Speakeasy
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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
In order for a representative democracy to properly function, a simple pre-condition must be met: citizens must be allowed to see how elected officials, entrusted to govern according to our nation’s laws and ideals, are actually governing.
If elected officials abuse their powers in secret, concealing illegal actions or the violation of citizens’ rights, representative democracy breaks down.
It’s that simple.
This is why the First Amendment and press freedoms are essential to a functioning democracy, and why it is considered in the United States, in its ideal form, as the ‘Fourth Estate.’ The right to report upon those things politicians wish to hide has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned check against government abuse.
Put another way: the press has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned whistle-blowing institution.
Which is why our government’s current war against whistle-blowers is nothing short of a war against representative democracy itself – a fact that makes what has happened to Bradley Manning, and what is happening to Edward Snowden – larger than any ‘national security’ or ‘Fourth Amendment’ argument we could possibly have.
In The New York Times this morning, Ben Wizner of the ACLU explains that the Obama administration did not have to put Manning on trial. After all, the American soldier had offered guilty pleas that would have put him behind bars for decades for leaking U.S. war crimes and illegal actions – abuses Manning felt needed to be in the public domain for Americans to properly evaluate the 'War on Terror.'
However, as Wizner writes, the U.S. government insisted on a trial, hoping to charge Manning with ‘aiding the enemy’ – hoping to cast, just as it has done in its persecution of the NYT’s James Risen, whistle-blowing to the press as worse than espionage.
The government’s reasoning, as Wizner writes:
… couldn’t be clearer or more dangerous: it’s preferable for the American people to remain in the dark if that’s what’s necessary to keep the enemy in the dark. But sometimes information that might be useful to an enemy – such as evidence that the United States tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere – is also indispensable to the public to ensure democratic accountability and adherence to our nation’s ideals.
Equating whistle-blowers with traitors is not only crude, but also fundamentally antidemocratic. And until our laws fairly distinguish between leaks in the public interest and treason against the nation, we shouldn’t be surprised when our whistle-blowers seek asylum elsewhere.
The adversarial approach the United States has taken to whistle-blowers is an extension of the adversarial approach it has taken to press freedoms themselves, both of which are extensions of First and Fourth Amendments setbacks which are weakening our democracy.
We’ve seen it in the military-style crackdown on protesting. We’ve seen it in the Obama administration’s prosecuting of more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. And now, we see it in FBI and NSA surveillance of journalists’ private phone and email records – abuses that accompany the government’s violation of millions of Americans’ privacy rights.
As we learn more each day about the secret scope of NSA surveillance, the public – and Congress – are growing more indignant.
Calls for accountability are growing.
As they should, for this is how democracy functions. This is how democracy is supposed to function. And such calls for accountability would not be happening had Snowden not stepped forward and released into the public domain information that is wholly in the public interest.
To do so, Snowden had to flee this country, for he knew he would be treated, in our current environment, as an ‘enemy of the state.’
This ‘enemy’ status is due to the government’s war against whistle-blowing, which itself is a war against the democracy we all hold so dear.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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On Saturday, August 3rd, my family will be at Totland in Berkeley celebrating our granddaughter Amiela’s second birthday. Amiela and I are particularly close, so my absence will be noticed.
I will be marching along with thousands of others concerned about climate change and horrified by the fossil fuel industry’s willingness to continue to place profits over worker and community safety, and over the very future health of the planet.
I will be wearing my white doctor’s coat and marching with the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) contingent. PSR’s international affiliate, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for proclaiming that there was no medical response to nuclear war. The only option was prevention. We can now say the same for climate change. Extreme weather events, food and drinking water shortages and all of the known and unknown consequences of destabilizing the earth’s climate system are all best prevented.
The mantra is clear and catchy. Adapt to that which you can’t prevent and prevent that to which you can’t adapt. Climate science now tells us that we can only burn 1/5 of the known fossil fuel reserves. Anything more will exceed the two degree celsius red line everyone agrees we can’t go beyond without huge catastrophes. Even at two degrees we will lose half of the Sierra snowpack and therefore half of our drinking water.
But Chevron, like the rest of the fossil fuel industry, is focused on short-term profits. They’re betting that no one will stop them from refining every last bit and then some, despite the cost to the planet and to my dear grand children.
We need to wake up and do what is right for the future. There is no meaningful medical response to climate chaos. Help prevent it by marching to the Chevron Refinery on August 3rd. Meet at Richmond BART at 10AM sharp.
Written by Tara Murtha for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
The recent announcement that actress Jenny McCarthy is replacing Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the popular ABC morning talk show The View has sparked an intense wave of backlash.
The problem is that after McCarthy's son was diagnosed with autism, she became convinced it was because of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and over the last several years she has reinvented herself as the leading celebrity voice of the anti-vaccine movement. Although the study that originally sparked the MMR vaccine-childhood autism panic has since been completely discredited, many parents have stopped vaccinating their children, in part because of anti-vaccine advocacy carried out by McCarthy and others. As a result, measles cases have spiked in recent years.
Critics say that McCarthy's anti-science views are a public health hazard, and giving her a platform, on a morning talk show or in other media outlets, legitimizes her view. For instance, "Larry King had [McCarthy] debate a doctor, as though her disproven ideas should be given the same equivalence as those of a medical expert," The Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote recently, adding, "False equivalency is one of journalism's great pitfalls, and in an effort to achieve 'balance,' reporters often obscure the truth." As Brendan Nyhan, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, argued, uncritically repeating discredited statements just amplifies the spread of misinformation.
False equivalence is the worst of what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen and others have called "he said/she said" journalism. It takes much less time—and subject expertise—to frame a story as a "controversy" than to give it informative context. (Not to mention that a non-scientific minority opposition to the vetted facts does not qualify as a "controversy.")
When it comes to covering health and science, the "he said/she said" short-cut is downright dangerous.
It's unfortunate then that media coverage of reproductive health issues often falls into this trap as well.
Reproductive Health
Hasselbeck, the former Survivor contestant whom McCarthy will replace, once argued to one of her co-hosts on The View that taking the morning-after pill is "the same thing as birthing a baby and leaving it out in the street." She said that she believes emergency contraception (EC) disrupts a pregnancy. In fact, EC prevents ovulation from occurring, preventing fertilization in the first place.
Since the medical definition of pregnancy is successful implantation of a fertilized egg, effective use of EC means you can't get pregnant in the first place.
Yet there was relatively little outrage over Hasselbeck's remark or the dispute, which was described in many outlets, as usual, as a "cat fight" between hosts.
When it comes to reproductive health, we have a much higher tolerance for hearing anti-science beliefs with serious public health consequences. Of the many fake-science falsehoods published every day on reproductive health issues, only the most obvious draws McCarthy-level heat. Most memorable is the belief, shared by an ever-expanding number of lawmakers, that women's bodies contain magic lady-venom to prevent pregnancy in cases of rape.
While these legislators draw much deserved public ridicule, it's the less obvious anti-science and evidence-free statements published every day that are most dangerous.
NBC's recent story on how 80 percent of Americans will be living at or near the poverty level in their lifetimes was accompanied by this photo of a "poor white family".
Images that feature human beings "work" in communicating political and social meaning because of how the viewer "reads" them. As such, there are stated and unstated assumptions which the person who is "seeing" applies to the "object" of their gaze.
For example, the White Gaze views a photo of a young black man wearing a hoodie and whose pants are sagging and sees a person who exists in a state of criminality, and is a social predator.
A photo of a white man wearing a suit and walking down Wall Street in New York will be seen by the White Gaze as representing a "respectable" person and a "hard worker" living the "American Dream."
In reality, the former may be on the way to his 3rd job, has never been in prison or arrested, and takes care of his aged parents and siblings. The latter could be a child-molesting murderer and rapist, who is also embezzling millions of dollars from his clients.
White and male--and Whiteness more generally--views itself as benign and harmless. Black and male--and Blackness more generally--is viewed by White American society as dangerous and pathological. The power of images is how they harness and channel assumptions about how various types of personhood find representation in, and are configured by, a broader system of dominance, subordination, privilege, inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy.
NBC.com's photo is an example of those processes at work. There we "see" two overweight white women with a young child, and thus make social and political assumptions about gender and class. We see a small home and generalize from that visual about how "poor people" live, and more importantly, "what type of people" they are.
Images also give the viewer permission to empathize or to condemn the subject. Are these "good" people or "bad people?" What is my sense of obligation to them? Does my sense of community extend to people like them?
Stereotypes serve as cognitive short cuts which the viewer, and we as a society, use to categorize and evaluate the relative worth of whole groups of people. The way that images of white, "poor", female, "overweight", "unattractive", bodies are processed by the viewer is a reflection of how we as a society think about race, class, and gender. These concepts exist individually while also having meaning in relation to one another.
Moreover, in America, because of the Calvinist-Horatio Alger-Myth of Individualism and Upward Mobility, claims on poverty necessarily involve moral judgments.
The black single mother is a "welfare queen" who is "lazy" and has "bad morals". The poor white person is a "redneck" or a "hillbilly" with all of the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in such language.
Consequently, poor white people are one of the few groups which can me made fun and mocked in American culture without consequence or public sanction.
White elites and opinion leaders do not want to talk about poor white people because that would expose the defects of capitalism. These same elites also avoid discussing white poverty because it would undermine how they have historically been able to mine white supremacy to mask inter-class conflict and exploitation among whites in the United States.
"Race is how class is lived in America." Consequently, the leaders in the black and brown community care about poverty as a general issue because it disproportionately impacts people of color.
White privilege extends to all white people in America. Black and brown folks have to deal with both the colorline and other types of inequality in American society. Attending to our needs, while doing so with a respect for the struggles of all people necessitates a practical focusing of energy where the white poor are viewed as an interest group that should be attended to by the white community.
Moreover--and I do believe black and brown elites are more correct than not in this choice and instinct--there is a deep belief, one hard taught by American history, that poor and working class whites will consistently choose to serve the interests of rich white people because of the psychic wages that are paid to them by Whiteness. As such, why focus the limited political capital of the black and brown community in a time of crisis on solving a "white" problem?
Poor and working class whites may have much in common with poor and working class people of color. But, their greatest allegiance is doing the work of white racism against their own immediate class interests. From Bacon's Rebellion forward, with some notable deviations, this has been one of the key themes in American history.
However, the new white poor are not the stereotypes drawn from the exploitative TV show Honey Boo Boo.
They are the former middle class and non-college educated whites who worked in the skilled trades or as low-level municipal and public functionaries. Many of them are invisible as they couch surf with friends, or move back in with their aging parents or other relatives. The new white poor lost their homes and are living in motels (if they are lucky). Other members of the new white poor are sleeping in their cars, one of the last possessions that marked them as "middle class", after their IRA's and 401k's are drained, the credit cards maxed out many months ago.
The new white poor are the students in some of my classes who share with me how they are using their student loans to support their parents; thus they must pass their courses or the whole family will be homeless. The new white poor are those college students that universities are having to accommodate with showers, lockers, dorms, and other supports because many of them quite literally have no where to go when the school day is over, and when the academic year has ended.
The new white poor are not toothless rural folks sitting around smoking meth and making moonshine as they are depicted in the American popular imagination. They are your neighbors, in the suburbs, rural areas, and our cities, that are right next door, and trying to get by while maintaining their dignity.
The type of white poverty stereotyped by the lede photo on NBC's news item is a caricature that is easy to mock and deride. Those poor white people are an alien Other. "Respectable" white folks (and others) mock them, because poor whites represent a basement below which the white middle class imagines they cannot fall beneath.
It is much harder to minimize and ignore the now poor white folks who are the former members of the middle and working class that shop at Trader Joe's or Target with their SNAP cards and pittance of remaining unemployment monies, praying that no one they know sees them, and then get back into their paid off SUV and drive to a parking lot to sleep for the night with their kids, and who then wake up early the next day to wash up in the McDonald's bathroom.
The mainstream news media will likely not show you a picture of failed white suburban domesticity in the Age of Austerity and the Great Recession. The Fourth Estate are not truth tellers. They support the status quo and the powerful.
As such, a meaningful discussion of white poverty in the Age of Austerity is not an approved topic for the public discourse even while "we the people" are suffering everyday.
Written by Imani Gandy for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
In the "war on women," 20-week abortion bans have become a rallying point for both pro- and anti-choice camps alike. While Texas' recently-enacted law, which among other things bans abortions after 20 weeks, may have garnered most of the media attention in recent weeks, so far 13 states have passed similar bans, and three states have passed even more restrictive laws, prohibiting abortions as early as six weeks' gestation. Nevertheless, these 20-week abortion bans have been gaining traction.
Much has been written about the politics behind these laws—especially the false claims that they are designed to protect women—but so far, there has been relatively little coverage of the anti-choice litigation strategy in relation to these bans. For instance, how do anti-choice campaigners intend to persuade the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade? Of all the various state anti-abortion laws, which one is most likely to be used as the test case at the national level?
The Supreme Court won't review its long-standing abortion jurisprudence unless it has to. Given the controversial nature of abortion, a simple appeal from a state to clarify abortion law probably won't prompt the Court to act. (The Oklahoma supreme court recently tried this tactic when it struck down Oklahoma's ultrasound law and practically begged the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case; the Court didn't bite.) What will prompt the Supreme Court to act is a conflict between the laws that apply in one circuit and the laws that apply in another.
"Circuit" is a fancy legal term for a group of states. The country is split into eleven circuits, plus the D.C. Circuit, with one federal appeals court in charge of setting the law for each of the circuits. If one circuit court sets law that is different than the law that applies in another circuit, then a legal mess—or, as it is sometimes called, a "circuit split"—results. And since the Supreme Court likes to have laws that bind the entire country, it will intervene to resolve the circuit split.
The push for 20-week abortion bans is part of a national strategy implemented by anti-choice advocates to create exactly the sort of legal mess that will force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and to revisit the viability standard that has served as the constitutional foundation for abortion rights for 40 years.
The cliché is alluring: A rising tide lifts all boats. Former Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush promised it would be true as they cut taxes on the rich.
If the rich got richer, Reagan and Bush contended, some of their extra cash would trickle down and float everyone else’s boat. The gist of this economic theory is that the mission of government is to serve big business and the wealthy, who then, occasionally, bequeath to the middle class and poor hand-me-down benefits.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. The rich got richer, alright. But everyone else got nada. Then the wealthy gamblers on Wall Street crashed the economy, swamping everyone else’s little skiff in a whirlpool of underwater mortgages, lost jobs and dashed hope. Now, a Democratic president has proposed a different economic path. Barack Obama said in a speech last week that America should invest in itself and build out from the middle class. In his economic model, government directly serves the vast majority of Americans in the middle while offering a hand to the poor so they can pull themselves up out of the drink.
His ideas so frighten Republicans that they’re threatening to wreck the U.S. economy –and possibly provoke another financial crisis worldwide – by refusing, once again, to raise the debt ceiling so Congress can pay the bills it already has incurred. If President Obama doesn’t agree to GOP demands to repeal Obamacare, which helps 50 million Americans who need health insurance, Republicans say they’ll kill the U.S. economy.
While President Obama is promoting government investment in infrastructure, jobs, education, home ownership, and retirement and health care security, Republicans are writing legislation to slash and burn services to middle class Americans. They’d make good on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s promise to execute Big Bird. They’d cut education grants for poor students by 16 percent; funding for the Department of Labor by 13 percent; funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 34 percent; funding for the Fish and Wildlife Service by 27 percent. They’d cut 18 percent from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is indicting hedge fund managers for insider trading and other illegal schemes.
The New York Times described the GOP chopping as “some of the most serious cuts to domestic spending since the Republicans in 1995 tried to shutter the departments of Energy, Education and Commerce – and ended up shutting the government down for 28 days.”
U.S. Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., said of President Obama: “His priorities are going nowhere” because the GOP intends to destroy Obamacare and thwart the President’s proposals to invest in America.
Republicans lost the White House. They lost an opportunity to control the Senate. They lost seats in the House, though they remain the majority there. Yet it is their plan, from that minority position, to sustain their sink-middle-class-boats economic policies and scuttle all attempts to change course.
Obama acknowledged their intransigence during his speech Wednesday. But it won’t deter him from pressing for what is right. He said, “We need a long-term American strategy based on steady, persistent effort to reverse the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades.”
Between 1979, just before Reagan took office, and 2007, when the economy collapsed under Bush, the income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled. But the income of the typical American family barely increased. Now the average American earns less than he or she did in 1999.
Middle class boats are sinking.
Instead of cut and kill, Obama proposes invest and build. His plan is to invest in infrastructure to create jobs, to invest in people through education, to invest in the middle to build it up and extend it out by enabling the poor to join its ranks.
The vast majority, the 99 percent, want a simple, straightforward relationship with their government. They’re not seeking guarantees or handouts. But they do believe their government should facilitate opportunity.
Opportunity requires a good educational system, from pre-K for all children to affordable technical schooling or college for all who want to go. Opportunity requires access to affordable health care so that an illness or accident doesn’t cause bankruptcy or death. Opportunity requires assurance that Social Security and Medicare will serve every generation so that old age isn’t utterly feared. Opportunity requires good jobs with good benefits, and with the economy still sluggish, the best way to spur job creation is investment in renewable energy sources and in the nation’s deteriorating roads and bridges and public transit.
This idea, the concept of investing in the future to promote growth, is gaining strength worldwide. The top financial officials of the world’s largest economies – the finance ministers and central bank governors for the G-20 countries – issued a joint statement earlier this month endorsing government spending to strengthen the global economy.
It is working in Japan, a victim of stagnation for nearly two decades before the Great Recession. Analysts attribute the significant first-quarter growth in the world’s third largest economy to the aggressive monetary easing and massive public spending by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office in December. His party won a huge victory in elections this month, giving him a mandate to continue what’s called “Abenomics” – investing in his country to spur recovery.
Similarly, China is launching additional initiatives, including railroad construction, to jump start its economy, though smaller than the massive spending – $586 billion – by the government in 2008 that fairly successfully prevented the world’s financial crisis from damaging the Asian giant’s flourishing economy.
Republicans insist all that’s required to bail those inundated middle class boats is more tax cuts for the rich and more service cuts for the middle class. It’ll never work. What it takes to float a middle class boat is government investment in America, government growing the economy from the middle out and direct government attention to average Americans.
Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
As Todd Akin and the country at large learned during the 2012 elections, pregnancies resulting from rape are very real and sadly all too common. If there was one silver lining in the entire debacle and "debate" over Akin's "legitimate rape" comment, it was that it helped expose a previously under-reported problem: 31 states allow rapists to sue for custody or visitation of children conceived by rape. It might initially seem like it wouldn't be much of a problem—most of us probably ask ourselves why rapists would bother to want these children at all—but the fact of the matter is that rapists rape because they like to hurt and control women. How better to make your victim's life a living hell than going after her through her children? Nothing says "I have power over you" like forcing yourself into someone's life through their children. Now a bipartisan group of congressmen are trying to close up this loophole in custody laws, with the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act, which creates financial incentives for states that bar rapists from suing their victims for custody.
Shauna Prewitt, a woman who chose to give birth after her rape resulted in pregnancy, was with the congressmen when they announced the bill. Prewitt filed charges against her rapist after she gave birth, and he retaliated by suing her for custody. There aren't any numbers out there to assess how common it is for rapists to abuse the family court system in this way, but there are thousands of women who choose to raise children conceived by rape every year, and we know that rapists are often dogged in their sadism, making suing their victims a tantalizing opportunity for many of them. Wife batterers are notorious in legal circles for their eagerness to abuse the family court system to continue the pattern of hurting and controlling their victim, so it makes sense that rapists—who have a lot in common with and are often batterers themselves—would be attracted to the same strategy. And if they get visitation rights or custody? Now they have tons of access to manipulate and hurt their victim for 18 more years.
Needless to say, it's probably not the greatest idea to let these men, who think it's okay to force sex on unwilling women, raise children, especially if there are alternatives—like the mother—available.
While this bill seems like the sort of thing that both liberals and conservatives should support—it is a bipartisan bill—there's a chance the bill will present a challenge to at least some Republicans in Congress. That's because this bill has the potential to be a wedge between two factions of anti-feminists that have the Republican ear: anti-choicers and a group of anti-feminists that often call themselves by the misleading term "men's rights activists." Misleading, because they are opposed to many women's rights. This group of anti-feminists tend not to be overly interested in the battles over reproductive rights—and some, like Glenn Reynolds, even claim to be pro-choice—but instead focus exclusively on their claim that men are being oppressed by their female overlords.
These anti-feminists mostly focus on trying to restore the social and economic power men have over women. They rage against equal pay legislation, defend sexual harassment, denounce the existence of child support, and peddle half-baked theories of female inferiority to defend discrimination. They have a special enthusiasm for pushing back against any effort to reduce gendered violence, aggressively promoting the idea that women routinely lie about rape and downplaying the statistics on rape and domestic violence. Most of the time, their goals overlap neatly with the anti-choice movement. For instance, when anti-choicers started to attack the Department of Health and Human Services mandate that insurance covers contraception, this other breed of anti-feminist—eager to believe women get "goodies" denied to men—jumped right in and agreed. This anti-rape bill, however, could reveal a major point of conflict.
It makes perfect sense for abortion opponents to support measures that make it harder for a rapist to sue for custody of children. If a woman impregnated by rape has reason to believe her attacker will try to get custody, that creates more incentive to abort. And unlike other attempts to reduce incentives to abort, ranging from greater access to contraception to a better social safety net, this bill doesn't come into conflict with the baseline anti-choice motive to punish women for sex. After all, rape victims didn't have sex. They were raped. They were trying not to have sex, so this presents an opportunity for anti-choicers to demonstrate consistency both with their stated values (to be pro-life) and their actual values (to oppose consensual non-procreative sex). Everyone is against rape, right?
Crossposted on Tikkun Daily
By David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG)
The largest mobilization of fast food workers in U.S. history, organized by Fast Food Forward, begins today in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City and Flint, Michigan.
Workers from a number of popular chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy’s, are walking out to protest unsustainable wages under the slogan, “We can’t survive on $7.25!”
As reported by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation, the strike is being backed by a number of religious groups, community organizations and unions, including Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Today’s mobilization comes under the backdrop of an infuriating budget ‘calculator’ published by McDonald’s, ostensibly meant to help employees budget wisely. What it does, in truth, is establish how it is virtually impossible to survive on a minimum wage salary provided the fast food chain. Unless, that is, one forgoes buying food or paying rent.
Today’s striking workers will be demanding that fast food companies raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, enabling hard-working employees to actually afford being able to feed their families and provide their children with health care:
Per a statement from Fast Food Forward:
In America, people who work hard should be able to afford basic necessities like groceries, rent, childcare and transportation. While fast food corporations reap the benefits of record profits, workers are barely getting by – many are forced to be on public assistance despite having a job. Raising pay for fast food workers will benefit workers and strengthen the overall economy.
Jonathan Westin, New York’s director for Fast Food Forward, credits the strikes for making the issue of minimum wage one that has become more prominent in public discourse:
“The more and more workers continue to take action and continue to publicize their fight, the more and more it starts to get at the fast food industry’s biggest asset, which is their name brand. And I think that’s what we’re beginning to see in a very real way.”
The strikes, which have kept the issue of minimum wage in the public’s eye and on the media’s radar for months, plan to continue after today’s action.
The ultimate goal: economic justice for a working class that, for too long, has been not just taken for granted, but taken taken advantage of as well.
Follow David Harris-Gershon on Twitter @David_EHG
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My former life as a shelter director included fighting systems that oppressed those without homes. I felt the responsibility. After all, homeless shelters perpetuate the economic and systemic pressures that keep people down.
This mother, Tyeast, wasn’t asking for anything outrageous. A federal law, at the time called the McKinney Act, included provisions, albeit weak, to allow kids to stay in the school they attended when they became homeless. We found out how weak this law was in the subsequent months.
I contacted the school, but they were adamant. Her children were staying in a different district and needed to enroll in the school nearest the shelter. The quality of education was not the issue. It was stability. The kids’ lives had been upended enough by the trauma, and stigma, of moving into a shelter. Staying with their same friends, teachers and routines would be best. So we thought. So we fought.
When the school district sued the mother to keep the kids out, that took things to a higher level. We got an attorney to counter-sue. To court we all went. And we shared the story with the Chicagoland media, finding interest and behind-the-scenes sympathy.
In the 2 months of court activity, we learned a lot. This situation—the harm experienced by homeless kids uprooted due to homelessness had dreadful side effects, “A ‘rule of thumb’ is that it takes a child four to six months to recover academically after changing schools.” (Dr. Joy Rogers, Loyola University). The federal law was pathetically weak. Kids in this situation deserved better. So we naively set about getting a state law passed to strengthen the rights of homeless students. (The longer story, a fascinating one, is available in my book, Crossing the Line: Taking Steps to End Homelessness, and at this link).
In the 20 years since the passage of the Illinois Education for Homeless Children Act, many amazing things have happened. Over 10 years ago, the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Act passed, and the federal law almost entirely mirrors our Illinois law. It clarified the responsibilities of schools to provide secure education to homeless children and youth. REACH, an 11-min video I made, explains the basics of the law and helps parents and youth in homeless situations advocate for their rights.
The back-to-school flurry is upon us. In every community, kids (and their parents) without homes and those without wherewithal (an estimated $635) struggle to get the stack of stuff required by their schools. Local efforts gallantly strive to help kids go to school prepared. My friend’s organization Operation Kid Equip, usually serves thousands of kids, making sure they’re well stocked for school. A disastrous flood destroyed most of their supplies a couple weeks ago, a big hit at a bad time.
Help is needed is to get word out to kids and their parents/guardians about this lifesaving law. Julianna, at the time mother of 4 school-age kids in the Phoenix area, had found herself unable to withstand the domestic violence. They needed to leave her abuser. But her kids made her promise 2 things: that she/they never return to him and that they didn’t have to change schools. The first promise was a no-brainer. The second, school stability, seemed daunting since the family was in the doubled-up mode of homelessness, bouncing from friend’s floors to other friends’ couches.
She lucked out, sharing her plight with a co-worker at her school who connected her with the district’s homeless liaison. When Julianna heard her kids could stay in their schools, get help with school supplies and transportation, and more, she felt her life had been saved. She would have likely ended up back in their violence-tainted home without the McKinney-Vento Act.
Over 1 million homeless school children/youth were identified last year. That doesn’t include parents, younger/older siblings, or those who haven’t appeared on the school’s radar screen. Shame, fear of losing their children, and ignorance of the law keeps too many kids out of school or in constant, unnecessary, motion.
Since it doesn’t appear we’re going to end homelessness anytime soon, the next best thing is to make sure the kids who are homeless get an education. Everyone can help:
- Share the link to the free easy-to-understand REACH video;
- Support back-to-school drives in your local community;
- Watch and share the free 4-min trailer of My Own Four Walls, a potent 20-minute documentary featuring kids talking about homelessness and school (HEAR US, my organization); and
- Advocate for social justice issues to ease the pain of families struggling to survive.
My life changed when Tyeast asked for help. Because of her courage, millions of kids experiencing homelessness would at least have a decent shot at getting an education.
I was so angry at CNN's Don Lemon last weekend because of the ignorant way he chose to voice a few comments.
Lemon took it upon himself to underline ways that the black community can improve itself. His suggestions were that we should stop wearing baggy pants, using the n-word, dropping out of school and having children out of wedlock.
They were good points, but the way he phrased them came across as a patronizing lecture which talked down to African-Americans because the majority of us don't act in those manners.
I felt he could have used the power of his pulpit to have a nuanced discussion about the problems in the black community, rather than sounding as ignorant as Fox host Bill O'Reilly, who pretty much repeated the same stereotypes about African-Americans.
However in the midst of my raging anger, an inner thought kept running throughout my mind.
For all of the arguments and discussions asking is the struggle for lgbt equality comparable to that of the African-American civil rights movement, there are times when very few notice the similarities.
And this is one of those times
Lemon's condescending lecture does nothing for the African-American community. Sagging pants and bad English are not indigenous to the African-American community. And children out of wedlock and the drop-out rates are not problems that's not centered solely based in the African-American community.
If there are going to be serious discussions about problems facing the black community, then they don't need to start with a pundit wagging his finger while sequestered behind a desk. There needs to be discussions as to why things such as out of wedlock births are happening. The discussions should have more context by mentioning socioeconomic factors such as unemployment, not having access to good education and healthcare, and systematic racism so ingrained that it practically works by itself. And there needs to be viable solutions voiced.
All Lemon (O'Reilly for that matter) actually did was to exacerbate racism against African-Americans by allowing those with biases against black folks to flood the comment boards with vulgar displays of gloating.
And they both reminded me of how the religious right exacerbates homophobia against the lgbt community.
So many religious right groups and leaders, from Tony Perkins and Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council to Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, are quick to point out Centers for Disease Control statistics which talk about health risk factors in the lgbt community as proof that homosexuality is a supposed dangerous lifestyle.
However, these so-called defenders of truth and morality always seem to deliberately omit that the CDC says that homophobia and its negative effects on the lgbt community are clearly to blame for the health risk factors, and not the so-called gay lifestyle. I've always believed that they omit this simple fact because it destroys their argument. They don't seek to have a nuanced discussion on being gay because they want to dehumanize the lgbt orientation.
Certainly this is not what Lemon was trying to do to the African-American community, but that is in fact what he did. Lemon dehumanized the African-American community into stereotypes, much like the religious right does to the lgbt community.
It's something which strikes at the heart of my soul because of my dual identity as a black gay man. It was something that Mr. Lemon maybe should have thought of seeing that he is also a black gay man. That tidbit hurt me the most because I once looked up to Lemon as a role model. With O'Reilly, such nonsense is to be expected. He is nothing more than a high maintenance Morton Downey, Jr. whose rage and bluster conceals the fact that he just that - rage and bluster without a semblance of nuance or integrity. And thus, his analyses of the arguments of the day are as soggy and weak as a bag of cotton candy caught in a rain storm.
Instead of agreeing with O'Reilly, Lemon should have aspired to give his audience something more intelligent.
Lemon's patronizing sermon is definitely something both the lgbt and African-American community should keep in mind instead of being tricked into playing another bout of the "oppression Olympics." Let's not allow ourselves to be fooled by segments of society who sees both of our communities as either children needing to be lectured or undesirables. And let's not allow ourselves to be pawns of pundits who see us as commodities to increase their ratings.
There is an unfortunate dichotomy in America which looks at both the black and gay communities as entities to be talked about rather than talked to and commodities to be used and abused like tissue paper. To defeat this dichotomy, both communities must do all they can to not only solve their problems but also wrest control of the conversation from those who would seek to define us in ugly and simplistic terms.
Because they simply don't have our best interests at heart.
