By Tamara K.Nopper

A Review of Who is White?:

In 1903 the ever-forward looking W.E.B. DuBois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” A century later, the relevance of DuBois’ observation is being contested by those preoccupied with the increasing ethnic and cultural diversification of the US. Many argue that DuBois’ centralization of the boundary between the entangled black and white worlds is outdated, going so far as to propose that we now have “colorlines.” Such gestures are more than semantic and instead imply that blackness as the definitive social boundary for US race relations is either less pronounced or completely erased by the significant presence of nonblack racial minorities such as Latino/as and Asian Americans.

This is precisely why George Yancey’s book Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide is such a necessary read. Yancey, a sociologist at the University of North Texas, provides compelling evidence that supports the (unstated) hypothesis that the color line of the twentieth century will remain firmly entrenched in the twenty-first. Using as his point of departure the popular projection that whites will soon be a minority group, Yancey opens his book by arguing that whites will remain the majority despite the growing populations of Latino/as and Asian Americans. How can the increase of Latino/as and Asian Americans enforce, rather than disrupt, the color line? Simple. By 2050, according to Yancey, most Latino/as and Asian Americans will be white.

For those who consider race to be a biological fact rather than a social and political one, Yancey’s projection is sure to raise eyebrows. Yet his argument is grounded in an understanding of how whiteness, like any racial category, is socially and politically defined yet enacted in real and meaningful ways. Whiteness is also fluid and maintains itself when threatened by incorporating previously excluded groups. In the chapter “How to be White,” Yancey covers ground commonly discussed by practitioners of what is becoming institutionalized as “whiteness studies,” including the racialized discrimination and nativism that different European ethnic groups faced before they eventually became socially accepted by Anglos and then later by a more expansive pan-European race simply known as “white.”

Since it is generally argued that these ethnic groups were able to assimilate into whiteness because they had similar phenotypes and could trace their roots to Europe – a point Yancey acknowledges – what makes Who is White? so provocative is its author suggests that European phenotype or ancestry will no longer be prerequisites for becoming white. While the US Census Bureau treats Latino/as as an “ethnic group” of sorts by emphasizing Latin American origin, many are socially read as “brown.” Most Asian Americans are markedly non-European in phenotype and ancestry. Nevertheless, Yancey argues that while they may experience patterns of discrimination and racism from whites, both Latino/as and Asian Americans are following the same pattern of assimilation as Europeans did before them.

Grounding his study within the framework of noted sociologist Milton Gordon, whose work on assimilation emphasized social acceptance by the majority and identification with it from the minority, Yancey provides compelling evidence indicating that Latino/as and Asian Americans are well on their way to becoming white. In the chapter “They are Okay – Just Keep Them Away from Me,” the author analyzes survey data on racial groups’ social attitudes regarding who they approve as potential neighbors as well as marriage partners for their children.

Contrary to the popular image of blacks as racially restrictive, Yancey discovers that black respondents are the most open to all other races. Yet despite being the most receptive to other groups, blacks in general are rejected by all nonblack groups – whites, Latino/as and Asian Americans. While some assume that whites will be closed off to anyone not white, Yancey’s research show that white respondents are more accepting of Latino/as and Asian Americans than they are of blacks. In turn, Latino/a and Asian American respondents are fairly receptive to one another as well as whites. Overall, Yancey’s findings reveal that whites, Latino/as and Asian Americans do not tend to reject one another as possible neighbors or their kids’ spouses, but all three groups show a general resistance to blacks in these social roles.

That all three nonblack groups were found to be more accepting of one another in a way that they were not of blacks suggests that assimilation may be less about desiring whiteness as it is avoiding blackness. Yancey concludes, “The rejection of African Americans, rather than the acceptance of European Americans, is the best explanation of social distance in the United States.”

This assessment will surely be criticized for being “pro assimilationist,” a response Yancey anticipates: “It is debatable whether assimilation is a desirable goal for racial minority groups. I do not take a position either way. However, understanding the ability of a given minority group to assimilate is necessary for determining the degree of acceptance experienced by that minority group.”

Another criticism of Yancey’s work may come from those who argue that Latino/as and Asian Americans are different from whites based upon cultural norms. Such proponents may think that Yancey’s emphasis on majority acceptance gives “whites too much power” by ignoring Latino/as’ and Asian Americans’ distinct cultures or worldviews. Yet Yancey shows that despite their supposed cultural differences from the white majority, Latino/as and Asians Americans do not necessarily reject dominant culture and ideology when it comes to racial politics.

For example, Yancey shows that, for the most part, Latino/as and Asian Americans express dimensions of what he labels a white racial identity, which, according to the sociologist, emphasizes individualism, color-blindness or an aversion to dealing with race, and a belief in European cultural normativity. Analyzing survey data measuring respondents’ opinions of “racialized” issues such as affirmative action, prison spending, welfare, and talking about race, Yancey determines that, even when controlling for social and demographic characteristics, “there was no situation where the nonblack minority groups differed significantly in a direction opposite from that by which European Americans differed from African Americans.” In other words, black respondents were the only group to demonstrate a “distinct” worldview – due, according to Yancey, from experiencing an intense amount of social alienation. Conversely, Latino/a and Asian American respondents did not significantly distinguish their opinions from those held by white respondents. This finding suggests that despite their current status as non-whites, Latino/as and Asian Americans are more apt to hold a white world view than a black one.

Overall, while some will surely dismiss Who is White? as “academic” – a practice many activists and even academics engage in when confronted with political conclusions that make them uncomfortable – Yancey’s research is extremely relevant for contemporary racial politics. Most importantly, Yancey’s findings hint at possible inadequacies of current approaches to “multiracial” America, most of which emphasize a white/non-white paradigm that minimizes or outright dismisses the reality of antiblack racism as the structuring and generative ideology of US race relations and social inequality.

Thus, Who is White? is more than a rich sociological study; it also serves as a blueprint for the political possibilities that lie before us if left unaddressed. In the final chapter, Yancey leaves us with a concluding remark that will hopefully be appreciated for its DuBoisian approach, which is one that challenges today’s activists and intellectuals to not only deal with the past and present, but also with the very real possibilities of America’s racial future:

“Previous research on majority group domination tends to be built upon either the concept that white supremacy is, or was, the dominant ideology among majority group members, or the concept that dominant group members utilize notions of color blindness to protect their racial position of privilege. Both concepts lead to an understanding of an American racial hierarchy formed by a white/nonwhite dichotomy. In such a system all non-European groups face social rejection and theoretically all non-European groups deserve an equal amount of academic attention – even if they have not been receiving it. Yet given the merging of nonblack racial minorities into the dominant culture, this white/nonwhite dichotomy is losing relevance. A black/nonblack dichotomy produces more understanding about contemporary race relations. It suggests that the informal rejection of African Americans, rather than a tendency by the majority to oppress all minority groups in a roughly equal manner, is the linchpin to the American contemporary racial hierarchy.”

Tamara K. Nopper is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is currently working on her dissertation which explores the different sources of capital and resources available to Korean immigrants to open, run and expand small businesses in the US. Contact her at

Jail population surges to 700,000: advocates and elected officials call for increasing re-entry programs and prison reforms

Washington, DC – According to data to be released by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) this Sunday, the number of individuals incarcerated in jails and prisons grew by 48,452 between midyear 2003 to 2004. Driven largely by growing federal and state prison populations, and huge increases in jail populations during the past 4 years, BJS reports the incarcerated population grew by 932 people each week.

Despite crime being in decline for over a decade, these numbers show a persistent rise in prison population, and push the US’s rate of incarceration to a startling 726 per 100,000-maintaining the US status as the world’s leading incarcerator (*England-142, *China-118, *France-91, *Japan-58, *Nigeria-31---*Incarceration rates per 100,000 citizens).

“Unless we promote alternatives to prison, the nation will continue to lead the world in imprisonment,” says Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. “While the numbers of incarcerated people continue to rise, some legislators are realizing that by removing the barriers to housing and jobs that formerly incarcerated individuals face when re-entering their communities, we can improve public safety, cut corrections costs, and rebuild communities.”

Prisoners and Jail Inmates at Mid-Year 2004 shows that between mid-year 2003 and 2004, the jail population grew by 3.3%, the state prison population by 1.3%, and the federal prison population by 6.3%. The increase in the federal population is unnerving to some since Congress is currently considering HR 1528, legislation that could drastically increase the federal prison population even more.

“The mandatory sentences in HR 1528 are cruelly punitive and destructive," said Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). "Despite a growing national movement away from mandatory sentencing laws, HR 1528 creates new mandatory sentences and senselessly increases existing ones. It targets parents with mandatory sentences if they witness their children using or selling drugs and do not turn them in and it would completely remove a judge’s discretion to consider the facts or the individual’s role in all federal cases.”

While more people are coming into the prison system through the front end, around the country, federal and state legislatures are considering a flurry of reforms designed to help the 650,000 people who leave prison each year to return to their communities.

Nearly two-thirds of people released from prison are re-arrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor. A spectrum of federal legislators, including Rep. Robert Portman (R-OH) and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) are working to pass the Second Chances Act (HR-1704), legislation that will coordinate federal policies on re-entry and increase job opportunities, housing, substance abuse, and mental health treatment, as well as provide support for families of those re-entering society.

Some states are reluctant to enact the kinds of reforms needed to reduce prison populations, or ease the burden on people returning to communities. In California, which has the second lowest level of parole success the nation, the state recently scrapped plans to reduce the parole failure rate by diverting people to drug treatment and community corrections instead of prison—even though these policies had already been shown to be reducing parole returns. Instead of closing prisons, which the state had originally projected it would do, the administration is instead pressing ahead to open the state’s 34th prison at Delano.

“There is more than a decade of evidence that California’s pre-reform parole system was a billion-dollar failure resulting in the highest return to prison rate in the country,” said Dorsey Nunn, a member of the Coalition for Effective Public Safety (CEPS). “It’s ironic that because we purportedly don’t have evidence that these reforms are working, we instead choose to return to a system we know is a disaster.”

Prisoners and Jail Inmates at Mid-Year 2004 continued to show an alarming rise in the number of people incarcerated as 13 states reported at least a 5% increase in their prison populations, led by Minnesota (13.2%), Montana (10.5%), and Arkansas (8.9%). On the flipside, 12 states including Connecticut, Alabama, and Ohio, saw their incarcerated populations drop. According to the survey, jails were holding nearly 100,000 more people than they were in 2000.

“We should be alarmed at the growth that we are witnessing in the local jail population, which has continued to rise exponentially,” says Dana Kaplan, a policy analyst with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City who is studying jail expansion.

Kaplan said the growth was caused by factors including: increased arrest rates for low-level offenses, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where many residents cannot meet bail, the increased detention of non-citizen immigrants in county facilities, and a rising number of people with mental illness who were formerly residing in mental health facilities. She said jail growth could easily be addressed by implementing the reforms that move people through, and frequently out, of the system faster.


The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington DC-based think tank dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. For more information on the issues cited here, please contact the commentators listed above, or contact Malik Russell at (202.363.7847x308, or cell 202-271-0742), or visit our website at www.justicepolicy.org

By Paul Kingsnorth

Perhaps you can hear it from where you’re sitting now: that low, distant rumble, growing clearer and closer as you focus on it. Perhaps you can see the storm clouds on the horizon. Out there, change is coming.

This is not empty rhetoric. All over the world, there is a revolution brewing. It’s not a revolution in the sense that the twentieth century has taught us to understand the word: not a massing of red flags this time, not a determination to seize the state, not a gathering of Peoples’ Parties with blueprints for a new Utopia. This is something that is harder to explain at first sight, but no less significant.

It’s clear why it is happening: the world is more unequal than at any time in history. A planet in which 20 percent of us are rolling in 86 percent of the wealth, while the very systems of life itself come under increasing strain from mass over-consumption, is not a civilization built to last. The uprising against it began years ago, and it’s gathering in speed.

What used to be called, inaccurately, the ‘anti-globalization’ movement has become a worldwide web of people and groupings dedicated to reclaiming the power that the cult of the market has stolen from them.

They see how the stealing of that power has affected their communities, and as they do so, they see what their causes, their battles and their problems have in common with those elsewhere in the world. They have become a movement – the first genuine global movement of its kind – and they are still growing. Two hundred thousand of them gathered at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, this year, and they represent the tip of a political iceberg that is tens of millions strong.

Who are they? They are Mexican Zapatistas, still battling after a decade to reclaim their community rights from the corporate stitch-up of nafta. They are the South African poor in the townships fighting water privatization. They are landless people all over Latin America, struggling to redefine their position in a corporate farming world. They are local activists in the US, using the law to drive corporations out of their small towns. They are farmers in India, resisting corporate patents and the market-driven food industry. They are tribal people in New Guinea, resisting the corporate enclosure of their land for mining and oil drilling. They are young Europeans trying to rethink resistance to capitalism in the shadow of communism’s spectacular failure.

What is new, and gives cause for hope, is the widespread awareness that old answers will no longer do. Few people involved in this new wave of resistance are very interested in seizing the state. They see where that has taken us in the past, and they also see that globalization has undercut the ability of governments to run their own national economies. In almost every country on Earth, political parties of left, right or center now pledge themselves to the gods of the market. What this new wave of revolutionaries wants is the chance to create its own spaces, free of the rule of the market. If the state can’t deliver that, other ways must be found.

In other words, this is a power struggle. We can talk about nafta, about the wto, about corporations – but at the heart of it all is an age-old human battle over resources, power and the public mind. Money is currently winning that battle. Societies everywhere are becoming markets first and communities second. We become consumers above all, and only then are
we given permission to be human.

This movement seeks to make us people first, to drive the market back into its cage. It can be seen, perhaps, as a battle for the public over the private mind. Who wins it – movement or market – will determine our future. It could be our last, best chance to avoid the McWorld that so many of us can see around the corner.

The movement exists on every continent, but it has no global manifesto because it seeks, in the words of Subcomandante Marcos, “a world with many worlds in it.” Both communism and neoliberalism gave us universal blueprints for prosperity and both failed us. This time, we can’t afford to be fooled by ‘Big Ideas’ that are built around theory and not reality. We can’t afford it because, as the global economy spreads into every nook and cranny of a previously unmarketed world, resistance spreads too.

Perhaps you think that this resistance, and the determination to build a new world based on new values which flows in its wake, is something that just happens to other people, somewhere else in the world. Think again. Wherever you live, it’s coming your way, and it’s coming fast. There has never been anything quite like this before, and as long as the global economy continues to move in its current direction, spreading poverty, inequality, exclusion and environmental destruction in its wake, this rebellion can only grow. Keep your eyes on the horizon, and get ready.

By Deborah Campbell

The university-aged children of France’s ruling class ought to have been contentedly biding their time. They were, after all, destined to move into the high-powered positions reserved for graduates of the elite École Normale Supérieure (ENS). “The ENS is for the very good students, and the very good students aren’t afraid to ask questions,” says Sorbonne economist Bernard Geurrien.

He was addressing a conference on the disconnect between mainstream neoclassical economics instruction and reality. Economics has an ideological function, he told them, to put forth the idea that the markets will resolve everything. In fact, he added, economic theory absolutely doesn’t show that.

A group of economics students, their worst fears confirmed, approached Guerrien eager to “do something.” A week later, 15 of them gathered in a classroom to hash out a plan of attack. Someone called the reigning neoclassical dogma “autistic!” The analogy would stick: like sufferers of autism, the field of economics was intelligent but obsessive, narrowly focussed, and cut off from the outside world.

By June, their outrage had coalesced into a petition signed by hundreds of students demanding reform within economics teaching, which they said had become enthralled with complex mathematical models that only operate in conditions that don’t exist. “We wish to escape from imaginary worlds!” they declared. Networking through the internet and reaching the media through powerful family connections, they made their case.

“Call to teachers: wake up before it’s too late!” they demanded. “We no longer want to have this autistic science imposed on us.” They decried an excessive reliance on mathematics “as an end in itself,” and called for a plurality of approaches.

With that, ‘autisme-économie,’ the post-autistic economics (PAE) movement, was born.

Their revolutionary arguments created an earthquake in the French media, beginning with a report in Le Monde that sent a chill through the academic establishment. Several prominent economists voiced support and a professors’ petition followed. The French government, no doubt recalling the revolutionary moment of May 1968, when students led a 10-day general strike that rocked the republic to its foundations, promptly set up a special commission to investigate. It was headed by leading economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, who also traveled to Madrid to address Spain’s nascent “post-autistic” student movement. Fitoussi’s findings: the rebels had a cause. Most important to the PAE, Fitoussi agreed to propose new courses oriented to “the big problems” being ignored by mainstream economics: unemployment, the economy and the environment.

A backlash was inevitable. Several economists (notably the American Robert Solow from MIT), launched a return volley. What followed was an attempt to discredit the PAE by implying that the students were anti-intellectuals opposed to the “scientificity” of neoclassical economics. The accusations didn’t stick: the dissenters were top students who had done the math and found it didn’t add up.

Gilles Raveaud, a key pae student leader, along with Emmanuelle Benicourt and Iona Marinescu, sees today’s faith in neoclassical economics as “an intellectual game” that, like Marxism and the Bible, purports to explain everything, rather than admitting there are many issues it hasn’t figured out. “We’ve lost religion,” says Raveaud, “so we’ve got something else to give meaning to our lives.”

Benicourt described his hope for PAE as follows: “We hope it will trigger concrete transformations of the way economics is taught . . . We believe that understanding real-world economic phenomena is enormously important to the future well-being of humankind, but that the current narrow, antiquated and naive approaches to economics and economics teaching make this understanding impossible. We therefore hold it to be extremely important, both ethically and economically, that reforms like the ones we have proposed are, in the years to come, carried through, not just in France, but throughout the world.”

Raveaud and Marinescu, key French PAE student leaders, visited the Cambridge Workshop on Realism and Economics in the UK. “It must have been the right time,” says Phil Faulkner, a PhD student at Cambridge University. That June he and 26 other disgruntled PhD students issued their own reform manifesto, called “Opening Up Economics,” that soon attracted 750 signatures. Economics students at Oxford University, who had been at the same workshop, followed with their own “post-autistic” manifesto and website. Similar groups linked to heterodox (as opposed to orthodox) economics began emerging elsewhere in Europe and South America.

The Cambridge rebellion “was prompted by frustration,” says Faulkner, but they hadn’t expected such a positive reception from fellow students. “If anyone were to be happy about the way economics had gone, we’d expect it to be PhD students, because if they were unhappy with it, they simply wouldn’t be here. In fact, that wasn’t the case.”

As expected, Cambridge ignored them. Their efforts, Faulkner explains, were meant to show support for the French students and to use their privileged position at the esteemed economics department to demonstrate to the rest of the world their discontent. Some of the signatories worried that speaking out could have dire consequences, and the original letter was unsigned. “I think it’s more future possibilities, getting jobs, etc., that [made them think] it might not be smart to be associated with this stuff,” says Faulkner. He says he already knew that his research interests meant he would have to work outside of the mainstream: “There was nothing to lose really.”

Edward Fullbrook, a research fellow at the University of the West of England, had already launched the first post-autistic economics newsletter in September 2000. Inspired by the French student revolt and outraged by stories emerging from American campuses that courses on the history of economic thought were being eradicated (which he viewed as an effort to facilitate complete indoctrination of students), Fullbrook battled hate mail and virus attacks to get the newsletter off the ground. Soon, prominent economists such as James Galbraith stepped up to offer encouragement and hard copy. The subscriber list ballooned from several dozen to 7,500 around the world.

Fullbrook edited The Crisis in Economics, a book based on PAE contributions, now being translated into Chinese. Textbook publishers, always hunting for the next big thing, have been inquiring about PAE textbooks. It makes sense, says Fullbrook, since enrollments in standard economics classes have been dropping, cutting into textbook revenues. In other words, students just aren’t buying it. Ironically, says Fullbrook, “Market forces are working against neoclassical economics.”

One of his contributors is Australian economist Steve Keen, who led a student rebellion in 1973 that led to the formation of the political economy department at Sydney University. “Neoclassical economics has become a religion,” says Keen. “Because it has a mathematical veneer, and I emphasize the word veneer, they actually believe it’s true. Once you believe something is true, you’re locked into its way of thinking unless there’s something that can break in from the outside and destroy that confidence.”

But the neoclassical model still reigns supreme at Cambridge. Phil Faulkner now teaches at a university college, but is limited to mainstream economics, the only game in town. “If you’re into math, it’s a fun thing to do,” he says. “It’s little problems, little puzzles, so it’s an enjoyable occupation. But I don’t think it’s insightful. I don’t think it tells these kids about the things it claims to describe, markets or individuals.”

Sitting in an overcrowded café near Harvard Square, talking over the din of full-volume Fleetwood Mac and espresso fueled chatter, Gabe Katsh describes his disillusionment with economics teaching at Harvard University. The red-haired 21-year-old makes it clear that not all of Harvard’s elite student body, who pay close to $40,000 a year, are the “rationally” self-interested beings that Harvard’s most influential economics course pegs them as.
“I was disgusted with the way ideas were being presented in this class and I saw it as hypocritical – given that Harvard values critical thinking and the free marketplace of ideas – that they were then having this course which was extremely doctrinaire,” says Katsh. “It only presented one side of the story when there are obviously others to be presented.”

For two decades, Harvard’s introductory economics class has been dominated by one man: Martin Feldstein. It was a New York Times article on Feldstein titled “Scholarly Mentor To Bush’s Team,” that lit the fire under the Harvard activist. Calling the Bush economic team a “Feldstein alumni club,” the article declared that he had “built an empire of influence that is probably unmatched in his field.” Not only that, but thousands of Harvard students “who have taken his, and only his, economics class during their Harvard years have gone on to become policy-makers and corporate executives,” the article noted. “I really like it; I’ve been doing it for 18 years,” Feldstein told the Times. “I think it changes the way they see the world.”

That’s exactly Katsh’s problem. As a freshman, he’d taken Ec 10, Feldstein’s course. “I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that Ec 10 presents itself as politically neutral, presents itself as a science, but really espouses a conservative political agenda and the ideas of this professor, who is a former Reagan advisor, and who is unabashedly Republican,” he says. “I don’t think I’m alone in wanting a class that presents a balanced viewpoint and is not trying to cover up its conservative political bias with economic jargon.”

In his first year at Harvard, Katsh joined a student campaign to bring a living wage to Harvard support staff. Fellow students were sympathetic, but many said they couldn’t support the campaign because, as they’d learned in Ec 10, raising wages would increase unemployment and hurt those it was designed to help. During a three-week sit-in at the Harvard president’s office, students succeeded in raising workers’ wages, though not to “living wage” standards.

After the living wage ‘victory’, Harvard activists from Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics (SHARE) decided to stage an intervention. This time, they went after the source, leafleting Ec 10 classes with alternative readings. For a lecture on corporations, they handed out articles on corporate fraud. For a free trade lecture, they dispensed critiques of the WTO and IMF. Later, they issued a manifesto reminiscent of the French post-autistic revolt, and petitioned for an alternative class. Armed with 800 signatures, they appealed for a critical alternative to Ec 10. Turned down flat, they succeeded in introducing the course outside the economics department.

Their actions follow on the Kansas City Proposal, an open letter to economics departments “in agreement with and in support of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement and the Cambridge Proposal” that was signed by economics students and academics from 22 countries.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers illustrates the kind of thinking that emerges from neoclassical economics. Summers is the same former chief economist of the World Bank who sparked international outrage after his infamous memo advocating pollution trading was leaked in the early 1990s. “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” the memo inquired. “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted . . . ”

Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, replied: “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane . . . Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”

Summers later claimed the memo was intended ironically, while reports suggested it was written by an aide. In any case, Summers devoted his 2003/2004 prayer address at Harvard to a “moral” defense of sweatshop labor, calling it the “best alternative” for workers in low-wage countries.

“You can’t ignore the academic foundations for what’s going on in politics,” says Jessie Marglin, a Harvard sophomore with share. share didn’t want a liberal class with its own hegemony of ideas. It wanted “a critical class in which you have all the perspectives rather than just that of the right.” Without an academic basis for criticism, other approaches “aren’t legitimized by the institution,” she says. “It becomes their word versus Professor Feldstein, who is very powerful.”

Harvard economics professor Stephen Marglin, Jessie’s father, teaches the new course. A faculty member since 1967, Marglin was the tail end of a generation formed by the Great Depression and World War II. “This generation,” he says, “believed that in some cases markets could be the solution, but that markets could also be the problem.”

His new course still uses the Ec 10 textbook, but includes a critical evaluation of the underlying assumptions. Marglin wants to provide balance, rather than bias.

“I’m trying to provide ammunition for people to question what it is about this economic [system] that makes them want to go out in the streets to protest it,” he says. “I’m responding in part to what’s going on and I think the post-autistic economics group is responding to that. Economics doesn’t lead politics, it follows politics. Until there is a broadening of the political spectrum beyond a protest in Seattle or a protest in Washington, there will not be a broader economics. People like me can plant a few seeds but those seeds won’t germinate until the conditions are a lot more suitable.”

The revolution is spreading. A slogan emblazoned on a wall on a Madrid campus, where the PAE movement has been making inroads, makes its case: “¡La economia es de gente, no de curvas!” – “Economics is about people, not curves!”

by Maya Wiley
Director Center for Social Inclusion

As a nation, we face a rising tide. The flood waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the mighty Mississippi River reminded us that poverty, while it comes in all colors, is disproportionately black. The broken levees also showed us that our disinvestment in our public infrastructure harms us all, even if it does not harm us all equally. We have eliminated legalized racial discrimination against people of color, but have left the structures it produced intact.

This is structural racism, which has five primary characteristics: 1) it is not race neutral; 2) history matters in that the structure of our society has been constructed over time and racial hierarchy has been an integral part of that restructuring; 3) effects matter because they tell us how the structure operates so that intentional bad acts are irrelevant; 4) racial disparities are effects that show the structure does not operate neutrally; and 5) everyone is harmed by the structure, even if we see it most glaringly in majority people of color communities.

The structures have unevenly distributed the benefits and burdens of our public policies and private actions. For example, many outer-ring suburbs, which have become among the most opportunity-rich communities in most metropolitan areas, have received a much larger allocation of transportation infrastructure funds than their urban neighbors. When these wealthy, lesspopulated suburbs are built, inner-city tax dollars subsidize their sewers, utility lines and new schools. The poor are paying for the rich. And often lower-income blacks are paying to support better-off whites.

Policies and actions driving racialized suburbanization have divided us as a nation. It has reduced our cross-racial interaction, fragmented our governmental structures between cities and suburbs, and it has made both city and suburbs, still critical in the globalizing economy and in the national consciousness, weak and unsustainable. However, there is a way out—the rising waters are also a rising tide of possibility. Efforts to reduce central city poverty have led to an increase in regional wealth and a reduction of regional poverty.

We must cross urban and suburban governmental fragmentation, business and community group divisions, and racial group identities to work together and invest in the poorest people and their communities, to connect them to opportunities like jobs in growth sectors, training and educational opportunities, transportation and housing. The state of Black America is the state of the nation. We, black and white, single mother and two-parent household, citizen and undocumented, all of us are critical to the strengthening of our nation and the success of our democracy.

by The Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones

Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (Retired) Senior Counsel


The state of civil rights in America is most precarious. This should come as no surprise to the civil rights advocates who have been manning the
barricades.

The warning signs have been many. The most ominous warning came from the late Justice Thurgood Marshall in the final dissenting opinion he wrote before retiring from the Supreme Court. One need only look at subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court on civil rights remedies, and in cases that impact on the rights of minorities and the poor, to know that Justice Marshall’s warning is coming to pass. Moreover, events surrounding the 2000 and 2004 presidential and congressional elections, followed by the way in which the federal judicial nominating process has been manipulated, have proven Justice Marshall prescient.

Voting rights are at the core of the people’s right of self-determination. When that ability is impaired, the officials who do get elected frequently dismiss or are deaf to the pleas of racial minorities. A recent example of this took place in the cynical way United States Senators turned a deaf ear to the protests raised by black and minority voters over Supreme Court nominees. Sadly, some Senators allowed their political partisanship and electoral cowardice to override their solemn duty.

This was a classic instance of non-accountability that cries out for a renewal and expansion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. There is a daunting fear that as a result of the way federal judicial nominations were made and the confirmation process was conducted, the ability of civil rights advocates to continue relying
upon the federal courts to define and enforce remedies may have been seriously undercut.

Those who relied upon the jurisprudence developed and refined by Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, William H. Hastie, and the civil rights bills enacted under the leadership of Clarence Mitchell, Whitney M. Young, Jr., Joseph Rauh and others, must be eternally vigilant and work to arouse the nation to the peril that confronts civil rights.

As Justice Marshall warned,“scores of established constitutional liberties are now ripe for reconsideration.” What was true when he wrote this is now, with the Supreme Court changed, even more true.

America’s Blinders
By Howard Zinn


Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support as the President was sending troops halfway around the world to Iraq.

A small example of the innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of the press is the way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to the Security Council, a month before the invasion, a speech which may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The New York Times was breathless with admiration. The Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain the vulnerability of the press and of the citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in the dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The other is in the dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against the sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us another safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that there has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between the government and the people of the United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from the beginning, as our Founding Fathers put it in the Preamble to the Constitution, it was “we the people” who established the new government after the Revolution. When the eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that the Constitution represented not the working people, not the slaves, but the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders, he became the object of an indignant editorial in The New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one another. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “Father of the Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that there was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. They bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of these concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in the history of lies told to the population, this is the biggest lie. In the history of secrets, withheld from the American people, this is the biggest secret: that there are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that the history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all the lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that these people up there—the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards the truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.

If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “the American century,” saying that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around the world was “the calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The values you learned here . . . will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout the world and give other people the opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is the idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in other parts of the world. Is it based on how well people in the United States live? The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and the United States was thirty-seventh on the list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any other nation. One of five children in this, the richest country in the world, is born in poverty. There are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And there is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead the world in the number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join the rest of the human race in the common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

by MIKE DAVIS


A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action.... We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. "Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, "are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been.... Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous currents of White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana--facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years--a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive only $1. Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers--can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. (There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the right of renters--who constituted 53 percent of the population before Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete "armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion in previously approved Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a 1 percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs." The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika--Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government--that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black suffrage, is being refought--perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. Despite some old-guard holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the New Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e., the man responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally established by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, Canizaro mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths. As he told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city. So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning dogma. The number of displaced residents returning to the city is obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on suspicious projections--provided by the RAND Corporation and endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro--that in three years the city would recover only half of its August 2005 population. Many Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile closer to Newark than to Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly educated African-Americans, whose real interests--it is claimed--might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build. BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-member commission was racially balanced and included City Council president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen (education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.

Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries for black Democratic power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of victory," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's distress.

New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. Tammany Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and electoral power. Both parishes are in the midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has expressed little concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area. Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools and to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in profits. The Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's "complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to court to challenge her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats whose support she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute. The authority has thus refused to disburse any of its hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending. At a special session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain control over where grants and loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers. Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret--in the mainstream press, at least--has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black neighborhoods. ACORN's membership has been the engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation's first municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND Corporation projections that portray most blacks abandoning the city. "Don't believe those phony figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in January. "We have polled our displaced members in Houston and Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to return. But they realize that this is a tough struggle, since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It is also a race against time. The challenge is, You make it, you take it. So our members are voting with their feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are working night and day to repair the homes of 1,000 member-families in some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort. Rathke points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. "First, suspension of Davis-Bacon [federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools and the destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He points to a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. "Trash collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members. Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company from out of state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements and occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In 1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our feeble response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second?

Kevin Powell

Few of us will have the will to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
ROBERT F. KENNEDY

“I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.”
MALCOLM X


Monday, November 8, 2004

I have sat in my Brooklyn, New York apartment, quietly, for several days now, too perplexed to talk with many people, friends or not, about the American presidential election of 2004. I have read mainstream and alternative news accounts of the campaign on and offline, absorbed statistics and exit polls, sifted through the debates, flipped between CNN and the Fox News Channel, dodged most emails and phonecalls coming my way, asking me what I thought it meant that President George W. Bush had won, that Senator John Kerry had lost. I have heard the chorus of Bush supporters say it was Mr. Bush’s “faith” that led them to punch the hole, to pull the lever, to touch the screen for the president-elect. And I have heard the chorus of Kerry patrons say they feel robbed, that there must be some vast conservative conspiracy, that they are deeply traumatized, in a state of shock, that they do not know what to do next, nor to whom to turn. I have spoken with my mother, who has voted in every election since she has been able to, dating back to the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. And who, with her sharp South Carolina accent and uncomplicated, front-porch observations on the world, has always given me something to ponder. My mother, like I, is a lifelong Democrat and her sleepy response was, well, dry, nonchalant, uncharacteristically melancholy: “Boy,” she said, “at least we got the chance to vote.”

Indeed, mother, indeed. But has it come to this? Where real democracy, real freedom, real self-determination, is tied, exclusively, to our right to vote? Is the vote it? Twenty years ago, when I was an eighteen-year-old first-year college student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the vote was the thing. I was stirred by a Southern Baptist preacher named Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm had done it in 1972, was the only other serious Black candidate for president my community has ever had. Reverend Jackson implored us, young and old alike, Black, White, Latino, Asian, Native American, to keep hope alive, that we were, in fact, somebody, and we believed him, believed that our vote could, would, matter. President Ronald Reagan was reelected, in a landslide that year, and by 1988, when Rev. Jackson ran a second time for president, and came in second in the Democratic primary to eventual nominee Michael Dukakis, many of us felt that Rev. Jackson, with those millions of Rainbow Coalition votes, had the power, the juice, to manifest a new American coalition of progressive people: Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, labor, city and country folks, working and middle class people humane enough to care about their neighbors to the left and right; and all those groups that had been marginalized during the Reagan-Bush years. It was, we felt back then, an opportunity to win back the soul of the Democratic Party, to have a party, an organization, that truly reflected the diversity, the gorgeous mosaic, as former New York City mayor David Dinkins was fond of saying, of America. But, alas, and for reasons only Rev. Jackson knows to this day, a great compromise was struck, the Rainbow Coalition was allowed to wither on an ashen sidewalk in exchange for Rev. Jackson’s seemingly cozy relationship with the Democratic Party hierarchy, and many of us young folks became disillusioned with politics for years to come.

I was one of those young people, at age 22, who walked away in 1988, right through the Clinton years, and in spite of Mr. Clinton’s youthful appeal and Kennedyesque affectations. I never stopped voting. I could not fathom that inaction as my mother chided me, habitually, that there was a time when we, African Americans, could not vote, that I had an obligation to do so for no other reason that blood, literally, had been spilled, that heads had been smashed, literally, so that I could have a semblance of citizenship in these times.

I say all of this to say it hurt me, immensely, to see so many young Americans, of various persuasions, registering to vote for the first time, volunteering for Mr. Kerry’s campaign throughout America, standing in lines in some areas for up to ten hours, then having to deal with the harsh reality that their candidate had lost. It hurt me to see the tears of defeat, to hear the echoes of Hey, it does not seem to matter what we do, nothing is ever going to change. There is a sense of confusion, of hopelessness, permeating young America, older America, Democratic America, liberal America, progressive America. Many people believed that MTV, BET, Rock the Vote, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, Russell Simmons, Oprah Winfrey, P. Diddy, Leonardo DiCaprio, Eminem, Michael Moore, and other popular and well-meaning institutions and icons could, and would, make a difference. Several people believed that because of the Iraqi war, the horrible economy, the outsourcing of American jobs, the ugly partitions that have been erected on our soil during the Bush-Cheney years (Black vs. White, White vs. people of color, Christian vs. Muslim, Americans vs. Arabs, poor vs. rich, straight vs. gay, and so on), that there was no imaginable way that Mr. Bush could get reelected. Many of us assumed, hoped, prayed, that John Kerry, though a mediocre candidate at best, would somehow win this election and get America back on the course of figuring itself out, for the good of us all.

But perhaps this is where the mistake began. We placed more faith in one person, Senator John Kerry, than we placed in ourselves. When Mr. Bush was awarded the presidency in December 2000, after a long and acidic fight that wound up in the United States Supreme Court, I did not, could not, read the newspapers nor watch the news for several months. I felt cheated, that a high crime had occurred. This was the sentiment of many Americans. But while we stuck our heads in the sand the Bush-Cheney regime took root, its agenda took flight, and before we knew it a tax cut was passed that greatly benefited the rich, September 11 happened, a war on terrorism began, and we invaded, first, Afghanistan, then Iraq. Civil liberties have been eroded under the heading The Patriot Act. And over 1000 American soldiers, mainly young Americans, have lost their lives to date. And the count for dead Iraqis is 100,000, according to several reports. So we have essentially been in reactionary mode the entire time; we being liberals, progressives, the Democratic Party. We being Americans who know that America does not belong to one particular party, to one particular ideology, to one particular race of people, to one particular history, to one particular God. And as we have been playing catch up, the incredibly wealthy leadership of the Republican Party has pandered, so very effectively, and with the help of a well-oiled propaganda and marketing initiative, and via, among other instruments, talk radio, to blue-collar, rural White Americans, in the Midwest, in the Deep South, catering to their most basic thoughts about God, religion and, if we are to be mad truthful, to their fears and prejudices. I was just in the great state of Ohio a couple of days after the election, and it was striking to be in areas where some of the poorest Whites lived but there, on the windows of their homes, on their pick-up trucks, stamped into their minds, was some symbol (a poster, a bumper sticker, a hunch) that Bush and Cheney were on the right side of God. Somewhere, some time ago, the Democratic Party ceased to be the party of the people, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have developed very few leaders who know how to talk with and listen to the masses of Americans. We have shied away from what the party had been about, at least on the surface, during Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure, and as manifested in the thoughtful dreams of Bobby Kennedy in 1968, of his brother Ted at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, and of Reverend Jackson for much of the 1980s. And we have allowed the Republicans to paralyze us with paranoia and inertia, thereby forcing us, again and again, to replicate strands of the Republican agenda rather than fulfill our mission of doing what is right, for the people, all people, all the time. I now wonder how many leaders in the Democratic Party actually even spend consistent time in their respective communities, in the ghettoes, in the backwoods, in the suburbs, on college campuses, in the churches, at prisons, at homeless shelters, at battered women’s facilities, interacting with the people, and not just when it is time to rally the troops for votes?

I can say this because, for sure, I have been fortunate, very fortunate, these last several years, dating back to the mid-1990s, to travel America extensively as a public speaker, a political organizer, and a writer, to see life in this nation beyond my city, county, state, region, and I have visited nearly all fifty states, big cities and small towns, densely populated locales and places where I did not see another person for miles at a time. These trips have given me a very different take on America. A fuller, more comprehensive take. While we remain a nation still embarrassingly segregated due to race, gender, class, region, religion, sexual orientation, and the like, I am also struck by the common stories of alienation, of the multitudes living on the frayed fringes of this so-called democratic nation. There was the middle-aged White gentleman in New Hampshire I met back in January, at the tip-off to the presidential crusade, who told me he was a Vietnam veteran, that he was driving the cab I was in because there were no jobs for him, that he was on welfare and ridiculously destitute, that he felt the government had been neglectful, woefully neglectful, of Vietnam War veterans. That he was not going to vote, and, as a matter of fact, he had not voted in over twenty years. When I asked him why not he said, with contempt at the borders of his mouth, that politicians did not care about people like him. When I asked which politicians, he muttered, All of them. There was the Black man, early 40ish, in Texas, Mr. Bush’s home state, whom I met only a week or so ago, who, when in his twenties during the Reagan 80s, was falsely accused and convicted of raping a White female. His jury was composed of 11 Whites, 10 men and one woman, and, sadly, in a state like Texas, with its history of sadistic racism (let us not forget that semi-retarded Black man, James Byrd, who was tied to the back of a truck a few years back, by bigoted and demented White males, and dragged to his death) this gentleman did not stand a chance. He lost his youth, he lost his innocence, he lost chunks of his sanity while in prison for a crime he did not commit, and only the use of a DNA test exonerated him, right at the start of Mr. Bush’s first term in office. This man now carries in his hip pocket crumpled copies of articles about his case, as well as a crumpled copy of his official pardon, as if he were in another time in American history where one, if Black, had to carry around his or her freedom papers to prove, without question, that one was free. And I have mentally recorded more tales than I can recount in this space, but the point is that America, this country, our country, continues to be stuck, spiritually, emotionally, in spite of the proclamations of democracy, of equal opportunity, of being one nation under God (which God, and for who?), of this being the greatest show on earth. If all of us are not completely free, and free in every sense of the word, then, dear friend, none of us are as free as we have been led to believe. And what, pray tell, is freedom, anyhow, and what is democracy, when in the alleged most democratic nation in the universe millions upon millions of human beings wondered, and still wonder, if their vote was actually counted on Tuesday, November 2, 2004, and why, for God’s sake, did some of them have to present an I.D. or otherwise prove why they have the right to vote in the year 2004? Is that being free after all that has happened to make the vote accessible to anyone qualified to vote?

Well, we certainly were not free at the Democratic National Convention in Boston back in July. As happy as I was to be there I could not help but think, far inside the marrow of my Democratic bones, that it was a charade, a hoax. There was no far-reaching vision, no expansive, humanistic agenda, no imaginative leadership, just, with the exception of brilliant speeches by Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, a lot of empty rhetoric and unsophisticated retorts to the Bush-Cheney platform. It was evident to me that while the Dems had more A-list celebrities, threw better parties, allowed hiphop, the forever controversial yet dominant culture of our day, into its sacred halls, it was all dental floss distorting the fact we had, and have, no teeth on the left, and, really though, have been missing our teeth for some time now. A month later I attended the Republican National Convention here in New York City and you could feel the focus, the vision, however myopic, and the battle plan. While the Dems barely spoke of faith, of religion, of spirituality, the Republicans spoke of it every chance they got, and they monopolized the market on moral values. The perception became the reality: the right is of God and the left is of the devil. And the Democratic Party, the liberals, the progressives, or whatever we label ourselves, have allowed the right to act as if they are more in step with God, with morality, with spirituality, with personal virtue, than we are. This is sheer lunacy, from my perspective as an African American, given that practically every movement, from the anti-slavery rumblings of the 1800s right through the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, has been led by the spiritual leaders of my community, of individuals who had a deep belief in a higher power, no matter what we called that higher power. And we were always clear that we were on the right side of God, that religion was about liberating and uniting people, not oppressing and dividing the multitudes. Certainly, we Americans who do not suffer from selective amnesia know something of the hypocrisy of racist White American Christians and their skill at distorting God’s words to suit their needs. Let us not forget that there was a time when these very types of Christians manipulated and abused the Bible to justify slavery, for nearly three centuries. Let us not forget that there was a time when these very types of Christians turned their noses up and turned their backs on Jews as they were being stuffed into Holocaust ovens in Germany. And let us not forget that there was a time when these types of Christians, under the guise of representing the true intentions of the Lord, physically assaulted Civil Rights marchers, Black and nonBlacks alike, in places like Alabama (down South) and Illinois (up North).

The point, dear reader, is that much of the Bush-Cheney agenda has everything to do with fear, with playing to folks’ base bigotries. The Southern White Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s (popularly known, then, as “Dixiecrats”) used the race card and their interpretation of Christianity to attack the Civil Rights Movement, then slowly but surely championed a mass exodus of the party (as Negroes got they right to vote) to become the driving force, all these years later, of those too many to count red Republican states we see today. While the race card is still used, albeit in more guarded, coded language, this year the taboo topic was homosexuality, or, rather, same-sex marriages. And what does it mean that right-wing Republicans, during an election year, can play political football with this polarizing subject, get it on the ballot in several states, while Vice-President Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is openly gay, is there at the post-election victory celebration, shoulder to shoulder with her lover, her partner, being photographed for the world to see? What kind of hypocrisy is that? Or, better yet, does it not suggest, we people of moral conscience, that many Americans have someone in our lives, a sister, a brother, a son, a daughter, a cousin, a friend, someone from our childhood, someone from high school or college, a coworker, a neighbor, a church member, a pastor (gasp!), who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, just as Dick Cheney does, but we are too ashamed to recognize their humanity, their existence, so terrified, in fact, to do so, that the Republicans can steamroll in and make homosexuality one of the central issues on which we are deemed as spineless, and lacking in morality? Why did anyone not say, boldly, Look, homie, Dr. King, a man of God, a Christian, a Christian minister, a Christian scholar, worked with Bayard Rustin, a gay man, who was the chief architect of the March on Washington in 1963? Dr. King may not have agreed with Mr. Rustin’s life path, but he at least respected the man’s genius, the man’s work ethic, the man’s humanity, the man’s quest for democracy, the man’s right to exist. And what could be more Christian than that? And who among us is God, himself, herself, itself, that we are in a position to say what form a person’s life should take anyhow?

But we on the left, as Newark, New Jersey Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka has said of the hiphop generation, need to grow up. Grow up and ask ourselves what do we, in fact, believe in? What are our moral values, our spiritual values? There are many Americans, in the Deep South, in middle America, who believe we have no principles whatsoever, that we believe in nothing more than having a good time. Any extreme is dangerous. That means the extreme of blind religious zealotry, but also the extreme of no boundaries, no agenda, in any form, for our lives, for this nation. Where, then, is the middle ground, where are our souls, and where is the soul of America, or are we simply destined for a certain kind of hell these next four years, and beyond?

As I continue to struggle and grow in my spiritual walk, in my Christian walk, in my human walk, I am clear that I don’t want to go to hell, nor do I want life in America, for any of us, to be a hellish nightmare. Nor do I believe that the 4 million votes that separated President Bush from Senator Kerry constitutes a mandate. We need to state, emphatically, that it does not. Mr. Bush may be the president, Republicans may control both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but the struggle has only begun. Our work was not in vain. I feel we have awakened a sleeping giant, or, more importantly, the giants, the leaders, in any of us who care about real democracy, real freedom, real self-determination, real people power. The younger Americans who became passionate about politics, about life, about living, in 2004, give me hope. Hope in spite of the fact that more bodybags will come home from Iraq. Hope in spite of the fact that extreme poverty is as deadly in America’s ghettoes as it is in any so-called third world nation. Hope in spite of the ugly divides, the intolerance, the lack of humanity we often show to each other. Hope in spite of the fact that the budget deficit will continue to force this nation to it knees, and in spite of the fact that unemployment and despair has reached epidemic levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Undoubtedly, I think all of us, myself included, because of Tuesday, November 2, 2004, must do a gut check, confront our personal demons (I assuredly have mine and have no problem, none whatsoever, owning them and working through them), shovel the debris surrounding our souls, struggle against our blatant contradictions, think, hard, about all the unnecessary fights, arguments, petty jealousies, juvenile competitions, pathetic trips into backbiting and gossip and ask ourselves, amidst another term of Bush-Cheney, Is this the best we can be in America? Is this what I, we, desire to be, an utterly imperfect human being, wallowing and content to be in a state of arrested development for the remainder of my natural life?

I am not going to surrender the moral high ground, any longer, to these right-wing activists who pretend to care about the average American, and really do not. And you should cease surrendering as well, if you truly care about freedom and democracy. For if we capitulate in this arena we will never be able to have any fruitful discussions, debates, and actions about the Iraqi War, this destructive economy, the lost jobs, nor about race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, poverty, hunger, homelessness, the environment, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the genocidal mayhem in the Sudan, the crisis in Haiti, and every other human drama that demands our attention. And at the end of the day it should not matter whether one is Black, White, Latino, Asian, Native American, or Arab; liberal or conservative; a Democrat or a Republican; Christian, Jew, or Muslim; straight or gay; what should matter is what type of human being you are, what type of human being you aspire to be, and whether you have any regard, any concern, any God-given compassion, true compassion, not just lip service, for other human beings.

And what do we do with that true compassion? Well, if we did not learn any other lesson from the tragedy of September 11, 2001, we should have at least learned this: As the Twin Towers were hit by those two jumbo airliners, as those buildings came crashing from the sky to the earth, as bodies leaped from windows or were crushed beneath the force of that concrete and steel, at that very moment suddenly trivial categories like race, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, religion, status in society, did not matter. What mattered, on that day, was how one had lived one’s life, what one had done with one’s life, to advance humanity, be it via the tiniest of baby steps, or via gigantic strides. That is the kind of American I yearn to meet, the kind of America I am looking for.

America did not begin as a real democracy, and in spite of the changes, the upheavals, the lives lost, the sacrifices made, we are still not there, yet. Mr. Bush and his crew need to think again if they believe, truly, that the American people have spoken. No, the last word has not been uttered, the last battle has not been waged. The freedom fighter legacy represents the America I am looking for. Freedom fighter as in Patrick Henry and Harriet Tubman. Freedom fighter as in Cesar Chavez and Fannie Lou Hamer. Freedom fighter as in the multicultural young leadership of today, of young people with names like Billy Wimsatt, Rosa Clemente, L. Joy Williams, Jeff Chang, Farai Chideya, and T.J. Crawford. Freedom fighter as in the millions of young people who voted in this presidential election, who understand, clearly, that they, we, younger Americans, are the leadership we are waiting for. What would the so-called American democracy look like if these folks had not existed, if they did not exist today?

I am looking for an America that will acknowledge, finally, its history of taking Native American land; of using free Black labor to build this nation; of treating women as objects, as invisible, second-class citizens; of viewing Latinos as nonspeaking nuisances to be seen, worked to death, but not heard; of marginalizing and excluding, at different times in our history, among many others, the women, the Chinese, the Jews, the Irish, Italians; of scapegoating and isolating the Japanese and, in this new millennium, Arabs, Muslims, gays and lesbians. I am looking for an America that will acknowledge that this nation would not exist were it not for the Native American, the Blacks, the women, the Latinos, the Chinese, the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Japanese, the Arabs, the straight, the gay, the liberal, the conservative, the me, the you.

I am looking for an America that respects every explanation for life, for the creator, the lifegiver, the higher power, that entity some of us may refer to as God, that others may refer to as Allah. I am looking for an America that ceases to refer to itself as a Christian nation but, instead, as a nation of many faiths, or many spiritual walks, a nation that has a tolerance and a patience not just for Christians, but also for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Rastafarians, Yorubas, all the many belief systems that manifest themselves daily within these borders.

I am looking for an America that does not rely on celebrities, on superstars, to be the leaders of the people, but understands that the real celebrities, the real superstars, the real leaders, are the mill workers, the secretaries, the construction workers, the teachers, the layers of cables and telephone lines, the postal workers, the artists, the grassroots organizers, the bus drivers, the home health aides, like my mother, the military veterans, like my uncle.

I am looking for an America that will have the courage to abolish the electoral college once and for all, that will have the audacity to create uniform and modern voting methods across the land, that will not seek to disenfranchise the most vulnerable persons in this society from their God-given right to be free, to speak their minds without fear of punishment or alienation. I am looking for an America that will no longer attempt to teach other nations how to make democracy work until we get it right, and working, here at home.

I am looking for an America that will raise the minimum wage, provide more money for public school education and less for war, an America that will really rehabilitate prison inmates, that will insure that elders, like my mother, can afford their prescription drugs and have a Social Security program that acknowledges what they have given to this country by way of labor, taxes, and endless loyalty.

And I am looking for an America where through much defeat and pain and suffering we can birth new possibilities, new ways of being and doing. We are not losers, friends, those of us who voted for Mr. Kerry, or, in some instances, against Mr. Bush. I am not, and neither are you. We who believe in real democracy, in real freedom, in real self-determination, who believe in the creative force or forces that placed us on this planet, who believe in the possibilities of humankind, in truth, in justice, in life, who believed that our efforts, our sweat, our vote, could and would count a few days ago, on Tuesday, November 2, 2004, here in America, have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing at all. Nor should we see the reelection of President George W. Bush, and the defeat of Senator John Kerry as the beginning of a great catastrophe for us, for this country. No, what we have is a beginning, a start, with necessary speed bumps along the way. But the questions remain for all of us to ponder. What are we going to do to create the America, to create the world, we so desire? And are we, each of us, willing to look within ourselves for that answer?

Nicholas Klassen

It starts with a police officer looking the other way in exchange for a bribe. Or a bureaucrat pocketing some cash to ensure that a particular application ends up on the top of the pile. Bottom feeders on the food chain, often simply trying to keep up in a competitive world. Many who engage in the practice will insist they haven’t done anything wrong: “How could I refuse a gift from someone who wanted to offer me a token of their appreciation?”

Such low-level corruption is all-too-familiar for the citizens of Zambia. Sure, they know that more serious graft happens in the upper echelons of government, but the lowly police officer is the one they have to deal with directly. They may be obliged to give a bribe at a roadblock. Or provide document processing “fees.” They’ll likely have to offer up gas money or taxi fare in order that the police can begin investigating. And to be fair, these “requests” are not unreasonable. The police genuinely don’t have money to fill up the gas tank. They work in tiny, barren offices with dilapidated furniture and equipment. Their children are hungry. Economic justice advocates at Zambia’s Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection estimate that that it costs the equivalent of about $380 per month to feed a family of six in the capital city of Lusaka. Police officers earn about $100-$200 a month. So to make up the difference, they engage in something Zambians commonly call “nichekeleko” – give me a share. That’s life in Zambia. It’s a matter of subsistence, not ethics. You’d do the same thing.

We commonly associate corrupt practices with developing countries. So we’re not surprised to hear Transparency International predict that the post- war reconstruction effort in Iraq could amount to “the biggest corruption scandal in history.” But who’s benefitting? Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Root and Brown overcharged the US occupation government in Iraq $108 million. Custer Battles bilked officials out of $50 million. American businessman Philip Bloom paid over $600,000 in kickbacks to US official Robert Stein in order to secure reconstruction contracts.

These crimes aren’t the isolated acts of a handful of wayward entrepreneurs. They are the predictable consequence of a US administration policy to award lucrative no-bid contracts – paid out in $100,000 plastic-wrapped bricks of cash – with little accountability. In an interview with Newsweek, former senior advisor to the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority Frank Willis compared Iraq to the “wild west” because the US government has either refused or stalled when called to look into fraud cases. Since only $4.1 billion of the $18.7 billion earmarked for reconstruction has been spent, Willis believes that “the corruption will only get worse.” Will American politicians – many of whom took great pleasure in scolding UN officials for failing to prevent the Iraq oil-for-food scandal – do anything about it?

It seems unlikely. After all, there’s enough corruption back in Washington to worry about.

Take Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, for example. On its surface, Abramoff’s story is a simple case of a prominent lobbyist accepting money from well-heeled clients in exchange for political decisions going in their favor. Business as usual, in other words. But what makes the story interesting isn’t the callousness he showed towards his clients – Native American gambling officials whom he referred to in emails as “monkeys,” “fucking troglodytes,” and “stupid idiots” – or the embarrassingly juvenile way he went about it – “I’d love us to get our mitts on that moolah!!” And the scandal wasn’t that Abramoff mixed money and politics. That’s old news. The real crime seems to be his excess. Republican Senator John McCain told a Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing: “Even in this town, where huge sums are routinely paid as the price of political success, the figures are astonishing.” Indeed, before he agreed to a plea bargain, the crux of Abramoff’s defence was that his actions were perfectly routine by Washington’s standards. His lawyer issued a statement insisting that Abramoff was “being singled out by the media for actions that are commonplace in Washington and are totally proper.”

It’s true. Abramoff did exactly what any good lobbyist would do. And part of his success hinged on being best buds with Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay – who is facing his own charges of influence-peddling and money laundering. It’s no great surprise that DeLay also maintains he has done nothing wrong. Remember, this is a man who declared that money “is not the root of all evil in politics. In fact, money is the lifeblood of politics.” So he’s a master at coming up with legislation that benefits his corporate donors and punishing fellow representatives who aren’t on side. Hence his nickname: “the Hammer.” Again, this wouldn’t be so bad if it were isolated to one individual, but DeLay heads arguably the most dominant political machine in American politics. He is one of the chief architects of the K Street Project, an effort to fill Washington’s most powerful trade groups, law firms, and lobbying organizations with conservative, activist Republicans – ideally former aides and confidants like Abramoff. This vast network fosters a sophisticated and pervasive culture of corruption and seasoned political reporter Jonathan Alter suggests that future historians will consider the period of DeLay’s “ruthless shakedown machine” as “the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives.”

It’s a damning statement, and it’s important to hold DeLay’s feet to the fire. But in focusing on the powerbrokers, we sometimes miss the more pervasive, if subtler, forms of structural corruption. Practices that are so woven into the fabric of the economy, we don’t immediately see the problem with them. Consider a recent development in the US medical field. Under a scheme called “gainsharing,” doctors are financially rewarded for using medical devices manufactured by the nation’s three largest orthopedic device companies. Surgeons who switch to one of the three brands get a 20 percent cut of any cost savings that result, and those who already used the brands get a 15 percent cut. The scheme’s originators insist that it will help drive down costs and therefore benefit everyone in the long run. But even if this were true, is it really a good idea for doctors to make operating room decisions based on how much they stand to benefit personally? The relationship between medical professionals and manufacturers is already too cozy. Some doctors enter into exclusivity contracts with certain companies where, in exchange for lucrative consulting fees, they promise to only use a particular manufacturer’s device. Sales reps who work according to commission are bound to flog the most pricey option. Perhaps it’s the for-profit nature of the American health care system that makes it so susceptible to kickbacks and other scams. Regardless, it should be enough to make us pause next time we look askance at the modest Third World police man collecting his share. Instead of judging “those” people, we would be well-served to look inward at the sophisticated payola schemes so fundamentally engrained in our own economies.

1. What is The Tipping Point about?

It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

2. What does it mean to think about life as an epidemic? Why does thinking in terms of epidemics change the way we view the world?

Because epidemics behave in a very unusual and counterintuitive way. Think, for a moment, about an epidemic of measles in a kindergarten class. One child brings in the virus. It spreads to every other child in the class in a matter of days. And then, within a week or so, it completely dies out and none of the children will ever get measles again. That's typical behavior for epidemics: they can blow up and then die out really quickly, and even the smallest change -- like one child with a virus -- can get them started. My argument is that it is also the way that change often happens in the rest of the world. Things can happen all at once, and little changes can make a huge difference. That's a little bit counterintuitive. As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect. And when there isn't -- when crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars -- we're surprised. I'm saying, don't be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.

3. Where did you get the idea for the book?

Before I went to work for The New Yorker, I was a reporter for the Washington Post and I covered the AIDS epidemic. And one of the things that struck me as I learned more and more about HIV was how strange epidemics were. If you talk to the people who study epidemics--epidemiologists--you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world. They don't share the assumptions the rest of us have about how and why change happens. The word "Tipping Point", for example, comes from the world of epidemiology. It's the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It's the boiling point. It's the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped in the mid 1990's, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted. When I heard that phrase for the first time I remember thinking--wow. What if everything has a Tipping Point? Wouldn't it be cool to try and look for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other nonmedical areas?

4. Why do you think the epidemic example is so relevant for other kinds of change? Is it just that it's an unusual and interesting way to think about the world?

No. I think it's much more than that, because once you start to understand this pattern you start to see it everywhere. I'm convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does. This isn't just a metaphor, in other words. I'm talking about a very literal analogy. One of the things I explore in the book is that ideas can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is. One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia. In the 1970's and 1980's, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment--from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?

5. Are you talking about the idea of memes, that has become so popular in academic circles recently?

It's very similar. A meme is a idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects. I must say, though, that I don't much like that term. The thing that bothers me about the discussion of memes is that no one ever tries to define exactly what they are, and what makes a meme so contagious. I mean, you can put a virus under a microscope and point to all the genes on its surface that are responsible for making it so dangerous. So what happens when you look at an infectious idea under a microscope? I have a chapter where I try to do that. I use the example of children's television shows like Sesame Street and the new Nickelodeon program called Blues Clues. Both those are examples of shows that started learning epidemics in preschoolers, that turned kids onto reading and "infected" them with literacy. We sometimes think of Sesame Street as purely the result of the creative genius of people like Jim Henson and Frank Oz. But the truth is that it is carefully and painstaking engineered, down to the smallest details. There's a wonderful story, in fact, about the particular scientific reason for the creation of Big Bird. It's very funny. But I won't spoil it for you.

6. How would you classify The Tipping Point? Is it a science book?

I like to think of it as an intellectual adventure story. It draws from psychology and sociology and epidemiology, and uses examples from the worlds of business and education and fashion and media. If I had to draw an analogy to another book, I'd say it was like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, in the sense that it takes theories and ideas from the social sciences and shows how they can have real relevance to our lives. There's a whole section of the book devoted to explaining the phenomenon of word of mouth, for example. I think that word of mouth is something created by three very rare and special psychological types, whom I call Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I profile three people who I think embody those types, and then I use the example of Paul Revere and his midnight ride to point out the subtle characteristics of this kind of social epidemic. So just in that chapter there is a little bit of sociology, a little of psychology and a little bit of history, all in aid of explaining a very common but mysterious phenomenon that we deal with every day. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure that this book fits into any one category. That's why I call it an adventure story. I think it will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the world around them in a different way. I think it can give the reader an advantage--a new set of tools. Of course, I also think they'll be in for a very fun ride.

7. What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

One of the things I'd like to do is to show people how to start "positive" epidemics of their own. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly. That makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their product, or for that matter to anyone who's trying to create a change with limited resources. The book has a number of case studies of people who have successfully started epidemics--an advertising agency, for example, and a breast cancer activist. I think they are really fascinating. I also take a pressing social issue, teenage smoking, and break it down and analyze what an epidemic approach to solving that problem would look like. The point is that by the end of the book I think the reader will have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes. This is not an abstract, academic book. It's very practical. And it's very hopeful. It's brain software.

Beyond that, I think that The Tipping Point is a way of making sense of the world, because I'm not sure that the world always makes as much sense to us as we would hope. I spent a great deal of time in the book talking about the way our minds work--and the peculiar and sometimes problematic ways in which our brains process information. Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing. People who understand The Tipping Point, I think, have a way of decoding the world around them.

By Saul Hansell

New York Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. They also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

Yahoo and AOL say the new system is a way to restore some order to e-mail, which, because of spam and worries about online scams, has become an increasingly unreliable way for companies to reach their customers, even as online transactions are becoming a crucial part of their businesses.

"The last time I checked, the postal service has a very similar system to provide different options," said Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesman. He pointed to services like certified mail, "where you really do get assurance that if what you send is important to you, it will be delivered, and delivered in a way that is different from other mail."

But critics of the plan say that the two companies risk alienating both their users and the companies that send e-mail. The system will apply not only to mass mailings but also to individual commercial messages like order confirmations from online stores and customized low-fare notices from airlines.

"AOL users will become dissatisfied when they don't receive the e-mail that they want, and when they complain to the senders, they'll be told, 'it's AOL's fault,' " said Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, which specializes in e-mail.

As for companies that send e-mail, "some will pay, but others will object to being held to ransom," he said. "A big danger is that one of them will be big enough to encourage AOL users to use a different e-mail service."

In a broader sense, the move to create what is essentially a preferred class of e-mail is a major change in the economics of the Internet. Until now, senders and recipients of e-mail — and, for that matter, Web pages and other information — each covered their own costs of using the network, with no money changing hands. That model is different from, say, the telephone system, in which the company whose customer places a call pays a fee to the company whose customer receives it.

The prospect of a multitiered Internet has received a lot of attention recently after executives of several large telecommunications companies, including BellSouth and AT& T, suggested that they should be paid not only by the subscribers to their Internet services but also by companies that send large files to those subscribers, including music and video clips. Those files would then be given priority over other data, a change from the Internet's basic architecture which treats all data in the same way.

This Tuesday the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing to consider legislation for what has been called Net neutrality — effectively banning Internet access companies from giving preferred status to certain providers of content. The concern is that companies that do not pay could find it hard to reach customers or attract new ones, threatening the openness of the Internet.

AOL and its parent, Time Warner, which also owns a large cable system offering high-speed Internet access, have not taken a public stand on the principle of Net neutrality. Neither has Yahoo, which has close relationships with AT& T and Verizon. The issue of e-mail postage has not yet come up in the debate over Net neutrality. In the next two months, AOL will start accepting e-mail processed by Goodmail Systems, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that will collect the electronic postage and verify the identity of the sender. Goodmail has tested the system with the participation of a few companies, including the American Red Cross and The New York Times.

Paying senders will be assured that their messages will be delivered to AOL users' main in-boxes and marked as "AOL Certified E-Mail." Unpaid messages will be subject to AOL's spam-filtering process, which diverts suspicious messages to a special spam folder. Most of these messages will also not be displayed with their original images and links.

Yahoo will start trying out Goodmail's system in coming months, but it has not decided how paid mail will be differentiated from unpaid, said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications products at Yahoo. Goodmail will charge 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message, with high-volume mailers getting the biggest discounts. It will give more than half of that amount to the e-mail service provider. Goodmail does not envision that individuals will need to pay to have their e-mail delivered to Yahoo or AOL accounts.

When AOL started to explain the details of its plan last month to companies that send a lot of e-mail, many quickly raised objections.

"No one wants Goodmail or any other provider to set up a tollbooth that makes it cost-prohibitive for legitimate mailers to reach the in-box," said Matthew Moog, the chief executive of Q Interactive. The company runs a marketing service called CoolSavings that sends e-mail to 10 million people a month who have requested it.

Mr. Moog said that he was very much in favor of systems that helped distinguish the mail he sent from spam. But Mr. Moog added that he wanted AOL and other Internet providers "to offer several competing services to ensure that innovation continues and there is a competitive market to drive fair pricing for the service."

For example, he said that CoolSavings already works with Bonded Sender, a company used by Microsoft's Hotmail service and other providers to identify sources of legitimate mail. Bonded Sender charges a flat fee of no more than $20,000 a year to the highest-volume senders, a fraction of what they would pay through the Goodmail system. Mr. Moog said that the Goodmail system would at least double the cost of an e-mail campaign. "I don't think the economics work," he added.

Matt Blumberg, the chief executive of Return Path, the New York company that runs Bonded Sender, said there was no need for the Goodmail price to be so high.

"From AOL's perspective, this is an opportunity to earn a significant amount of money from the sale of stamps," he said. "But it's bad for the industry and bad for consumers. A lot of e-mailers won't be able to afford it."

But Mr. Garlinghouse of Yahoo said that by making senders pay for each message, they will be forced to be more discriminating in whom they send e-mail to, which will benefit users.

"Because the cost of sending e-mail is so low, some players are not as good at keeping their lists clean," he said. "I still gets e-mails from lists I signed up for three years ago, but I haven't responded to a single one."

As spam has started to clog millions of mailboxes, particularly over the last five years, some people have suggested that requiring all e-mail senders to pay some sort of postage would drive out spammers, who can profit even if they sell their wares to a very small percentage of mail recipients.

But in recent years the volume of spam has leveled off, in part because of a new federal law that imposes penalties for many deceptive e-mail practices. Moreover, most major e-mail providers have built sophisticated filters that divert much of the spam. AOL says that spam complaints from its members are down 75 percent since their peak in 2003. (These filters also capture about 20 percent of legitimate mail, according to Ferris Research.)

A more troublesome problem now is phishing, messages that appear to be from a bank or an online payment service and that seek to fool recipients into divulging their passwords or credit card numbers. Phishing has led Internet providers and other companies to look for ways to help people identify legitimate mail.

Goodmail was founded several years ago with the idea that it would charge postage for all mail, but it has narrowed its focus to mail sent by companies and major nonprofit organizations, which will pay a reduced rate. Messages from paying customers will bear a special symbol to indicate that they are not fraudulent.

"The e-mail in-box is a potentially dangerous place," said Richard Gingras, the chief executive of Goodmail. "There is a tremendous need for a class of certified e-mail that can convey to consumers that a message is authentic."

Mr. Gingras argued that companies will be glad to pay the postage fee because their customers will have more trust in their e-mail and thus will buy more from them.

And Mr. Graham of AOL added that the portion of the postage it will receive is justifiable compensation for the costs it has incurred in developing systems to combat spam.

"We have some prerogative to move to a system that asks for other people to participate and share the financial burden in making a clean e-mail environment on the Internet," he said.

By ERIK ECKHOLM

BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Although the problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of "Black Males Left Behind" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mr. Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially when it comes to determining the scope of joblessness. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore who recently described their experiences.

One of them, Curtis E. Brannon, told a story so commonplace it hardly bears notice here. He quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three mothers, and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.

"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," Mr. Brannon said recently in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."

Mr. Brannon, 28, said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up in six months.

A group of men, including Mr. Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of several private agencies trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.

The clients readily admit to their own bad choices but say they also fight a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

"It hurts to get that boot in the face all the time," said Steve Diggs, 34. "I've had a lot of charges but only a few convictions," he said of his criminal record.

Mr. Diggs is now trying to strike out on his own, developing a party space for rentals, but he needs help with business skills.

"I don't understand," said William Baker, 47. "If a man wants to change, why won't society give him a chance to prove he's a changed person?" Mr. Baker has a lot of record to overcome, he admits, not least his recent 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.

Mr. Baker led a visitor down the Pennsylvania Avenue strip he wants to escape — past idlers, addicts and hustlers, storefront churches and fortresslike liquor stores — and described a life that seemed inevitable.

He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine. He was for decades addicted to heroin, he said, easily keeping the habit during three terms in prison. But during his last long stay, he also studied hard to get a G.E.D. and an associate's degree.

Now out for 18 months, Mr. Baker is living in a home for recovering drug addicts. He is working a $10-an-hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.

"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Mr. Baker said.

According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States.

Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars — and the young men themselves — agree that all of these issues must be addressed.

Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core.

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."

All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. Federal data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.

Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Mr. Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

Dropout rates for Hispanic youths are as bad or worse but are not associated with nearly as much unemployment or crime, the data show.

With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20's who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book "Punishment and Inequality in America" (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.

Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.

First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.

Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980's, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.

By their mid-30's, 30 percent of black men with no more than a high school education have served time in prison, and 60 percent of dropouts have, Mr. Western said.

Among black dropouts in their late 20's, more are in prison on a given day — 34 percent — than are working — 30 percent — according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.

The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.

About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.

Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."

The recent studies identified a range of government programs and experiments, especially education and training efforts like the Job Corps, that had shown success and could be scaled up.

Scholars call for intensive new efforts to give children a better start, including support for parents and extra schooling for children.

They call for teaching skills to prisoners and helping them re-enter society more productively, and for less automatic incarceration of minor offenders.

In a society where higher education is vital to economic success, Mr. Mincy of Columbia said, programs to help more men enter and succeed in college may hold promise. But he lamented the dearth of policies and resources to aid single men.

"We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women," Mr. Mincy said. "We are not even beginning to think about the men's problem on similar orders of magnitude."

by Greg Tate

Talk about flipping the script: Gordon Parks was born dead and damn near buried alive. Then went on to live to the ripe young age of 93. Fortunately, two doctors were attendant that November 30 in 1912. The thinking one had the brainstorm of immersing the stillborn infant in ice water to jump-start his heart and gave him a fully operational third eye in the process. Total immersion of head and heart would become his lifelong m.o. Given his staggering output as photographer, filmmaker, writer, painter, choreographer, and composer, he seems to have not slept much after his rebirth. Orphaned by his mother's death and sent to live with an aunt, he was thrown out into a subzero Minnesota winter at 14 by her model-of-man's-inhumanity husband. So take a memo: the mark of a visionary is being a young Black man in the Depression and blowing $7.50—a month of meals back then—on a camera. Only lo and behold the fledgling shutterbug begins showing at the local Eastman Kodak shop by impressing the manager's wife.

As with Oscar Wilde and Duke Ellington, Parks's greatest invention was himself. Here we have one of those impossibly rare instances where the work and the man measure up as parallel monuments. Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan decrees that "a warrior must be impeccable," and Parks—dapper, debonair, perpetually down for the cause, and ready like a samurai for whatever the funk called for—epitomized that edict. But what of the work? In his books you'll find immaculate, inventive, indelible images of society, high and lower than low. Other than Richard Avedon, it's hard to think of another native-born photographer who so gracefully moved between haute couture and the street. When aimed at an injustice, Parks's camera could pull you so close to the pathos that you might overlook his skill and surface beauty. After just one day in 1930s Washington, D.C., encountering what he called the worst racism of his life, he shot his first classic, American Gothic, in which office cleaner Ella Woods grips a broom in one hand and a mop in the other in the pose of Grant Wood's stoic farm couple while the red-white-and-blue hangs in the background like a shroud. Woods, Parks reported, cleaned the office of a white woman of no more education who'd also started at the company with a mop. Parks's boss thought the photo would get them all fired for its implicit critique of the America way. Much to his chagrin it turned up weeks later in The Washington Post.

This wasn't the last time the gatekeepers found his work too Black too strong. A series he shot of Black fighter pilots training during WWII was held back by a military unready to present that image of the Black soldier. His Life series on poverty in Brazil's favelas was initially reduced to one shot by his editors, who thought Parks's countrymen didn't want to know what poverty looked like in carnival Rio. Parks nearly resigned until fate had The New York Times run a story the next day on the U.S.'s obligations to Brazil's oppressed. The series generated donations of $30,000; its asthmatic subject spent two years in the U.S. being cured pro bono and bought his family a new house. Parks's immersion process would also produce portraits of a family who shared their Chicago project apartment with him. These photos too earned their subjects a house, but the father would die after coming home drunk and setting it ablaze and eventually nearly all the children would perish in jail or of AIDS.

Parks often found himself on the other side of the camera sharing the most intimate and tragic details of his subjects' lives. He once took a ride tailed by the cops with some young L.A. Panthers with guns in their laps. One asked him if he would still choose the camera over the gun, as he'd declared in his 1967 memoir, A Choice of Weapons. Parks reiterated his belief. Two weeks later the Panther was dead. When Life nearly betrayed the trust he'd gained from a young Chicago gang leader by choosing a cover shot of the youth with a smoking gun, Parks destroyed the negative. In 1963, Life asked him to "infiltrate" the Nation of Islam. Instead he and Malcolm X became quick friends. Parks is the godfather of Malcolm's daughter, Qubilah, and is cited in The Autobiography as a successful Black man who never lost touch with his people.

Because Parks transitioned into filmmaking just as TV was destroying photojournalism, the post-1970 generation knows him primarily as the aristocratic white-haired eminence who directed Shaft. And while Parks's autobiographical cinematic debut, The Learning Tree, is in the National Film Registry, his most critically acclaimed films, The Super Cops and Leadbelly, have languished unavailable for far too long. One online pundit thinks the mostly white Super Cops has aged far better than The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, while Roger Ebert calls Leadbelly hands down the best movie about a musician ever. I'd go further and say Leadbelly is the most lyrical work save August Wilson's about the roustabout world of violence, bloodhounds, swamps, railcars, bordellos, juke joints, cotton fields, and chain gangs that spawned the blues and its alchemical admixture of sardonic joy and short-lived sensual pleasure. Parks nearly abandoned Hollywood the day he found out Paramount had opened it in a New York porno theatre. It defies two of Hollywood's still standing prohibitions by depicting Black people enjoying themselves sexually and Black men defending themselves against bloodthirsty crackers. No wonder it remains unavailable on VHS or DVD. You can see Leadbelly was where Parks took all he knew about the blues as musician, lover, rambler, and Depression survivor, and translated it into gritty impressionist cinema—earthy, erotic, dust-filled.

No one who knows all this about Parks would be surprised to find that even in his late eighties he was experimenting with computer-generated imagery and finishing his last book, the just published A Hungry Heart. The comedian Franklyn Ajaye has a routine that ends, "They don't make 'em like that anymore. They never did.'' When they come as self-made as Parks, that tells the tale.

By Manning Marable

Back in 1919, in the chaotic aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson's administration sought to suppress radical and progressive intellectuals here at home. Government agents harassed W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP's journal, The Crisis. Copies of African-American socialist A. Philip Randolph's militant journal, The Messenger, were seized and destroyed. When President Wilson was given a copy of The Messenger, he declared that Randolph must surely be "the most dangerous Negro in America."

Randolph later went on to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, the first successful African-American labor union. In the 1930's. Randolph conceived of the National Negro Congress, a black united front that challenged the racism of Jim Crow segregation and the inadequate programs of the Roosevelt administration in dealing with black unemployment. In 1941 Randolph pressured Roosevelt with the call for a "Negro March on Washington, D.C.," resulting in the desegregation of defense industry jobs generated by federal contracts. Randolph was indeed "dangerous" to the enemies of black freedom.

Randolph immediately came to mind when I learned recently that I was listed among "The 101 Most Dangerous Professors" in America's colleges and universities. The indicted of these 101 "academic subversives" appears in a new book by right wing gadfly David Horowitz. Horowitz crashed the headlines several years ago when he circulated the provocative advertisement denouncing black American reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation as "racist." His latest political maneuver is the demand for an "Academic Bill of Rights," calling for state legislatures to restrict academic freedom on campuses.

The political sins of Manning Marable, according to Horowitz, are monumental. A "lifelong Marxist" and known associate of African-American radicals such as Angela Y. Davis and Amiri Baraka, Marable makes "no pretense to academic or scholarly inquiry" in his position at Columbia University. "Professor Marable advocates black 'resistance' as the only antidote to the 'inherent racism' of American society." To the charge of calling for black empowerment and full socioeconomic justice and political equality, I must plead guilty.

Horowitz's book is especially troubled by two specific projects that I have initiated: the "Africana Criminal Justice Project," and my biographical research on Malcolm X. For Horowitz and his research assistants, the funding my criminal justice studies have received from "George Soros's Open Society Institute" was politically motivated, "no doubt because it fits Soros's agenda of unseating Republicans" by restoring voting rights to former prisoners, who are disproportionately black, brown and poor. Nowhere in my own writing can one find the claim that I "[maintain] that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist," or that the "enemies" of my research on Malcolm X are "the white middle class, which he also believes to be the source of the inequities of American society that inflames his radical passions." Yet Horowitz doesn't mind twisting the facts to promote his bizarre interpretation of America's unequal racial realities.

"The 101 Most Dangerous Professors" reads like a "Who's Who" of America's most prominent public intellectuals and university scholars. Columbia University led the nation, with nine "most dangerous" scholars among its faculty, including internationally-known intellectuals like Eric Foner, Victor Navasky, Todd Gitlin, Lisa Anderson and Hamid Dabashi. Other African-American intellectuals stigmatized as "most dangerous" include bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Maulana Karenga, Kathleen Cleaver and legendary legal theorist Derrick Bell. Several of the "dangerous" intellectuals are editorial board members of a journal I edit at Columbia, Souls – Foner, Dyson, Cleaver and Brooklyn College Professor Priya Parmar. Clearly for Horowitz this is additional proof that subversives are building incendiary networks for academic mayhem.

Horowitz's objective is to discredit, isolate and stigmatize prominent scholars of the left by eliminating them from universities entirely. His bogus "Academic Bill of Rights" promotes the same goal by mobilizing conservative Republicans in state legislatures to impose ideological strait jackets on faculty appointments and tenure decisions. To accomplish this, he deliberately twists and distorts the published writings and lectures of progressive intellectuals, taking phrases out of context or even inventing quotations, to mobilize political conservatives.

Only days before the "101 most dangerous" controversy erupted, however, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, headed by conservative Republican Ambassador John Bolton, requested me to speak and serve as moderator of a prestigious panel on the theme, "The U.S. Civil Rights Struggle: Its Global Implications," which was held on February 24, 2006. The panel's featured presenter was Miss Johnnie Carr, a confidant of both Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a former leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association in Alabama. My politics are clearly at odds with Ambassador Bolton's, yet our U.S. Mission at the U.N.'s invitation to me requested that I be provided with "the opportunity to address the international community on the importance of equal rights, not just in the United States, but globally." Is Bolton wrong, or is Horowitz simply wrongheaded?

Critically-engaged scholarship for the oppressed must both inform and transform people's lives. Documenting and preserving the histories of black Americans frightens reactionaries like Horowitz. Efforts to link social science research for reforming our destructive criminal justice policies, and restoring voting rights to the black, brown and poor disfranchised, causes equal consternation. In the tradition of Randolph, I make no apologies.

By Ronald Roach

In an academic publishing venture that seeks to honor the intellectual legacy of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, political scientist Dr. Michael Dawson and sociologist Dr. Lawrence Bobo, both of the Harvard University African and African American Studies Department, have launched the Du Bois Review." Social Science Research on Race. The review, published for the first time by the Cambridge University Press this past spring, is a bi-annual academic journal that showcases interdisciplinary research on race.

While the publication draws upon Du Bois' reputation as a gifted scholar whose accomplishments in history, sociology, literature and political advocacy in connection to the African American experience proved legendary, it attaches that legacy to a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary examination of race rather than to the exclusive focus on a particular racial or ethnic group, according to Bobo and Dawson, who serve as publication co-editors.

"In the very first issue ... we were delighted to publish a paper that dealt with Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba to signal the fully diasporic scope with respect to those of African ancestry. We had a serious essay of work dealing with relations between African Americans and Asian Americans in the essay 'Beyond Black and White'," says Bobo, who is the Norman Tishman and Charles M. Diker professor of sociology and of African and African American studies.

"The next issue should take even stronger steps in that direction to make it clear to people that we pivot off the African American experience but are definitely not setting that as the limit of our interests. It's a starting point for branching out into how race and ethnicity have shaped the human experience at large," Bobo adds.

The move to publish the Du Bois Review resulted largely from discussions between Harvard colleagues Bobo and Dawson that began after Dawson joined the Black studies department in 2002. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chair of the department and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, agreed to back the journal with nearly $50,000 in startup funding and the endorsement of the institute.

The colleagues say the journal is filling a void by providing a forum in which social science scholars can publish their race-focused research, a subject area the editors say is growing. The multiracial complexion of the United States has motivated many scholars to examine race in ways that were not possible in the past, the editors contend.

"Probably the central idea was that increasingly the work on race is multi-disciplinary in nature. We thought it was a very good time to produce an extremely high-level journal that will pull together the best empirical work across disciplines on races and at the same time provide a forum for both discussion of trends in a discipline and trends in the study of race," says Dawson, who is a professor of government and of African and African American studies.

Bobo explains that making the journal that highlights interdisciplinary work is in keeping with the character of the research being done on race. He says that traditional, discipline-based academic journals have not been eager to publish race studies.

"There are two types of problems. Some resistance (comes) especially from the very top journals in the disciplines of publishing work that really puts race in the foreground, especially if it's offering a critical and challenging perspective ... Second, a lot of work on race has an interdisciplinary quality to it that sometimes will result in the work having more ambiguous grounding in a single discipline so that those major journals will go, 'maybe you should be sending this to the psychologists rather than the sociologists or maybe this should be going to the political scientists rather than to the economics journals,'" Bobo says.

Scholars, citing the presence of African American-focused social science journals that explore race, say that a challenge for the Du Bois Review as it claims the Du Bois legacy is whether it will have a broad impact upon public understanding of complex issues and influence public policy.

"Is this journal going to be able to expand the popular understanding with scholarly work? Will the social science (research) link to public policy solutions?" asks Dr. Scot Brown, an assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Brown says publications, such as the Journal of Black Political Economy, have long featured social science research on race, but they have had difficulty developing and sustaining the readership able to push for significant changes in the communities on which research has been conducted. He says the Du Bois Review will be held to high expectations given that it should be able to command considerable resources coming from Harvard as well as by carrying the Du Bois name.

Dr. Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore, expresses skepticism that a journal coming out of the Gates-led Du Bois Institute will be inclusive enough, particularly with the diversity among Black studies programs, to present an effective critique of White supremacy and White racism.

"I think it's good that we have another journal about race, but it's not the first one," Winbush says.

He adds that he believes the scholarship and popular work produced by scholars affiliated with the Du Bois Institute and the African and African American studies department have presented too soft of a critique of White racism. "It's a polite view of racism and White supremacy," he says.

"The real test of this journal is whether it's going to include Molefi Asante, Maulana Karenga, and Na'im Akbar, scholars who articulate an African-centered point-of-view. Will Black nationalists be represented; will Afrocentrists be there; or will even White nationalists be included?" Winbush asks, noting that a diverse group of Black scholars writing for the journal would enable it to have a stronger critique of White-dominated societies.

This past spring, the launch of the Du Bois Review was celebrated at a Harvard reception and at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Bobo says the journal has gotten a positive response from university libraries and academic departments, and that Cambridge University Press is optimistic the publication will turn a profit as it finds a readership.

"Down the road, we hope that we transform how scholars and indeed how the world is thinking about and dealing with what Du Bois identified is the problem of the color line. I'd like to think we've already had some small effect. I think we will see some of the core disciplinary journals take a somewhat more favorable posture towards papers they might not have been so ready to look at in the past," Bobo says.

Dr. Michael Dawson, professor of government and African and African American studies at Harvard University and co-editor of the Du Bois Review, says it was necessary to provide a forum for both discussion of trends in a discipline and bends in the study of race.

By Dan Eggen

A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents.

The Justice Department has characterized the "pre-clearance" of the controversial Georgia voter-identification program as a joint decision by career and political appointees in the Civil Rights Division. Republican proponents in Georgia have cited federal approval of the program as evidence that it would not discriminate against African Americans and other minorities.

But an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post recommended blocking the program because Georgia failed to show that the measure would not dilute the votes of minority residents, as required under the Voting Rights Act.

The memo, endorsed by four of the team's five members, also said the state had provided flawed and incomplete data. The team found significant evidence that the plan would be "retrogressive," meaning that it would reduce blacks' access to the polls.

A day later, on Aug. 26, the chief of the department's voting rights section, John Tanner, told Georgia officials that the program could go forward. "The Attorney General does not interpose any objection to the specified changes," he said in a letter to them.

Eric Holland, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement this week that "disagreements are healthy in a debate" and that voting rights decisions are made "after reviewing both the pros and cons very carefully."

"At the end of the day, the section chief is responsible for tendering a recommendation" to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, he said.

The Georgia voter ID program has been the subject of fierce partisan debate since it was approved by the state's Republican-controlled legislature in March. The plan was blocked on constitutional grounds in October by a U.S. District Court judge, who compared the measure to a Jim Crow-era poll tax. A three-judge appellate panel, made up of one Democratic and two Republican appointees, upheld the lower court's injunction.

The program requires voters to obtain one of six forms of photo identification before going to the polls, as opposed to 17 types of identification currently allowed. Those without a driver's license or other photo identification are required to obtain a special digital identification card, which would cost $20 for five years and could be obtained from motor vehicle offices in only 59 of the state's 159 counties.

Proponents said the measure was needed to combat voter fraud, but opponents charged that Republicans were trying to keep black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, away from the polls.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires Georgia and eight other states, mostly in the South, to submit any voting rule changes that might affect minority groups to the Justice Department for review. The department can either halt the proposed changes with an objection or issue a "pre-clearance" letter allowing them to proceed. Portions of the act, including Section 5, are up for renewal in Congress, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has said that he supports reauthorizing the law.

The Justice Department's decision to approve the Georgia measure was the latest in a series of disputes within the Civil Rights Division, which lost nearly 20 percent of its lawyers in 2005 and has assigned dozens of those who remain to handle immigration cases instead of civil rights litigation. In the voting rights section, which handles election-related issues such as the Georgia plan, political appointees also overruled career lawyers in approving GOP-backed redistricting maps in Mississippi and Texas in recent years, current and former employees have said.

The Voting Rights Act puts the legal burden on Georgia to show that proposed election-related changes would not be retrogressive. According to the Aug. 25 memo from the Justice review team, Georgia lawmakers and state officials made little effort to research the possible racial impact of the proposed program.

The 51-page memo recommended several steps that Georgia could take to make the ID program fairer to minority voters, such as continuing to allow the use of non-photo identification, such as birth certificates and Social Security cards, that have not been shown to pose security problems.

Those in favor of issuing an objection were Robert Berman, deputy chief of the voting rights section; Amy Zubrensky, a trial lawyer; Heather Moss, a civil rights analyst; and Toby Moore, a geographer, according to the memo. A fifth member of the team, trial lawyer Joshua Rogers, recommended approval, but the memo does not include his reasoning.

Berman did not return a call made to his office.

A key area of disagreement between the staff and their supervisors appears to be the reliability of data provided by the Georgia Department of Driver Services and other state agencies.

The staff memo noted that the records were riddled with errors, including the unexpired licenses of dead people, and were "of a quality far below what we are accustomed to using in the Voting Section." And other sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, showed that Georgia blacks were much less likely than whites to own vehicles and also less likely to have photo IDs, the memo said.

"While no single piece of data confirms that blacks will [be] disparately impacted compared to whites, the totality of the evidence points to that conclusion," the memo said. It added later: "The state has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that the change is not retrogressive."

But Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella cited the state's data in an Oct. 7 letter to a senator that argues the number of eligible voters without a photo ID is "extremely small."

"All individual data indicates that the state's African-American citizens are, if anything, slightly more likely than white citizens to possess one of the necessary forms of identification," Moschella wrote to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) in defense of the department's decision.

State Sen. Bill Stephens, a Republican who helped win passage of the legislation, said the Justice Department's approval was vital because of the restrictions faced by Georgia under the Voting Rights Act.

"That is the most crucial part of any elections legislation we pass," said Stephens, who is a candidate for secretary of state. "We know we have to await the Justice Department's pre-clearance of virtually anything we do."

State Rep. Tyrone L. Brooks Sr., a Democrat and president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, said he was not surprised by the Justice Department's position in the case.

"Some of my colleagues told me early on that, because of politics in the Bush administration, no matter what the staff recommendation was, this would be approved by the attorney general," Brooks said. "It's disappointing that the staff recommendation was not accepted, because that has been the norm since 1965."

by J. Hoberman

Adapted by the Wachowski brothers—and helmed by their Matrix assistant director James McTeigue—from Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta is a most provocative piece of pulp fiction. You can bet there won't be many other movies at the multiplex extolling anarchist terror.

V for Vendetta, which opens March 16, is nothing if not topical in its fantasies. The action is set in a totalitarian London dominated by fake news and ruled through xenophobic panic. Historically, however, the movie takes a longer view. A pre-credit sequence walks through the 17th-century Gunpowder Plot, in which Guy Fawkes and a cabal of Catholic fanatics hid 36 barrels of explosives beneath Parliament to blow the British government to kingdom come. England's not-quite 9-11 (a pretext for a crackdown on Catholics and foreigners), this thwarted conspiracy—celebrated every year as Guy Fawkes Day—has an even more hysterical significance. Had it been successful, the explosion would have vaporized half of London and thus, in its state-of-the-art carnage, offered a foretaste of Hiroshima.

Supremely tasteless, V for Vendetta, with the mysterious V (Hugo Weaving) haunting London in an insouciantly smiling Guy Fawkes mask, was scheduled to have its premiere last November on the day of the Plot's 400th anniversary. The opening was delayed out of deference to last summer's London subway bombings, as well it might have been. What's remarkable about the Wachowski scenario, as opposed to Moore's original, is the degree to which it stands Fawkes on his head—recuperating this proto–suicide bomber as a figure of revolt. (Moore, incidentally, has disassociated himself from the film.)

A movie of multitudinous comic book tropes, V for Vendetta is predicated on secret identities, floridly alliterative dialogue, and gnomic bromides: "There are no coincidences, only the illusion of coincidence," V grandly explains. In other words, it's all about the plot. (McTeigue's pedestrian mise-en-scéne is elaborate without being particularly detailed.) Like the movie in which he dwells, V is partial to 19th-century fictions like The Count of Monte Cristo, even as his social function is grotesquely hyper-contemporary. Name and origin unknown, V is blank slate and screen for projection. V for Vigilante.

V is orchestrating, literally, his own gunpowder plot. With his mocking fixed grin, this political superhero plays Joker to his own Batman. V's full-face disguise recalls the ski masks of the Italian Red Brigades; his slashing trademark is a recognizable permutation on the anarchist "A." This empty signifier argues for terror as a semiotician might—an attack on symbols—and he paraphrases Emma Goldman on the revolutionary importance of dancing. His subterranean museum of solitude boasts a Wurlitzer jukebox. A romantic, he's partial to Julie London's "Cry Me a River."

Moore's stories appeared throughout the '80s, conflating Thatcherite Britain and Orwell's dystopia, imagining a post–World War III regime founded on racial purity, sexual conformity, and Nazi-style concentration camps. The Wachowskis tweak this premise to tweak the U.S. It's 2020, the year of perfect vision, and to no one's disappointment, America has collapsed in chaos. Awash in secret detention camps and biological weapons (including avian flu), the U.K. is a Muslim-phobic fascist state (Koran consigned to the Ministry of Objectionable Material) ruled by a fascist Chancellor who came to power in a biological Reichstag Fire.

The Chancellor appears—both to colleagues and the TV-fuddled masses—as an outsize video image. (Having played Winston Smith in the 1984 1984, John Hurt plays a sort of Big Brother here.) Meanwhile, V's lone disciple, Evey (Natalie Portman), daughter of two disappeared social activists, works in a version of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Given V's essential abstraction, she's the movie's most human presence. A former Broad-way "Anne Frank," Portman adds Saint Joan to her baggage—once captured and processed by the police, she looks like a diminutive, doe-eyed Falconetti.

V and Evey meet cute when he saves her from police gang rape. Other forms of social control include a snarling Bill O'Reilly type known as the Voice of London. His opposite number (Stephen Fry) is a subversive chat show host who ridicules the Chancellor and pays the price for his music hall stunt. Clearly, the Wachowskis have not entirely abandoned the idea of the Matrix. When V blows up London's central criminal court, Old Bailey, the fake news goes into major damage control, bragging that it was an intentional demolition job. Fog City is so shrouded in conspiracy that, in tracking down the mystery terrorist, the government's hangdog investigator (Stephen Rea) has no alternative but to investigate himself.

If The Matrix betrayed the Wachowskis' acquaintance with Jean Baudrillard, V for Vendetta suggests they've been perusing political philosopher Antonio Negri—both the old ultra-left Negri of Domination and Sabotage and the new Michael Hardt–collaborating Negri of Empire and Multitude. (The latter book even name-dropped The Matrix as an example of how Empire feeds on the creative "social productivity" of the ruled.) V's dictum that "people shouldn't be afraid of their government, the government should be afraid of its people"—is a Cracker Jack box restatement of Negri and Hardt's notion of democracy for all. And the theorists would surely approve of V as the antithesis of a Leninist revolutionary elite.

This hero not only has no name but also no actual personality. (Why hire Weaving? The role could have been played by a computer program.) At a key moment in V for Vendetta, the Negri-Hardt multitude—mysteriously networked and absurdly masked like their faceless non-leader—takes to the streets and waits expectantly. Their patience is rewarded by a superbly irresponsible finale that conflates the "1812 Overture," the Rolling Stones, Malcolm X, and Gloria Steinem. Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.

by Evalyn Tennant

Veterans of the civil rights movement like the Rev. James Lawson, who spoke at the rally sending the Los Angeles riders off, and Rep. John Lewis, who welcomed them in D.C., have eloquently expressed the connections between the Freedom Rides 40 years ago and those of today. Others have drawn and will continue to draw parallels between civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and contemporary immigrants’ rights campaigns. But there may be some additional “lessons from history” to be drawn from another, more recent campaign—the Free South Africa Movement launched by Randall Robinson and others in late 1984 that resulted in a national mobilization and the passage of economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa, even over President Reagan’s veto.

Both the Free South Africa Movement and the Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides were conceived as a way to connect African Americans’ struggle for racial justice in the civil rights era to the struggles of other groups—for the FSAM, it was black South Africans; for the IWFR, it’s immigrant workers (and their children) in the U.S. today. Such calls to action are based on broadly conceived, even expanded, understandings of solidarity rather than narrow conceptions of interest.

The Free South Africa Movement succeeded in many of its specific aims—getting Congress to impose economic sanctions that deprived the apartheid regime of its ally and an important source of foreign investment in its economy, and building a movement infrastructure from the ranks of student, labor, religious, and African American community organizations. What enabled the Free South Africa Movement’s “meteoric rise,” and what did the FSAM succeed in doing?

Launching a National Movement

In 1984, in the face of escalating violence and repression in South Africa and the refusal of the Reagan administration to take measures against the Botha regime, a group of Washington-based anti-apartheid and civil rights leaders launched the Free South Africa Movement. Randall Robinson, then director of TransAfrica, along with Mary Frances Berry, Walter Fauntroy, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, arranged a meeting with the South African ambassador. During that meeting, Norton left to call the media to announce that the other three would not leave the embassy until their demands—that the South African government release all political prisoners immediately and dismantle apartheid—were met. The media and supporters were there to capture the removal of Robinson, Fauntroy, and Berry in handcuffs, and the daily protests outside the embassy began. The protests spread from the embassy in Washington, D.C., to South African consulates and other symbols of the South African government around the United States. Over the next two years, at least 6,000 people would be arrested at embassy and consulate protests including major figures from the civil rights movement, members of Congress and other political figures (even a few Republicans), and many artists and entertainers.

The FSAM protests were immediately successful, and everyone remembers the high-profile political figures and entertainers who signed up to protest and be arrested, usually in front of the cameras. These people were joined by workers, students, members of religious communities. The impact and newsworthiness of the protests in the U.S. were closely connected to the escalation of protest in South Africa and the mainstream American media coverage of those protests. The images of violence in South Africa, of white policemen beating unarmed black protesters, sometimes looked strikingly similar to the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The FSAM provided a way to convert American outrage into mobilization and support.

Like the IWFR, the Free South Africa Movement explicitly invoked both the tactics and the moral authority of the civil rights movement. Both were planned at a national level to garner support for the passage of legislation by Congress. And both were orchestrated to attract mainstream media attention to help get their message out to, and mobilize support from, a broader public. But the Free South Africa Movement achieved its successes as a national movement for national legislation, largely because it mobilized existing local, grassroots anti-apartheid groups and their allies for a new campaign.

Anti-Apartheid Activism before the FSAM

The struggle against U.S. government and corporate support for apartheid had been going on for two decades when the FSAM caught fire. In the early and mid-1960s, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and others began criticizing not only South African apartheid and the United States’ support for its supposed ally, but also the role of U.S. banks and other corporations as “partners in apartheid.” The first actions in the 1960s targeted banks that provided loans to the South African government, but soon went beyond banks to include corporations doing business in South Africa, focusing on the effects of these corporations’ involvement on the ability of the apartheid regime to maintain its hold on power and its brutal repression of the black majority.

In the early 1970s, the Boston-based Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement mounted a campaign against its employer’s involvement in South Africa and in producing the technologies used to make the “passes” black South Africans were required by law to carry. Around the same time, activists initiated a boycott of Gulf Oil, whose payments to Portugal for the right to drill for oil in the Angolan enclave of Cabinda financed the Portuguese dictatorship’s wars to hold on to their African colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. African solidarity activists became even more focused on South Africa after Portugal withdrew from Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and South African forces invaded Angola.

Activists called on banks and other corporations to withdraw from South Africa, but very few did. When Polaroid withdrew in 1977, seven years after the PRWM started, it was one of the first U.S. firms to do so. Corporations kept touting their business in South Africa as a “progressive force” for change in South Africa, and they implemented some limited programs to benefit their black workers and black educational institutions. Even if such efforts had been serious, the South African government made sure there could be no real black advancement. In fact, it implemented policies requiring that black students be taught in Afrikaans, a language few spoke or wanted to speak, so that they could better serve Afrikaans-speaking whites.

Black high school students in Soweto, and then across the country, rose up against this policy in 1976, attracting increased international attention. Students on campuses around the U.S. came out in force to support black South African students and demanded that their universities get rid of stocks in corporations that were helping the apartheid state maintain its policies.

Opportunities seemed poor for U.S. national legislative action, so activists opted for more local targets—including state and local governments and institutional investors such as universities, pension funds, and churches. A new wave of local organizing was born, and new local coalitions forged. Usually the targets were local and state government relationships with corporations doing business in South Africa, but sometimes, targets were more direct. The ILWU in San Francisco, which formed part of the core of the extensive Bay Area anti-apartheid movement, took their protest to the docks to prevent the unloading of South African cargo.

Groups pressing for divestment faced a new obstacle in 1977, just as they were gaining momentum. The Rev. Leon Sullivan, a member of the GM board of directors, complicated the call for withdrawal by providing an apparent alternative, a code of conduct for corporations calling for such things as desegregating lunchrooms and other workplace facilities and offering educational and career advancement opportunities to their own black workers. The burden was on anti-apartheid activists to show that such changes mattered little. They would affect only the relatively few black workers directly employed by American firms, while those same firms’ contribution to the South African economy in general, and to strategic sectors like the military and high tech in particular, played a substantial role in bolstering the apartheid regime’s grip on power.

Between 1977 and late 1984, divestment legislation had been passed at the state or local level in 16 states and the District of Columbia, and campaigns were on in several others. During this period, activists honed their arguments against the Sullivan Principles’ approach to corporate responsibility in South Africa. In almost all cases, these efforts were undertaken by coalitions of black and predominantly white groups representing a range of constituencies and working, sometimes uneasily, across significant racial and ideological differences. Much of the cooperation across racial lines was accomplished by black activists who took the time to work with both black groups and predominantly white, multiracial groups. Some multiracial groups, like the Chicago-based Coalition for Illinois Divestment from South Africa (later the Chicago Coalition in Solidarity with Southern Africa), made explicit efforts to deal with issues of race within the group. According to one of the original members of CIDSA, “The board… very consciously from day one had black leadership and wanted to keep that but also always was a multiracial formation and we came to understand that as part of our mission, to be that, and realize how hard that was.” Unfortunately, in many cases the interest in dealing explicitly with racial issues and tensions in the local and national context did not extend so far.

Shifting to a National Focus

When Randall Robinson and others launched the FSAM, existing anti-apartheid organizations, especially in the cities, state capitals, and university communities of the Northeast, Midwest, and on the West Coast, were often ready to work out among themselves who would picket in front of South African consulates on which days, and how to work in newly recruited blocks of protesters—from labor, religious, and community organizations. New groups formed, especially on college and university campuses, around the country even in places where they had not been strong before. Where there weren’t existing anti-apartheid groups, labor and church groups took the tasks of organizing demonstrations.

Within longer-term anti-apartheid efforts, racial tensions and ideological differences never disappeared, but most activists put them aside in favor of achieving shared goals. As long as everyone could get behind the same strategy, the incentives to downplay differences, especially in public, were great. On one level, it mattered little which South African liberation movement one supported when the target was the U.S. Congress. Most activists seemed to see the strategic value of having the public face of the FSAM be both black-led and multiracial, even those who thought that was not the way the movement really was or should be.

The Free South Africa Movement succeeded in getting a national mobilization “against South African racism—and against Ronald Reagan’s approach to dealing with it,” as Newsweek put it, and ultimately in getting sanctions passed in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, over Reagan’s veto. The sanctions legislation itself, while significant, used the Sullivan Principles criteria for some purposes, rather than requiring full corporate withdrawal. The FSAM also succeeded in getting local and state divestment efforts going in new locations where there had not been the kind of long-term anti-apartheid activism presence as in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and California.

On the other hand, momentum generated in the sanctions and campus divestment campaigns did not get converted to a broader progressive anti-racist movement focused on local or national issues, in part because the focus on short-term goals was often combined with a reluctance to get into the deeper, more complicated issues of racial tensions in local and national contexts. What was an extremely decentralized anti-apartheid movement before the FSAM campaign quickly returned to that form. The Free South Africa Movement had, to a significant degree, turned a collection of locally based coalitions into the organizational infrastructure for a national mobilization: a mobilization directed at a national target—Congress and U.S. foreign policy—making strategic use of national media, and, especially, invoking the connection to U.S. civil rights struggles.

From Free South Africa to Freedom Ride

The solidarity expressed in the FSAM was with a struggle far away (far away at least in practical terms, even if it was also conceived by many as fundamentally a global struggle), but it was a solidarity that was organized and expressed locally in corporate boycotts, in consulate pickets, and in local and state divestment campaigns in cities across the United States before it could be effectively mobilized for the national campaign for sanctions.

The solidarity that has to be expressed for the IWFR campaign to succeed would also seem to need to be locally, not just nationally, organized and built. Anti-apartheid activists could not change U.S. foreign policy directly with their divestment campaigns aimed at local and state governments and institutional shareholders like universities, churches, and pension funds. Similarly, immigrant rights activists cannot get federal immigration law changed by local and state governments. But in the course of trying to get state and local governments to issue driver’s licenses and other documentation recognizing immigrants’ presence, if not all of their rights, the benefits might be twofold, especially if the kinds of labor, people of color, and civil rights constituencies behind the IWFR are sought out and brought into local campaigns. The anti-apartheid experience points to the potential that in addition to the obvious benefits of local victories, there could be important longer-term benefits in terms of building a diverse, organized local base that can be mobilized for national action when the time is right. This potential was not realized in the way many anti-apartheid activists had hoped, although in some local organizations it came close.

As Robin D. G. Kelley, among many others, has pointed out in Freedom Dreams, dreams (and the solidarities they envision) are not necessarily contained within national boundaries; nor should people’s exercise of their human rights be limited by national boundaries. Freedom dreams and solidarity struggles also need not take for granted the wedges, especially racial wedges, that have divided workers’ struggles. But they need to be many people’s dreams, and not just some people’s or some organizations’ strategy. Even in the current globalized world, even given the importance of national and global media attention, there still has to be real, ongoing and organized local support behind the vision of a national campaign.

by KIM GILMORE

"I'M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT `U.S.A.' STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED Slaves of America" (Esposito and Wood, 1982: 149), wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000, as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. "state," and as private prison and "security" corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic in human unfreedom, the analogies between slavery and prison abound. This year the U.S. prison population cascaded past 2,000,000, 1 with millions more under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system in local jails awaiting trial, in INS prisons awaiting deportation, or in their homes linked with criminal justice authorities through ankle bracelets that track their every move. Recent studies of the prison boom stress the persistent disparities in sentencing according to race -- prison populations continue to be disproportionately African American and Latino. With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century.

Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery. As many scholars of the punishment industry have shown, regardless of the labor prisoners do to service the larger economy (either private or public), prisons increasingly function in the U.S. economy as answers to the devastation unleashed by the dual forces of Reaganomics and the globalization of capital (Parenti, 1999; Gilmore, 1997; Manning, 1983). The immediate post-emancipation period is a key place to start in outlining the investment of the U.S. state in this trade in humanity.

Related to the above is the growth of new abolitionist movements whose goals are the elimination of mass imprisonment as a method of treatment for addiction and mental illness, as an economic ameliorative, and as a method of social control -- what one scholar has termed "the carceral management of poverty" (Wacquant, 1999: 349). The connections between slavery and imprisonment have been used by abolitionists as an historical explanation and as part of a radical political strategy that questions the feasibility of "reform" as an appropriate response to prison expansion. As a leader in the creation of this new abolitionist movement, Angela Davis (1996: 26) has written, "I choose the word `abolitionist' deliberately. The 13th Amendment, when it abolished slavery, did so except for convicts. Through the prison system, the vestiges of slavery have persisted. It thus makes sense to use a word that has this historical resonance." Though some 20th-century abolitionist movements connect themselves expressly with the tradition of 19th-century abolitionists and antislavery advocates, abolitionism as defined here is the conglomerate of many local movements that express abolitionist aims indirectly through challenging the fundamental methods of the prison-industrial complex -- mandatory minimum sentences, harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, and the continuous construction of prisons that goes on regardless of crime rates. Although a fully conceptualized abolitionism is starting to emerge, it may be useful to outline some of the historical antecedents to current anti-prison and antiracist movements.

As prison construction and the crime frenzy continue around the U.S. (and indeed, the world) at such a dizzying pace, calls for prison abolition risk being perceived as utopian. The state, as it is currently configured in the U.S., has a primary investment in making the world safe for free trade, with domestic "stability" through state violence and brutality a key method of achieving the temporary faÁade of stability. In rural and urban areas crippled by the slow decline in manufacturing and skilled jobs, the punishment industry has emerged as the new jobs program, a role it plays with the military.2 In this moment, it may seem more difficult than ever to envision a state that supports humanity rather than eviscerates the possibility of freedom and health for so many of its people. Yet it is precisely now, when prisons crowd the physical and psychic landscape, that imagining abolition is most critical. Thus, the new abolitionism has arisen out of the communities most affected by the prison state -- those least able to conceptualize anything other than a transformation of the state as it is currently configured.

Studies of the relationship between slavery and mass imprisonment have a long history in the United States and internationally.3 This article will discuss some of the connections activist groups have made between the legacy of slavery and the prison expansion of the last several decades, starting with a brief outline of some of the historical scholarship on the convict lease program, the Black Codes, and later, Jim Crow. Tracing this history and the relationship between slavery and prison expansion can help inform current efforts toward prison abolition and provide a context for moving beyond reforms that have usually boosted the carceral state through a rejuvenation of the prison system, rather than clearing a path for true liberation and transformation.

From the vantage point of post-slavery emancipation, it seemed like the possibility of genuine freedom and democracy for freed slaves was a reality in the making. Although the roots of 19th-century abolitionism were varied, the popular understanding is that it was a middle-class movement led by whites and a few ex-slaves. In reality, much of the scholarship on abolitionism conflicts with this limited conception of the coalitions that powered the move to end slavery (Aptheker, 1941; Robinson, 1997). Whether rushing over Union lines to fight against the Confederacy, planning slave revolts, or resisting slavery through countless individual acts, freed blacks and slaves challenged the foundations of a labor and social system based on racialized slavery. Anti-slavery efforts spearheaded by slaves pushed emancipation as they refused to accept the terms of gradual emancipation. African-American slaves and anti-slavery activists sought not only the abolition of slavery as a labor form, but also a broader realization of slaves' dreams of freedom, alive despite hundreds of years of violence and coerced labor (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1988; McKelvey, 1935). These visions of freedom rarely conformed to the narrowly articulated parameters defined in the Constitution; yet to make their ideas plausible to the state, freed slaves often had to frame their arguments for freedom in the language and categories constructed by the formal state. Although the creation of African-American free communities and institutions during Reconstruction were almost immediately threatened by new configurations of white power and supremacy, freed slaves continued to exercise their right to vote and hold office in order to enact their own plans for education, land ownership, and self-determination. This incomplete transformation was cut short by vigilante justice and racialized violence, as well as by the state-sponsored criminalization of African Americans.

In the past decade, several influential studies of this period have revealed the relationship between emancipation, the 13th Amendment, and the convict lease program (Lichtenstein, 1996a; Mancini, 1996; Davis, 1999). Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished "except as a punishment for crime." This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use "unfree" labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the South's infrastructure. During this period, white "Redeemers" -- white planters, small farmers, and political leaders -- set out to rebuild the pre-emancipation racial order by enacting laws that restricted black access to political representation and by creating Black Codes that, among other things, increased the penalties for crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness (Davis, 2000). As African Americans continued the process of building schools, churches, and social organizations, and vigorously fought for political participation, a broad coalition of Redeemers used informal and state-sponsored forms of violence and repression to roll back the gains made during Reconstruction. Thus, mass imprisonment was employed as a means of coercing resistant freed slaves into becoming wage laborers. Prison populations soared during this period, enabling the state to play a critical role in mediating the brutal terms of negotiation between capitalism and the spectrum of unfree labor. The transition from slave-based agriculture to industrial economies thrust ex-slaves and "unskilled" laborers into new labor arrangements that left them vulnerable to depressed, resistant white workers or pushed them outside the labor market completely.

The transfer of power to the state signaled by the 13th Amendment profoundly reshaped the political landscape along with emancipation. By empowering the state to regulate relationships between private individuals, the state also gained the ability to determine the contours of freedom and unfreedom. The expansion of state jurisdiction thus had the dual effect of establishing legal rights for African Americans while paving the way for new, state-maintained structures of racism. Convict labor became increasingly racialized: it was assumed that blacks were more suitable for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and on corporate railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1996b). Contrary to popular representations of chain gang labor, not only black men, but also black women were forced to work on the lines and on hard labor projects, revealing how the slave order was being mirrored in the emerging punishment system. This mimicking of the slave system structure in the post-emancipation prison system, particularly in the South, suggested a belief that the performance of antebellum culture could bring the slave system back to life (Jackson, 1999). In Northern prisons, which had historically been structured around industrial rather than agricultural labor, racially based divisions were sharpened after emancipation as well. African Americans were criminalized for committing Black Code-type crimes and often were subject to tougher sentences than those imposed upon whites convicted of similar crimes (Du Bois, 1935).

Even though the efforts of ex-slaves and other abolitionists made it impossible to reinstall legalized chattel slavery, racialized labor arrangements persisted in the form of convict labor. Convict labor built the post-Civil War infrastructure in the U.S., not just in the South but also throughout the U.S., and the struggle to determine how free unfree labor would be continued. Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in "free markets" in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a "state-use" system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn, 1993). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project, conducted a massive study of prison labor in all 50 states and concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Citing overcrowding and inadequate facilities, the PIRA recommended the expansion of the prison system and the construction of new prisons in almost every state (Fraser and Gerstle, 1989). No clear statistics demonstrate that "crime," particularly violent crime, had increased during this period. Moreover, many of those who ended up in prison were criminalized for crimes stemming from unemployment, suggesting that if the state had had a handle on unemployment, there may not have been a need for more prisons. Thus, the PIRA embodied one of the many contradictions embedded in the "New Deal state" -- its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with its overabundance of labor. Thus, the PIRA, together with a racialized labor system that had roots in the slave system, cleared the path for the prison-industrial complex that has flourished in the post-World War II period.

Given the links between the legacy of slavery and mass imprisonment of people of color in the U.S., it might be useful to examine how a few previous prison abolition movements positioned themselves in relation to this history. These groups were often led by Quakers or inspired by the Quaker abolitionists of the 19th century. One such group, the Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS), was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s and saw the abolition of mass imprisonment as the key to completing the partial emancipation signaled by the 13th Amendment. According to CAPS, which produced Prison Slavery, their collaboratively authored book, the triumph of emancipation was not a total victory since the 13th Amendment legalized penal servitude as punishment for particular crimes, a stipulation that was incorporated into many state constitutions. Prison Slavery (Esposito and Wood, 1982:114) cites the significant 1871 court ruling from Ruffin v. Commonwealth. This landmark Virginia case--revealingly argued using the language of slavery -- set a precedent for state control of inmate bodies and labor:

[1] For the time, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.

CAPS found much to admire in the 19th-century slave abolition movement, but viewed penal servitude as a new incarnation of slavery. The group critiqued the failure of abolitionists, particularly Quakers, who worked to overthrow the Southern slave regime but stopped short of eliminating the broader inequalities that were reflected in the prison system. CAPS was, essentially, struggling to define the continuing nature of unfree labor and was critical of the Quakers who preceded them for participating in class oppression.

When Prison Slavery was published in 1982, many states still had clauses in their constitutions that deemed slavery and indentured servitude legal punishments or had no proviso about the legality or illegality of prison enslavement (some states eliminated any reference to slavery in the middle decades of this century). Since this 13th Amendment provision was, for CAPS, the legal cornerstone codifying prison slavery, they proposed a "new abolitionism" that would make the elimination of these clauses from all constitutions its goal. Their abolitionist strategies also included education campaigns to inform the public about prison conditions, an issue typically relegated to the sidelines of an individual's physical and psychic landscapes. The group also advocated boycotting consumer products made by prison labor, supporting alternatives to imprisonment, and working toward an acknowledgement of the class-based exploitation inherent in mass imprisonment. By circulating petitions that would amend state punishment clauses, CAPS created alliances between prisoners on the inside and activists on the outside. They learned of the brutalities that often occurred behind prison walls through testimonies from inmates who had developed their own analyses of prison system injustices, but frequently found themselves confined by the limited resources available to them, or constrained by criminal justice administrators and guards who threatened prisoners with violence for expressing their views and working for change.

Like CAPS, the Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP) saw the abolition of prisons as the only avenue for real change, for reform movements generally succeeded only in temporarily improving prison conditions rather than questioning the very efficacy of long-term punishment. In their handbook for change, Instead of Prisons, PREAP catalogued the general sentiment of the prison abolition movement of the 1970s -- espoused by elected officials, inmates, ex-cons, former prison administrators, and inmate advocates -- that evidence revealed that incarceration was hardly a deterrent to crime and that it actually tended to exacerbate crime. The early 1970s marked the onset of new drug laws and sentencing guidelines, such as the Rockefeller drug laws in New York that provided the legal justification for prison expansion throughout the U.S. During the first half of the 1970s, however, a prisoners' rights revolution was going on, in which prisoners all over the U.S. were filing individual and class action lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the conditions existing within U.S. prisons, including unchecked violence and inhumane working situations (Chilton, 1991; Natale and Rosenberg, 1974; Cohen, 1972). Legal theorists -- using evidence that attempts of reform movements to improve conditions inside prisons continually fell short and failed to protect inmates from cruel and unusual punishment -- argued that the state's goal should be the gradual elimination of long-term sentences for drug offenders and other nonviolent prisoners. While these lawsuits brought abolitionist views into the courts, groups like PREAP were learning to balance legal strategies for change with other tactics. Such tactics included gathering acknowledgements from different arenas that mass imprisonment was falling -- falling to address the problems of violence, falling to rehabilitate, and failing to provide anything but a destructive response to issues of racism, unemployment, and deindustrialization.

The working group that assembled Instead of Prisons put forward compelling arguments that illustrated the limits of reform. They argued that although prison reform movements could change the material existences of people in prison in real and important ways at particular moments, at the core reformers accept the premise that there is value in mass punishment. The activists writing this volume thus faced the very difficult task of trying to conceptualize abolition while acknowledging the importance of creating short-term strategies for change. They called for an immediate moratorium on prison construction and illustrated the ways in which the state was funneling money into incarceration rather than education. The authors pointed to the importance of creating and supporting innovative alternatives to incarceration, which then (as now) were not given a chance to succeed. More fundamentally, they interrogated the mythologies of deterrence and turned definitions of crime inside out by asking how the state produces criminalization rather than how people produce crime. Without underplaying the very real tragedies resulting from violence, both within and outside prisons, PREAP tried to envision responses to these issues that would limit violence rather than increase it.

From the late 1960s to the mid- 1970s, the prisoners' rights movement helped to bring the violence and disorder that prevailed in U.S. prisons to the forefront of public consciousness. Previous to the landmark prisoners' rights cases of the 1960s and 1970s, a "hands-off" policy had left the administration of prisons to criminal justice officials. Yet, as prisoners filed cases that slowly revealed the human rights abuses that were common throughout the criminal justice system, the tide began to turn. Cases like Holt v. Sarver in Arkansas drew attention to issues of prison violence. The Arkansas court ruled that the entire prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment after investigators discovered that inmates were routinely beaten, packed into unlivable living quarters, and forced to work excruciating shifts on the prison farms while being undernourished and constantly threatened with violence. This case, and others, led to a vast federal assessment of state prison systems. By the early 1980s, dozens of prisons were under federal court supervision for violating the rights of inmates. Despite all this, prisons already had started to operate as industries and the abolitionist expressions of anti-incarceration advocates were lost amid the "law and order" rhetoric that eventually helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Groups like CAPS and PREAP suffered because they did not understand the processes of globalization and deindustrialization taking place concurrently with prison expansion. Just as the aftermath of 19th-century emancipation reproduced the racial hierarchies of slavery in the structures of the criminal justice system, during the post-World War II period new economic and social configurations provided fresh impetus to the acceleration of prison building. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1997) traces how these transformations -- globalization, reindustrialization, imperialism, and racism -- converged in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, activists inside and outside prisons refused to see these changes as "forces," but instead as choices that emerged from state reconciliation with capital. Prisons were the physical structures called upon to help respond to the chaos unleashed by the globalization of capital and they were supposed to (at least in theory) contain the array of struggles waged against these processes by people of color, immigrants, and the poor.

Although new prison construction was propelled by state officials, corrections administrators, and politicians, it was also endorsed by populations who have benefited from deindustrialization and globalization. A new and growing body of scholarship has shown how racist ideologies of exclusion generated by white property owners and voters, among others, have underpinned the social and political fields in the U.S. after World War II. Ideologies of white privilege, though perhaps not always articulated as such, were put in motion through red-lining projects, discriminatory union practices, and the privatization of public spaces, all of which hastened the exclusion of people of color from the realm of state protections (Roediger, 1991; Goldfield, 1999; Lipsitz, 1998; Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). These forms of welfare -- suburbanization and privatization -- were often administered by the state through the same people who were active on neighborhood association boards, school boards, and corrections and police boards. Whiteness, just as it functioned in the 19th century to pave over class differences in the interest of racial solidarity, also has contributed to structuring urban poverty and to building the fear of criminal populations (nonwhites) that has fueled the construction of the prison-industrial complex.

Previous prison abolition movements seem to have understood mass incarceration as a class-based injustice perpetrated against the working classes and the poor. Yet as Angela Davis has pointed out, prison abolitionists have much to gain from building coalitions with those who focus on the abolition of "whiteness" as a way to approach the effects of racism embodied in the prison-industrial complex (Gordon, 1998). Because racism has played such a central role in the proliferation of prisons and the irrational fear of crime (helping to assure passage of legislation like California's Proposition 21), imagining abolitionism requires us to envision the elimination of the privileges of whiteness, as well as a divestment of public resources from prison building. Because the uneven distribution of state resources that has contributed to the prison-industrial complex has been driven by racism, movements that challenge the terms of mass imprisonment will necessarily be joined with antiracist movements, which acknowledge the continued racialization of state resource distribution.

The echoes of slavery still reverberate throughout the prison state; earlier this year, the Wackenhut corporation announced a new contract to build a federal prison on the site of a former slave plantation in North Carolina. This brings us back to the question of the feasibility of anti-incarceration movements. In the age of Proposition 21, the Super-Max, the rapid reinvigoration of the death penalty, globalization, and the convergence of the two political parties in the U.S. around punishment as a corrective to unemployment and race problems, can prison abolitionism be heard? The answer is "yes," for the very starkness of this moment breathes new life into abolitionism as a counter to reforms that accept the terms of human destruction and devastation inherent in contemporary prisons. Throughout the U.S., and increasingly throughout the world, prison abolitionism is finding new life as local movements against prison construction, mandatory minimum sentences, and the criminalization of youth are created out of the very communities they decimate. This year, as Western European nations and corporations finally have been forced to accept their complicity in the use of slave labor under Nazism, perhaps the issue of reparations for slavery in the U.S. will at last gain legitimacy in a country that has institutionalized new forms of slavery rather than vanquish bondage completely.

The influx of foreigners to New York and its suburbs and the continuing exodus of non-Hispanic whites to other parts of the country have transformed the face of metropolitan New York so profoundly that whites will constitute a minority of the region's population within a few years, demographers say.

The shift would make New York the first large metropolitan area outside the South and West in which whites do not make up a majority, according to an analysis of 2004 Census estimates by the Brookings Institution that was released yesterday.

The analysis also reveals a historic reversal: For the first time since at least the 19th century, the black population of both the city and, to a lesser extent, the region, has declined. In the five boroughs, according to the estimates, the number of blacks declined by about 30,000 since 2000, dipping below 30 percent of the overall population, as the migration of blacks to the suburbs and areas like the South outpaced immigration from the Caribbean and Africa.

In contrast, the analysis found that while the greater New York region over all lost 162,000 non-Hispanic whites and several hundred blacks from 2000 to 2004, the region gained 288,000 Hispanic people and 201,000 Asians — more Asians, in fact, than any other metropolitan area.

Increasingly, the New York region's growing multiracial makeup reflects the changing face of the inner ring of suburbs as many new immigrants bypass the city altogether or migrate from the city to neighboring counties after a generation or less.

What makes the city and the region unusual, though, is that among the nation's 88 metropolitan areas with half a million or more people, New York is one of only three — Houston and Honolulu are the others — where the proportion of blacks, Hispanics and Asians each exceeds their share of the national population.

Whites have been a minority in New York City since the 1980's. But now that shift is extending to the wider metropolitan area, driven by immigration and higher birth rates among immigrants. Already, non-Hispanic whites are a minority of the metropolitan area's population younger than 15.

"New York is still the classic melting pot, with a whole diverse array of immigrants coming in, but the suburbs are now becoming part of this bigger melting pot," said William H. Frey, the Brookings Institution demographer who conducted the analysis. "The suburbs are now tasting this new diversity."

His analysis found that whites declined to 52.2 percent of the population in 2004 from 54.2 percent in 2000 in the census-defined metropolitan area, which includes the city, Long Island, the northern suburbs, northern New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania, but not Connecticut.

"We went down 2.1 percent from 2000 to 2004," Dr. Frey said. "If we go another 2 percent before the end of the decade, you're there." He added: "The suburbs are now contributing to this. They've all shown a decline in the percent of whites since 1990."

The approaching statistical milestone in the New York region has not been unexpected by demographers.

"What this shows is that the pattern is spreading out," said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, "and the non-Hispanic white population is continuing to dwindle."

"The New York metropolitan area is becoming more like the city, and the nation's metropolitan areas are becoming more like New York," Dr. Beveridge said.

The trend was foreshadowed in an earlier analysis by New York's Department of City Planning, which found that while the region's ethnic and racial numbers had been driven for several decades by changes in the five boroughs, those changes were also being mirrored in the suburban counties closest to the city.

"The inner-ring suburbs are emulating the city," said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the department's population division.

What's happening in New York has already occurred in metropolitan areas in the West and South, including Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and San Francisco.

The proportion of whites has also dipped to just over a majority in the San Diego, Washington, Dallas and Las Vegas metropolitan regions as Asian and Hispanic people disperse beyond central cities and their suburbs and as blacks migrate to the South. In each of those areas, whites are already a minority of the population under age 15.

Atlanta led large metropolitan areas in black population growth and is poised to overtake Chicago as the region with the second-highest black population in total numbers, after New York.

In 1990, metropolitan Los Angeles and New York accounted for 30 percent of the nation's Hispanic population. By 2004, those two regions were home to only 23 percent of Hispanic people.

"For immigrant minorities, especially, friendship and family networks have drawn them to traditional ports of entry, even during times when labor market considerations would suggest they move elsewhere," Dr. Frey wrote. "Blacks, as well, have tended to follow well-worn patterns, initially out of the South and, later, to a network of cities across the North and West."

But more recently, he concluded, "many lower-skilled Hispanic migrants are moving to fast-growing areas of the country, in response to retail, service and construction job growth, while higher-skilled minority migrants are following the same professional opportunities that have attracted whites."

by K. Kazi-Ferrouillet



There are two hopeful, exciting trends among young African Americans today, especially on the college campuses. These two trends are Afrocentricity and a resurgent interest in El Hajji Malik Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X--especially so on the heels of Spike Lee's epic film. This article is an attempt to analyze the connection between these trends and how they inform and impact our understanding of African and African-American history.

Dr. Molefi Asante, chairman of the Temple University Department of African American Studies and considered by many to be a leading figure in the Afrocentrism movement, writes in his book, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge that: "Afrocentricity, as an aspect of centrism, is groundedness which allows the student of human culture investigating African phenomena to view the world from the standpoint of the African."

This means that African people, i.e., people of African descent, have the right and the responsibility to view the world through their own eyes, to interpret the world via their own analysis, to study and teach world history from their viewpoint as subjects and not objects of history, and to approach the study of history as makers of history, not victims of history.

According to Dr. Asante, "Multiculturalism in education is derived from several cultural perspectives; Afrocentricity is one of those perspectives, and it is one of the simplest and fastest growing ideas to have been developed in the African-American intellectual community. If you are African American, placing yourself in the center of your analysis so that you are grounded in an historical and cultural context is to be Afrocentric. Without Afrocentricity, African Americans would not have a voice to add to multiculturalism."

The view of ourselves as helpless victims of circumstances beyond our control must end. I believe that we must replace this view with the conviction that we are members of Allah's greatest creation, humankind, submissive to but one entity--the will of Allah. We must become proactive strugglers for what we believe is right and good. Continued growth and tempering our analyses of our world's condition using the yardstick of truth and righteousness are the major lessons that we can learn from the life of El Hajji Malik Shabazz. This is the legacy he left for us.

The history of African people is as old as time and as wide as the planet. The African man and woman are considered by numerous authorities to be the mother and father of all humankind. The research of countless archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians point to Africa as the birthplace of the common ancestor of all humankind.

Within this understanding, all people on the planet are children of Father and Mother Africa. And if we share the same mother and father, then surely we are all brothers and sisters.

The Holy Qur'an, Sura 49, verse 13, reads: "O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into Nations and Tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other). Verily, the most honored of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you."

That understanding places Afrocentricity in a special framework. Afrocentricity is not the end point of our study and struggle; rather, it is a necessary, crucial step along the path to universal brotherhood. Afrocentricity is crucial in that effort because we, as a people, must know and love ourselves before we can truly know and love others--on both an individual/personal level and on a collective level. Also, Afrocentricity is crucial because others must know us in order to fully know themselves. All of our destinies are interconnected; we all share the same planet.

But, our true story, a truthful history of Africa and the continent's many diverse and dispersed sons and daughters, has yet to be taught and studied by the masses of our people or by the masses of other people. We're only beginning to scratch the surface of the great and glorious African past that is impacting our lives today and will tomorrow.

Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, linguist, anthropologist, and professor of African Studies at Rutgers University, author of They Came Before Columbus, and considered to be one of the world's preeminent authorities on African and African-American civilizations, documents in his books and lectures many outstanding accomplishments of African people, many of them often hidden and unknown to most of us.

For example, Dr. Van Sertima tells of the Banyoro surgeons in East Africa who were performing Cesarean sections with a 100 percent success rate back in the1800s. Yet, in the mid 19th century, in Europe, whenever the Cesarean section was performed, the mother almost invariably died. The British learned of the Banyoro surgeons and sent a team of doctors under a Dr. Felkin to study how the African surgeons performed the operation. To the British's surprise, they found that these Banyoro surgeons had superior antiseptic solutions to what was being used in Europe. They found that the Africans could seal off bleeding points with minor tissue damage with the use of hot iron. They studied how the Banyoro surgeons collapsed the abdominal wall and drew the stitches. After this encounter, the C section was performed with much greater success in Europe and in other parts of the world.

Dr. Van Sertima lectures about the Dogon people who live in the mountains in the area of Africa that is now called the Sahel, about 200 miles from Timbuktu. A Frenchman, Marcel Griaule, encountered the Dogon and found that for 500 years the Dogon had plotted and ceremoniously danced the orbit of a star that is now called Sirius B. This star is impossible to see with the naked eye. NASA only found out about its existence within the last decade or so.

The Dogon pointed out that there was an object flashing and darkening in space near Sirius B. NASA only discovered this six years ago. The object turned out to be a dwarf nova, only recently discovered by the NASA Einstein orbiting satellite. The Dogon said it was an extremely heavy star. It has since been found that it is the heaviest type of star in our galaxy. The Dogon said that the star had an elliptical orbit of 50 years around its parent star Sirius A. NASA has only recently confirmed that orbit as accurate.

I wonder how many of us, when we study astronomy at the world's prestigious centers of learning, get to study the Dogon people, or even hear about the Dogon.

These are only a couple of examples of the kind of legacy that Africa has bequeathed to the world. The list is endless.

Yet Noah Webster, the great dictionary maker, wrote in 1843 that: "of the wooly haired Africans who constitute the principal part of the inhabitants of Africa, there is no history and there can be none. That race has remained in barbarism from the first ages of the world.'' Poor Mr. Webster. Surely, this is a classic case of willful ignorance.

But, unless we continue to struggle to lift the veil of ignorance, which forces us to view ourselves as "minorities," as bit players in the world's drama, as mere victims of circumstances beyond our control, we will forever ride on the back of the bus of history.

Also, on another level, Afrocentricity may have some other benefits for us.

Kwabena Faheem Ashanti, a staff psychologist and researcher at North Carolina State University, conducted a study to determine the possible impact of an Afrocentric curriculum on African- American students. Black Issues in Higher Education reported on the study in December 1990. The report states:"Struggling Black students who enrolled in an Afrocentric study program improved their college average by almost a full grade point.... In one of the largest Afrocentric studies to date, 147 students at NC State participated in a Black history and culture program for at least one full year. After a year in the program, students raised their grade point average from 1.8 to 2.6, and 40 percent earned grade point averages of 3.0 or better....While Black scholars have touted Afrocentric studies for some time, the research at North Carolina may be the most revealing yet about the potential effectiveness of such a curriculum."

So, the move toward Afrocentricity is good, is liberating, and, when addressed honestly, can lead us along the path to the goal of universal brotherhood. But, there are dangers along the path.

There are negative critics of the Afrocentric movement who imply that Afrocentrists merely plan to substitute a dishonest "Afrocentric" version of history to replace European history. They fear that Afrocentrists will attempt to erase the European contribution to world history, just as the Eurocentrists did to much of African history.

As Dr. Molefi Asante has said, "Afrocentricity is not about valorizing your position and degrading other people. Whites must not be seen as above anyone; but by the same token they've got to be seen alongside everyone."

Dr. Vesta Daniel, associate professor in the Department of Art History at The Ohio State University, writing in Baraza, the newsletter of the Black Cultural Center, notes: ''Unlike the pervasive Eurocentrism, which is monocular and teaches that all contributions of value to the history of the world are European based, Afrocentrism encourages the side by side placement and interweaving of all cultural and/or ethnic groups in the construction of world history and culture."

Another danger along the path is the possibility of an "Afrocentric backlash," if you will. Last year, Emerge magazine termed it "melanin madness."

There's a growing rumbling of Afrocentricity being characterized as anti-whiteness, which seems to attach a hierarchy of acceptability among our people based upon the amount of melanin in the skin. This madness tries to intimate that skin melanin has neurological and spiritual properties that elevates Black-skinned men and women above the less Black-skinned. This, I believe, is a dangerous step backwards that makes no sense.

If skin melanin is the criterion for judging African acceptability, then how does one justify El Hajji Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X), a true African champion, who was red-skinned, with light-colored eyes and red hair? Despite Spike Lee's. choice of Denzel Washington to portray Malik Shabazz in his film, the truth is Malik Shabazz would probably fall near the "bottom" end of the melanin scale.

Emerge, in its February 1992 issue, profiles the controversial Dr. Leonard Jeffries, of the Black Studies Department at City College of New York, who is considered by many as a leading figure in the Afrocentric movement.

Dr. Jeffries, in one of his classroom lectures is quoted as saying: "This course is for people of African descent only [my emphasis]. And if you're a light-skinned Black person, be prepared to fight for your rights and prove your ancestry [my emphasis]."

Since when is knowledge the exclusive property of just one segment of the population? That sounds like what we're fighting against now. Besides, the average African American, dark, light, or in between, can't trace his or her ancestry back past his or her great grandparents. In fact, our lack of knowledge of family lineage is one of the continuing, cruel by products of the slave trade that perhaps, may never be fixed--the complete severing of family lineage beyond the Middle Passage.

The late Alex Haley, the author of Roots and collaborator with Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) on his autobiography, is one of the blessed few to have been able to trace his family lineage back to Africa.

Maybe one day science and technology, perhaps through advanced DNA analysis, will allow us to discover these lost connections. Otherwise or until then, millions and millions of people of African descent may never be able to "pave their ancestry."

If I would dare to be so bold, I would ask Dr. Jeffries one question: What great ancient African civilization had families with the last name of Jeffries?

Another danger along the path is the failure of many of the proponents of Afrocentricity to acknowledge the pervasive, positive, and enlightening impact and influence of the religion of Islam on our African personality, culture, and history.

Imam W. D. Mohammed, who is known as the Muslim American spokesman for Human Salvation, son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, in the December 20, 1991 issue of Muslim Journal is quoted as saying: "Afrocentricity minus Islam is a cheat."

W. D. Mohammed (known in the mid '70s as "Wallace" Muhammad) is the man who was chosen to assume leadership of the old Nation of Islam when his father passed away in 1975. El Hajji Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) in his autobiography tells of how, after his break with the Nation of Islam, he was contemplating learning more about the religion of Islam, of how he was thinking about making the Hajji (pilgrimage) to Mecca, the once-in-a- lifetime duty of every able-bodied Muslim.

Malik Shabazz said: "Once in a conversation I broached this subject with Wallace Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad's son. He said yes, certainly, a Muslim should seek to learn all that he could about Islam. I had always had a high opinion of Wallace Muhammad."

And now, Imam W. D. Mohammed writes: "There is a new influence being promoted in the African family of people, especially here in America, called 'Afrocentricity.' I am not against Afrocentricity, if it is honest and straight... ''[Afrocentricity's] promoters say we should make Africa the center, and all of us of the African family should look to Africa as the center. But their Afrocentricity ignores Islam that has become the center and has been the center for that continent for many centuries...Evidence of mighty people, mighty civilizations influenced by Islam and that were Islamic civilizations, is the history of Africa."

Many of the great historians and Afrocentrists bubble over with pride at some of the great rich civilizations and empires of our African past. They speak of the magnificent Ghana, Songhay, and Mali empires and some of the great leaders and statesmen like Askia Mohammed Toure' (Askia the Great), Mansa Mussa, Sundiata Keita, among others. This magnificent flowering of civilization in Africa was Muslim, was Islamic.

They speak and write about that great centers of learning and scholarship like the University of Sankore at Timbuktu, and some of the groat scholars like Ahmed Baba and Ibn Khaldun. These men were Muslims. The University of Sankore at Timbuktu was an Islamic center of learning.

Dr. A.S. Toure, in his magnificent book, The African Intelligentsia of Timbuktu, documents beautifully Islam's pervasive and positive influence on science, the arts, architecture, and scholarship in Africa and other parts of the world.

For nearly a thousand years before the European colonialists entered Africa, Islam was an intricate and irresistible part of the fabric of African life and culture. Islam has been at the center of far too much of African life for far too long to be dismissed or ignored.

Don't be fooled into thinking that Islam is just an "Arab thing." Arab people make up only about 18 percent of the world's Muslims, according to the Saudi Arabian Embassy. The Saudi Arabian Embassy publishes and distributes a booklet entitled Understanding Islam and the Muslims. It informs us that Africa as a whole makes up almost one fourth of all the Muslims in the world. Nearly 30 percent of Muslims live in the Indian subcontinent, 17 percent in Southeast Asia, 10 percent in the former Soviet Union and China, 10 percent in Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. There are significant Muslim populations in Latin America, Australia, the Caribbean, and in Europe. And, there are some six million Muslims in the United States--42 percent of whom are African American.

Dr. Allan Austin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written an exciting book entitled African Muslims in Antebellum America, published by Garland Publishing. It offers undeniable documentation that a large portion (some sources say almost 50 percent) of the Africans who were captured and sold as slaves and brought to America were Muslims and that their peoples and families had been Muslims for centuries prior to the Atlantic slave trade.

In Dr. Austin's preface to his book he states: "This volume is the result of a quite specific attempt to better understand the Old and New Worlds of Kunta Kinte, the hero of Alex Haley's novel Roots...[In 1977 and 1978] I began to gather notes on historical Africans who had left behind stories of lives on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Fragments of such stories, those of Job Ben Solomon, Abdul Rahaman--two men who had sailed from the Gambia River as had Kunta Kinte Venture, Omar ibn Said, and Olauda Equiano (called Gustavus Vassa in the West) were already familiar...But I found that their lives had not yet been related to one another nor to fascinating fragments of information about similar lives...As the overwhelming majority of the lengthier pieces told of Africans who were, like Kunta Kinte, Muslims, and as the Islamic part of the African diaspora had clearly been neglected by scholars, and as, finally, the Africaness of most of these men had been disputed, the scope of my inquiry had been settled.''

Dr. Austin's book tells how many African Muslims, in slavery, were forced to sublimate their true religion, Islam, or give it up altogether and forced to accept instead the slave master's religion, which was for the most part Christianity.

Islam was frowned upon by the slavemasters because one of the major directives and obligations of Muslims is to free slaves and fight against oppression.

But some African Muslims who were enslaved secretly maintained their religion. And there is evidence to suggest that it was African Muslims who were often at the forefront of the slave revolts and insurrections.

Dennis Walker in his work, Black Islamic Slave Revolts of South America writes: "Brazil was shaken by a series of Islamic uprisings amongst the Black slaves in 1801, 1809, 1813, 1826, 1827, 1830, and culminating in the great Bahia uprising of 1835.

''Black discontent in Brazil had been channelled by the underground Islamic movements into an organized and widespread challenge to the whole social, religious, and economic foundations of the racist system of slavery.

"The Black man registered by armed revolution his refusal to accept either the whip or the Christianity of white Western culture.

"The clarity and beauty of Islam (and the Muslims' ) religious- political consciousness, their qualities and skills fitted them to take the role of leadership, to which the oppressed masses of Black people, determined to smash their chains, eagerly responded."

Historian and author, Clyde-Ahmad Winters, a former professor of African and Islamic Studies at Iowa State University, in his manuscript, "Afro-American Muslims--From Slavery to Freedom," concurs. He writes: "Many of the earliest slave 'revolts'/jihads in the Americas, even when they involved both Africans and Indians, were led by Muslims from Senegal. In 1531, the Spanish declared that the Wolof [Senegalese] were 'haughty, disobedient, rebellious, and incorrigible.' From 1753 to 1757, Mackandal, an imam or religious leader of Haiti, led numerous raids against the plantation owners."

Islam, as a liberating force for Africans in the diaspora, is very much a part of our history, very much a part of our Afrocentric reality.

Malik Shabazz, via his Hajji and conversion to Islam, has taken us full circle back to a key aspect of our true ancient African reality. As a student of our history and as a spokesman for our future, he was constantly growing; he was always eager to add on new knowledge.

Malik Shabazz was a self-taught genius. He didn't have diplomas and degrees, but he could hold his own in debate with anybody. He was a "no sell out'' fighter for the rights of his people, and he was both a Pan- Africanist and an Internationalist.

Malik Shabazz was a sterling example of African-American manhood. He was unafraid to speak his mind, unafraid to die for what he believed in. He was clean, articulate, strong, no-nonsense. He had a sense of humor-- he smiled easily and often.

Malik Shabazz was a husband, father, and family man. He didn't drink liquor, eat pork, or chase women. He believed in one God, Allah, and he prayed five times a day.

Malik Shabazz could talk to the bloods on the corner as well as the academicians in the universities. He was, as Ossie Davis eulogized him, "Our Black Shining Prince."

On February 16, 1965, just five days before his death, in a speech at the Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, NY, he made clear his position. He said: "I'm a Muslim, which only means that my religion is Islam. I believe in God, the Supreme Being, the creator of the universe. This is a very simple form of religion, easy to understand. I believe in one God. It's just a whole lot better...I believe that God had one religion, has one religion, always will have one religion. And that God taught all the prophets the same religion, so there is no argument about who was greater or who was better: Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, or some of the others. All of them were prophets who came from one God. They had one doctrine, and that doctrine was designed to give clarification to humanity, so that all of humanity would see that it was one and have some kind of brotherhood that would be practiced here on earth. I believe in that."

He goes on to further state: "We don't judge a man because of the color of his skin. We don't judge you because you're white; we don't judge you because you're black; we don't judge you because you're brown. We judge you because of what you do and what you practice. And as long as you practice evil, we're against you. And for us, the worst form of evil is the evil that's based on judging a man because of the color of his skin. And I don't think anybody here can deny that we're living in a society that just doesn't judge a man according to his talents, according to his know-how, according to his possibility... This society judges a man solely upon the color of his skin. If you're white, you can go forward, and if you're black, you have to fight your way every step of the way, and still don't go forward.''

In his autobiography, Malik Shabazz wrote: ''On the American racial level, we have to approach the Black man's struggle against the white man's racism as a human problem, we had to forget hypocritical politics and propaganda.... Both races, as human beings, had the obligation, the responsibility, of helping to correct America' s human problem . The well- meaning white people...had to combat, actively and directly, the racism in other white people. And the Black people had to build within themselves much greater awareness that along with equal rights there had to be the bearing of equal responsibilities.

"I've had enough of someone else's propaganda. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such, I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

By Amin Sharif

The only way that we’re going to be free is to wipe out once and for all the oppressive structure of America. We realize we can’t do this without a popular struggle, without many alliances and coalitions, and this is the reason that we’re moving in the direction that we are to get as many alliances as possible of people that are equally dissatisfied with the system. —Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense, Black Panther Party


Perhaps the most interesting chapter found in Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s groundbreaking book, Black Power, is entitled “The Myths of Coalition.” Here, Ture and Hamilton argue why coalitions between whites and Blacks during the time of the Black Power Movement were deemed impractical. But the time of Black Power has long since passed into history. The question that must be raised today is whether coalitions between whites and Blacks—indeed between the entire Fourth World and whites—are in order.

First, let me say that I do not presume to speak for the entire Fourth World. The oppressed minorities of the United States, Canada, and Europe can speak for themselves. Whatever coalitions they choose to make and with whom they choose to make them are, in the strictest sense, their own affair. This article will be restricted to whether Black people in America—the most advanced sector of the Fourth World—should consider alliances with whites in America.

Whether other Fourth World peoples or even other Black people accept or reject the arguments that are made here is not as important as the presentation of the subject. For whatever errors or erroneous assumptions that are contained within these few pages can easily be corrected through a process of serious criticism.

Having prefaced my remarks in this fashion, I would begin by saying that the rejection of white allies during the Black Power Movement, though understandable, may have been one of the gravest errors made by Black Power activists in America. This is not to say that the many concerns that Black Power advocates expressed about the reactionary and racist nature of whites were unfounded.

Still what was essentially a political decision about our need as black people for unity has now been turned into a perpetual indictment of all white peoples, at all times. Not only are such sentiments counter-progressive but it flies in the face of common sense. For, at its essence, this assertion does not take into account the dynamic nature of the political situation in America. As Huey P. Newton suggests in the above quotation, an anti-white alliance stance isolates the black community and black organizations from potential allies—even non-white ones such as Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans.

Central to the question of whether blacks in America should consider alliances with whites is whether they alone have the power to transform American society. Most serious political thinkers would assert that it is a given that blacks do not possess such power. If true then it is incumbent on progressive forces within the Black Community to say so and begin to move away from the political baggage connected to the time-dated philosophies of Black Power and Black Nationalism. If we are to transform American society, we must employ strategies and tactics that can give us some chance to complete our mission.

Rather than making a blanket condemnation of all white peoples, at all times, Black Power activists would have perhaps been better off limiting their assertions to the immediate period in which their struggle took place. For all political consciousness is the product of a particular time and place. In every instance, it is subject to limiting factors that must sooner or later be acknowledged and transcended by those who inherit it.

As things stand today, too many Black activists have appropriated the political rhetoric of Black Power without relevant analysis. They have taken the assertions made by some Black Power advocates in regard to whites and projected them onto the current political and social environment. The result has been that no real consideration has been given to the question of whether blacks should under the present circumstances have coalitions with non-blacks. Indeed, it might even be argued that the subject of such coalitions has become taboo within the Black radical political community.

Yet, for the authors of Black Power, the question of political alliances with whites was of paramount importance. Whether they concluded rightly or wrongly to exclude whites from the Black Power Movement is not so much the issue here as is the strength of their argument. Ture and Hamilton show brilliant political thinking within the pages of Black Power, not so much because of flawless arguments about the political questions of their time but because in the first place they had the courage to face these questions. In light of the political timidness that now characterizes black political discourse, Ture and Hamilton stand as giants in a land of dwarfs.

Ture and Hamilton begin their chapter on “The Myths of Coalition” and their argument against coalitions with whites thus:

There is a strongly held view in this society that the best—indeed, perhaps the only—way for black people to win their political and economic rights is by forming coalitions with liberal, labor, church and other kinds of sympathetic organizations or forces, including the “liberal left” wing of the Democratic Party. With such allies, they could influence national legislation and national social patterns: racism would thus be ended. This school sees the “Black Power Movement” as basically separatist and unwilling to enter alliances. . .


The ideology of white assistance in movements of black resistance is deeply rooted in American history. Indeed, there were white abolitionists in the anti-slavery movement, not only in America but in Great Britain as well. During Reconstruction, radical (white) Republicans passed legislation that assisted the newly emancipated slave. And as Langston Hughes points out, “The idea of the NAACP really began with a letter written by Mary White Ovington,” a white woman, “a social worker and freelance writer.”

Coalitions have existed in more recently between Blacks and the white Communist Party around the trial of Angela Davis and between members of the so-called New Left and the Black Panther Party. White students also staffed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization from which Black Power flowed. In fact, from a historical perspective, nearly all of the political movements of black resistance have been inclusive of whites. The most noted exceptions have been black movements rooted in some form of black nationalism, namely, the Garvey Movement and the Nation of Islam.

The central and legitimate question is not whether these past alliance were effective. But rather, whether such alliances were effective under the conditions that black people found themselves in during the early and mid decades of the twentieth century.

By the time of the publication of Black Power, many younger Black activists had grown weary of the gradualist strategy of the older biracial civil rights organizations. These activists found that racism was far more deeply entrenched in America society—especially in the North—than expected.

Younger black activists wanted to attack more aggressively the problem of black oppression. The first step was to frame the dialogue between blacks and whites in a new and dynamic manner. A new frankness soon characterized the dialogue between blacks and especially white liberals. The style of the dialogue was confrontational. For as Ture and Hamilton put it in the Preface of their work

Anything less than clarity, honesty and forcefulness perpetuates the centuries of sliding over, dressing up, and soothing down the true feelings, hopes and demands of an oppressed black people. Mild demands and hypocritical smiles mislead white America into thinking that all is fine and peaceful. They mislead white America into thinking that the path and pace chosen to deal with racial problems are acceptable to the masses of black Americans. It is far better to speak forcefully and truthfully. Only when one’s true self—white and black—is exposed, can society proceed to deal with the problems from a position of clarity and not from misunderstanding.


This frankness alarmed white liberals as well as the old civil rights establishment. White liberals understandably were comfortable with the older more moderate black leadership. But events on the ground showed clearly that the black masses, especially in the North and West, were growing impatient with the pace of change. Organizations such as SNCC under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), was one of the first to re-think its position on coalitions with whites. SNCC, like many other Black Power based organizations, came to the conclusion, as expressed in Black Power, that

The major mistake made by exponents of the coalition theory is that they advocate alliances with groups which never had as their central goal the necessarily total revamping of the society. At bottom, those groups accept the American system and want only—if at all—to make peripheral, marginal reforms in it. Such reforms are inadequate to rid society of racism.


Black Power advocates were not alone in noting a tendency toward moderation among whites in the sphere of political change. In his book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists, Howard Zinn makes the following observation:

. . . there has been a nervousness in high places ever since the Negro revolt began—an anxiety over how far it would go and sporadic moves to contain it before it became dangerous. This does not come out of a conspiratorial plot by hobgoblins of reaction; it springs more or less out of the historic American tendency toward moderation whenever there is a forward thrust of social change. And it comes from liberals as often as from conservatives. The compass needle of the civil rights movement flutters, and every once and a while it settles in a direction which awakens tremors in the pilots themselves.


It was precisely this tendency toward political moderation among whites, especially white liberals, which disturbed Black activists. The Negro civil rights leadership had always been willing to modify its positions to accommodate this moderate tendency among their white supporters. They were then faced with strident calls to take a more confrontational stance in regard to racism in America. These cries no longer were restricted to those forces that stood outside the Civil Rights Movement.

They came principally from SNCC—an organization with impeccable civil rights credentials. An internal debate ensued within the Civil Rights Movement between old guard and new guard forces. Perhaps the most important in Black progressive politics, this debate had ramifications that lasted for decades—indeed to this very day.

Two political schools of thought emerged from this contentious debate. One school of thought was embodied in the old civil rights leadership and organizations. The other school reflected a new militancy among younger civil rights activists. The older civil rights leadership was immensely skilled in navigating the treacherous seas of American politics. They knew when to press forward, when to step back.

They courted white financial aid and sympathy. In fact, they married political activism with shrewd insights that many times led to the successful manipulation of the system. Despite their political skills, systemic racism flourished in America. It was systemic racism that the new school of militant Black activists wanted to attack.

But what exactly did these new Black militants mean by systemic racism, or as they termed it—“institutional racism”? Black Power provides us with an answer on the first page of the first chapter of the book.

What is racism? The word has represented daily reality to millions of black people for centuries, yet it is rarely defined—perhaps just because that reality has been so commonplace. By “racism” we mean the predication of decisions and policies on the consideration of race for the purpose of subordinating a racial group and maintaining control over that group.


Black Power continues

Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community.


It is clear that if this definition is accepted that racism is in play on every level of American society. Not only is the American government a tool of white racism, in that it acts to maintain a stagnant social order. But individual whites through their attitudes and behavior also foster white racism. In this context, Ture and Hamilton ask as

Camus and Sartre have asked: Can a man condemn himself? Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming blacks and start blaming their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion? We-black people have found that they usually cannot condemn themselves: therefore black Americans must do it.


The idea of the condemnation of whites emerged as one of the three central themes of Black Power. The other two principles were Black control of Black organizations and the renunciation of non-violence. The theme of white condemnation led first to the severing of ties with the elder statesmen of the Civil Rights Movement who insisted upon the inclusion of whites within the struggle, along with adherence to non-violence. But more importantly, this theme resulted ultimately in the expulsion of whites from certain black organizations and their entire exclusion from the Black Power Movement.

After the policy of white expulsion was put into place, three things immediately occurred:

It gave moderate and liberal whites whose support of Civil Rights was weakening a chance to exit the Movement.

It cut radical Black Power advocates off from white funds and resources needed to establish a consolidated, national mass movement to confront racism as the Civil Rights Movement had done.

It allowed the greater white community, which had been divided into liberal and conservative camps on the issue of race as it had been divided on the issue of slavery, to consolidate and coalesce around an increasingly conservative agenda.

A “silent majority” soon emerged—led by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and the Republican Party. But it was not just the voices of conservatives that were silent in the face of post-Civil Rights era repression. Millions of white liberals were also silent, too.

The ruling class forces took this collective silence as a license to disrupt advancing, progressive Civil Rights and Black Power agendas and opened a new political discourse on the role of white liberalism in the governance of America. Indeed, the central cause for the decline of American liberalism and radicalism in the post-Civil Rights era can, in many ways, be traced back to the strategy of white condemnation.

Of course, I speak here with 20-20 hindsight. There was no way for the black radicals of the Black Power era to gauge the impact of the condemnation of whites on the future political environment. In fact, tactically, the Black Power Movement had good cause to question the continued moderate stance of whites toward the ending of racism. Black Power advocates wanted to move the struggle to the next phase.

White liberals balked at more radical actions to end racism called for by Black Power advocates. This disqualified most white liberals from being involved organizationally in this next phase of black struggle. From the Black perspective, the liberal purging from the ranks of the Black Power Movement was at once logical and justified. Yet, by not finding a way to reach out to whites in some fashion, the Black Power Movement gave up an important tactical advantage of dividing the white community into two opposing camps on the issue of race.

Still Ture and Hamilton argued that under the condition they faced in the middle 1960s that alliances with whites held no advantages for Blacks and were in fact based on three false assumptions. They were as follows:

1. That it is false to assume that “the interests of black people are identical with the interests of certain liberal, labor, and other reform groups.”

2. That it is false to assume “that a viable coalition can be effected between the politically and economically secure and the politically and economically insecure.”

3. That it is false to assume “that political coalitions are or can be sustained on a moral, friendly, sentimental basis: by appeals to conscience.”

These assumptions on their face would seem to negate any possible alliance between blacks and whites. But upon closer examination, these assertions are, like so much of the political rhetoric of the time, mostly based on broad generalizations and only partially substantiated truths.

Today, we can see that Ture and Hamilton were perhaps too myopic in their view of whites. Much of their shortsightedness emerges from the nationalistic rhetoric of the time. Black consciousness arose in opposition to white racism. A natural outcome of this dichotomy was a psychological and physical stepping away from all things white. On the psychological level this was necessary to restore equilibrium within the psyches of black people, which had been undermined by the racial ravages of slavery and segregation. The resolution of this dichotomy on the political plane was the call for self-determination by Black people for black people.

Yet Ture and Hamilton, as students of history, knew better than most black people that whites were capable of struggling in tandem with blacks under the harshest of conditions

They were naturally aware that anti-slavery Quakers ran the Underground Railroad, that a white John Brown was hanged for his belief in the immediate emancipation of black slaves. Ture knew first hand that many white students had been brutalized and even killed during the Civil Rights era.

Indeed, both Ture and Hamilton were aware of a whole history of radicalism from Haymarket to the then emerging Weathermen that showed that whites can see America as, if not racist, at least as racially exploitive. And, that indeed, white “shame” could be converted into a “revolutionary emotion” under certain conditions.

Because such transformations can and do occur within the ranks of whites, the history of American radicalism has been so effectively suppressed. For, just as knowledge of black history liberated black people from a past linked to slavery, American radicalism if properly understood by the white masses, could also liberate them from a past linked to wage slavery and racism. Though the two sets of oppression are not identical, they are similar enough to allow a common front to form among blacks and whites against a common enemy.

This is not to say that there is no truth in the claims of Ture and Hamilton concerning the fallacies of proposing coalitions with whites. Blacks and whites do not generally share “identical” interests. But, again as students of history, Ture and Hamilton undoubtedly knew that for whites to share the “identical” interests as blacks, they would have to have undergone an identical historical process, i.e., slavery and segregation.

No segment of the American population has been held in slavery and subjected to segregation in the manner of the blacks. That includes Irish Catholics and Jews, as well as, Latinos and Asians. Ture and Hamilton do not put forth arguments against coalitions with Latinos and Asians, though they do not share “identical” interests with blacks. In any case, it is not identical but rather common interests that form alliances and coalitions.

Ture and Hamilton were on much firmer ground when they asserted that “viable coalitions can not be effected between the politically and economically secure and the politically and economically insure.” Published in 1967, Black Power was prior to the decline of the American industrial base. Then, there were still good, high paying jobs with substantial benefits and pensions to sustain a middle class or at least an upper working class lifestyle and strong unions to protect the interests of industrial workers.

Today, there is much less economic security for white workers. The industrial base has eroded through globalism and competition with the emerging economies of Japan, India, and China. Wages for all American workers are stagnating or increasing at a rate that barely keeps pace with inflation. Industrial unions no longer negotiate from positions of strength. Instead, they have become partners in their own demise and now negotiate how much of the wages, benefits, and pensions their membership will give back to their bosses.

The relative security of the white worker in the middle decades of the twentieth century has now been replaced by the insecurity of an American economic system on the verge of crisis. So, even if Ture and Hamilton were correct in their assessment of the relative security of white workers in 1967, this assessment no longer holds any validity.

Because the white middle and working classes are under pressure, the question of alliances between blacks and whites rises to the fore once again. If the American economic system can no longer buy the allegiance of the white middle and working classes, might these workers regain class consciousness and stand with other working class people in order to transform American society? If so, then it is sound strategy for black radical forces to engage in a common front against the economic rape of all working classes.

Here, we are arguing for a limited coalition between whites and blacks primarily because while the economic interests of black and white workers might coincide, their social interests could still be different. For no manner of economic pressure by itself will immediately remove the personal prejudices and racism of the white working classes.

Feelings that blacks are inferior are deeply rooted within white communities. These attitudes can only be eradicated through intense personal struggles, in which whites move toward viewing blacks not only as their class allies but also as full human beings. It is only by engaging and struggling with whites that blacks can defeat both institutional and individual racism.

Ture and Hamilton’s suggestion concerning the futility of alliances with whites found fertile ground within the revolutionary and cultural nationalist sectors of the Black Power Movement. However, there was one notable black organization that took acception to this strategy. The Black Panther Party was perhaps the most unique organization of resistance ever to exist within the black community.

Intensely militant, fearless, and charismatic, the Black Panther Party organized around three central themes: Armed Self-Defense, Service to the Black Community, and Self-Determination for Black People. The Black Panther Party stood in direct opposition to the narrowness of cultural and revolutionary black nationalism, and held according to Charles E. Jones in The Black Panther Party Revisited a broad

. . . commitment to the virtue and dignity of individuals regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Unlike many of the Black Power organizations of the period, the BPP demonstrated a willingness to enter into functional alliances with White Leftist groups. . . . In short, the BPP represented a model for genuine multiculturalism.”


Huey P. Newton, the BPP’s leading theorist, had from the very beginning sought out alliances with white leftists. Chairman Bobby Seale reinforced on various occasions the anti-racist stand of the Black Panther Party. The BPP, he said

. . . is not a Black racist organization, not a racist organization at all. We understand where racism comes from. Our Minister of Defense has taught us to understand that we have to oppose all kinds of racism.


In many ways the theory of the Black Panther Party was more advanced than that of the Black Nationalist forces. Newton had constantly sought to advance the Party’s theory and practice from Black Nationalism to Revolutionary Nationalism and then to an eclectic form of Marxism-Leninism that he called "Intercommunalism." But, even in its embryonic stage, the BPP recognized the necessity to organize a broad united front against racism and capitalism.

When the Party sent forth the slogan: All Power to the People! It was making a call for Brown, Red, Yellow and White to follow its example and opposed a common enemy. In making this all-inclusive call, especially to minority populations of America, the Black Panther Party became in theory and practice the first proto-Fourth World organization.

Charles E. Jones states in The Black Panther Party Revisited that

“The first Panther biracial alliance occurred with the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP). On December 22, 1967, the BPP formed a coalition with the PFP. Under the terms of the alliance, the Panthers agreed to assist the PFP in collecting the necessary signatures to allow PFP candidates to be placed on the ballot for the 1968 elections. In return, the Party gained use of PFP’s sound equipment, which was needed to mobilize support for the exoneration of Huey P. Newton.”


The Black Panther Party made alliances with not only the white Peace and Freedom Party but also with the white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the White Panther Party and the Patriot Party—“a revolutionary party of poor and working class Whites based in Chicago.”

The alliances that the Black Panther Party made with whites and other oppressed minorities allowed it to organize the United Front Against Fascism (1969) and the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Conventions (1970). More importantly, these alliances allowed the Panther to fuse the revolutionary politics of the Black ghetto with the anti-war protests of the white suburbs.

When these two forces descended on Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention, the result was the infamous uprising known as the “Days of Rage.” It was during the “Days of Rage” that Chicago police turned their brutality on young whites and enraged America. This fusion of black revolutionary politics with anti-war movement was further advanced when as Jones points out,

On November 15, 1969, David Hillard , the Chief of Staff, delivered a speech at the San Franciso Moratorium Demonstration, one of the largest rallies of the anti-war movement.


Clearly, the evidence presented here puts to rest the notion that alliances with whites are not useful to blacks. For it was exactly at the time of the alliance between the Party and its white allies that modern-day radicalism reached its height.

In the end, the questions of alliances with whites must be considered in light of whether black radical forces are committed to the transformation of American society or not. Blacks cannot make this transformation alone. Many black radicals, particularly the Pan-Africanists and Black Nationalists, have not made up their mind exactly where they stand in regard to the question of the transformation of a predominately white society.

Indeed, many of these forces believe that it is impossible to transform white America—that racism is so deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of most white Americans that nothing can make them ever join Blacks or other oppressed people in a united front against a common enemy.

We, who embrace the concept of the Fourth World, have chosen to step beyond the narrow nationalism of our times and are willing to reach out to whites in order to form a common front against racial and class oppression. For us it is unthinkable to demand that others recognize our humanity as Black, Brown, Yellow or Red peoples while we ourselves fail to recognize the humanity of white people.

But we do not wish to have alliances with just any white individual or organization. The whites we seek an alliance with must be committed fully to the radical transformation of America. They must be willing to accept the principle of Fourth World self-determination—that is, only Fourth World peoples can determine what is best for them in regard to the general transformation of society. This may mean that whites still might not be able to join any emerging Fourth World organization.

It will mean nevertheless that we must seek ways to work together to build a mass united front organization where all progressive forces are welcome. By definition, the Fourth World already is inclusive of all other non-white minorities that inhabit the First World of Europe, Canada, and America. It is a given that the Black sector of the Fourth World seeks an active alliance with Latino, Asian, and Native Americans. We look back to the Black Panther Party as the proto-type of what can be done when “common” and not “identical” interests are taken into consideration in an effort to transform America.

We have no intent of abandoning potential alliances and coalitions with black nationalists and Pan-Africanists. Our persuasion will be by argument as well as example. Certainly, if we are willing to struggle with whites around their racism, we can struggle with these groups around principled ideological similarities. For, in the end, whether Fourth World, Pan-Africanist, Black Nationalist, Marxist or Anarchist—what each wants is to build a better world free from economic exploitation and racial oppression.

With this view in common, we all move forward together.

Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by mid-decade 62 percent of us described ourselves as "truly desperate" about crime-almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement "This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem"?

In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress?

Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story. In the late 1990s the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. People who had been pounding the pavement for years could finally get work. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster. They predicted inflation would take off, just as they had a few years earlier-also erroneously-when the unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent.

We compound our worries beyond all reason. Life expectancy in the United States has doubled during the twentieth century. We are better able to cure and control diseases than any other civilization in history. Yet we hear that phenomenal numbers of us are dreadfully ill. In 1996 Bob Garfield, a magazine writer, reviewed articles about serious diseases published over the course of a year in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. He learned that, in addition to 59 million Americans with heart disease, 53 million with migraines, 25 million with osteoporosis, 16 million with obesity, and 3 million with cancer, many Americans suffer from more obscure ailments such as temporomandibular joint disorders (10 million) and brain injuries (2 million). Adding up the estimates, Garfield determined that 543 million Americans are seriously sick-a shocking number in a nation of 266 million inhabitants. "Either as a society we are doomed, or someone is seriously double-dipping," he suggested.

Garfield appears to have underestimated one category of patients: for psychiatric ailments his figure was 53 million. Yet when Jim Windolf, an editor of the New York Observer, collated estimates for maladies ranging from borderline personality disorder (10 million) and sex addiction (11 million) to less well-known conditions such as restless leg syndrome (12 million) he came up with a figure of 152 million. "But give the experts a little time," he advised. "With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts."

Indeed, Windolf omitted from his estimates new-fashioned afflictions that have yet to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association: ailments such as road rage, which afflicts more than half of Americans, according to a psychologist’s testimony before a congressional hearing in 1997.

The scope of our health fears seems limitless. Besides worrying disproportionately about legitimate ailments and prematurely about would-be diseases, we continue to fret over already refuted dangers. Some still worry, for instance, about "flesh-eating bacteria," a bug first rammed into our consciousness in 1994 when the U.S. news media picked up on a screamer headline in a British tabloid, "Killer Bug Ate My Face." The bacteria, depicted as more brutal than anything seen in modern times, was said to be spreading faster than the pack of photographers outside the home of its latest victim. In point of fact, however, we were not "terribly vulnerable" to these "superbugs," nor were they "medicine’s worst nightmares," as voices in the media warned.

Group A strep, a cyclical strain that has been around for ages, had been dormant for half a century or more before making a comeback. The British pseudoepidemic had resulted in a total of about a dozen deaths in the previous year. Medical experts roundly rebutted the scares by noting that of 20 to 30 million strep infections each year in the United States fewer than 1 in 1,000 involve serious strep A complications, and only 500 to 1,500 people suffer the flesh-eating syndrome, whose proper name is necrotizing fasciitis. Still the fear persisted. Years after the initial scare, horrifying news stories continued to appear, complete with grotesque pictures of victims. A United Press International story in 1998 typical of the genre told of a child in Texas who died of the "deadly strain" of bacteria that the reporter warned "can spread at a rate of up to one inch per hour."

Killer Kids

When we are not worrying about deadly diseases we worry about homicidal strangers. Every few months for the past several years it seems we discover a new category of people to fear: government thugs in Waco, sadistic cops on Los Angeles freeways and in Brooklyn police stations, mass-murdering youths in small towns all over the country. A single anomalous event can provide us with multiple groups of people to fear. After the 1995 explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City first we panicked about Arabs. "Knowing that the car bomb indicates Middle Eastern terrorists at work, it’s safe to assume that their goal is to promote free-floating fear and a measure of anarchy, thereby disrupting American life," a New York Post editorial asserted. "Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working," wrote A. M. Rosenthal in the New York Times.

When it turned out that the bombers were young white guys from middle America, two more groups instantly became spooky: right-wing radio talk show hosts who criticize the government-depicted by President Bill Clinton as "purveyors of hatred and division"-and members of militias. No group of disgruntled men was too ragtag not to warrant big, prophetic news stories.

We have managed to convince ourselves that just about every young American male is a potential mass murderer-a remarkable achievement, considering the steep downward trend in youth crime throughout the 1990s. Faced year after year with comforting statistics, we either ignore them-adult Americans estimate that people under eighteen commit about half of all violent crimes when the actual number is 13 percent-or recast them as "The Lull Before the Storm" (Newsweek headline). "We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around or our country is going to be living with chaos," Bill Clinton asserted in 1997, even while acknowledging that the youth violent crime rate had fallen 9.2 percent the previous year.

The more things improve the more pessimistic we become. Violence-related deaths at the nation’s schools dropped to a record low during the 1996–97 academic year (19 deaths out of 54 million children), and only one in ten public schools reported any serious crime. Yet Time and U.S. News & World Report both ran headlines in 1996 referring to "Teenage Time Bombs." In a nation of "Children Without Souls" (another Time headline that year), "America’s beleaguered cities are about to be victimized by a paradigm shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call ‘the superpredators,’" William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, and John DiIulio, a criminologist, forecast in a book published in 1996.

Instead of the arrival of superpredators, violence by urban youths continued to decline. So we went looking elsewhere for proof that heinous behavior by young people was "becoming increasingly more commonplace in America" (CNN). After a sixteen-year-old in Pearl, Mississippi, and a fourteen-year-old in West Paducah, Kentucky, went on shooting sprees in late 1997, killing five of their classmates and wounding twelve others, these isolated incidents were taken as evidence of "an epidemic of seemingly depraved adolescent murderers" (Geraldo Rivera). Three months later in March 1998 all sense of proportion vanished after two boys ages eleven and thirteen killed four students and a teacher in Jonesboro, Arkansas. No longer, we learned in Time, was it "unusual for kids to get back at the world with live ammunition." When a child psychologist on NBC’s "Today" show advised parents to reassure their children that shootings at schools are rare, reporter Ann Curry corrected him. "But this is the fourth case since October," she said.

Over the next couple of months young people failed to accommodate the trend hawkers. None committed mass murder. Fear of killer kids remained very much in the air nonetheless. In stories on topics such as school safety and childhood trauma, reporters recapitulated the gory details of the killings. And the news media made a point of reporting every incident in which a child was caught at school with a gun or making a death threat. In May, when a fifteen-year-old in Springfield, Oregon, did open fire in a cafeteria filled with students, killing two and wounding twenty-three others, the event felt like a continuation of a "disturbing trend" (New York Times). The day after the shooting, on National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered," the criminologist Vincent Schiraldi tried to explain that the recent string of incidents did not constitute a trend, that youth homicide rates had declined by 30 percent in recent years, and more than three times as many people were killed by lightning than by violence at schools. But the show’s host, Robert Siegel, interrupted him. "You’re saying these are just anomalous events?" he asked, audibly peeved. The criminologist reiterated that anomalous is precisely the right word to describe the events, and he called it "a grave mistake" to imagine otherwise.
Yet given what had happened in Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oregon, could anyone doubt that today’s youths are "more likely to pull a gun than make a fist," as Katie Couric declared on the "Today" show?

We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship.

Even concerns about real dangers, when blown out of proportion, do demonstrable harm. Take the fear of cancer. Many Americans overestimate the prevalence of the disease, underestimate the odds of surviving it, and put themselves at greater risk as a result. Women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, a Dartmouth study found. Their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. Women’s heightened perception of risk, rather than motivating them to get checkups or seek treatment, can have the opposite effect. A study of daughters of women with breast cancer found an inverse correlation between fear and prevention: the greater a daughter’s fear of the disease the less frequent her breast self-examination. Studies of the general population-both men and women-find that large numbers of people who believe they have symptoms of cancer delay going to a doctor, often for several months. When asked why, they report they are terrified about the pain and financial ruin cancer can cause as well as poor prospects for a cure. The irony of course is that early treatment can prevent precisely those horrors they most fear.

Still more ironic, if harder to measure, are the adverse consequences of public panics. Exaggerated perceptions of the risks of cancer at least produce beneficial by-products, such as bountiful funding for research and treatment of this leading cause of death. When it comes to large-scale panics, however, it is difficult to see how potential victims benefit from the frenzy. Did panics a few years ago over sexual assaults on children by preschool teachers and priests leave children better off? Or did they prompt teachers and clergy to maintain excessive distance from children in their care, as social scientists and journalists who have studied the panics suggest? How well can care givers do their jobs when regulatory agencies, teachers’ unions, and archdioceses explicitly prohibit them from any physical contact with children, even kindhearted hugs?

Was it a good thing for children and parents that male day care providers left the profession for fear of being falsely accused of sex crimes? In an article in the Journal of American Culture, sociologist Mary DeYoung has argued that day care was "refeminized" as a result of the panics. "Once again, and in the time-honored and very familiar tradition of the family, the primary responsibility for the care and socialization of young children was placed on the shoulders of low-paid women," she contends.

We all pay one of the costs of panics: huge sums of money go to waste. Hysteria over the ritual abuse of children cost billions of dollars in police investigations, trials, and imprisonments. Men and women went to jail for years "on the basis of some of the most fantastic claims ever presented to an American jury," as Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal demonstrated in a series of investigative articles for which she became a Pulitizer Prize finalist in 1996. Across the nation expensive surveillance programs were implemented to protect children from fiends who reside primarily in the imaginations of adults.

The price tag for our panic about overall crime has grown so monumental that even law-and-order zealots find it hard to defend. The criminal justice system costs Americans close to $100 billion a year, most of which goes to police and prisons. In California we spend more on jails than on higher education. Yet increases in the number of police and prison cells do not correlate consistently with reductions in the number of serious crimes committed. Criminologists who study reductions in homicide rates, for instance, find little difference between cities that substantially expand their police forces and prison capacity and others that do not.

The turnabout in domestic public spending over the past quarter century, from child welfare and antipoverty programs to incarceration, did not even produce reductions in fear of crime. Increasing the number of cops and jails arguably has the opposite effect: it suggests that the crime problem is all the more out of control.

Panic-driven public spending generates over the long term a pathology akin to one found in drug addicts. The more money and attention we fritter away on our compulsions, the less we have available for our real needs, which consequently grow larger. While fortunes are being spent to protect children from dangers that few ever encounter, approximately 11 million children lack health insurance, 12 million are malnourished, and rates of illiteracy are increasing.

I do not contend, as did President Roosevelt in 1933, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My point is that we often fear the wrong things. In the 1990s middle-income and poorer Americans should have worried about unemployment insurance, which covered a smaller share of workers than twenty years earlier. Many of us have had friends or family out of work during economic downturns or as a result of corporate restructuring. Living in a nation with one of the largest income gaps of any industrialized country, where the bottom 40 percent of the population is worse off financially than their counterparts two decades earlier, we might also have worried about income inequality. Or poverty. During the mid- and late 1990s 5 million elderly Americans had no food in their homes, more than 20 million people used emergency food programs each year, and one in five children lived in poverty-more than a quarter million of them homeless. All told, a larger proportion of Americans were poor than three decades earlier.

One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors. Poverty, for example, correlates strongly with child abuse, crime, and drug abuse. Income inequality is also associated with adverse outcomes for society as a whole. The larger the gap between rich and poor in a society, the higher its overall death rates from heart disease, cancer, and murder. Some social scientists argue that extreme inequality also threatens political stability in a nation such as the United States, where we think of ourselves not as "haves and have nots" but as "haves and will haves." "Unlike the citizens of most other nations, Americans have always been united less by a shared past than by the shared dreams of a better future. If we lose that common future," the Brandeis University economist Robert Reich has suggested, "we lose the glue that holds our nation together."

The combination of extreme inequality and poverty can prove explosive. In an insightful article in U.S. News & World Report in 1997 about militia groups reporters Mike Tharp and William Holstein noted that people’s motivations for joining these groups are as much economic as ideological. The journalists argued that the disappearance of military and blue-collar jobs, along with the decline of family farming, created the conditions under which a new breed of protest groups flourished. "What distinguishes these antigovernment groups from, say, traditional conservatives who mistrust government is that their anger is fueled by direct threats to their livelihood, and they carry guns," Tharp and Holstein wrote.

That last phrase alludes to a danger that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans’ lists of fears. So gun crazed is this nation that Burger King had to order a Baltimore franchise to stop giving away coupons from a local sporting goods store for free boxes of bullets with the purchase of guns. We have more guns stolen from their owners-about 300,000 annually-than many countries have gun owners. In Great Britain, Australia, and Japan, where gun ownership is severely restricted, no more than a few dozen people are killed each year by handguns. In the United States, where private citizens own a quarter-billion guns, around 15,000 people are killed, 18,000 commit suicide, and another 1,500 die accidentally from firearms. American children are twelve times more liked to die from gun injuries than are youngsters in other industrialized nations.

Yet even after tragedies that could not have occurred except for the availability of guns, their significance is either played down or missed altogether. Had the youngsters in the celebrated schoolyard shootings of 1997–98 not had access to guns, some or all of the people they killed would be alive today. Without their firepower those boys lacked the strength, courage, and skill to commit multiple murders. Nevertheless newspapers ran editorials with titles such as "It’s Not Guns, It’s Killer Kids" (Fort Worth Star–Telegram) and "Guns Aren’t the Problem" (New York Post), and journalists, politicians, and pundits blathered on endlessly about every imaginable cause of youthful rage, from "the psychology of violence in the South" to satanism to fights on "Jerry Springer" and simulated shooting in Nintendo games.

Imagine a computer database which catalogued your entire social network: the email, home address, and sensitive details of all your friends, and consequently, all of their friends in a massive interlinked web. What if this service also archived all of your personal preferences on everything from books to movies to music? And if it also categorized your political views, club associations, previous jobs, educational background, and who you are dating?

How about if this information was available not only to government spooks but the general public free of charge?

Sounds like a hellish vision of the future, right? But this program is not the devilish spawn of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, nor the secret plans of “private” data miners like Choicepoint or Axciom.

The Beast system is here right now. And worst of all, people are voluntarily giving up this information, with some updating their profile every day with their latest personal details.

Welcome to TheFaceBook.com. Founded in February 2004, it currently operates on 800 college campuses cataloging the details of its 2.8 million users. According to the Boston Globe, “the free network…boasts that on average it attracts 80 percent of a school’s undergraduate population as well as a smattering of graduate students, faculty members, and recent alumni.”

For example at Boston University, 14,007 of the school’s 15,846 undergraduates have joined and volunteered their most intimate details. According to the statistics, approximately 60 percent of users log in daily, with 85 percent logging in weekly.

And just to make sure you can join the fun, TheFaceBook.com is busy adding more than 50 campuses a month as well as expanding to high schools and international institutions.

Call it Big Brother with a consumer-friendly smile.

So who do we have to thank for this? According to the official story, TheFaceBook was founded by 3 students from the CIA’s favorite breeding ground of Harvard University. Their first $500,000 in funding came from Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal.

Thiel is also a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a graduate of Stanford University, the home of NSA computer research and CIA mind control projects like MK ULTRA. He is an avowed neocon and globalist whose book “The Diversity Myth” received praises from William Kristol, Christopher Cox, Edward Meese, and Linda Chavez. Thiel sits on the board of the radical right-wing VanguardPAC and he personally donated $21,200 to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for governor.

At a June 24, 2004 conference, Thiel remarked “I think the only way that the world can become unified in some sense is through technology. Technology is driving us towards a single, seamless humanity.” Surely John Poindexter and the architects of the cashless society control grid would agree.

Yet TheFaceBook.com’s connections to the shadowy world of black ops don’t stop there. They recently received $13 million in venture capital backing from Accel Partners. James Breyer, the manager of Accel, sits on the board of National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) alongside Gilman Louie, head of In-Q-Tel.

The CIA set up In-Q-Tel in 1999, with the goal of fostering companies that provide “data warehousing and mining” in a “secure community of interest.” Further goals include “profiling search agents” which are “self-sustaining, to reduce its reliance on CIA funding.” Sounds like an exact description of TheFaceBook.

After all, what better way to spy on potential radicals and student activists than with a program so seemingly innocuous? TheFaceBook already categorizes users on a scale from “Very Liberal” to “Very Conservative” allowing for easy government profiling. Additionally they can search for anyone who lists the wrong keywords, like “anarchist,” “protest” “New World Order,” or any other thought crime. And with the click of a button, they have your picture, address, and the names and information of all your friends.

TheFaceBook is the devil in sheep’s clothing. It is leading the vanguard of the “consumer friendly” Big Brother targeting young people, specifically college and high school students. While pretending to be a harmless and fun service, TheFaceBook is a dark foray into psychological profiling, where the cryptocracy wants to know every detail of your life and track your location at every moment.

Unfortunately, this is part of a larger plan to spy on students. In March, AOL, a company that has admittedly handed over emails and web logs to the FBI and NSA, announced a new privacy policy for their popular AIM instant messenger program used predominately by students. It said “You waive any right to privacy." Civil liberties advocates immediately warned users that all their conversations could be tapped by AOL, which uses an Illuminati all-seeing eye as their logo. But with so much MTV to watch and so many Britney Spears songs to memorize, it seems few of them are listening.

Last week the CIA announced they would be hiring students to spy on campus activists and report the information back to headquarters. In actuality this has probably been going on far before the official announcement.

Eventually all of this information will be stored in pentabyte databases and linked to our microchipped National ID card. But before they can implant Verichips into our hands and solder BrainGate chips into our brains, they must weed out the “student troublemakers” with the help of programs like TheFaceBook and AIM.

Civil liberties advocates are so busy protesting the PATRIOT Act that they have ignored the insidious spy networks right under our noses. The same college students who list themselves in the ACLU club on TheFaceBook are blind to the danger of announcing their affiliation to the world.

TheFaceBook.com is nothing more than COINTELPRO with slick packaging. It is part of a new breed of spy networks designed to profile students for the next phase of martial law. The Bush regime is a megalomaniacal cabal of mass murderers who want to crush all internal dissent, and like all dictatorial regimes, the first place they will look is students.

Of course with the ECHELON network already spying on all phone calls and emails, there is really nowhere to hide. So in the meantime I am using TheFaceBook to my advantage. I have listed myself as a “Very Conservative” intern at the Dan Quayle Library with a penchant for books by Oliver North.

After all, maybe I have entered the right keywords and the CIA will come recruit me as one of those new student spies.