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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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1968

On Monday Earth Day, I was thinking about the student actions for Palestine at universities across the country. I am inspired by the students' bravery. I am sure they are aware of the dangers and that no matter what they will bare costs. I felt sad too.The thoughts about this year brought up memories of 1968.

I was only 13 in 1968. I am sure I conflate things that happend later with that year. But I am just as sure that 1968 rocked the foundations of my world. I was all shook up. Itwas a year that cuts time, where nothing would be as it was.

I was surprised clicking on an old link from my blog to a 50-year retrospective of 1968 in photos put together by Alan Taylor in The Atlantic. To my amasement The Atlantic let me see the article--for well over a year I have not be able to get around their paywall for any articles. If it opens for you it's a very good collection of photos.

I'm sure there are many 13-year olds taking in the events of this year sensing that this year is different. And they are wondering how to proceed.

I was thinking about Earth Day, in 1970. We had moved to Charlotte, NC and I made a really groovy teenager room. On my desk I had envelops with literature about Earth Day. I also had the book The Strawberry Statement. That book is why I had some sense of the 1968 campus protests from a student perspective, albeit a few years after. The title of the book comes from one of Columbia's Deans said in the press which students mocked as "the strawberry statement": "Whether students vote 'yes' or 'no' on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries." The bitterness about diminishing the humanity of studnets ressonated.

One of the parts of the book I remember is the author of the book, James Kunen telling about picking up a hitchhicker. I remember it because he was driving a Dutch car called a Daffodil. In 1968 one of the moms in the car pool drove a Daf. My mom drove an Opel station wagon with a puny engine and another neighbor had an Isetta--it's a bit strange to think of small cars in the sixties. The hitchhicker was Black, Kunen read the guy as Black, but he also observed that hisskin was lighter than his own. It made racism visible in a way worth wrting about.

In 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech laying out the three evils of society: the sickness of racism, poverty--excessive materialism, and militarism. I probably didn't know about the speech, but do believe that I'd internalised, at least by 1970, connections between poverty, militarism and racism. A white kid in the suburbs understood that to be anti-war was also to be anti-racist and anti-colonial. It was important to know that I wasn't the only one.

My education in whiteness was also ramping up, perhaps most obviously as a factor of my age and schooling. I went to a school that was under a court-mandated desegregation plan. I was a new kid at schoo and didn't have lots of friends. There was an underground press that I didn't have much connection to, but I had some. The Earth Day materials are an axample. I would send self-adressed stamped envelops off and sometimes tape quarters to index cards, or send stamps to adresses found in the want ads of The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

I am really happy when I see Zines on the Internet because they're familiar with the life line that made me feel connected. Young people are seeing the news. I am sure that they want to "connect, "to find the other ones" as Timothy Leary famously advised , just as I needed to.

#politics#youth#campus protests#teach in#solidarity#palestine#poverty#racism#militarism
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In 2020, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on subsidies for homeowners — "most families who enjoy this benefit have six-figure incomes and are white" — but just $53 billion on direct housing assistance for low-income families. That's not for lack of need. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only 1 in 4 extremely low-income Americans who qualify for housing aid get it.

Jennifer Ludden at NPR. 'Poverty, By America' shows how the rest of us benefit by keeping others poor

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

#poverty#government subsidies#book#rich people
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The beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names. There is no “failed schools” problem in America, but only government’s failed policy of “benign neglect” that has blighted inner cities and their schools for generations. One has only to consider the historical reason that caused this urban blight: the decades-old urban planning of sustained and systemic neglect that simply wrote off the inner cities to die on the vine, as state and federal funding was diverted to facilitate “white flight” to the suburbs.

Frank Breslin at Dissident Voice. Why America Demonizes its Public-School Teachers

#education#poverty#teaching#schools
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I can no longer call myself an evangelical, because what defines a white evangelical in the United States has become a longing for an authoritarian state where Christianity is prioritized and privileged. This kind of Christian nationalism is entirely at odds with the gospel of Jesus, who told us right from the beginning that he was going to be good news to the poor, the imprisoned, the sick and the oppressed — and that he would be bad news for people who longed to clutch at power and safety and affluence at the expense of their neighbor.

D. L. Mayfield in Religion News. How a Sean Feucht worship service convinced me I am no longer an evangelical

#christian nationalism#reclaiming jesus#poverty#politics
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After all, in every chapter of American history, abolitionists, workers, labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the oppressed have struggled for a better nation not just in streets and workplaces, but in the pulpit, too. In the wreckage of the present Trumpian moment, with a fascistic, white nationalism increasingly ascendant, people of conscience would do well to follow suit.

Liz Theoharis at Tom Dispatch. The Rise of Christian Nationalism in America

Or How to Legislate Evil and Punish the Poor

Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said about the Poor

#poor peoples campaign#poverty#most of us#policy#christian nationalism#reclaiming jesus#book
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When you give the best you have to someone in need, it translates into something much deeper to the receiver. It means that they are worthy.

Kristine Levine in Human Parts at Medium. I’m a Little Too Fat, a Little Too Giving. I Think I Know Why.

Using the hunger I experienced as a kid to teach mine the power of generosity

#generosity#food#brotherhood#solidarity#poverty
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In fact, researchers who focus on health disparities have suspected for decades that people who live in poverty die early because of the stress of poverty itself rather than the poor health choices low-income people make. That’s not to say that poor people don’t make decisions about diet and exercise, but in general they are preoccupied with very different choices than wealthier people are: Should I pay my electricity or my water bill? Can I pay my rent and buy my kid a pair of school shoes? The immediacy of these pressures may make it more difficult to think about how eating choices today will affect health 10 or 20 years from now.

Heather Tirado Gilligan at Slate. Food Deserts Aren’t the Problem

Getting fresh fruits and vegetables into low-income neighborhoods doesn’t make poor people healthier.

#food#poverty#stress
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Against the war

I was 13 years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. My parents were not outspoken against the War in Vietnam. But I was against the war even at that young age.

This week someone posted a link to MLK's speech "The Three Evils of Society" given at the Nation Conference on New Politics in the August 1967. Listening to the speech, I wasn't sure whether I knew MLK was opposed to the War when I was 13. And I wondered how it happened that I became anti-war?

It's not easy to tell accurate stories from memories. I am sure I was sad about much that happened in 1968. I read Time Magazine and Life Magazine and watched TV. Robert Kennedy's assassination in June hit me hard. It wasn't that I was a partisan as much as  feeling that things were falling apart. I was 13, hitting puberty. And I remember one Sunday dinner crying at the table without a clue why.  

On our family trip to New England we stopped briefly in Washington DC. Parking was impossible, and when we'd finally parked my father said something harsh about the Poor People's Campaign that was on-going. I don't remember if we visited the Smithsonian, it is possible. But I think we didn't stay in Washington because parking was so insecure. That memory of being in Washington places the timing of the trip after Robert Kennedy's assassination and before the eviction of Resurrection City in late June.

On that trip I remember seeing a car with an anti-war bumper sticker and being impressed that the occupants of the car were old people. MLK mentions William Sloane Coffin in his "Three Evils" speech. I had heard of him in 1968. Coffin and four others, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber had been indited on conspiracy charges for their activities to resist the War in Vietnam and hinder the draft. Their trial received some press in April of that year.

Clearly  actions of resistance made an impression on me. I am not sure that I put the pieces together coherently. But so many years down the line, Martin Luther King's "Three Evils" rings true now as then.

#war#poverty#racism#memory
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Thomas makes a series of counterintuitive decisions regarding character development and the way the action of her novel unfolds, all of which seem motivated by the concern that feelings of personal identification and empathy, though valuable, are not enough to combat the corrosive force of systemic social problems. By directing our readerly attention away from the personal and the particular and toward the broader social circumstances that shape the fates of her characters, Thomas simultaneously evokes and attempts to counteract the effects of inhabiting a society riven by structural racism and economic inequality.

Mariah Gubar at Public Books. Empathy Is Not Enough

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

#book#structural racism#poverty#racism#representation
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Microfinance has become a socially acceptable mechanism for extracting wealth and resources from poor people.

Jason Hickel in The Guardian. The microfinance delusion: who really wins?

Far from being a panacea, small loans add to poverty and undermine people by saddling them with unsustainable debt, argues anthropologist Jason Hickel

#poverty#debt#microfinace#economics
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For tens of millions of Americans, the source of deep workaday insecurity isn’t the standard roster of foreign enemies, but an ever-more entrenched system of inequality, still growing, that stacks the political deck against the least well-off Americans. They lack the bucks to hire big-time lobbyists. They can’t write lavish checks to candidates running for public office or fund PACs. They have no way of manipulating the myriad influence-generating networks that the elite uses to shape taxation and spending policies. They are up against a system in which money truly does talk -- and that’s the voice they don’t have. Welcome to the United States of Inequality.

Rajan Menon at TomDispatch. National (In)Security In the United States of Inequality

#poverty#influence#democracy#power#inequality
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policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk

Via From Poverty To Power. Davos is here again, so it’s time for Oxfam’s new report on prosperity and poverty, wealth and work.

Oxfam’s report ‘Reward work not wealth’, out today, looks at these statistics and analyses what this means for people. It headlines on this last bullet point: last year, for every $5 of wealth created, $4 went to the already wealthy. So what does this look like for different people around the world?

#davos#poverty#inequality#work
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I must honestly say to you that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation, discrimination, colonialism and these particular forces. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I must say to you tonight that I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence, for in a day when Sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or non-existence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. And I assure you that I will never adjust to the madness of militarism.

Martin Luther King, Jr. from a transcript at Democracy Now!. Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa

#militarism#poverty#racism#martin luther king
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It's more comfortable to talk about inequality and poverty outside the context of race. More than half the country thinks past or present discrimination is not a major factor in why black Americans face problems today. But in the past, it was OK to literally build a wall between a white neighborhood and black neighborhood. That was a lot easier to point at and say: Hey, that's racist. Now, those concrete symbols of racism are largely gone and what's left are their systemic effects. Sometimes, that makes it hard to be as outraged. But in this country, we forced people into toxic neighborhoods based on the color of their skin, and it still plays an overwhelming role in which people gets a real shot to be healthy, happy, and hopeful. In other words, the walls are still there.

Alvin Chang at Vox. Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life

#poverty#housing#networks#racism
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The FHA held the view that the presence of minorities in a neighborhood would increase homeowners’ risk of default. The neighborhoods that the FHA deemed risky, they colored red on a map. This action gave rise to the term “red-lining” and made it extremely difficult (and in some cases impossible) for black people to become homeowners. The FHA’s refusal didn’t deter the developer. He had a solution. He would build a wall to separate the two neighborhoods. That would send a loud and clear signal that blacks and whites didn’t live in the same neighborhood.

Ardelia Lee in the Daily Detroit. The Detroit Wall: A Tale of How Federal Policy Helped Divide A City

#fha#law#poverty#redlining#racism
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In many of the city’s low-income neighbourhoods, social and economic changes and cuts in public sector funding mean that people don’t come together in the ways they used to through faith-, place- or work-based forms of voluntary association. Libraries, pubs and community centres have closed down, making it almost impossible in some areas for groups to find somewhere to congregate together regularly.

Sophie King in Transformation at Open Democracy. When you get a front door, remember to leave it open

A Manchester-South Africa exchange reveals striking similarities in the dynamics of urban inequality.

Slum/Shack Dwellers International

#poverty#housing#cultural exchange
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