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Kay Bradley

Opinion | What 'Structural Racism' Really Means - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...structural-racism.html

shared by Kay Bradley on 09 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • “Race prejudice,” Cox writes, “developed gradually in Western society as capitalism and nationalism developed. It is a divisive attitude seeking to alienate dominant group sympathy from an ‘inferior’ race, a whole people, for the purpose of facilitating its exploitation.”
  • It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.
  • Kay Bradley on 09 Nov 21
     
    Jamelle Bouie: it's not the language, it's the structural facts.
Kay Bradley

Angela Davis Still Believes America Can Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...angela-davis.html

shared by Kay Bradley on 19 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s
  • Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged
  • she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.”
  • ...67 more annotations...
  • As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future.
  • she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction.
  • a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
  • Stuart Hall,
  • Prudence Crandall
  • Anne Braden
  • For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
  • But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women
  • had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda
  • So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?
  • She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.
  • “Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.
  • and Columbia University.
  • that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them
  • this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration —
  • Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed
  • And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.
  • Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system
  • a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades.
  • )
  • It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?
  • I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il
  • but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader
  • most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized.
  • Fannie Lou Hamer
  • Huey P. Newton w
  • Mark Rudd
  • [Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.
  • One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.
  • Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi
  • all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves
  • E.D. Nixon,
  • Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,”
  • Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;
  • several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.
  • the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)
  • Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools
  • she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
  • From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.
  • t was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue.
  • After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism
  • a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers
  • Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world.
  • In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
  • NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,
  • oth forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics.
  • Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.
  • There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.
  • A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
  • There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.
  • Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion.
  • The elephant in the room is always capitalism,”
  • Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.
  • We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”
  • It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.
  • Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.
  • Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
  • Black Lives Matter movement.
  • this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.
  • It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly.
  • there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”
  • She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy
  • As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.
  • AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history.
  • We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
  • Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity
Kay Bradley

The Debate Over Critical Race Theory - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...itical-race-theory-debate.html

race critical race theory inequality structural inequality

shared by Kay Bradley on 16 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • In a culture-war brawl that has spilled into the country’s education system, Republicans at the local, state and national levels are trying to block curriculums that emphasize systemic racism.More than 20 states have introduced legislation restricting lessons on racism and other so-called divisive concepts.
Kay Bradley

Police Reform Is Necessary. But How Do We Do It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...police-reform.html

shared by Kay Bradley on 27 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • The United States spends more on public safety than almost all its peer countries and much less, relatively speaking, on social services
  • Now we’re having a conversation that’s not just about how black communities are policed, and what reforms are required, but also about why we’ve invested exclusively in a criminalization model for public safety, instead of investing in housing, jobs, health care, education for black communities and fighting structural inequality.
  • Budgets are moral documents, reflecting priorities and values.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Garza: In 2018 and 2019, my organization, Black Futures Lab, did what we believe is the largest survey of black communities in America. It’s called the Black Census Project. We asked more than 30,000 black people across America what we experience, what we want to see happen instead and what we long for, for our futures.
  • the No.1 issue facing them, and keeping them up at night, is that their wages are too low to support a family.
  • Imagine that you have a tool chest for solving social problems. It gives you options. Then you lose the tool of mental-health resources. You lose the tool of public education. They take out the tool of job placement. And then all you’ve got left is this one rusty hammer. That’s policing.
  • Simply defunding the police cannot be a legacy of this moment. I want to hear about investing in black communities more than I want to hear about defunding.
  • There are a host of things that the police are currently responding to that they have no business responding to.
  • They cause others to be armed, out of fear, who shouldn’t have to worry about defending themselves
  • A tiny percentage of people are the ones destabilizing communities
  • In many cities, the police spend a lot of time “on traffic and motor-vehicle issues, on false burglar alarms, on noise complaints and on problems with animals,”
  • When a police report leads to criminal charges — only a subset of the whole — about 80 percent of them are for misdemeanors. Friedman argues that we should hand off some of what the police do to people who are better trained for it.
  • The dispatcher would route calls that aren’t about crimes or a risk of harm to social workers, mediators and others.
  • There has been such a massive disinvestment in the social safety net that should exist to give black communities an opportunity to thrive, whether it’s access to health care or housing or education or jobs.
  • If you have a car accident, why is somebody with a gun coming to the scene?
  • Or answering a complaint about someone like George Floyd, who the store clerk said bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill?
  • Similarly, if you have a homeless man panhandling at a red light and you say to a cop, “Go fix it,” he’ll arrest the man. And now he has a $250 ticket. And how does he pay that? And what does any of this accomplish?
  • domestic disputes. They’re the subject of 15 to more than 50 percent of calls to the police
  • But might we get further in the long run if someone with other skills — in social work or mediation — actually handled the incident?
  • The women were deeply wary of the police in general, but 33 of them had called them at least once, often for help with a teenager. “Calling the police on family members deepens the reach of penal control,” Bell wrote. But the mothers in her study have scant options.
  • hey knew that if they called the police that real harm could come, and they didn’t want that.
  • When I did investigations for the Justice Department, I would hear police officers say: “I didn’t sign up to the police force to be a social worker. I don’t have that training.” They know they’re stuck handling things because there is a complete lack of investment in other approaches and responses.
  • In Eugene, Ore., some 911 calls are routed to a crisis-intervention service called Cahoots, which responds to things like homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness. Houston routes some mental-health calls to a counselor if they’re not emergencies. New Orleans is hiring people who are not police officers to go to traffic collisions and write reports, as long as there are no injuries or concerns about drunken driving. I’m borrowing these examples from Barry Friedman’s article. The point is that some cities are beginning to reduce the traditional scope of police work.
  • One of the most interesting studies about policing is a randomized comparison of different strategies for dealing with areas of Lowell, Mass., that were hot spots for crime. One was aggressive patrols, which included stop-and-frisk encounters and arrests on misdemeanor charges, like drug possession. A second was social-service interventions, like mental-health help or taking homeless people to shelters. A third involved physical upkeep: knocking down vacant buildings, cleaning vacant lots, putting in streetlights and video cameras. The most effective in reducing crime was the third strategy.
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