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

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!

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.

(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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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. 

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. 

I’m at a conference in New Orleans covering these themes, though the words “regional,” “social” and “smart” come before them, respectively.  (Me, I’m skeptical of regionalism and smart growth.)

It’s an interesting conference in that these themes don’t necessarily go hand in hand, and it’s effectively a community development conference that’s rather glitzy: held at the Sheraton on Canal St, with talks by Danny Glover and a panel beginning in a minute hosted by Tavis Smiley.  Last night the Mayor said a few words at the evening reception.

But it’s been interesting so far, as I hear from scholars, practitioners and wonks about trends in federal policy, the rising salience of poverty among voters, and municipal strategies for combatting poverty. I’ve been surprised at how much I enjoy it, given I usually can’t sit still during conf. presentations for more than 5 minutes.

I’ll be back over the weekend when this is all said and done with some longer, more interesting updates.  For now, I have to complain about one thing: WHY DOES THE MARRIOTT NOT ONLY CHARGE IT’S GUESTS A DAY RATE FOR INTERNET, BUT ALSO REQUIRE US TO USE A WIRE ATTACHED TO A MODEM?  I THOUGHT IT WAS 2008. 

Happy Friday.

PS: Life’s a lot more peaceful without the incessant virtual shouting of the blogosphere.

I loathe this man.  Read on.

With 8 days until the March 4 primaries, this is how I feel. Exhausted of the he said/she said. Tired of sifting through the various charges leveled at candidates, campaigns, their supporters, the media, bloggers, at me. A week ago I was fired up - This is participatory democracy! - and NYC Weboy and I laughed about how the blogs need a mediator to keep the place civilized. I was spending all day on the web, and at one point exchanged emails with a dear friend of mine about the rise of social isolation in contemporary society and how I am one of those people who have *traded* face-to-face interaction for virtual socializing.This dear friend, a young black woman married and raising an interracial child, has so far been a voice of reason for me in this campaign. While the clunky media-driven debate over “Race v. gender” has raged for months, searching greedily for The Biggest Loser between our two Dem candidates, she said to me in an email that this has been her “dream” primary - she’s supporting Obama, but would have happily supported Clinton. With Obama she gained a role model for her daughter and theoretical future sons, but she got teary at both Obama’s “Yes We Can” and Clinton’s “This One’s for the Girls” videos. This friend is who I think of when I see The Obamas grace three magazine covers in one week (he on The Economist and US News, and Michelle on Newsweek) and am struck by how cool and overdue that is for this nation. It is her that I think of when I feel pride watching these two candidates share the debate stage and make the Democratic Party look great. And it is this friend who I am now pulling into the blogosphere, at her own peril.

Because now this my lovely friend is spending more time than usual on-line, discovering for herself how f***ing obnoxious so many of the blog comment threads are about the candidates. And my experiments in consciousness-raising here at The RP suddenly feel especially unpleasant. I’m taking her down with me! Oh No!

My support for Clinton has origins in her qualifications for the Presidency - she’s the smartest and the realistic best the Dems have to offer, I think, and her gender firmly pushes me into her camp. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that her candidacy has taken on a whole new level of meaning for me, divorced from the candidate. This has become a fight for me about gender equity, a battle I’ve long waged, whether aggressively or sometimes just silently in my head. I feel like I’m fighting for Clinton in honor of my mother and her peers, in honor of the women’s lives I’ve had the privilege to study for school, and for myself and my and my peers’ future. Watching the attacks on Clinton this primary season has unleashed an anger in me that I’d either been ignoring or resisting until now, one that I’m hoping will last for the rest of my life.

The problem is that Clinton - of course - is not a perfect candidate on which to mount my fight for justice. No single woman would be; the fight to reduce oppression and domination of women is a battle to be waged across campaigns, political and economic and social structures, and on behalf of and with a range of activists committed to social equity.

The meta-narrative of this campaign, and electoral politics more generally, have pretty much prohibited such a coalitional struggle, as the false choice between the “black man and the white woman” exploits and reinforces the already fragile relationships between activists representing different social groups and struggles. As a Clinton supporter, in the time and space available to me in my current on- and off-line life, I’ve sacrified depth of analysis about this race for qualified support of my candidate. I say qualified because most everything I post in her favor is casually vetted and posted at a deliberately partisan site for other Clinton supporters. I’ve characterized this site as a safe space that I think legitimately has its place here in the ’sphere. And I love being a part of it.

But I cannot stress enough that this Clinton support is not my politics as usual. The reason I rarely get fired up about elections or candidates is because I think politicians are pretty much all the same, and the system is set up such that their self-interest always comes first. I believe that to get things done you need to be willing to negotiate with a pretty varied range of people and groups, and that conflict (versus violence) is fundamental and necessary, and difference is to be tolerated and embraced, not suppressed. I think change comes incrementally, due to a variety of intertwined external and internal pressures, including movement politics, protest, behind-the-scenes deal-making, and policymaking.

Clinton and Obama both represent different pieces of the scenario I just described. They comprise different coalitions of voters, different tactics (between them and within their campaigns) to land the nomination, different narratives of how they’ll lead, different leadership styles, yet very similar political positions and stances across a wide range of issues that matter to various voters. Neither of them will really change our power to influence the system, regardless of how much both camps of supporters believe they will (beyond the diffuse and thrilling symbolic empowerment many of us will feel should our preferred candidate take that oath in January). Only we can do that, and once either of them is in office, both become more representative than they are now of all the legislative, regulatory, distributive, and participatory changes we need in our government.

What has been a real loss for me this campaign is how divergent I feel from my usual stances of a) trying to better understand the intersectionality of various forms of oppression that women, people of color, LGBT, and others feel, and b) fighting for greater anti-poverty policy and equity in the U.S. I don’t believe that loss would be vindicated by participating in the Obama campaign either. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this primary, rather than tripping over deepened gendered, ethno-racial, sexist and classist divides, our mutual desire to heal our (re-) opened wounds is stronger than ever.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was a national outcry for an honest conversation about the persistence of racial and economic inquity in the U.S. Some folks actually began that conversation, picking up where they left off before the storm struck, and are still talking and agitating to this day. May the 2008 Presidential elections leave us with a similar mandate, and may more of us engage with it than the many-but-still-too-few who are fighting for justice in the Gulf Coast now.

Because just like Katrina evacuees in TX, all of us matter well beyond March 4, November 4, and January 20, 2009. Pretty soon Clinton or Obama or even McCain will be behind the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll still be sitting here at our desks, in our cars, on the bus, or behind the counter. Staring down the same old shit.

UPDATE: The LA Justice Institute and The Children’s Defense Fund (Sen. Clinton’s former employer, I might add) have released preliminary data from a survey of families living in the 38,000 FEMA trailers still spread out around the Gulf Coast. They found that approximately 100,000 people live in those trailers, or an average of 3 people per unit. (FEMA trailers are about 400 sq ft, IIRC.)

Other findings include (their emphases):

Most families have been in the trailer for over 2 years, since the fall of 2005 or spring of 2006.

The majority of people living in FEMA trailers are employed. Many are retired.

15% report depression, anxiety, other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues. 10% report that their mental health problems are their biggest obstacle to getting out of the trailer.

55% report that if they are evicted from their FEMA trailer in the next few months they have no family they can turn to for help and they expect to be homeless.

29% reported rashes, itchy eyes, breathing problems and other symptoms usually related to high levels formaldehyde in their FEMA trailer.

“Our presidential candidates must understand the plight of FEMA trailer residents and answer the tough questions those conditions present concerning affordable permanent housing for Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita survivors. This is no way to treat our people!”

HERE ARE THE DETAILS ON SEEING A FEMA TRAILER FIRSTHAND AT TONIGHT’S DEM DEBATE IN AUSTIN :

Though the Democratic debate in Austin on Thursday has limited space for the public, there is an opportunity for folks in the vicinity to visit the KatrinaRitaVille Express: The National FEMA Trailer Tour. From krvexpress.org:

This is a rare opportunity to place our region’s unaddressed recovery/justice needs squarely before the candidates, media and US electorate. Our FEMA Trailer and a caravan of survivors/speakers from coastal AL, MS, LA and TX would certainly help raise the region’s national visibility.

Friends at UT Law School’s Justice Center are currently looking into a day-long exhibit and speak-out at some campus location not far from Thursday night’s debate.

With your help, the event will feature the trailer, human testimonials, video, and the distribution of information on housing, environment and other social justice/policy needs for gulf coast communities.

Click here for more debate info.

Meanwhile, legal activists have filed another lawsuit to halt demolition in the on-going public housing struggle in New Orleans, even as buildings at C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, and St. Bernard have come down (No word on any demolition at Lafitte). In DC, Sen. Landrieu has again marked up S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, to renew the negotiations with her colleagues and staunch opponents, Sens. Shelby (R-AL) and Vitter (R-LA), on this critical affordable housing bill.

This fight is far from over! ! !!

I’ve updated my blogroll, especially the Politics category, but also some overdue additions in my Feminist links.  Check ‘em out.  Introduce yourself.  Make friends.

I’m spending some time with the fam this evening (currently blocking one of my mom’s dogs from the box of Cheez-its beside me as I type), and will be back tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s some links to what I’m reading:

On-line:

Who Represents the Progressive Movement?

Periodically Speaking;

Count WHOSE Vote?;

“White” Like Who?;

and

Generation Gap.

 

Off-line:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears;

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao;

Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City;

and Justice & the Politics of Difference.

 

Happy reading.

This post has been marinating for awhile, and is a plea for us to call out the Clinton and Obama campaigns on the respective racism and sexism being dished out/tolerated.  It’s spurred in part by the dissonant experience of finding incredible solidarity in the anti-misogyny and emerging Clinton supporter pride in my blogosphere at the same time that I’m defensively arguing with Obama shippers who otherwise speak the truth about structural racism, sexism, and discrimination in this frenzied primary season.   I could bore you with the research I’ve studied and conducted about group identity; group threat; race/class/gender schisms in urban politics; and how all those social phenomena shape and re-shape our political, social and economic power structures.  But instead I’m going to return to the personal, as these debates seem to be getting increasingly so for most of us, to both our individual and group benefit and detriment.

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I’m late on this announcement from Sens. Clinton and Schumer (D-NY), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring together two of my major issues here at the RP: supporting the recovery of the Gulf Coast and Sen. Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

S. 1668, the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, is by no means dead, but rather is subject to on-going negotiation and revision now that local Gulf residents, former tenants, and their activist allies lost the battle over demolishing public housing in New Orleans.  Sen. Landrieu (D-LA) and her supportive colleagues continue to try to find a way to push through this much needed legislation, and break down the resistance of AL and LA Sens. Shelby and Vitter, respectively.  I’ve written extensively here about the struggle to rebuild the Gulf Coast and win passage of this critical bill.  Without further adieu, Sens. Clinton and Schumer’s statement in support of the Act:

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Rates are up 20% since last year, and at the highest level since the Army began keeping records in 1980.  From The WP (my emphases):

The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated.

[An army study] found that the common factors in suicides and attempted suicides include failed personal relationships; legal, financial or occupational problems; and the frequency and length of overseas deployments…The study…acknowledges that the Army still does not know how to adequately assess, monitor and treat soldiers with psychological problems. In fact, it says that “the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally designed for a combat/deployment environment.”

Staff Sgt. Gladys Santos, an Army medic who attempted suicide after three tours in Iraq, said the Army urgently needs to hire more psychiatrists and psychologists who have an understanding of war. “They gave me an 800 number to call if I needed help,” she said. “When I come to feeling overwhelmed, I don’t care about the 800 number. I want a one-on-one talk with a trained psychiatrist who’s either been to war or understands war.”

Santos, who is being treated at Walter Reed, said the only effective therapy she has received there in the past year have been the one-on-one sessions with her psychiatrist, not the group sessions in which soldiers are told “Don’t hit your wife, don’t hit your kids” or the other groups where they play bingo or learn how to properly set a table.

The article also tells this miserable story of a female Army medic who was repeatedly harrassed by her commander in Iraq, had a nervous breakdown and shot herself, and then was brought up on charges by her commander and faced a court-martial.  After she tried to kill herself, the charges were dropped. 

Under this Administration, we’ve overtaxed and