Jay D. Jurie : 'Approved Killing' in Florida

Emmett Till, left, and Trayvon Martin. Image from Tumblr.

Intimations of Emmett Till:
A 'shocking story of 
approved killing' in Florida

Today the pre-1960s explicit racial 'code' has been supplanted by the implicit code upon which 'profiling' is based.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2013

The Rag Blog's Jay Jurie will discuss issues raised in this article with Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, July 26, 2013, from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live to the world. The show is rebroadcast by WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. (EDT), and all podcasts are posted at the Internet Archive after broadcast.

SANFORD, Florida -- Inevitable comparisons between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin have been made by several observers, including Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Ben Jealous of the NAACP.

What happened to Emmett Till has been described in numerous accounts. By way of brief recap: In 1955 Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago, was sent by his mother to stay with relatives in rural Money, Mississippi. That August, he entered a "mom and pop" grocery store where an encounter ensued between him and the proprietor, a young white woman named Carolyn Bryant.

What happened isn't exactly clear. Till supposedly whistled at, or flirted with, the woman. While whatever he said or did may have been inappropriate, only in the South at that time would it have warranted a death sentence. Elsewhere, it would at most have been seen as a minor offense.

Even in 1950s racially-segregated Mississippi, Till had every legal right to be where he was. However, he overstepped the bounds of the "code" of subservient behavior imposed by the white majority on Southern African-Americans at that time. Although his relatives reportedly schooled him on the code, perhaps fueled by the impudence characteristic of teen-aged boys of any race, Till may have had little or no idea of the gravity of his "offense."

Word of what occurred soon reached the husband of the store owner, Roy Bryant, and several nights later, with his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and possibly another companion, he kidnapped Till from the home of his great-uncle. Till was savagely beaten and tortured, and then shot. A 70-pound cotton mill fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire, and his body was dropped into the nearby Tallahatchie River.

Several days later, his body was discovered in the river and then was shipped back to Chicago. His mother ordered it placed in an open casket, so the extent of Till's injuries could be seen. This created a sensation, with thousands viewing the body and the story receiving nationwide media coverage.

Seated in the racially-segregated courtroom at the subsequent trial of Bryant and Milam was an all-white jury selected from a part of the county known to be disposed against African-Americans. Not surprisingly, Bryant and Milam were acquitted. Protected against double jeopardy, Milam later admitted in a magazine interview they had in fact murdered Till.

The interview, by journalist William Bradford Huie, was published in Look magazine under the title, "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" :

As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights.

I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. "Chicago boy," I said, "I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."

Milam's revelation sent shock waves across much of the country, and in its wake, the first of the major post-Reconstruction federal laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, was passed to secure the rights of African-Americans. It's now widely contended the South is a far different place than it was prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Florida, some have argued, was always a much different place than Mississippi. However, that's not entirely accurate, either then or now.

It can be argued that's particularly not the case when it comes to Sanford, Florida, where 17-year old African-American Trayvon Martin was shot dead by Neighborhood Watch coordinator George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012. Sanford was historically an agricultural community with an African-American population employed as farm labor. When the agriculture industry declined, this population was left stranded economically.

One more time. Image from Tumbler.

A very recent movie, 42, about Jackie Robinson, the first African-American major league baseball player, features scenes from Sanford in the late 1940s. One scene, of Robinson being thrown off a playing field by the police chief, is represented as taking place in nearby Deland, when it actually occurred in Sanford. Another scene, showing Robinson being forced to flee Sanford due to threatened Ku Klux Klan violence, is accurate (Goldsboro Historical Museum).

Sanford is where fatally-injured civil rights pioneers Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore were taken after their nearby home was bombed by the Klan in 1951. Sanford filled in its downtown public swimming pool rather than allow it to be integrated, and to this day, the only public swimming pool is in a predominantly African-American part of town.

Like the rest of Florida, and the South, Sanford has experienced change. However, not only is the past still present, but ongoing efforts preserve the status quo ante. While Sanford possesses several diverse neighborhoods, most of the town remains divided into sectors which are either predominantly white or predominantly African-American. Sanford has been the scene of several instances of police abuse or neglect of the African-American population, which have lately been extensively covered in the mass media.

Explicit, hard-core racism, as epitomized by the Milam quote above, is largely part of the past. Nonetheless, even more insidious, and more intractable, is implicit, soft-core racism. Illustrating this is the debate in 1998 to build a hotel-conference center in the same downtown park as the filled-in swimming pool.

Testimony from white residents in support of this proposal was based on the claim that the park was only used by drug-dealers, pimps, and prostitutes. Yet, no evidence was ever produced in support of this assertion, whereas many of the park users consisted of African-American boys and young men playing basketball.

Although not overtly stated that way, this was a not-so-transparent means for whites to reclaim "their" park. Similarly, until met with considerable protest, a recent city ordinance prohibited fishing along portions of the city's river front, when clearly the large majority of the people who fished there were African-American.

A prominent white citizen, while campaigning for city council, proposed running the homeless out of downtown, and building a shelter on 13th Street, which is the heart of Goldsboro, the most prominent African-American neighborhood in Sanford. This proposal did not meet with success, but instead, Sanford's imposing new police center was put in the heart of the community.

Incidentally, Goldsboro was once a separate and distinct African-American municipality, which over the objections of its residents, was incorporated into Sanford.

Trayvon Martin was murdered at the Retreat at Twin Lakes subdivision, in a rapidly developing part of Sanford, a somewhat diverse part of town alongside Interstate 4 also featuring other newer housing developments, big box stores, strip malls, including the 7-11 where he bought his last Skittles and iced tea, and auto dealerships. Not far to the east is Goldsboro, placing the newer and unstable identity of the Retreat in proximity to "old" Sanford.

It was into this admixture of past and present that George Zimmerman stepped in his self-appointed role as Neighborhood Watch captain. Speculatively, Zimmerman may be uncertain about, or conflicted with, his own ethnic identity. Of Jewish and Hispanic background, it is unlikely the explicitly racist white supremacists would consider him one of their own.

In addition to being a "wannabe cop," Zimmerman may also have been asserting his desire for acceptance by "white culture," he may have sought to protect both this identity, and community, which may have helped frame and foster implicit racist presumptions.

Today the pre-1960s explicit racial "code" has been supplanted by the implicit code upon which "profiling" is based. When Trayvon Martin sought to return to where he was staying with his father, even less knowingly than Emmett Till he violated that code. In today's "New South," perhaps especially in "purple" Florida, he may have thought he was more free than he was, not understanding he did not "belong" in that neighborhood, and was expected to react obsequiously if confronted by a "creepy-ass cracker."

Validation: George Zimmerman congratulated by attorneys Don West and Lorna Truitt after verdict. Photo by Joe Burbank / Reuters.

Implicit racism should be regarded as part of an entrenched system of values. Like its unwritten code, this system sustains itself through the denial of its existence. Granting a defense motion in the Zimmerman case, Judge Debra Nelson ruled the prosecution could not use the word "race" in describing "profiling." In a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper after the trial, "Juror A-37" claimed "we didn't talk about race" during the jury deliberations.

While the jury at the Emmett Till trial, was all white, the jury in the Zimmerman case, with one Hispanic exception, was all white. An interesting question, which the prosecution apparently was not allowed to ask during voir dire, even if they wanted to, was the extent to which prospective jurors might identify with "white culture and values," or to what extent they were familiar with, or subscribed to, the "code."

Seminole County, the pool from which the jury pool was drawn, is 81% white, including 65% non-Hispanic white, and 12% African-American (U.S. Census).

A closely-related question not considered is Seminole County's political climate. Whereas in 2012 Barack Obama won Florida, Mitt Romney won Seminole County 53% against 46% for Obama (Politico.com). Aside from Democratic pockets of the County consisting largely of African-American and Hispanic voters, and a scattering of white liberals, the white population is fairly solidly conservative.

A jury drawn from this political background is more likely to identify with the narrative spun by George Zimmerman, and be unaware of the influence of the "code" or even deny its existence.

Some argue the problem today is no longer race, but gun laws such as "stand your ground" that must be changed. There can be little doubt that such laws cry out desperately for change. But, especially here, the race factor is inescapable.

Critics contend Zimmerman was tried on the grounds of self-defense, not stand your ground. Regardless, it was Zimmerman's stand your ground claim that allowed him to walk free for a month and a half before public pressure resulted in his arrest.

Evidence at trial indicated Sanford Police believed and supported Zimmerman's claim, which implicitly denied Trayvon Martin's legitimate right to be where he was, and dismissed the possibility that an unarmed Martin unsuccessfully attempted to stand his own ground.

Preliminary research has found that stand your ground laws are predominantly biased in favor of whites at the expense of African-Americans (Richard Florida, The Atlantic Cities).

There's the current case of Marissa Anderson, a black woman in Florida who produced no injury when she fired a warning shot at her abusive husband, but when she claimed a stand your ground defense, received a 20-year prison sentence on a charge brought by Angela Corey, the same state attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted George Zimmerman.

What happened to Trayvon Martin is not simply an anomaly. Some racial progress has been made. Sanford, Florida, in 2013 is not Money, Mississippi in 1955. But we are not as far removed from that time or place as many would misleadingly have us believe. We need look no further than the approved killing of Trayvon Martin.

[Jay D. Jurie, Ph.D., is an associate professor of public administration and urban and regional planning at the University of Central Florida. He lives in Sanford, Florida. Read articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

Also see "Walking while black: Trayvon Martin's fatal shortcut" by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog, March 22, 2012.

Citations and References:
Richard Florida, The Atlantic Cities article:  http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/07/its-not-just-zimmerman-race-matters-lot-stand-your-ground-verdicts/6195/
Goldsboro Historic Museum, Sanford, on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/Foliver1961
Huie, William Bradford, PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html
Robin D.G. Kelley article on systematic racism: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/15/the-us-v-trayvon-martin/
Sanford, FL: a place to wait for a verdict: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/12/in-black-sanford-a-place-to-gather-and-wait-for-a-verdict-2/
SPLC compares Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/statement-from-civil-rights-memorial-center-director-lecia-brooks-in-response-to-v
Washington Post article on the Zimmerman trial verdict and justice: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-zimmerman-verdict-in-martin-case-shows-justices-flaws/2013/07/14/7f7eae6a-ecc7-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html

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Robert Jensen : The Craziest Person in the Room

The craziest person in the room:
Reflections on how a mediocre
white guy can try to be useful

It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities -- those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult -- not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 18, 2013

[This is an edited version of a talk given at the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE) in New Orleans on June 1, 2013.]

I recognize that the title for this presentation -- “The Craziest Person in the Room: Reflections on How a Mediocre White Guy Can Try to Be Useful” -- is not particularly elegant or enticing, maybe not very clear or even coherent. So, let me begin by explaining what I mean by some of these terms.

First, the “white guy”: For some years now, I’ve begun talks on injustice and inequality by acknowledging my status: White, male, educated, comfortably middle class, and born in the United States -- in short, a privileged citizen of a predatory imperial nation-state within a pathological capitalist economic system. Borrowing a line from a friend with the same profile, I observe that, “If I had been born good-looking, I would have had it all.”

That approach communicates to people in this room who don’t occupy these categories that I recognize my unearned privilege and the unjust systems and structures of power from which that privilege flows. (It also indicates that I am not afraid to look in a mirror.)

But today I won’t offer much more of that reflexive white liberal/progressive/radical genuflecting, which while appropriate in many situations increasingly feels to me like a highly choreographed dance that happens in what we might call “social-justice spaces.” In rooms such as this, such a performance feels like that -- just a performance.

So, yes, there are some things I don’t know and can’t know because I’m a white guy, and that demands real humility, a recognition that people on the other end of those hierarchies have different, and typically deeper, insights than mine. But after 25 years of work to understand the world in which I live, there are some things I am confident that I do know and that are more vitally important than ever.

This confidence flows from an awareness that I am mediocre.

About “mediocre”: Don’t worry, I don’t have a self-esteem problem. I am a tenured full professor at a major state research university, a job that I work hard at with some success. This is not false modesty; I believe I’m an above-average teacher who is particularly good at expressing serious ideas in plain language.

I describe myself as mediocre because I think that, whatever skills I have developed, I’m pretty ordinary and I think that most of us ordinary people are pretty mediocre -- good enough to get by, but nothing special. If we put some effort into our work and catch a few breaks (and I’ve had more than my share of lucky breaks), we’ll do OK. Too many bad breaks, and things fall apart quickly. I think this is an honest, and healthy, way to understand ourselves.

So, for me, “coming out” as mediocre is a way of reminding myself of my limits, to help me use whatever abilities I do have as effectively as possible. I’ve spent a quarter-century in academic and political life, during which time I’ve met some really smart people, and I can tell the difference between them and me. I have never broken new theoretical ground in any field, and I never will. I probably have never had a truly original idea. I’m a competent, hard-working second-tier intellectual and organizer.

As a result, I’ve focused on trying to get clear about basic issues: Why is it so difficult for U.S. society to transcend the white-supremacist ideas of its founding, even decades after the end of the country’s formal apartheid system? Why do patriarchal ideas dominate everywhere, even in the face of the compelling arguments of feminists?

Why do we continue to describe the United States as a democratic society when most ordinary people feel shut out of politics and the country operates on the world stage as a rogue state outside of international law? Why do we celebrate capitalism when it produces a world of unspeakable deprivation alongside indefensible affluence?

And why, in the face of multiple cascading ecological crises, do we collectively pretend that prosperity is just around the corner when what seems more likely to be around the corner is the cliff that we are about to go over?

Those are some really heavy questions, but people don’t have to pretend to be something special to deal with these challenges. We can be ordinary, average -- mediocre, in the sense I mean it -- and still do useful things to confront all this. Instead of trying to prove how special and smart we are, it’s fine to dig in and do the ordinary work of the world.

But people like me -- those of us with identities that come with all that unearned privilege -- do have one opportunity to do at least one thing that can be special: We don’t have to pretend to be the smartest, but we can strive to be the craziest person in the room.

Third, and final, clarification, about “crazy”: In this context, I mean crazy not in a pejorative but in an aspirational sense. I want to be as crazy as I can, in the sense of being unafraid of the radical implications of the radical analysis necessary to understand the world.

When such analysis is honest, the implications are challenging, even frightening. It is helpful to be a bit crazy, in this sense, to help us accept the responsibility of pushing as far and as hard as is possible and productive, in every space.

I take that to be my job, to leverage that unearned privilege to create as much space as possible for the most radical analysis possible, precisely because in some settings I am taken more seriously than those without that status.

If it’s true that white people tend to take me more seriously than a non-white person when talking about race, then I should be pushing those white folk. If I can get away with talking not just about the need for diversity but also about the enduring reality of racism -- and in the process, explain why the United States remains a white-supremacist society -- then I should talk “crazy” in that way, to make sure that analysis is part of the conversation, and to make it easier for non-white people to push in whatever direction they choose.

Once I’ve used the term “white supremacy,” it’s on the table for others who might be dismissed as “angry” if they had introduced it into the conversation.

If it’s true that men tend to take me more seriously than a woman when talking about gender, then I should be pushing the envelope. If I can get away with talking not just about the importance of respecting women but also about the enduring reality of sexism, then I should talk “crazy” about how rape is not deviant but normalized in a patriarchal culture, about how the buying and selling of women’s bodies for the sexual pleasure of men in prostitution, pornography, and stripping is a predictable consequence of the eroticizing of domination and subordination.

I should talk about the violent reality of imperialism, not just questioning the wisdom of a particular war but critiquing the sick structure of U.S. militarism. I should talk not just about the destructive nature of the worst corporations but also about the fundamental depravity of capitalism itself.

As someone with status and protection, I should always be thinking: What is the most radical formulation of the relevant analysis that will be effective in a particular time and place? Then I should probably take a chance and push it a half-step past that. I should do all this without resorting to jargon, either from the diversity world or the dogmatic left. I should say it as clearly as possible, even when that clarity makes people -- including me -- uncomfortable.

Outside of overtly reactionary political spaces, most people’s philosophical and theological systems are rooted in basic concepts of fairness, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people.

This isn’t always as difficult or risky as it seems. Outside of overtly reactionary political spaces, most people’s philosophical and theological systems are rooted in basic concepts of fairness, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people. Most of us endorse values that -- if we took them seriously -- should lead to an ethics and politics that reject the violence, exploitation, and oppression that defines the modern world.

If only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths -- incapable of empathy, those who for some reason enjoy cruel and oppressive behavior -- then a radical analysis should make sense to lots of people.

But it is not, of course, that easy, because of the rewards available to us when we are willing to subordinate our stated principles in service of oppressive systems. I think that process works something like this:

• The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
• Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits, and some limited number of people in subordinated classes will be allowed access to most of those same rewards.
• People are typically hesitant to give up privileges, pleasures, and benefits that make us feel good.
• But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of the vast majority of those in the subordinated classes.
• Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of equality and human rights, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
• One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are “natural” and therefore inevitable, immutable. There’s no point getting all worked up about this -- t’s just the way things are.

If this analysis is accurate, that’s actually good news. I would rather believe that people take pains to rationalize a situation they understand to be morally problematic than to celebrate injustice. When people know they have to rationalize, it means they at least understand the problems of the systems, even if they won’t confront them.

So, our task is to take seriously that claim: Is this domination/subordination dynamic natural? Yes and no. Everything humans do is “natural,” in the tautological sense that since we do it, human nature obviously includes those particular characteristics. In that sense, a pacifist intentional community based on the collective good and a slave society based on exploitation are both natural.

We all know from our own experience that our individual nature includes varied capacities; we are capable of greedy, self-interested behavior, and we also can act out of solidarity and compassion. We make choices -- sometimes consciously, though more often without much deliberation -- within systems that encourage some aspects of our nature and suppress other parts.

Maybe there is a pecking order to these various aspects of human beings -- a ranking of the relative strength of these various parts of our nature -- but if that is the case, we know virtually nothing about it, and aren’t likely to know anytime soon, given the limits of our ability to understand our own psychology.

What we do understand is that the aspect of our nature that emerges as primary depends on the nature of the systems in which we live. Our focus should be on collective decisions we make about social structure, which is why it’s crucial to never let out of our sights the systems that do so much damage: white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism.

There are serious implications to that statement. For example, I do not think that meaningful social justice is possible within capitalism. My employer, the University of Texas at Austin, doesn’t agree. In fact, some units of the university -- most notably the departments of business, advertising, and economics -- are dedicated to entrenching capitalism. That means I will always be in a state of tension with my employer, if I’m true to my own stated beliefs.

Education and organizing efforts that stray too far from this focus will never be able to do more than smooth the rough edges off of systems that will continue to produce violence, exploitation, and oppression -- because that’s what those systems are designed to do.

If we are serious about resisting injustice, that list of systems we must challenge is daunting enough. But it is incomplete, and perhaps irrelevant, if we don’t confront what in some ways is the ultimate hierarchy, the central domination/subordination dynamic: the human belief in our right to control the planet.

Let me put this in plain terms: We live in a dead world. Not a world that is dying, but a world that is dead -- beyond repair, beyond reclamation, perhaps beyond redemption.

Let me put this in plain terms: We live in a dead world. Not a world that is dying, but a world that is dead -- beyond repair, beyond reclamation, perhaps beyond redemption. The modern industrial high-energy/high-technology world is dead. I do not know how long life-as-we-know-it in the First World can continue, but the future of our so-called “lifestyle” likely will be measured in decades not centuries.

Whatever the time frame for collapse, the contraction has begun. I was born in 1958 and grew up in a world that promised endless expansion of everything -- of energy and material goods, of democracy and freedom. That bounty was never equitably distributed, of course, and those promises were mostly rhetorical cover for power. The good old days were never as good as we imagined, and they are now gone for good.

If that seems crazy, let me try again: The central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy -- propped up by a technological fundamentalism that is as irrational as all fundamentalisms -- is that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption.

The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social arrangements, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: This high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump. We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.

Does that still sound crazy? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live -- groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of dead zones in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity -- and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy,” using more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction). Instead of gently putting our foot on the brakes and powering down, we are slamming into overdrive.

And there is the undeniable trajectory of global warming/global weirding, climate change/climate disruption -- the end of a stable planet.

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points (June 7, 2012, issue of Nature) and planetary boundaries (September 23, 2009, issue of Nature), about how human activity is pushing Earth beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience,” which means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.” (Anthony Barnosky, et al, “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” (Nature, June 7, 2012.)

That conclusion is the product of science and common sense, not supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories. The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it).

Many tough-minded folk who are willing to challenge other oppressive systems hold on tightly to this lifestyle. The critic Fredric Jameson wrote that, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” but that’s only part of the problem -- for some, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of air conditioning.

I’m not moving into rapture talk, but we do live in end-times, of a sort. Not the end of the world -- the planet will carry on with or without us -- but the end of the human systems that structure our politics, economics, and social life.

All this matters for anyone concerned not only about the larger living world but also the state of the human family. Ecological sustainability and social justice are not separate projects. One obvious reason is that ecological crises do not affect everyone equally -- as those in the environmental justice movement say, the poor and oppressed of the planet tend to be hit “first and worst, hardest and longest” by ecological degradation.

These ecological realities also affect the landscape on which we organize, and progressive and radical movements on the whole have not spent enough time thinking about this.

First, let me be clear, even though there is no guarantee we can change the disastrous course of contemporary society, we should affirm the value of our work for justice and sustainability. We take on projects that we realize may fail because it’s the right thing to do, and by doing so we create new possibilities for ourselves and the world. Just as we all know that someday we will die and yet still get out of bed every day, an honest account of planetary reality need not paralyze us.

Then let’s abandon worn-out clichés such as, “The American people will do the right thing if they know the truth,” or “Past social movements prove the impossible can happen.” There is no evidence that awareness of injustice will automatically lead U.S. citizens, or anyone else, to correct it. When people believe injustice is necessary to maintain their material comfort, some accept those conditions without complaint.

Social movements around race, gender, and sexuality have been successful in changing oppressive laws and practices, and to a lesser degree in shifting deeply held beliefs. But the movements we most often celebrate, such as the post-World War II civil rights struggle, operated in a culture that assumed continuing economic expansion.

We now live in a time of permanent contraction -- there will be less, not more, of everything. Pressuring a dominant group to surrender some privileges when there is an expectation of endless bounty is a very different project than when there is intensified competition for increasingly scarce resources. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done to advance justice and sustainability, only that we should not be glib about the inevitability of it.

Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

If all this seems like more than one can bear, it’s because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges. Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

It’s easy to cover up our inability to face this by projecting it onto others. When someone tells me “I agree with your assessment, but people can’t handle it,” I assume what that person really means is, “I can’t handle it.” But handling it is, in the end, the only sensible choice. To handle it is to be a moral agent, responsible for oneself and one’s place in a community.

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities -- those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult -- not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

Facing this doesn’t demand that we separate from mainstream society or give up ongoing projects that seek a more just world within existing systems. I am a professor at a university that does not share my values or analysis, yet I continue to teach.

In my community, I am part of a group that helps people create worker-cooperatives that will operate within a capitalist system that I believe to be a dead end. I belong to a congregation that struggles to radicalize Christianity while remaining part of a cautious, often cowardly, denomination. We do what we can, where we can, based on our best assessment of what will move us forward.

That may not be compelling to everyone. So, just in case I have dug myself in a hole with some people, I’ll deploy a strategy well known to white people talking about social justice: When you get in trouble, quote an icon from the civil-rights movement. In this case, I’ll choose James Baldwin, from a 1962 essay about the struggles of artists to help a society, such as white-supremacist America, face the depth of its pathology.

On this question of dealing honestly with hard truths, Baldwin reminds us, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In that essay, titled “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” Baldwin suggested that a great writer attempts “to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more.” (James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” in Randall Kenan, ed., The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings [New York: Pantheon, 2010], pp. 28-34.)

He was speaking about the struggle for justice within the human family, but if we extend that spirit to the state of the larger living world, the necessary formulation today would be “to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then all the rest of the truth, whether we can bear it or not.”

By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don’t make ourselves safe. All we do is undermine the potential of struggles for justice and sustainability and guarantee the end of the human evolutionary experiment will be ugly beyond our imagination. We must remember, as Baldwin said, “that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.”

This article was also published at Racism Review.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Disenfranchising Black Voters in Texas, 1890-1920

Poll Tax Receipt, January 30, 1908; digital image from the University of North Texas Libraries.
The hidden history of Texas

Part IX: 1890-1920/3 -- Disenfranchising black voters in Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2012

[This is the third section of Part 9 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1900 and 1910, in an effort to make it more difficult for dissatisfied African-American and poor white small farmers in Texas to express their discontent and their desire for radical democratic political and economic change, politicians intensified their efforts to more permanently disenfranchise African-American voters in the state and to create a poll tax in Texas.

As Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans recalled:

White efforts to disenfranchise Negroes also stimulated the decline in the number of black voters by 1906. Negroes formed majorities in 14 counties along the coast, in the Brazos River Valley, and in Northeast Texas . They constituted 40 to 50 percent of the population in 13 other East Texas counties. Black majorities on the local level often elected Negroes to positions such as alderman, county commissioner, justice of the peace, county treasurer, tax assessor, and constable...

The white primary... spread rapidly across East Texas in the late 1890s and early 1900s…The state Democratic executive committee in 1904 suggested white primaries to all county committees which generally accepted the idea... The legislature in 1902 passed a constitutional amendment allowing a poll tax for voting. Populists, Mexican-Americans, labor unions, and some Anglo papers opposed it... The amendment passed by 2 to 1 margin, with the support of most whites...

According to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, “the Terrell Election Bills... in 1902, 1903, and 1905, respectively... provided for a poll tax requirement for voting, a first and second primary, and a voter declaration of party membership...”

And “the Terrell Election Bill of 1905, designed to disenfranchise blacks, laid the foundation for the white Democratic primary by giving the party’s executive committee the right to determine eligibility for party membership and by making it a misdemeanor to pay poll taxes for blacks.”

According to Black Texans, “the decline in Negro voter participation from about 100,000 in the 1890’s to approximately 5,000 in 1906 suggests the effectiveness of the white primary, the poll tax, and the `lily white’ thrust in the Republic party" -- in which “division between black leaders and white control of federal patronage” had, by 1906, also “opened the way to increasing white dominance of the Republican party” in Texas, as “`lily whites’ returned to the fold” of the Texas GOP.

According to the book, “the poll tax, the Democratic white primary, and white Republican leaders combined to keep most black Texans outside the political arena and to allow little voice to those who entered it from 1904 to 1944.”

In 1900, 63 percent of employed African-Americans in Texas still “continued to labor at various forms of agriculture” and “landowners formed 31 percent of the Negro farmers, with 69 percent sharecroppers and tenants -- compared to 50 percent among white farmers,” according to Black Texans.

The same book also recalled that, in 1900, 28 percent of all employed African-Americans in Texas worked as “servants, laundresses, nurses and mid-wives, restaurant and saloon keepers, hair dressers, and barbers,” and that “by 1900 no major city” in Texas yet “claimed more than six Negro doctors,” although there were then still 23 African-American-owned weekly newspapers in Texas at that time.

And not surprisingly, given the increasing level of institutionalized and legalized white supremacy and racism that developed in Texas between 1890 and 1920, “the vast majority of Negroes in Texas found it impossible to overcome a combination of economic and racial problems which kept them at the level of sharecropping and unskilled labor as the 20th century began.”

"Black people who had been at least voters and laborers in the post-Reconstruction period found themselves virtual outsiders in Texas society of the early 20th century,” according to Black Texans.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Obama, Progressives, and the White Nationalist Backlash

Image from Reckless Eyeballing.
Task for progressives in 2012:
Monkey-wrenching the white united front

It has been striking that many progressives have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2011

In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda, and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address.

To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate.

The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools?), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting.

The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights.

In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns such as the literacy of the electorate.

African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what this means about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that "Fletcher is covering for Obama," this column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president.

Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he (and the changing demographics of the USA) represents the end of the white "American Dream."

We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one's own playpen.

[BlackCommentator.com editorial board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. This article was first posted at BlackCommentator.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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Bob Moser : The White-Power Legislature of Texas

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Slash-and-burn:
Texas' white-power legislature

By Bob Moser / The Texas Observer / May 17, 2011

AUSTIN -- Back in February, at a rally protesting anti-immigrant legislation, State Rep. Lon Burnam raised some eyebrows by letting loose with the “R” word. “You are here,” he told the crowd at the Capitol, “to say no to the most racist session of the Texas Legislature in a quarter of a century.”

The Fort Worth Democrat had in mind such bills as Voter ID, which suppresses minority votes, and “Sanctuary City” legislation, which would legalize racial profiling. It had been decades, Burnam argued, since so many laws were aimed at putting non-whites, you know, in their place.

“All of this legislation is really directed that way,” he said. “Everybody knows it.”

I can only pick one bone with Burnam: Sadly, tragically, everybody doesn’t know it. More than out-and-out racism -- more than pure hatred, or a determination to subjugate non-whites -- what afflicts the majority of our conservative lawmakers is a form of willful race-blindness. It’s that stubborn old “unconscious habit” of white supremacy, as W.E.B. DuBois called it.

Rather than hating other races, the great black scholar and activist wrote in 1930, white people more often unconsciously -- and fiercely -- hold onto their privileges because of the psychological and economic benefits they get from them.

“I began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folk to oppress us,” DuBois wrote, “we were facing age-long complexities sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.”

Eighty years later, those urges and habits take different forms. White supremacy is no longer enforced by legal segregation and red-lining, cross-burnings and attack dogs. It’s now perpetuated by the right-wing mania for tax-cutting and government-shrinking.

This is a subtler, less overt form of discrimination, which makes it harder to recognize and tougher to combat. And there is no purer, or more pernicious, model for this 21st-century white supremacy than the state budgets passed this spring by the Texas House and Senate.

Both chambers have approved radical, no-new-taxes budgets that take billions from public schools, Medicaid, and social programs of every description. The House and Senate still have to reconcile their differences, perhaps in a special session this summer. But even if the Senate’s more “generous” budget wins the day -- it cuts only $4 billion from schools and merely $3 billion from Medicaid -- one thing’s for certain: The budget will perpetuate white privilege in Texas far more effectively than any racial-profiling law, however despicable, could ever do. It will make one of the nation’s most inequitable states the most inequitable. (Eat our dust, Mississippi!)

Am I saying it too strongly? Afraid not. Consider just a few ugly facts. The poverty rate among both African-American and Hispanic Texans is already three times that of Anglos. Drowning public education and health care in Grover Norquist’s bathtub will inevitably widen that obscene gap.

Educational disparities in Texas are already staggering: According to the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, only 13 percent of Hispanic adults in Texas have college degrees, while 40 percent of Anglos do. Does anybody imagine that gap will close, now that funds for public education and higher education are being cut?

I’m not suggesting anything conspiratorial here -- Heaven forbid! -- but it does seem mighty suspicious that school funding is being decimated at a time when Texas schools are “browning” at a rapid pace. In the last decade, Hispanic enrollment in public schools jumped by 50 percent, with 775,000 more students. Meanwhile, 6 percent fewer Anglo students are enrolled, as well-off whites opt for private schools.

Why is public-school funding less of a priority for Anglo legislators nowadays? You do the math.

It’s much the same with Medicaid. Of the 3.5 million non-elderly Texans who rely on Medicaid for their health care, 63 percent are Hispanic; just 18 percent are Anglo. Five times more Anglos have health insurance through their employers than African Americans. Fifty-nine percent of Texans without health insurance are Hispanic; 26 percent are Anglo.

So why are Anglo legislators hell-bent on decimating Medicaid? Here again, you can do the math.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether our lawmakers are motivated by blatant prejudice or “unconscious habit.” The toll that their slash-and-burn budget will take on Hispanics and African Americans is clear. It’s horrifying. It’s unconscionable. And it will, eventually, wreak economic disaster on the entire state, with millions more poorly educated, unhealthy citizens.

That’s why the budget must be recognized, and called out loud and clear, for what it is: white supremacy masquerading as economic conservatism

[Bob Moser is editor of The Texas Observer, where this article was first published. A native North Carolinian, he edited the Independent Weekly before being named a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. Bob has been a senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center and a senior editor at The Nation. He's the author of Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority.]

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