Declaration of Interdependence

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Posted by Pierre Berastain

I recently came across this Call to Action video by Let it Ripple.  Given that my work centers around restorative justice, I found the clip particularly compelling.  What would it be to feel interconnected?  What change would it create in our communities?  The implications of interdependence and interconnectedness are powerful: it is a call to  LGBQ/T rights, children rights, a more humane immigration reform in our country.  To read the Declaration of Interdependence, please click here.

Harlem activist gets justice

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By Alan Bean

Joseph “Jazz” Heyden, a Harlem activist accused of carrying a dangerous weapon (a miniature, souvenir Yankees bat) in his vehicle, got some very good news yesterday.  Jazz has been a vital part of a movement working to end the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy which is largely reserved for young men of color.  I should note that the attorney representing Mr. Heyden, Sarah Kunstler, is (a) the proud daughter of the famous civil rights attorney William Moses Kunstler, and (b) the co-producer (with her sister Emily) of an excellent documentary that became the foundation of the fight for justice in Tulia, Texas.

Jazz Heyden and his supporters have argued that the defendant’s car was pulled over by officers who had previously been filmed by Mr. Heyden out of a desire for retribution.  Although the DA’s office argues for the record that these claims are not supported by the facts, that should be interpreted as a face-saving gesture rather than a serious argument.

Weapons Charges Reduced for a Monitor of the Police

By KIA GREGORY

Prosecutors in Manhattan have agreed to reduce weapons charges against a Harlem community activist who was arrested after a traffic stop in his former neighborhood last year.

Around 9 p.m. on Dec. 2, the community activist, Joseph Hayden, was pulled over by the police near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 132nd Street for a broken taillight. According to the criminal complaint, the officers searched his vehicle and found a wooden club and a switchblade.

Mr. Hayden, 71, known for filming videos of police interactions with the Harlem community, said the officers had stopped him in retaliation. Months before his arrest, he said, he had filmed and questioned the same officers as they conducted a vehicle search in the area.

Molly Brottmiller, an assistant district attorney, said in an appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday that the office found “no merit to these claims” and had concluded through an investigation that the stop was lawful.

But prosecutors said that there were issues with the weapons. (more…)

Honoring the real Fannie Lou Hamer

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fannie-lou-hamer-statue

By Alan Bean

A statue has been erected in the Ruleville, Mississippi home of civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer.  I have read several stories related to this event, and thus far not one of them mentions the ugly fact that Ms. Hamer, along with several companions, were beaten half to death in the Montgomery County Jail in June of 1963.

It is inspiring to learn that Fannie Lou Hamer’s gospel singing inspired a beleaguered handful of black sharecroppers to enter a courthouse in Indianola.  But the shameful side of the story is often passed over without comment.  It is shameful that courthouse personnel refused to allow Hamer and friends to register, as is the fact that she was summarily fired when she returned to her Sunflower County plantation, as is the fact that, later that night, someone fired a shotgun at the home in which Fannie Lou took refuge.

It is inspiring to imagine an intrepid Fannie Lou Hamer telling Hubert Humphrey that the Freedom Democrats of Mississippi didn’t come all the way to the Atlantic City Democratic Convention in 1964 “for no two votes”.  It is shameful that Lyndon Johnson, the civil rights president, called a press conference for the sole purpose of deflecting media attention away from Ms. Hamer’s testimony before the credentials committee.

But Fannie Lou got the best of the world’s most powerful man, a man who dismissed her as “that ignorant woman”.  Johnson feared, with good reason, that if the Mississippi Freedom Democrats were accepted as delegates in good standing, he would lose the support of Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland and white votes across the South.  Hamer’s testimony was so gripping that all three major networks featured her entire presentation on the evening news.  America was treated to a blow-by-blow account of the indignities Fannie Lou Hamer and her friends experienced at the courthouse in Indianola and the horrors she encountered in Montgomery County, Mississippi.  She left nothing to the imagination.

America was never the same.

I was pleased to see that the daughter of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers was present for unveiling of Fannie Lou’s statue.  The article failed to mention that Evers was assassinated while Hamer and her companions were being assaulted in Montgomery County.  Fannie Lou Hamer was an untutored woman with a courageous heart, a powerful singing voice, and a genius for grassroots organizing.  The price for changing America was steep, but Fannie Lou paid it in full.  God rest her soul.

Please click on the video and listen to the words that changed America.

Affirmative action and the traumatized twentieth

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By Alan Bean

As this excellent article in Colorlines suggests, simple racial inequality has no bearing on the affirmative action debate, and for one simple reason:

 In order to argue that affirmative action is necessary to remedy past discrimination, schools would have to present evidence showing that they’ve previously discriminated against the groups they’re now going to great lengths to admit. Doing so would open them up to litigation from students of color who’d been denied.

With equity off the table, universities have only one legally acceptable argument: affirmative action creates a diverse student body and diversity is intrinsically beneficial to students. This argument makes sense to white administrators who would feel uncomfortable presiding over a homogeneous student body.  According to Colorlines: (more…)

Are we losing our religion?

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By Alan Bean

“About 19.6 percent of Americans say they are ‘nothing in particular,’ agnostic or atheist, up from about 8 percent in 1990.” That statistic is from a report released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  Most of the folks in the broad “None” category (68%) believe in a God of some kind; it’s just that they have no use for organized religion and don’t relate to any of the traditional religious labels.

And then there’s the surprising fact that the Unitarian Universalists grew nationwide by 15.8% in the past decade.  Who knew?

Meanwhile, Southern Baptists have been experiencing five straight years of membership decline and have now fallen below the magic 16 million figure they worked so hard to attain.

Overall, evangelical churches are still growing (albeit with less vigor than formerly) while old mainline Protestant denominations like the United Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians continue a half-century plunge in membership and cultural influence. In other words, we are seeing growth among those who define God and the godly life in explicit terms and among those who don’t want to nail anything down.

How do we account for the significant growth on the liberal end of the religious spectrum?  According to the WP acticle, the “none of the above” people

are strongly liberal on social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage, but no different from the public overall and the religiously affiliated on their preference for a smaller government providing fewer services.  If they have an issue, it’s that they don’t believe religion and politics should mix.

The “Nones” celebrate the separation of church and state because the Religious Right has become such a dominant force within the Republican Party. Back in 1972, Dean Kelley argued that conservative churches are growing because they place strong doctrinal and behavioral demands on their members.  The liberal mainline was in decline because their “can’t-we-all-just-get-along” piety gave congregants little for the heart or the head to feed on. (more…)

Gramma Jesus, Jubillee theology and the New Jim Crow

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Dr. Iva Carruthers

By Alan Bean

Yesterday, I spent eight hours listening to Texans talk about the impact of mass incarceration (more on that in a moment).  This morning I am sitting in a McDonald’s in Beaumont, Texas eating an Egg McMuffin and listening to the weather channel compete with FOX news.  I usually tell the young woman behind the counter (if, as is usually the case, she is African American) that FOX is insulting to our president and that upsets me.  But I don’t have the energy for that this morning.

I am in Beaumont to visit Ramsey Muniz, the Latino political leader serving a federal life sentence for his part in a non-existent narcotics conspiracy.   Normally, visitors are allowed to enter the visitor’s area at 8:30, but this morning we were told that we would have to wait three hours to see our loved ones because “we’re doing a fog count.”

It isn’t foggy in Beaumont.  Seasonably humid, perhaps, but you can see for miles in any direction.  The sign on the prison door says, “No visitation until 11:30.”  No, “we apologize for the inconvenience,” or “please accept our apology, but . . .”  This is prison, folks.

I informed the four twenty-something attendants in the visitation area that this kind of messaging combined with a totally unnecessary “fog count” constitutes an insult to the families who have come to visit.  They reacted as if I was being a smart-ass (which I was).  The rules are the rules.  Fog counts are very serious business.  Some inmate might wander off in the fog.  The fact that there is no fog this morning changes nothing.

So I got in my car and drove fifteen miles to this McDonald’s.  I can afford the $3.50 in gas; most of the other visitors cannot.  They will sit in the parking log for three long hours, trying to keep the toddlers entertained.  The shame and disgrace of incarceration clings to the families of the incarcerated.

Which brings me back to yesterday’s full day of testimony concerning prisons, inmates, inmates-in-waiting (the children of the incarcerated) and the mechanics of the New Jim Crow. (more…)

Why Obama lost the debate

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By Alan Bean

My guess is that Mitt Romney will soon be neck-and-neck with the president in most swing states.  Nationally, the GOP candidate may soon move a point or two ahead.  Debates don’t always such deep impact, of course, but this one was different.  Barack Obama’s lead in the polls was based on two factors: a Democratic convention where everyone stayed on message, and an infamous video that made Romney look like a heartless, out of touch, let-them-eat-cake plutocrat.  Romney sank in the polls because he looked like a jerk.

Last night, Romney redefined himself. (more…)

Weird political predictions

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By Alan Bean

John Hagee, the San Antonio preacher whose endorsement John McCain sought then rejected in 2008, is making bold predictions about the consequences of a second Obama term.

“I have said it before and I will say it again: the election on Nov. 6, 2012 for the office of president is the day of decision for America. Four more years of Obama will bring absolute socialism to America. Our children and grandchildren will never know the greatness of America that we have experienced.

“This must not happen! … I am asking the Christians of America to join us in 40 days of prayer for this presidential election. These 40 days of prayer will begin on Sept. 28, 2012. You can do it individually or in groups, but prayer is the most powerful force God has given us to bring our nation back to righteousness. I’ll be saying more about this as the year progresses, but mark it on your calendar and start telling your family, friends, and church members now about the 40 days of prayer.”

To place this in context, let’s remember James Dobson’s predictions about how America would look if Obama got a first term.  Dobson, the erstwhile head of Focus on the Family, is a far more responsible source than Hagee, yet as Fred Clark notes, every single prediction he made in his “Letter From 2012 in Obama’s America” was dead wrong.   (more…)

Where corporations are persons and the undocumented are not

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By Alan Bean

With the first presidential debate looming, Mitt Romney has moved to the center on the immigration issue.  He still promises to oppose the DREAM act, if elected, to veto the bill if it passes congressional muster.  But Romney now says he would honor the work visas which, at President Obama’s direction, are currently being awarded to young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

As Ross Douthat (with admirable cynicism) pointed out in a recent column, when it comes to the immigration issue, presidential aspirants can win votes by exhibiting compassion (George W. Bush, Rick Perry) or by playing mean (Mitt Romney during the primary season), but there is no advantage to waffling between these two strategies.  Like most right-leaning pundits, Douthat favors using immigration as a wedge issue:

 Taking a more restrictionist position and using the issue to portray the Democrats as beholden to their party’s ethnic interest groups and out of step with blue collar Americans’ concerns.

The wise course, in other words, is to drive a wedge between hardworking Latinos and Anglos.  Nice, Ross.  A self-proclaimed “Christian” columnist advocates this sort of nastiness and no one cries “for shame!”  That’s the America we live in.  Christianity, it seems, has no moral application unless we’re talking about abortion.

Texas politicians like George W. Bush and Rick Perry are “soft on immigration” because their support base includes a lot of agribusiness people who couldn’t survive without cheap undocumented labor.  Alienating Latino voters might benefit Republicans in the short-term; but it is a long-term loser.

It is also devilish, but hey, in American politics you’ve got to give the devil his due.

Romney and Obama are both waffling on the immigration issue.  Obama claims to be working for comprehensive immigration reform (known as CIR in immigration reform circles), but he also deported a record 400,000 undocumented immigrants last year, three-quarters of them to Mexico.  To put that in context, that’s the same number of undocumented residents the United States deported between 1908 and 1980. In theory, the feds are deporting criminals, “the worst of the worst”.  In reality, half of the deportees have no criminal record and most of the “criminals” represent little threat to American public safety.

Historically, American politicians of both parties have waffled on immigration, bouncing between compassion and demagoguery.  In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a bill that exchanged amnesty for many undocumented immigrants for assurances that the border would be closed to new arrivals.  Typically, the approach has been to privilege on group of undocumented Americans at the expense of other undocumented groups.  The DREAM act, for instance, would allow young people who came to the United States as children to obtain work permits and apply for citizenship, but their parents, and children who arrived too late, would be out of luck.

This good-immigrant-bad-immigrant approach is fundamentally unfair and utterly unworkable.  We gain nothing by kicking the immigration can down the road.

Politicians like Obama and Romney can’t be more progressive (or regressive) than the American middle.  A new poll suggests that the majority of Americans now favor providing a path to citizenship over mass deportation.  This shift occurred, I suspect, because Barack Obama found the courage to protect (albeit temporarily) DREAM act young people from immediate deportation.

Few of us think our way to an opinion.  We listen to what significant others are saying and follow suit.  We don’t all march to the same drummer, but few of us supply our own drum track.  True reform will come when both major parties realize that they can get one of their people elected president, or they can enrage the Latino electorate, but they can’t do both.

Here’s the results of the CNN poll: (more…)

Imprisoned by the walls that divide us

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By Alan Bean

The United States of America is an uncommonly religious nation.  More to the point, we are an uncommonly Christian nation, at least insofar as stated religious affiliation is concerned (whether we actually reflect the soul of Jesus Christ is another matter altogether).  In the midst of startling ethnic diversity, three great cultures dominate: Latino, African American and Anglo.  Many things divide these three segments of the human family, but religion is not one of them.  Brown, Black and White, we are all overwhelmingly Christian.  In theory, we should all moralize and vote in a distinctly Christian fashion.  We should share a common moral discourse.

But we don’t.

Latinos, Blacks and Whites are all divided by internal political and ideological disputes, of course, but valid generalizations are possible.

For instance, Latinos, as a group, are deeply concerned about mass deportation, Blacks agonize over mass incarceration, and Whites, for the most part, give little thought to either issue.

Stout walls have gone up between us. These fortifications simplify our moral worlds by ensuring that we don’t have too much worry on our plates. But the walls lock us into tiny, constricted worlds.  We are deep in denial, imprisoned by fear and self-imposed ignorance.

There is nothing surprising in this.  Humans have a limited capacity for pain and complexity.  We worry more about our dogs and cats than the plight of the poor and the prisoner because puppies and kittens rub against our legs and demand our attention.  We love our immediate families with a singular intensity because we share a common history and anticipate a shared destiny.  We don’t care so much about other people’s kids because we don’t know them and most likely will never know them. (more…)