cultural violence – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Open Letter to the Benton County Commissioners on Renaming the County

By Joseph Orosco (June 27, 2020)

Dear Commissioners Augerot, Malone, and Jaramillo:

This June, you issued a statement in response to the historic protests across the globe reacting to the killing of George Floyd. You recognized that communities were gathering together to “give voice to the centuries of inequality, exploitation and abuse suffered by Black and African American people in our country” and added, “The demands for change cannot go unanswered.” As part of your commitment, you dedicated yourselves to listening to the concerns of disadvantaged communities and to examining the ways in which the County might participate in historic racism. You promise that “All systems that reinforce oppression and racism must be thoroughly examined, changed where needed and rebuilt in coordination with the people that have been historically disenfranchised.”

I suggest that one of the tasks the Board needs to consider is renaming the County.

Benton County is named in honor of US Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who served in federal government for some thirty years from 1820 to 1850. He was instrumental in the promotion of settlement of the Oregon Territory. Though he never set foot in Oregon, he is considered someone whose political career was dedicated to the cause of opening the West for Americans.

However, Senator Benton was a notorious white supremacist. His championing of the Oregon Trail was so that white Americans could displace Native American tribes who he considered “savage” and “uncivilized.” He thought that Western expansion was a good idea in order for European and Christian ideals to spread to Asia and transform those cultures. Though he did work to end slavery in the United States, it was not because he considered African Americans equal to white people, but because the issue threatened the stability of the Union.

In 2017, Oregon State University, responding to student concerns and protests, initiated a review of building names on campus, including Benton Hall. I was the co-chair of the committee involved in organizing the review process. A team of professional historians investigated the background of Senator Benton and the naming of the building. While OSU chose to remove Senator Benton’s name from the building for reasons other than his historical legacy, historians found the legacy of Senator Benton to be “controversial and discomforting” because of his support of Native American removal and a white supremacist promotion of Manifest Destiny. This report can be found at:

https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/sites/leadership.oregonstate.edu/files/OID/BuildingPlaceNames/Historical-Reports/benton_hall_and_annex_historical_report.pdf

One way to remedy the harm to Native Americans caused by Senator Benton would be to rename the County after the Kalapuya people who were displaced by the United States from this area in 1855. There is precedent for this in Oregon, since ten of thirty-six counties are named after Native American tribes or use Native American names. The Board should consider consulting tribal historians and officials from Grand Ronde. Nearby Lane County is also involved in a process of reviewing its name for similar reasons.

If the Benton Country Board of Commissioners is truly interested in “dismantling” and “deconstructing” Oregon’s history of systemic oppression, then it should cease to honor one of the politicians who dedicated most of his life’s work to laying the foundations for it.

Everything You Would Call the Cops For, The Cops Have Done to Me

By Teka Lark (June 15, 2020)

CW: sexual assault

I heard someone say, “We need the police, what if you get home invaded.” Chances of that happening are almost nonexistent for boring people who worry about being home invaded on Facebook. That’s a crime you have to plan out, it’s not a dash-and-grab kind of situation, and it typically involves people who you know.

I, unfortunately, DID get home invaded: by the police. I hid behind the piano while the police dressed in street clothes ransacked my house and destroyed my computer owing to some stories I wrote in my newspaper.

I remember my first interaction with the police. I was 14 years old, my friend had called the police on the drug dealers next door (look up Rampart for details on that). Turned out the drug dealers next door were also the police. They put guns to our heads and threatened to drop our bodies in the LA River.

My second interaction with the police, I was 15. I was a camp counselor, and for some reason, the police helped to run the camp. Anyways, a police officer offered to take me home. In the car, he put his hand on my leg. Right before he got to my house, he stopped the car and sexually assaulted me in the car. I had begged my parents to let me have a job. They said they were worried something would happen to me, so I did not tell anyone what happened, and I hung out at the library for the rest of the summer.

I have only called the police one time in my entire life.

In 2003, I called the police when my friend’s (who was on vacation) taco stand in Los Feliz looked like it had been robbed. When the police arrived, it became apparent that they were viewing me as the perpetrator of the crime, so I somehow managed to get them to let me go to the bathroom of the eatery next door, and once I got in the bathroom, I exited the window and went home.

I have been questioned half a dozen times by the police for not having a car and waiting for the bus to work as a special education kindergarten teacher. Fun fact: If the police think you’re a sex worker and question you about it, they also sexually harass and/or try to become a client when they stop you.

I have ZERO positive stories of the police. I have had 100% negative interactions. They have never solved a problem; they have never made anything better; they have almost always made things worse.

Literally, everything you call the police for, the police themselves have done to me. Is that called irony?

But really, I don’t think if you’re white, you’ll have to worry. I really can’t see the United States allowing you to be treated the way I have been treated, cops or no cops. That would be barbaric.

How to Deal With Racists on the Job and In Your Family: A Message for White People

By Mark Naison (June 15, 2020)

Right now, your Black sisters and brothers are depending on you to make this country a safer place for them to live, work and raise their children. That can only happen if white people hold other white people accountable for behavior which makes Black people feel isolated, stressed out, and in danger.

There is no simple way to do this.

In the long run, we are going to have to change the way key institutions function, the way history is taught, and how resources are allocated, but individual white people do have influence over how their white friends, co-workers, and family members conduct themselves in public

The most important thing you can do is come to the defense of Black people in your neighborhood, on the job, on your team, in your college residence hall or in a store or on the street when they are being racially profiled, intimidated or attacked, whether it is by a boss, a coach, by law enforcement, their teammates or fellow students, or by random people they encounter. In this society, it is the job of white people of conscience to risk their own safety to come to the defense of Black people under attack.

But secondly, you have to police the language of white people around you. Everyone has the right to hold views about important subjects you might disagree with so long as they don’t use threatening or abusive language, but the minute someone in your family, on the job, in the locker room, or at the local bar uses the “N” word or an equivalent reference to Latinos, Muslims, Jews or Gay people, you need to say “Hold It. You can’t say that word around me. If you say it again, I am not only leaving this gathering, I am filming you saying it and putting it on social media”

The normalization of racial epithets in private leads directly to racial intimidation in public.

It’s time white people of conscience risk being hated to make Black people in America feel safe.

Think that’s rough? What’s rougher is what this country will be like if we DON’T do that.

There is a New Possibility in the Air

By Louis Colombo (June 9, 2020)

What’s striking about Democratic proposals for police reform, aside from the awful optics provided by Pelosi and Schumer (best forgotten), is that proposals that would have seemed to most people pretty bold and forward looking a few weeks are already being met by charges that they don’t go far enough (they don’t). But the “obviousness” of this awareness shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Instead we should recognize a real win for all the folks involved in the protests – a shift in mass consciousness so that now the real conversation isn’t about whether chokeholds should be legal (duh, no), but what “defining the police means,” what that would like in action, what new resources and types of “first responders would take the place of police,” etc.

There’s a new spirit of possibility in the air, new worlds being not just imagined, but discussed, and to this we owe the protestors – the kids on the ground – a world of gratitude.

Why “Demilitarizing Law Enforcement” Will Make the Country Safer

By Mark Naison (June 9, 2020)

If we want to have a society where life expectancy and infant mortality are not at the bottom of advanced nations, and where 50% of the wealth doesn’t accrue to the top 1 percent, we have to gradually shift public funds from prisons and policing to education, health care, and affordable housing.

As we have learned from this Pandemic: NO ONE is safe when poor people and people of color are packed together in crowded residences, deprived of preventive health care, and concentrated in the most dangerous and lowest paying occupations.

As protests continue in every city, town and hamlet, we need to commit ourselves to “demilitarizing” our law enforcement apparatus and investing in a broad array of measures that improve public health and expand economic opportunity.

It is gratifying to see a broad range of leaders in business and government proclaim “Black Life Matters” and commit themselves to an honest effort to confront their own complicity in the promotion and preservation of racism and white supremacy, but without major changes in how law enforcement functions, and how public funds are distributed, these efforts at moral reformation may have little lasting impact on how we actually live
in our communities.

Lessons About Police Brutality from the Chicanx Experience

By Joseph Orosco (June 3, 2020)

The past week has seen an explosion of urban uprising that has not been experienced in the US in decades. Almost 5000 people have been arrested nationwide in protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hand of police in Minneapolis. What is unique about this moment is that a majority of Americans support the protests, in part, because they have seen the violent response of police forces all across the country. Even mainstream media outlets are calling the police response disproportionate and many more people are starting to consider the alternative of police abolition as a serious option.

The history of Mexican American people in the US is one that emphasizes the point that police violence is not recent problem created by the militarization of police forces or of white supremacist infiltration. In the mid 1800s, police forces were created specifically for controlling Mexicans and Mexican American citizens. The Texas Rangers were created during the Republic of Texas era specifically to do border patrol duty with Mexico and then later became a regular unit when Texas was absorbed into the United States. The story of the Rangers is a bloody one of lynchings, massacres, and disappearances. From 1915-1919, in a period named La Hora de Sangre, Rangers abducted and murdered hundreds of Mexican Americans with impunity.

In the 20^th century, several cases are notable, not only for their brutality but also because of what they teach us about responding to police violence today.

Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots

The first is the 1942 case of the Sleepy Lagoon murder in Los Angeles that was popularized in the play and film by Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit. Dozens of Mexican American youth were arrested for killing another Mexican American under very uncertain circumstances. By this point, the LAPD was notorious for police brutality and especially for being effective at creating a blue wall of silence to protect their own (one famous case that demonstrates this is). But what was significant about this episode was the treatment of the pachuco youth by the whole criminal justice system—police, prosecutors, social workers, and judges. During the trial, the Mexican American men were denied being able to speak to lawyers, they were not allowed to wear clean clothes to hearings, and were subjected to testimony by state “experts” who told the jury about the savagery of the Mexican people and their propensity to use knifes to cut and maim that went back to Aztec times. The girlfriends of the young men refused to testify against them in trial and were then taken away from their families without due process and put into state custody at reform school.

What this points out is that thinking about police state violence will require more than reforming police forces with better training or body cams and so forth. Sleepy Lagoon revealed that there are many sites of power within the criminal justice system that can coerce and harm individuals. Moreover, this case also reveals how institutional reform may not matter much without confronting the way white supremacy structures culture and everyday life. The state dehumanized those young men and women and played off the stereotypes of violent Mexican gangs to secure their imprisonment and family separation. Those stereotypes would just simply explode a year later when police and military forces persecuted Mexican American youth in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943. In other words, police state violence would not have been possible if many white citizens weren’t willing to tolerate it in order to keep Black and Mexican American youth in their place.

The Bloody Christmas Episode

LAPD police brutality against Mexican American youth continued and crested in 1951 with the Bloody Christmas episode (which became popularized in the 1997 film LA Confidential). A group of young Mexican American men were confronted in a bar by police and fought back against the officers that were harassing them. They were arrested and brought back to the city jail. During a drunken Christmas Eve party, dozens of LAPD officers formed a secret gauntlet in the basement of the jail and forced the defendants to run through it while they beat them with clubs. The torture went on for an hour and half and several defendants had broken bones and ruptured internal organs. They were then forced to pose in photos with the officers they had resisted.

The LAPD expected this case to be covered up just like countless of other cases had been. However, the families of the defendants joined together and became part of a grassroots group called the Community Services Organization. The CSO had been organizing with Mexican American communities in Southern California for several years. When the families brought the CSO network to bear on their case, the city and FBI insisted on a review of the Bloody Christmas incident. In the end, a handful of LAPD officers were convicted of crimes and many were reassigned. It was one of the first times that the blue wall of silence was broken.

It should be noted on how CSO accomplished this victory. For some years, CSO had been conducting meetings in the homes of Mexican American families to inform them about issues and the power of collective community action. These meetings inspired thousands to see themselves as agents of change and not just passive subjects of state control. It had created a very successful voter registration drive that empowered thousands of Mexican American voters. CSO also encouraged multicultural alliances with other groups, namely Jewish cultural organizations and Black and Asian labor groups. This kind of solidarity enabled them to help to elect Ed Roybal to the LA City Council in 1949–one of the first Mexican American political officials in the city since the Mexican American War of 1848. Roybal was instrumental in getting pressure on the LAPD during the Bloody Christmas incident.

The organizer that helped to create this Mexican American political bloc was a man by the name of Fred Ross, Sr. He had gained a reputation about Mexican American communities because of helping them to mount a legal case in Southern California to desegregate public schools that went on to be a template for Brown v. Board of Education. After the victory of the Bloody Christmas, Ross went to San Jose to help form CSO chapters. It was there he met a young man by the name of Cesar Chavez, who later went on to become the national organizer for CSO for almost a decade before he helped to form the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta (who was also another CSO organizer).

(Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, Luis Valdez, and Dolores Huerta)

Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War

The last episode has eerie resonance with today’s uprisings. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War. The Chicano Moratorium was a nationwide group that came together in repose to the disprortionate numbers of Chicanx youth that were dying as casualties in the South Asian conflict. For months, the Chicano Moratorium group planned a huge march and rally in Los Angeles for August of 1970. When the day came, almost thirty thousand people showed up for the demonstration, making it one of the largest anti-Vietnam war protests in history. The march ended in a park, where there were speeches and performances. In a nearby neighborhood, there was a break-in of a local business and police were called. County and city officers responded by the dozens and they came with riot gear. Without warning or provocation, they rushed into the protest crowd, shooting tear gas, and indiscriminately beating people with clubs. There were several casualties, including the Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar, who was shot in the head with a tear gas projectile that was launched into an enclosed bar.

The casual nature of the police violence in this case, and the easy manner in which police were able to deploy weapons in a deadly way, demonstrated to many Chicanxs that mainstream America would not tolerate even nonviolent dissent from people of color.

Paths Forward Now

When we see the responses from police in today’s headlines we have to wonder whether anything has really changed in the last 50 years. The magnitude of the uprisings is certainly different, even if the state responses are not. The big question is how will the work on the street translate into the kind of institutional and cultural changes necessary to confront and end police violence?

Chicano leader Corky Gonzales presented an outline of reforms in his “El Plan del Barrio” in 1968, as part of his contribution to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. He suggested a program of economic reforms that included housing, jobs, and wealth redistribution that surely merits revisiting today.

A further lesson from the Chicanx experience is the importance of organized communities, like those with CSO, that can support families who find themselves victims of police violence. Sleepy Lagoon, however, demonstrates the need for more sustained work, because police violence is just the tip of the iceberg of state coercion toward communities of color. The Sleepy Lagoon trial reveals the need to think about reforms in the training of lawyers in law schools, and election of prosecutors and local district attorneys and judges. We need also think about the education of social workers, and others charged with public health and child protective services, to make sure they understand the various forms of aggression, macro and micro, directed at young children and their families from society and the state. This would also involve looking at how juvenile justice programs are operating. Much of this is on the agenda of prison abolition projects around the country already, but that then also raises the topic of the corporate intervention in the prison industrial complex that profits off the dehumanization of youth of color and the politicians that benefit from those business entities. Finally, it also means that ordinary white folks need to seriously contend with lingering white supremacy in their families and communities, and everyone, include Chicanx/Latinx people, need to acknowledge and grapple with anti-Black racism that is a cornerstone of the white supremacy that harms us all. Educators will have to craft explicitly anti racist curriculums, and discussions will need to happen in homes, workplaces, and especially, communities of faith.

The experience of Chicanx communities shows us that police violence is not isolated or even recent; it is also not something that can be solved easily by focusing on entirely on the prosecution of a few “bad apples”, or on police force reform. I hope that this history does not make it seem like dealing with this problem is an overwhelming and impossible task. Rather, I hope that we can see that there are many places to get involved, many different sites of struggle, for our energies. But it will indeed be hard.

An Historian’s Thoughts on the Uprisings in Our Cities

By Mark Naison (May 30, 2020)

As an historian, I am am hardly surprised at the uprisings taking place in cities throughout the country.

The murder of George Floyd pushed people filled with rage at their position in Trump’s America over the edge.

It is not just that repeated murders of unarmed Black men and women, by police or self appointed security agents, had convinced many Black people that most whites signed off on policies that terrorized their communities, it is that they saw the rhetoric and policies of the Trump Administration as a daily assault on their safety and security.

In the minds of many people of color, it is wholly predictable– and profoundly infuriating- that a country that could elect a race baiting demagogue like Donald Trump would sign off on the murder of unarmed Blacks, and never send those responsible to prison

Think about it: you are living in country where gun toting, Nazi and Confederate flag waving whites are cheered on by the President while unarmed Black men and women are shot down in the streets and their own homes, and where immigrant children of color are put in cages.

If you think that experience wasn’t making people unbelievably angry, you are ignoring the lessons of history.

At some point, I suspected, that anger, which I know well because I feel it inside myself, was going to break loose. George Floyd’s death may have been the spark, but there were a long chain of grievances which have come to the surface in its wake

I do not know where these uprisings are going, nor how they are going to end.

I do know they have been a long time coming.

Anybody really LISTENING to what their Black/LatinX friends, colleagues,neighbors and family members have been saying over the last few years, in response to provocation after provocation, should hardly be surprised at what is taking place in the streets of our major cities.

We Need a People’s Bailout

By Red Corbeau (April 19, 2020)

It is difficult to argue for a ‘stay at home’ strategy to limit the deaths when so many unemployed people are now wondering where the money is going to come from for food and rent. I understand the temptation to deny the severity of this pandemic and, out of fear, clamor for an immediate re-opening of the economy.

What would make ‘sheltering in place’ more workable for the long term would be:

-to provide adequate and welcoming shelters for those who don’t have them; strengthen and expand the social safety net, including a people’s bailout of at least $2,000.00 a month or more for each household (we know the money is there – and remember? collectively we created all that wealth now held by so few), at least until the pandemic passes (I’d rather see this part of the “bailout” continued);

-across the board forgiveness of debt;

-and a moratorium on rent at least until people can safely return to work.

-We need to also recognize that the entire planet is connected, and unless we want to see the pandemic recurring, we need coordinated international efforts.

All of these things have been proposed, but none of them are likely to happen under this Administration (and maybe the next). So the growing fear of destitution and impoverishment has already been mobilized by the powers that be for a disastrously early “reopening” of the economy, and as the pandemic continues, people are more and more caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

We should be protesting for a People’s Bailout, rather than for the chance to die or kill others to make money for the oligarchy. Ultimately, of course, we need to create a people’s economy that works for all of us.

Structural Racism is the Reason People of Color Are Dying of Covid-19

By Teka Lark (April 13, 2020)

The Surgeon General, Dr. Adams, stated, to paraphrase, that we people of color (Black people and Latinos) need to lay off the alcohol and healthfully eat so that we won’t die of the COVID-19. People were quite (understandably) outraged, but I also found something similar in the Chicago Defender that also outraged me:

“If it was in place now, it would be issuing nutritional, dietary and lifestyle advice to Blacks that emerging research is beginning to suggest that may minimize the effect of the epigenetic damage.”

Respectability politics sometimes comes dressed in a three-piece suit and other times, it comes dressed in kente cloth. Still, regardless of its uniform, in the end, it blames Black people for our oppression, and it refuses to attack the root cause directly (fewer grants in that).

For many reasons, I don’t like the historical trauma argument. It implies that we’re damaged when we are born and that gives alive racists a get out of jail free card. I’m not willing to do that. I’m not throwing it out, but I feel it’s a dangerous game to play with white institutions, because white institutions are always looking at ways to pathologize Blackness and wiggle out of fixing themselves. Fixing themselves would involve no longer existing.

The disparity in care is a massive problem for Black people. It takes us twice as long to get help, and once we get help, it takes us twice as long to convince medical professionals to understand or rather, care what we ware saying. And once we do all that, we’re dead.

From NPR “All Things Considered” from 2016 Analysis by NYC Health

“Five years of data found that black, college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school.”

This analysis and other studies point to a disparity of care.

Another challenge is that Black people live farther from their jobs. Black people and Latinos typically live farther from work and are farther away from good public transit options. That means Black and Latino people generally are walking more than a mile and transferring at least once to get to work. The 2015 “It’s About Time: The Transit Time Penalty and It’s Racial Implications” study of the Minneapolis and Twin Cities area stated that people of color communities were spending 11-46 more hours a year on their commute than white people.

You lose nearly two days of your life just for not being white.

More time commuting means more time being exposed to illness, disease, and just the elements and being in cold weather in addition to stressful commutes lower the immune system.

Another huge issue for Black people is that we typically work in the public sector and the service industry. In July 2010, the Center for Labor Research and Education released a report examining the state of Black workers in the years 2005 – 2007. It found that the public sector is the most critical source of employment for African Americans, and it is the sector that provides us with the highest paying jobs.

Those jobs include education, transportation, sanitation, the postal service. Even when we have degrees, we’re going to be working with the public, owing to the dynamics of race and access in the US.

In 2020 this is still the case.

Outside the public sector, we work in retail services and parts of the health care sector, including home health aides and nursing home workers, jobs that also expose you to the public.

And also the kind of jobs we have outside the public sector tend to be last hired, first fired. Jobs that you can’t do at home, that are at-will employment.

The cemented institutions of racism is the reason that Black people are disproportionately —exposed and dying from COVID-19.

There are no buts here. There are no if we just…no, it’s structural racism, that’s why and that is the only reason why.

References

Nelson, A. (2002). Unequal treatment: Confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Journal of the National Medical Association, 94(8), 666-8.

To Be in the United States During a Pandemic

By Jasper Smith (April 9, 2020)

To be in the United States during a pandemic:

– People without homes are told to stay home.
– People without clean water are told to wash their hands.
– People lose their job and with it their healthcare.
– Most people don’t have enough savings to cover two weeks of lost income to quarantine without paid sick leave.
– Hospitals overflowing with sick patients lose money and threaten to close because they have to cancel elective surgeries.
– People must risk their lives to work and even to vote.
– Kids without internet and computers are told to do school online.
– The market drives up the price of essential consumer and medical supplies.
– Scammers target vulnerable people to cheat them out of what little they have.
– Current and historic inequities compound the losses in communities of color.
– Gun sales surge and some people fear getting shot if they wear a mask for safety.
– Women and children suffer abuse in their homes.
– Politicians vilify immigrants even when a third of our doctors were born in other countries.
– Environmental regulations are suspended to compound the impeding climate crisis.
– Members of Congress use access to information to buy and sell stocks and enhance their wealth.
– Misinformation is more prevalent than information.
– Leaders see a financial crisis and pass a stimulus bill for the wealthy rather than a health crisis needing relief for those in need.
– The president fires the independent oversight for $2 trillion in spending.
– We waste time developing our own test that doesn’t work when functioning tests from other countries were available.
– The president hawks an unproven drug in which he and his allies have financial interests after having previously disbanded the government’s pandemic response team.
– For two months the president tells us there is nothing to worry about and now we lead the world in the most cases and will soon lead in most deaths.

It’s in the Blood of the American Liberal to Lose

By Julio Covarrubias (April 8, 2020)

The most heavily black and Democratic part of Wisconsin has the greatest obstacles to the ballot. It is much easier to vote in Waukesha county, for example; it is 92 percent white and has 50 polling locations for a population of 404,198. Madison, which is 78 percent white, has 66 open polling locations for a population of 258,054. For a population of 48,376, Wauwatosa has 10 polling locations; it’s 86 percent white. Meanwhile, Milwaukee, which is almost 39 percent Black, went from 180 polling locations to just 5 for a population of 592,025.

Outside of Milwaukee, fewer interruptions have been reported, and wait times have been as low as 5 minutes to a half an hour in some suburbs and rural areas. In Milwaukee, it is an average 2.5 hour wait.

What we are seeing is a demonstration of what the journalist Mark Ames noted long ago: the right in this country understand power politics and the left do not. The right are so ruthless they are even willing to take collateral damage to their base in order to gain and retain power, while the “left” (really, the liberal center)–“imagining politics to be a country club instead of a battlefield”–are willing to bend the rules only to keep the center-left from power. They can’t even help themselves, much less aid the people.

Useless. It’s in the blood and marrow of the American liberal to lose; the whole of their recent history is a history of concession and compromise with the right. Rotted out and hollow, they are a limb that has to be amputated for us to survive.