The Redstar Perspective

I’m not blogging here again, I just figured if I was still in folks’ rss feeds, they might want to check this out.

I’d been wanting to write about LA’s Gov. Bobby Jindal, who’s been popping up around the intertubes lately as a possible VP candidate for McCain, a former biology major who’s performed exorcisms, and the leader of the state that just passed by a landslide the teaching of intelligent design in local schools. But honestly, you should just read this post at Firedoglake. It’s got all details of the horrendous, humorless, dangerous irony of Jindal’s Reaganesque conservative rise against the backdrop of Katrina.

My contribution? A dear friend’s work-in-progress photo essay of the “recovery” of the Lower 9th Ward, captured from January 2006 through August 2007 (and the second anniversary of the storm). It will be updated next month.

I guess LA school children will be learning how God leveled New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina to punish those homosexuals after all.

From McCain/Jindal ‘08, may G-d save us all.

x-posted at NYC Weboy

I am no longer checking comments here.  If you need to reach me, please e-mail me.

UPDATE (10:55 p.m.): Apparently I’m not the only one quitting. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson is expected to resign tomorrow. Wahoo!!! Ok, now I’m done. Read on.

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It’s with some sadness and some relief that I write this post: I will not be blogging anymore at The Redstar Perspective. This has been a difficult decision, and I’m still unsure what it means. I may retire this site entirely, or I may resurrect it at an unknown point in the future. I’m still sorting out the details.

Here’s what led to this decision, somewhat in order of importance:

a) It’s time to write my dissertation. After meeting with two of my advisors recently, it’s clear I can finish this thing in the next 12 to 15 months and GRADUATE!!! Especially since the New Year, but generally speaking, blogging has become my primary activity, and an enormous time suck for me. Yes, my stats are SLOWLY growing, and, according to readers, my writing is improving. But, in addition to feeling like I’m losing my way re: the content of this blog (more on that in a minute), I also feel like I’m investing so much time and energy in this blog and not generating the returns I want to get. It’s not ok with me that my readership grows when I discuss the general election, because that’s not my preferred content focus. The hours I’ve been spending on posts about Obama v. Clinton, etc., is distracting me from really focusing on the writing I need to be doing NOW - that is, on issues of social justice, urban recovery and contentious politics in post-Katrina New Orleans. In other words, my dissertation.

b) I no longer feel comfortable blogging without anonymity in the ’sphere. Given where I’m at in my still-emerging career, I’m not ok with folks’ ability to track down my thoughts and opinions on-line.  I regret not blogging anonymously, and any blogging I do in the future will strive for greater anonymity. For someone with deeply personal intellectual interests, the current context of the Democratic primary and the empassioned and often heated on-line discussions of race, racism, gender, sexism and misogyny, privilege and prejudice have left me feeling that the web is an even less safe space to really grapple with these issues. In our splicing and dicing interpretative world, I know my thoughts and perspectives on the primary, on poverty, on my family, etc. are up for grabs for appropriation and re-interpretation. Nonetheless, I plan to remove some of the content from this site, but will leave the rest up for the history books.
c) The RP has run its course. This blog began in part because of my work in New Orleans, because my buddy Jake urged me to blog rather than send long e-mails to everyone I knew about what I was experiencing in the city beginning in January 2006. With this dissertation, my work in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is coming to a close. This blog has grown from that original reporting, to cover topics of development, poverty, housing, inequality, activism, cities, and politics more broadly, but all of this has been mixed up with odes to my boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy, and random (hopefully amusing) stories about my childhood and roots. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing a general interest blog that’s a mix of analysis and journaling. I need the latter for my mental health, but I’ll find another outlet. My priority is to examine urban inequality, especially as it impacts low-income women, households, and neighborhoods. This is what I want to be blogging about (and working on in my lifetime), and I know there’s a niche audience who wants more of this. I’ve got all kinds of ideas for blogging, but I need a new and fresh venue. That will come in time.

So there you have it. Just in time for what would have been the second annual RP History Month. I’m still figuring out how to keep my original New Orleans posts and select others on-line and available. I’ll probably make an announcement about that in the future.

If you’d like to stay in touch, please leave a note in comments. That will give me an e-mail address for you (remember, others can’t see it) if/when I launch another blog.

Thanks to all my readers and champions over the last two years, especially NYC Weboy, and other blogging allies such as Professor Zero, DonnaDarko, Pizza Diavola and Pocochina. It’s been fun, instructive, exhausting and mostly my pleasure. I have become a blogger. Look at me.

Until we meet again, I leave you with some highly recommended reading:

Please read this disturbing, enraging and graphic coverage of the brutal rape and assault of a woman and her kids in Dunbar Village in W. Palm Beach, FL, and how you can let the NAACP know where their legal, PR and activist resources really belong.

A pregnant man challenges people’s ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. And shakes up the healthcare profession. (H/t Echidne.) Meanwhile, pregnancy discrimination complaints from women reach record levels.

A refreshing comments thread that asks bloggers to cool it re: their election coverage. Instead of all the collective hyperventilating, let’s all check out Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action. (H/t Corrente.)

Read Brownfemipower’s WAM conference speech about centering feminist activism around questions of citizenship and the problems this creates for advocating for immigrant women. (How I missed this conference - held at MIT, the irony! - is beyond me.)

Be well, have fun, and stay safe.

As the housing market goes to complete sh*t, Gulf Opportunity (GO) Zone tax credits intended to spur housing development in the Gulf rapidly are losing value for investors, threatening to stall already precarious housing recovery in New Orleans and across the region.

Homeowners are not the only one at risk in our crashing housing market.  Renters looking for affordable homes in redeveloping areas like New Orleans (and other urban areas seeing a complete shutdown of the last few years of affordable housing construction) face a serious shortage of housing opportunities. 

Across the nation, affordable housing deals are crumbling as investors, hurt by the economic downturn, lose interest in purchasing tax credits and lenders pull out of projects. But nowhere is the situation worse than in Louisiana, where Congress created an extra $168 million in tax credits after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — nearly 20 times the state’s regular annual allocation of tax credits — to spur the development of 27,000 affordable and mixed-income housing units. All of the Gulf Opportunity Zone tax credit projects must be ready for occupancy by the end of 2010, which means developers can’t afford to wait until the market improves for tax credits.  

This further dampens the economic recovery of the city, as workers continue to be shut out of the area, and industries and sectors limp along without those necessary workers.  On and on the cycle goes. 

The rosy, mixed-income futures of those large former public housing sites that are already becoming zones of rubble?  Not so promising either:

In the New Orleans area, about 31 of 77 projects have not yet closed on their financing, and may find it more difficult to make the numbers work. Those projects, including the replacements for the public housing developments that are being demolished, represent about 46 percent of the 9,779 units that are on the drawing board for the five parishes that make up the New Orleans area. 

Congress is working on some corrective legislation, and, I’m thrilled to see, calling for HUD Secretary Jackson’s resignation.   I know we’ve only got about 8 months to go of Bush et al., but maybe they could throw in some articles of impeachment with that resignation request. 

Of course, Jackson’s more than welcome to take his $100,000 portrait home with him.  He does deserve a souvenir of his important accomplishments of the last few years. 

This spring, keep an eye out for abandoned construction projects and tent cities coming soon to your community!

Clinton/Obama supporters on the internet:

Since your descent into abject hackery, Petey, your reading capacity has diminished a great deal. But thanks for shoving words in my mouth, you fucking prick.

Clinton/Obama supporters on the ground:

 (click to enlarge)

Photo by author taken March 4, 2008 in San Antonio, TX.

After 7+ years of Bush, our economy is in the worst shape since the Depression.  Tent cities are even in the public consciousness.  These developments point to the consistent, callous pattern of government neglect and abdication of responsibility under the Bush Administration, who, along with a GOP-led Congress, put into overdrive the worst trends of three decades of government devolution. 

Take my favorite example of New Orleans, where a flourishing Tent City should come as no surprise to anyone following post-Katrina recovery trends.  One of the worst travesties of the destruction of public housing in New Orleans is the grossly inadequate replacement of subsidized housing units in the proposed mixed-income developments.  Only one proposal - Lafitte - includes one-for-one replacement, in part because one of the development partners, Enterprise Community Partners, knows first hand the success of this model from past public housing renovation in Seattle.

A significant number of developer/do-gooder transplants to New Orleans hail from affluent cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, which tend to have highly competitive, sophisticate and activist affordable housing development sectors.*  They bring these high-capacity models of affordable housing development with them to New Orleans.  Yet, several fundamental problems in New Orleans impede their replication. 

Obviously, all cities have unique socio-political cultures and different demographics.  That New Orleans is a distinctive place in the nation cannot be overstated.  Second, the political economy of New Orleans was weak prior to the storm, and is in tatters now.  Most of the non-profit and civil society actors in the city are trying to fill a serious void left by the financially eviscerated city government.  Third, and most problematically, the massive displacement of the poorest and most vulnerable, the overall whitening of the population, and a corresponding shift to a more conservative, middle-class urban politics, makes alive and well the spirit of Rep. Baker’s (R-Baton Rouge, LA) comment

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

This spirit is driving local and national decision-making behind affordable housing development in post-Katrina New Orleans. 

At the conference I was at in NOLA two weeks ago, in a panel on affordable housing development tenant activists routinely questioned the featured scholars, researchers and developers on the issue of displacement.  It came up over and over again, no matter how strenuously the panelists tried to frame market-based housing solutions as an overall positive for cities and low-income residents.  Cities like Boston et al. are not acting out of any unique urban altruism to retain low-income households, but out of political necessity (votes) and reality (suburban political power and NIMBY-esque zoning + federal funding for cities for low-income populations).  When one of the poorest cities in the country like New Orleans sees a silver lining in Katrina displacing a significant percentage of its neediest tenants all at once - versus the slow trickle generated in other cities in the last twenty years - you can be damn sure the political elites will do everything in their power to keep those folks out. 

They owe a big thanks to the GOP-dominated government we had until 2007, who denied the HUD and Medicaid funds that could have flowed to properly shelter, care for and bring home these families after Katrina.  Actions like this reflect the same spirit behind the massive funding cuts to HUD and HHS Programs and the complete absence of regulation of the housing and homeownership boom that contribute now to rising rates of foreclosures and homelessness nationwide. 

A national pollster at the NOLA conference talked about widespread Katrina fatigue, accompanied by a sense of “we’ve got our own problems now.”  No doubt.  I just hope that as we turn inward to deal with local economic insecurity and crisis, we all remember that post-Katrina New Orleans was never the exception, but the harshest of realities for our country. 

Because election fever has overtaken my brain, I’ve been neglecting the issues I usually talk about here: poverty, urban development, housing, inequality, and post-Katrina New Orleans. (That my blog readership is way up reinforces the notion that no one likes to talk about poor people.  Sigh.)  So I pass the mike to Prof. Peter Dreier from Occidental College, who I recently saw speak at a conference where he urged those college kids who could afford it to drop out of school this fall and organize voters for the election.

Dreier sums up a great deal of what I’ve been studying these last four years - in the context of class, power and voting patterns. His point of departure is Obama’s re-hashing of the meme about working-class white (WCW) resentment - one I picked up happily as it gave me an opening to embrace the good and bad about my roots. Dreier points out that although WCW racism and prejudices held by all middle- and lower-income social groups exist, it is the institutional power of wealthy whites that perpetuates structural racism and inequality - a system upheld in the voting booth year after year. He writes:

…let’s be clear about the class nature of racial prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination, and disparities. Wealthy whites are more likely than working-class whites to use the race card in the voting booth. Voting statistics reveal that most upper-income whites consistently vote in Republican, not Democratic, primaries, which means they don’t have to vote for black or Latino candidates. And in partisan run-off elections, wealthy whites overwhelmingly vote for Republican over Democratic contenders. [He goes on to sample supply voting data by income categories.]

…

…in an Obama-McCain face-off fewer wealthy whites will vote for Obama than working-class whites whom affluent pundits are so quick to label as racist. Indeed, we’ve already seen a significant number of blue-collar white voters show their support for Obama in Iowa, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and other states. Yes, white working-class Democrats in economically troubled Ohio favored Clinton over Obama. But in November, most of the blue-collar Democrats, working-class independents, and union members who voted for Clinton — in Ohio and elsewhere — are likely to switch to Obama, not McCain.

It is understandable that most wealthy whites would consistently vote for Republicans, who like low taxes and hate strong unions. But in recent decades, a significant number of working-class whites — the so-called “Reagan Democrats” — have voted for GOP candidates who have done so little to address their bread-and-butter concerns. As Thomas Frank argued in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the Republicans have successfully used “wedge” issues — abortion, religion, gun control, gay rights, affirmative action, and, of course, the war on terrorism — to persuade some working-class whites to vote against their economic interests.

But the tide seems to be changing.

…

By focusing on voting behavior and attitudes, however, political pundits deflect focus away from other fundamental concerns. America’s corporate and political rulers have long used racism, ethnic stereotypes, and immigrant bashing to divide working people and weaken their collective power. Manufacturers recruited Southern blacks to act as strikebreakers in Northern cities, and employers warned “No Irish need apply” and resorted to anti-Semitism to pit workers against each other. In hard economic times, scapegoating against blacks and Hispanic immigrants diverts white workers’ attention away from the failure of business and political elites to create enough decent jobs.

Although working-class white Americans may harbor racist sentiments, they do not control the major institutions that are responsible for America’s racial divide, including the economic forces that sometimes pit white, black, and Hispanic working families against each other for jobs, housing, and decent schools.

…

in every sphere of American life — income, hiring, promotion, housing, the quality of public schools, college attendance, treatment by the criminal justice system, media portrayals, and others — race remains a divisive issue. While upper-middle class pundits may get some smug pleasure out of pointing to racial prejudice among America’s white working-class voters, they would be more accurate if they looked up, rather than down, the economic ladder to identify who really has the power to prop up, or fix, the institutions that turn bigotry into discrimination.

It’s worth reading the whole thing. This is where my worries flare up that current Clinton supporters - should she not get the nomination - will fall for the “Maverick McCain” meme rather than supporting Obama/the Democratic nominee. We cannot let that happen.

From a CBS “Oppression Olympics” poll, insipidly titled “Gender Matters More Than Race” (My emphases, of course):

Voters are slightly more likely to say that a woman candidate faces more obstacles than a black candidate when it comes to presidential politics even as they see racism as a more serious problem for the nation overall, according to a new CBS News poll. Thirty nine percent of registered voters said a woman running for president faces more obstacles while 33 percent said a black candidate does.

When it comes to the 2008 presidential election, voters say Hillary Clinton has been judged more harshly because of her gender than Barack Obama has because of his race. Forty two percent said Clinton has been judged “more harshly” and six percent said she has been judged less harshly because of her gender. Twenty seven percent said they think Obama has been judged “more harshly” because of his race while 11 percent said he has been judged less harshly.

Still, racism is seen as a bigger problem for the nation in general. Among all adults surveyed, 42 percent of respondents said racism is a “serious problem” in the country compared to just 10 percent who said…sexism [is a serious problem]. Twenty three percent said both are serious problems.

…

…all groups said they are more offended by racist remarks than sexist ones.

…

More voters admit their unwillingness to vote for a woman. Nearly one in five voters says that all things being equal, they would rather vote for a man.

Moral of the story: It’s hard out here for a lady, but spare us your tears.

Aren’t polls so helpful and informative??

(This post has been updated.  3/18/08.  10:11 p.m.)

Obama’s Speech is here. Here’s my first reaction (and here are others).  I want to respond now to the truth he raises about loving those who make us who we are, warts and all, and using that unconditional love of our deeply flawed, contradictory pasts and selves to bring about positive social change.  Obama says (my emphases throughout):

[Rev. Wright] contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I spent the weekend with dear friends, two of whom have a similar upbringing to mine in being raised within lower-income networks of a single mother and her kin and friends.  The three of us now have advanced degrees from high status private schools, relationships with white men from middle-class families, and are hopefully on track to do better than our parents (although in my case, it would now be to keep up with them). Over the weekend we laughingly compared the different elements of our pasts that we’re trying to leave behind versus still embrace, and the middle-class proclivities we’ve developed: our own personal journeys from the beer track to the wine track, if you will. 

Yet, I left the weekend feeling a little like a stereotypical resentful, angry working-class white, namely due to the carping of another friend who kept talking about how elite we all were and how we didn’t live in “the real world,” and a late night dinner ode to immigrant paragons versus ignorant, uneducated, unskilled native-born Americans.  Sigh.  I don’t need to remind RP readers that the world’s a little more complicated than that.

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Obama’s Philly speech is here.  My initial thoughts on the audacity of his campaign are here. 

Initial reactions from around the web are coming in.  I agree with Melissa at Shakesville about the absence of reaction to Wright’s comments about Clinton.  She links it to complaints (like mine) about elitism, and I’d only add that sexism is infused in this elitism, as the worlds of politics, academia, and other high status professions are often the worst arenas for gender inequity and (white) male privilege.  Feministing commenters continue the debate about the absence of addressing sexism in Obama’s speech.

I also agree with Jeralyn at Talk Left that this speech will ameliorate unsettled Obama supporters and not work with those already disinclined to support him.

Finally, I don’t have the same reaction to his speech as Riverdaughter, but she raises a good point about his passive references to the use of race during the campaign.  Obama’s use of vague and passive language like she points out has bugged me to no end this campaign, as his phrases like “the forces of division” remind me of Bush’s framing of geopolitical conflict as the war between good vs. evil.  The rest of the speech was strong and direct, so let’s knock off the insinuations, Obama. 

The full transcript of Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race this morning is here. 

Throughout this campaign, I - a Clinton supporter - have found myself relating more personally to the foibles of the Obamas.  I’m supporting Clinton for a number of reasons I’ve elaborated on previously, but I’ve often felt it was a real shame she and Obama were running at the same time, because I’d have enjoyed vigorously campaigning for him.  My personal resistance to Obama has to do with a) an elitism and arrogance I associate with the highly educated worlds in which we both orbit, b) the disingenuous notion that he is not like other politicians, and c) the problematic conflation in his campaign of movement building with electoral politics.  But there is a great deal more to the man and his candidacy that attracts me than these three strong negatives.  His speech this morning on “the contradictions” inherent in “the people that are a part of [him]” illustrates perfectly that he, more than some of his most vociferous supporters and surrogates, understands (or at least acknowledges) the messy work involved in fighting for social inclusion and positive social change. 

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UPDATE, 3/13/08: NAGIN WON’T SIGN DEMOLITION PERMIT FOR LAFITTE.  GOOD FOR HIM.  I’M MOVING THIS 3/10/08 POST ABOUT MY RECENT TRIP TO NOLA BACK UP TO THE TOP. 

I am sitting at Sound Cafe in the Marigny in New Orleans.  I have a full disposable digital camera in my free conference bag that contains two very depressing photos of the partially demolished St. Bernard housing projects in Gentilly.  I am drinking iced tea and enjoying the 60-ish degree breeze coming through the open door on my last evening in NOLA.

This post is dedicated to Professor Zero, who recently meme’d me for my “excellent coverage of New Orleans.”  After being gone for six months, I have been out of the loop here, and her shout out and this recent trip are signals of my renewed involvement in recovery through ‘08.

This visit I was in the Marriott on Canal on the edge of the French Quarter.  I have stayed in the Quarter once before, but at a smaller Holiday Inn on the northern (?) / upriver edge of the neighborhood, not quite in the heart of things.  Until I rented a car today, I did not leave the FQ/Central Business District/Warehouse District areas, taking dinner the last two nights in upscale spots like Luke and Herbsaint, and spending yesterday afternoon walking around the Quarter, dropping in and out of clothing boutiques. 

As you might imagine, the trip started to feel like a vacation, not only because of my own activities, but because the streets and Jackson Square and restaurants and my hotel lobby were crowded with tourists.  On this trip I particularly feel the loss of never having visited the city before the storm, because these neighborhoods’ weekend vibrance left me wondering if this was what this area was like prior to Katrina.  I’ll never know.  All I know is that wandering around yesterday, I felt better about my post-professional relationship with the city, meaning that I could see myself returning here just for pleasure after my work here ends.  Disaster recovery work is so emotionally draining that I was not sure I’d ever find peace with the city.  Yesterday I found myself thinking how fortunate I was that I knew well many of New Orleans’s neighborhoods, so that if I did come back for a vacation, I would not be confined to the charming yet touristy FQ.

This morning a colleague picked me up and took me out to the airport to pick up my rental car.  3 minutes up river from my FQ hotel is a multi-block tent city of homeless folks living beneath the highway.  And I was back in the New Orleans I’ve come to know through my work.  My 24 hour vacation was over.

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…of its inability to deliver services, that is…

Ridership continues to decline, while the use of public transportation continues to grow nationwide.

First, let’s thank NY Gov. Spitzer for reminding us of Vitter’s sexual indiscretions.  Both men rule on platforms of fighting vice. I say, if we’re going to oust Spitzer, let’s make sure Vitter’s sitting beside him in the back of the Lincoln Town Car as they both get the hell out of town.

(As an aside, check out this pro-legalization of sex work piece from Cara at The Curvature.  Brings up some great points re: women’s rights and gender equity.)

I hear MS has a primary today?  But let’s not overlook this little nugget from The American Prospect (registration), summed up at Racewire:

Mississippi’s Black labor groups are organizing alongside the state’s growing immigrant population to fight for driver’s licenses for all residents.

Throughout the 1990s more immigrants arrived looking for work. Some guest workers overstayed their visas, while husbands brought wives, cousins, and friends from home. Mexicans and Central Americans joined South and Southeast Asians and began traveling north through the state, finding jobs in rural poultry plants. There they met African Americans, many of whom had fought hard campaigns to organize unions for chicken and catfish workers over the preceding decade.

It was not easy for newcomers to fit in. Their union representatives didn’t speak their languages. When workers got pulled over by state troopers they were not only cited for lacking driver’s licenses but also often handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Sometimes their children weren’t even allowed to enroll in school.

As someone who’s had the honor to work occasionally with activists for Latino immigrants and African-Americans in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, it’s thrilling to read news like this.  The AFL-CIO unions are named specifically in the Prospect piece.  From what I’ve seen of their work the international and some of the locals are really making an effort to bridge long-standing divides and build strong coalitions in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.  

This is great news. 

Finally, here’s a round-up of links to the UN’s comdemnation of human rights abuses via the racially and economically discriminatory plans to demolish much needed public housing in New Orleans.  The UN treats post-Katrina government failures as the ultimate example of enduring racial discrimination and inequity in the U.S.:

The UN Committee calls for adequate, affordable housing in Katrina-affected areas, and also for the remedying of housing conditions in racially segregated areas across the country.

Right on. 

This afternoon in NOLA I saw a car with both Clinton and Obama bumper stickers.  Part of the Anything But McBush movement, no doubt. 

If I lived in this city I would certainly finally move up into the next pants size I am currently just below.

I passed what looked like an enormous Baptist group on my way back to my hotel tonight.  I think Jim Wallis may be right about this place being a “converting ground.”

There was a parade or protest this afternoon; I saw it from my car near St. Bernard and Claiborne.  I need to find out what it was.

Home tomorrow!  Yay! Wish me luck trying to get on some earlier flights, and not getting stuck forever in ATL.  In my absence, do check out my thoughts from the past few days.

(This post is a substitute for the Excellent academic meme I am supposed to participate in. I don’t read enough academic blogs.)

I’ve always known I am an ageist. I have a tendency to look up or around me for information, not down. (I also don’t like bending down, though I think that’s due to my height and old back injury.)

Part of this is due to my own desire to grow up fast - I’m always looking ahead, and I rarely miss the “good old days.” Thus, I’m tough on the youngsters, which by now I’d probably think of as anyone about 4-5 years younger than me. What can I say, at least I’m in touch with my biases.

This NY Times article about young, famous DC blogger dudes (ok, I think they mention one or two women by name) triggered this observation. Matt Yglesias (26) and Ezra Klein (23) are two featured bloggers I recently dropped from my Google reader (my blogroll to the right is much more comprehensive than what I read daily). Yglesias I just found too narrow-minded in his Upper West Side worldview after awhile (despite his relative awareness of his own lens), and Ezra I only recently dropped after too much hysterical shrieking over Clinton and a willingness to tolerate his even more unglued commenters (for those who suspect a bias, I also dropped Taylor Marsh, for her pro-Clinton zeal).

Of course, given how much time I spend in the ’sphere, and how much news I get from it versus from other sources, I often forget that a large chunk of its *authoritative* voices are from folks (dudes, really) under 30. Reading this article now, I felt a mixture of dismissiveness and jealousy. Why am I listening to these young, white boys? And why is everybody else? Consider these excerpts:

Life in the house informs life on the blog…

UnfoggeDCon was so popular that the Flophouse played host to it again last year. It was a typical keg party, with 70-plus people packed into the house for drinking and dancing. “We had a laptop and people were live blogging the party for the people who couldn’t come,” Becks said.

These bloggers are the cool kids who know they’re smart, like some Seth Rogen character with a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Oy. (Though I did throw a great party back in my 20-something NY days. In my 30s in Boston, not so much.)

In part because so many people blog anonymously, this leaves me wondering about the life experience (and indirectly, age) of the bloggers I really enjoy and/or respect. So I made a list of my faves; the ones I look forward to reading, even if I don’t always agree with them.

After the jump are my Top 12. I separate them according to if they’re part of my “Clinton blogging” world or not, as with the Clinton-related folks I spend little time discussing anything but the primary, and we all (except for Big Tent Democrat) are Clinton supporters. There’s also a bonus shout-out for a new blogroll addition at the end.

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Yesterday, after my conference ended, I called the M.A.S. and railed against the infantile on-line fighting about the Democratic primary.  More and more bloggers are equally fed up: Parachutec at Firedoglake takes us all to task for our blind idolatry, points out the obvious reality that neither Clinton nor Obama are especially progressive, and concludes with asking us what the issues are on which we’ll hold the incoming President accountable.  Much to his/her and my dismay, virtually no commenter answers the question, whether because they are unable to or uninterested in doing so. 

I can think of several issues, which I had the pleasure of discussing and learning more about in the company of 1,500+ conference attendees here in New Orleans this week.  We were at PolicyLink’s third Regional Equity summit, where major topics included poverty alleviation, affordable housing, racial equity, and social and economic justice.  One of the plenaries was a discussion of keeping race and equity on the political agenda in the ‘08 elections (though the question came up if they were even on the agenda in any meaningful way).  Comprised of Jim Wallis, Maria Echaveste, Patrick Gaspard (EVP of SEIU1199), Antonio Gonzalez, and Dr. Robert K. Ross, and moderated by Tavis Smiley, the panel was fascinating mainly in the candidates’ varying degrees of optimism or pessimism about the possibilities for a progressive agenda, and increasing the political power of ethnic/racial minorities. (With only one woman on the panel, it was the least gender balanced of the 6 I attended, indicative of the gender bias in our political sphere, including who is considered an authority.) 

Wallis, a preacher who is white, mostly focused on the religious commitments to combatting poverty: with church groups returning repeatedly to the Gulf Coast, he described New Orleans as “converting ground” for a generation of “new abolitionists” committed to eradicating global poverty, which they believe is the “new slavery.”  (He also spoke earlier this week to 200 evangelicals in Boston, which I found particularly fascinating.)  The other panelists - Latino/a and African-American - took on the issues of the a) black/brown divide, especially as it concerns economic opportunity and neighborhood violence; b) coalitional possibilities among African-Americans and Latinos, c) tremendous voter participation and mobilization within these two broad ethnic categories; d) rural versus urban poverty; e) economic mobility for immigrants versus native-born minority groups, and f) immigration policy. 

The entire panel urged the audience to continue fostering positive social change at the community level, to continue to build what many consider to be a progressive, grassroots movement for economic and social equity in the 21st century, and to never cease the “forceful agitation” against the fat cats in D.C. in pressing for social change.  Elections, said Gonzalez, are always “opportunities” for change, but nonetheless are “blunt instruments” for making change.  Most of them advocated for small steps versus big solutions, butalso called for, as Dr. Ross put it, a “transformational frame around poverty,” versus our current “transactional frame around services” that incites fear of tax increases and the free riding of the undeserving poor. 

The final session was a feedback forum for attendees to talk about what worked and didn’t at the conference.  A major critique that I also heard during a specific session on reducing poverty was that the topic was effectively framed as a problem exclusive to African-Americans and Latino groups.  An Asian/Pacific Islander (AIPA) immigrant and native born AIPA both publicly called for greater attention to poverty among all racial-ethnic groups, pointing out that between 20-30% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are AIPA, and that in places like Minnesota, for instance, poor whites are a major target of anti-poverty activism.  There was also a call for greater youth mentorship as Civil Rights activists passed the torch to a new generation of leaders, criticism of the absence of tenants’ voices from panels on housing, and making race, class and poverty more explicit topics of concern for progressive researchers. 

As Mayor Otis Johnson of Savannah, GA put it, anti-poverty and development activists need “specific [analyses] of people and place” in order to develop strategies and initiatives that appropriately respond to geographically diverse “pecking order[s] of social mobility” in the U.S. (Mayor Johnson also described his political philosophyas one of “incremental radicalism,” which I think describes mine too.)

Drinking all of this in against the backdrop of our current election, the frivolity of shouting at each other on-line is stark.  Panelists refrained from primary partisanship, and even took pains to consider our options under a future President McCain, sticking to a general discussion of what our “righteous work” (thanks Tavis) looks like going forward under any of the three major candidates.

Because, as Wallis put it, “Washington [D.C.] is the last place movements hit.”  Folks in D.C. think “history moves through them,” but “history does not bear this out.”  It is the grassroots that matter.

So campaign for your candidate, even preach (to the unconverted!) why you believe in them, but really consider what they can do for us, and how they can facilitate or empower our “righteous work.”  We cannot let our energy and passion die on November 5, 2008.  Hell, it’s just another Wednesday in the never ending struggle for positive social change. 

(Or, some primary season pop psychologizing; this post is a work-in-progress)

In the wake of Clinton’s tremendous wins this week, rising up in the blogosphere are a few voices pushing back on the notion that this happened in part because she went “negative.”  (Personally, I find Obama’s subtle, dismissive vocabulary of “I guess” and “apparently” used to qualify her wins just as offensive as some find her 3am phone call ad.)  Most of these contrarian voices say one or two things: a) that’s scarcely negative compared to what the Dem nominee will and has faced in the general election, and b) Toughen up, for Christ’s sakes.  This is politics.

I can’t really understand the broader appeal of Obama’s unity message.  Some guy in the cocktail line at Clinton’s victory party in TX said to me, “I thought everyone your age was supporting Obama.”  I said, “they are!” and furthered that I thought it was their “idealism.”  As he put it, “that isn’t a bad thing.”  Hell, I wish I were not so jaded.  What I’m thinking of in this post is the lefty consensus that Clinton is too competitive and too aggressive and too mean to the *real* candidate.  Layered on to this is how many media/blog personalities apparently hate what is actually a marvelous competition in the Democratic primary.

Both candidates are improving and benefitting from such a close race.  So are their supporters, who are similarly energized by the competition.  I’ve experienced first hand the amazing passion of Clinton supporters, who allegedly pale in comparison to Obama supporters.  The truth is that Clinton and Obama are running similarly strong, record-breaking campaigns.  Contrary to on-line wisdom, most Dems love the both of them, and the popular vote is incredibly close.  This two candidates are pretty evenly matched, and we should have a grudging respect for both of them. This race is a gift, and we should be so happy to have so many choices. 

I hear anecdotally around the web all the time that fellow bloggers and writers share some of my qualities, such as introversion or a preference for the written over the spoken word.  I have always lived on the edge of the crowd: whether it was reading on a couch in the middle of countless relatives as a kid or being the only non-Jew in a tight-knit group of Jewish college roommates.  This doesn’t make me any less a part of either of these groups; what it does indicate is that I require a little distance, whether spatially or culturally, so I can retreat into my head for periods of time.  I don’t consider myself shy, but other bloggers have described themselves as such.

The other thing about blogging for me is that narcissism is involved.  While part of it is certainly a release, a need to write as an emotional and cognitive process, it’s also the case that I think people should be reading what I have to say.  That my opinions matter, and should be instructive for others.  Why else would I make it public?

It seems to me that this whining over negativity and a corresponding fear of competition is coming from a group of people that should be analyzed for their tendencies toward opting out of mainstream social interaction and group experience, because we didn’t fit in for one internal or external reason or another.  If other bloggers possess a similar mix out there of my introversion and narcissism, then it is little wonder we’re all tearing each other to pieces on a regular basis over our preferred candidate.  Add to this that bloggers are not beholden to external codes of impartiality, distance or objectivity; we think we know what we’re talking about, that what that is is valuable (despite only few having been rewarded our rightful financial desserts! heh), and so the rest of y’all might as well F-off.  (Unless you agree with me, of course.) 

“Going negative,” contrary to utopian notions of rising above the fracas, are a reality of winning. (Hell, it’s a little hypocritical on all our parts to castigate Clinton for unseemly behavior when that’s all we can seem to dish out on-line.)  It’s incredibly difficult to opt out of the battle alone; to some, Obama’s attempt to be above it all comes across as arrogant and removed.  (While there is a racial insinuation here of the uppity Negro, there’s also the blatant anti-elitism we have in this nation.  One reason I avoid pro-Clinton sites like the nutty, security-oriented No Quarter blog is because of it’s pro-working-class anti-elitism, which leaves MIT-educated working-class-born me feeling like I should be ashamed of my education.)  So although Sen. Obama trying to run a different campaign is commendable, it’s more likely to succeed if all the Dem candidates had gotten together prior to map out the agreed upon rules of the game.  I know, such a lofty notion!  FWIW, I don’t think either campaign has gotten particularly ghastly, and I also think this tit-for-tat we’re engaging in on-line of which candidate is the bigger a**hole is ridiculous.  For every shot Clinton allegedly fires, there’s a camp who believes Obama also holds a smoking gun.  

Reality tv and welfare retrenchment and free market sloganeering all indicated to me that as a nation we dig competition, particularly unfair fights.  Now, I know that my blogosphere is decidedly to the left on at least social and economic policy (if not tv programming), but I’m surprised that our allegedly communal zeal for regulation, big government and fair trade somehow means that Obama is the clear heir to nomination.  One thing that has Clinton supporters fired up is the not-so-tacit suggestion that we are somehow illegitimate.  Given that generally women, Latinos, the elderly and the lower-middle- and working-class voters favor her, whereas younger people and African-Americans favor Obama, this election bickering is a shallow yet dangerous play on very real divisions across different groups who have been marginalized, oppressed or disenfranchised in one way or another in society.  It’s kinda all fun-and-games on the web, but after being at a conference on equity and justice for the last 2 days, and doing this kind of work for a living, and campaigning for Clinton with a very diverse group earlier this week, I’m both more dismissive and more frustrated by the hating than ever. 

As I’ve made clear here, I’m speaking to a mainly Internet phenomenon among people who may prefer the anonymity and arms-length communication mode available on-line versus in