid the United States and the world of capital punishment – Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, and Journey of Hope . . . from Violence to Healing. Victims’ families and the death penalty abolition movement have long worked together to let the public know that the death penalty does not help, but harms such families. The expensive punishment drains needed resources from grief counseling, victims’ families’ compensation, and other services and programs that enable these families to heal. Together, the voices of abolitionists and such murder victims’ families’ organizations and victims’ family members are amplified, united, as they say, “Please – don’t kill in our names.”

It is my hope that this Easter season, as many of us celebrate the resurrection of He who also stood for nonviolence and peace, we remember the words of Dr. King and his family members who rejected a punishment system that in the end dehumanizes us all. “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy,” Dr. King said. “... In fact, violence merely increases hate. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

Margaret Summers is the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty’s Director of Communications.

ColorOfChange.org: Demand the GOP stop inciting and supporting hate

The hateful acts that occurred at the tea party rally in Washington this weekend were not isolated incidents -- they are part of a growing pattern of violent rhetoric, racially charged imagery, and paranoid conspiracy theories emerging from the Republican party's grassroots supporters.

Republicans officials have contributed to this atmosphere with fear-mongering and coded racism, and they have actively courted this element of their party. It's time that Republican leadership is forced to address what it's helped to create.

Please join us in confronting Republican leaders and demanding that they take responsibility for tamping down the bigotry and hate among their supporters, and that they disavow the fear-mongering that leads to it. And please ask your friends and family to do the same -- unless we take a strong stand against this kind of hate, it will continue. We need as many people as possible -- of every race -- demanding that it stop.

Our members are calling on Michael Steele, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell to do two things:

1. Unequivocally condemn bigotry and hate among your supporters, and make clear that those who embrace it have no place in your party and that you reject their support.

2. Make clear that you will not tolerate fear-mongering and coded appeals to racism from officials in the Republican party, at any level.

What White People Fear

By Robert Jensen

Republished courtesy of YES! Magazine

In the struggle for racial justice, it’s time to pay more attention to the fears of white people.

In a white-dominated world, that may seem counter-intuitive. In the racial arena, what do we white people have to be afraid of?

There are lots of things to fear in this world, of course; race is not the only aspect of life in which people face injustice and inequality. A majority of people of all colors (including working-class and poor whites) struggles economically in a predatory corporate capitalist system, and all women, regardless of race, cope with gender discrimination and the threat of sexual violence in a male-dominated world.

But what fears could white people have as white people?

Understanding the fears behind the racial politics of both conservative and liberal whites can help guide strategy for changing a society in which wealth and well-being are still tied to race. And make no mistake, there is still a racialized gap between white and non-white America on measures of wealth and well-being—income, home ownership, graduation rates, access to health care, infant mortality, etc. In fact, the gap between white and black America on some of these measures is greater today than in the immediate aftermath of the major legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, and on some measures the rate of improvement is so glacial that it will be decades, if not centuries, before we reach equality. The legislative achievements that ended legal apartheid in America were a great victory, but the economic apartheid that remains is a reminder of our failures.

Put bluntly: The United States abolished a formal apartheid system but remains a white-supremacist society. After more than a decade of writing and speaking about these issues, which has sparked lots of feedback from all political angles, here’s what I have concluded about white folks and our fears.

Aren’t We Special?

For conservative white people, the dominant fear is of someday living without the privilege that comes with whiteness. Polite conservatives defend the primacy of “Western civilization.” More reactionary whites are openly racist about the threat that non-white peoples pose to “our way of life.” Both versions defend the existing distribution of wealth and power, even though many of the working-class and poor whites who endorse such views have access to precious little wealth or power. Race is used by white elites today, just as it was in the nation’s formative years, to drive a wedge between people who would otherwise come together to challenge those elites. Divide-and-conquer strategies, it seems, never go out of style.

Liberals are quick to denounce both the thinly veiled and the openly reactionary conservative racism. But what of the fears of liberals? White liberals might reject the very idea that they are afraid, citing their support for diversity and multiculturalism. But my experience suggests that while white liberals reject assertions of white supremacy, many fear the loss of white centrality. They are willing to renounce the idea that white people are superior, as long as they are allowed to live comfortably in a world where white is the norm.

In short, both the conservative and liberal positions are based on the same underlying assertion: “I’m white, and I’m special.” Conservatives are more likely to say it openly, while liberals tend to offer platitudes about racial justice while avoiding the risks required to make good on anti-racist principles.

What remains obscured is the distinctly uncivilized nature that Europeans and European Americans exhibited during their barbarous conquest of much of the world. The inherently fragile sense of white self-importance that emerges from that history is at the core of white fears—at some level, we all know that the truth of the depravity of white supremacy belies claims of white superiority.

In the institutions that adopt the liberal view, diversity is just fine (as long as whites remain in control) and multiculturalism can flourish (as long as white norms remain dominant). Institutions defined by the values and practices rooted in white Europe can open up to non-white people, as long as we white people remain comfortable. In such a white-defined liberal world, “people of color”—abstracted into a single group, erasing the particularity of people—are welcome, even sought after, to prove that we have transcended white supremacy.

Getting Uncomfortable

This analysis of the dynamics of mixed-race settings is hardly original. Non-white people have long recognized that white liberals are happy to engage with folks who aren’t white as long as their white-centric worldview isn’t threatened, and that white groups are happy to have non-white members as long as the power dynamics don’t change.

I observe all this not from some arrogant high ground, but as someone stuck in the same dynamic, struggling to get out. I know that for all my writing and political work on racial justice, I still feel most comfortable in settings where my understanding of the world defines the interaction, no matter the racial composition of the group. Rather than pretend otherwise, I start with that reality and search for ways to move forward.

I have a choice: I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human.

A first step for me has been to question the value of the seemingly endless “race dialogues” that are popular in white liberal groups. In the pseudo- therapeutic setting of such dialogues, with more talk about personal healing than about political change, white people are guaranteed that we won’t be forced out of a white-defined world. White-dominated institutions—corporations, nonprofits, universities, government agencies—are happy to sponsor such dialogues, diversity trainings, and multicultural events, precisely because they don’t threaten the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

White-dominated institutions . . . are happy to sponsor such dialogues, diversity trainings, and multicultural events, precisely because they don’t threaten the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

I have been involved in many of those events myself, as a facilitator or a participant, and I have learned from them (typically as much from my failures as successes). The most important lesson I take away is that race dialogues are not enough. As long as we stay confined in a safe world that doesn’t challenge power, we guarantee failure—if our goal really is to change the distribution of that power.

There’s no easy recipe for this kind of challenge, but we move in the right direction when we seek out places where we don’t feel comfortable, looking for relationships in which we can help change the dynamic. For me, that means putting myself in situations where I have to face my fear of being seen—or, more accurately, being seen-through—by non-white people. What if I step into those uncomfortable spaces and non-white people see the ways in which I hang onto some sense of my own supremacy/centrality? What if they see the ways in which I haven’t shaken off my racist cultural training?

I have a choice: I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human.

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Embracing Precious: The nuances and truths in the individual and collective stories we tell

By Imani Perry

Guest Contributor

These are strange days indeed. We are firmly into the 21st century, and yet the 80s are haunting us. For African Americans it is yet again a decade of dream and deferral.

Back in the ‘80s, for the young Black and college educated, the doors of corporate America and other professions opened up and broadened the spectrum of the Black middle class like never before. But also, back in the ‘80s, crack cocaine and the aftermath of deindustrialization crippled areas of concentrated blackness in major urban centers.

Now in the 21st century, a new Black elite floods the popular imagination as Capitol Hill, the president and his administration become more and more colorful. But also now, in the 21st century, the recession hits Black communities hardest, and at the intersection of devastating rates of imprisonment, joblessness, and inadequate education lie a critical, hurting, mass of Black Americans.

Then came Precious.

The film, released in the Fall of 2009 elicited a flurry of responses. The debates over the film were complex, nuanced, impassioned. In fact, among the Black intelligentsia there seemed to be more discussion about Precious than there was about President Obama’s education agenda, the stimulus package, or rising unemployment and imprisonment. That was troubling. But then again, it is easier to fire off a blog post or provide a commentary about a movie than it is to write a concise response to a complicated web of policy, law, and economics. However, I believe the film elicited so much engaged response precisely because it highlighted the challenge of this moment when it comes to race in America.

The film tells an individual story, a poignant one, about an abused young woman in Harlem in the 1980s. If we attend to the individual story, fictional though it may be, our hearts go out to Precious. We see in her story personal resilience, possibility, healing. Those are good things.

The film tells a collective story. The story it tells is about the devastation that the 80s wrought on Black communities, and the failure of the public school system to provide a path out for “the underclass.”

In both the collective story and the individual story, there is truth. There is a real Precious out there. The story is fictional, but it is human. The problem is that fictional stories, especially ones on film, don’t just stand as individual stories, but they do “representative work.” They become part of the way we make sense of the world in which we live. The story of one novelist or filmmaker’s imagination becomes the story of entire groups of people or “types” of people. This is especially true when the kind of social location depicted in the story is remote from the experience of the majority of the viewers.

We . . . yearn for the stories of those who sustain humanity and decency in the face of devastating poverty and marginalization . . . for those stories . . . are, after all, far more representative of Black life than the wreck that is Precious’ life.

On the one hand, many of us who are familiar with the way the story of Black America in the 80s was told, and the way the story of the rise of imprisonment in contemporary Black America is being told, are frustrated with the spectacle of Black violence, deviance, and dysfunction that appears over and over again. We are tired of this story of pathology that we see yet again in Precious. Instead we want a story that reveals the laws and policies and economic conditions that produce concentrated poverty and its violence. We also yearn for the stories of those who sustain humanity and decency in the face of devastating poverty and marginalization. We would prefer for those stories to be told because they are, after all, far more representative of Black life than the wreck that is Precious’ life.

And so, we balk at a film like Precious, rhetorically asking: Doesn’t it just recycle those old images of Black pathology? And isn’t it reviving those stories just when we are beginning to suffer so much again, just when we don’t need a convenient explanation of “they are pathological” to facilitate the nation turning its back on the responsibility to provide conditions for all citizens to lead productive lives as participants in the democracy and economy? 

[S]ome of us want to embrace a film like Precious because it highlights a kind of suffering that our society fails to respond to.

On the other hand, some of us want to embrace a film like Precious because it highlights a kind of suffering that our society fails to respond to. Children who are poor and of color, are inadequately protected in our society. They are more vulnerable to predators, more likely to be victimized on the street and in school, and less likely to have families that are able to marshal resources to deal with trauma, mental illness, and addiction. At the same time, poor, emotionally scarred parents who become abusers have virtually no resources to repair themselves.  So when we see a movie like Precious, we applaud it for encouraging sympathy and investment in young women like Precious. We think “yes, the reality of her life deserves to be depicted, maybe it will inspire action.”

The film does both kinds of work on the audience at once. Strange indeed.

Earlier, I referred to how the film reveals the challenge of this moment. The  challenge is this:  When it comes to race: critically thinking members of this society have to consider the implications of symbolism (like the Black president, or the Oscar worthy dysfunctional sexual abusing welfare mother played by Mo'nique) at the same time as we consider the messy, complicated, content of our society, without assuming that these things have a clear or consistent relationship to each other.

Additionally, the film demands that we bring more to the table than just an analysis of its as a piece of art. If the film stands alone, it gets deployed and interpreted every which way. But if we use the film to open the door to conversations about society, ones that are filled with knowledge, data, and careful analysis, rather than mere anecdote and fiction, then it can do some useful work in our social and political lives. Perhaps it can inspire solutions to problems of representation and policy challenges.

President Obama is on our televisions, and a young Black man is selling drugs on a corner near my home in Philadelphia. Precious is on our movie screen, and my classes are filled with brilliant young Black women pursuing degrees at a world class university. These are realities. But what relationships do these individuals have to each other and to the society at large, and how do those relationships reveal the resilience of inequality or the promise of democracy?

Asking and answering these sorts of questions is key for understanding race in the 21st century United States.

Imani Perry is a professor at Princeton University and regular contributor to Afro-Netizen. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences.

University of California Swindle: California’s Apartheid Schoolhouse

By Sikivu Hutchinson
Guest Contributor

On March 4th, as the University of California San Diego continues to roil with the fallout from the so-called Compton Cookout, thousands of students and faculty will participate in statewide protests against a draconian budget that has cut a bloody swath into California’s public universities. UC and Cal State student activists across the state are calling for an end to the “privatization” of public higher education.

Activists charge that university officials are increasingly siphoning funding for instruction to research and development through byzantine private investment schemes. In addition, there is a growing trend to give preference to out-of-state students who pay higher admission fees. The majority of these students are not from historically underrepresented African American and Latino communities.

This strategy essentially reduces spots for working class students of color who are far more likely to rely on financial aid. While UC chancellor Mark Yudoff recently boasted of an $800,000 salary and perks to star faculty, “grunt” faculty and staff were laid off or forced to take furlough days, classes were canceled, program funding was curtailed and a draconian 32% tuition hike was proposed. Yudoff’s king’s ransom was garnered on the backs of California students of color who will be denied access to a system that is nationally regarded as the “Rolls Royce” of public higher education.

For those experienced with the business of white supremacist higher education politics, the UCSD administration’s pro forma soul searching, public denunciations and earnest pledges to discipline the “Cookout” offenders are all tiresomely familiar. In 2005, a Black female student at the private California Institute of the Arts found vulgar anti-Black epithets scrawled in her dorm room and degrading anti-Black graffiti had been written on an artwork in the Institute’s gallery.

In response to the incidents, the campuses’ Black Student Union organized protests and meetings with the administration which yielded few commitments to long term change. The school’s miniscule Black and Latino population was imperiled by scant financial aid, invisibility in the Eurocentric curriculum and the paucity of faculty mentors of color.

White faculty fiercely defended their liberal/progressive credentials with showy claims of multiculti “down-ness.” The college president publicly invoked his appreciation for Martin Luther King and deplored the hate crime as an isolated incident. When I was hired in 2006 to teach Cal Arts’ first Women of Color in the U.S. course, the campus was still festering with resentment and racial unrest. Pushing for campus climate change in a group of faculty and student advocates, I presented at endless meetings in which the administration stonewalled on redressing institutional bias through professional development training. The perpetrators had been given a slap on the wrist and it was business as usual in the “liberal” “inclusive” world of arts education that privileged the canon of the white avant garde.

During an interview on CNN, UCSD Ethnic Studies professor Sara Clark Kaplan outlined the crux of the problem with scapegoating individuals in the midst of a systemic crisis. It’s simply not acceptable to blame the university’s egregious disregard for the needs of students of color on the bigoted acts of ignorant white or “minority” students. UCSD’s gross under-representation of Black students reflects the UC system’s institutional neglect of recruitment and outreach to African American high schools. The devastating impact of Proposition 209 (which prohibited California public universities from using affirmative action admissions criteria) has been a convenient smokescreen for maintaining segregation in the UC system.

When I taught at UCLA in 2001 at the Graduate School of Education I had only one African American student in my course on culturally relevant pedagogy. Black students had gone from having a vibrantly visible presence during my stint as a student there during the late 80s and early 90s to barely registering. In some instances it was more difficult for accomplished African American seniors from highly regarded predominantly Black Los Angeles high schools like King-Drew Medical Magnet to get into UCLA than Ivy League colleges.

At slightly more than 1%, UCSD’s Black student enrollment is yet another indictment of the UC’s disgraceful wholesale complicity with the spirit of 209. As part of its demands to administration, UCSD’s Black Student Union has called on the university to step up its recruitment and retention efforts for underrepresented students. They have also pressed for more recruitment of diverse faculty and granting of tenure to faculty of color.

Recruitment, retention and tenure are important goals. Yet the deeper question of the lack of cultural responsiveness of the faculty and administration is a thornier issue. The ghettoization of ethnic studies and other so-called “minority-oriented” interdisciplinary departments contributes to a segregation of cultural knowledge in which the historical foundations of racial apartheid are obscured. Racism is viewed as a series of misguided individual acts rather than as an integral part of American national identity, power and authority. At core, the UCSD events are merely another manifestation of the post-racial fallacy that plays out every day in California’s first world apartheid classrooms.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.