Carl Anthony co-founded Race, Poverty and the Environment in 1990. In this interview with RP&E editor B. Jesse Clarke, Anthony shares his reflections on some of the key milestones that led to the creation of the Journal and its role in the ever-evolving environmental justice movement. Recorded at the studios of the National Radio Project, this interview introduces Radio RP&E—Podcasts and Broadcasts from the national journal of social and environmental justice. Read an edited excerpt below or listen to the full interview.  http://new.reimaginerpe.org/carl-anthony-on-earth-day-founding-of-rpe

Jesse Clarke:  Can you talk a little bit about where the environmental movement was on Earth Day 1970?

Carl Anthony: Earth Day 1970 was started, in part, as a result of the work of Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962. That book and similar research on the effects of DDT sparked a growing interest in the environment that went beyond protecting wildlife and open spaces. In some ways, it was paradoxical, because it became a powerful protest movement that was also distancing itself from issues of race and social justice.

Some proponents of environmentalism sought to use it to put a closure on the struggles of the 1960s and launch a new kind of consciousness about the earth and the environment, without really addressing issues of social and racial justice. But in fact, all these movements were interrelated. Many people, for innumerable reasons, were really upset with the dominant society and the way in which it was destroying both culture and places. Indeed, the new environmental movement owed something to the civil rights movement.

Earth Day was organized as a “teach in” about the earth as proposed by then Senator Gaylord Nelson. The teach-in can be traced back to the anti-war movement and before that, to the freedom schools of the civil rights movement. And so, the first Earth Day actually came out of that tradition.

The anti-war movement [gathered] steam just as the civil rights movement was winding down, and the environmental movement came in and got a lot of energy from the anti-war movement. The environmentalists learned from the civil rights movement how to mobilize a large number of people. But it was mostly a white movement... European Americans.

Clarke: Jumping ahead two decades, in 1990 environmentalism was still basically a white, middle-class movement.

Anthony: Yes, it was. So much so that 150 civil rights groups wrote a letter to the "Big Ten" mainstream environmental groups in January 1990, complaining that the memberships, the staffs, and the boards of directors of these organizations were almost all white. But most devastating of all, their priorities really reflected the issues of [concern to] predominantly suburban constituencies, and not [those] of people of color. Many actually went against the interests of the communities of color.

Then in 1987, the United Church of Christ put out a report [entitled] “Toxic Waste and Race,” which touched off a shift. That report revealed that the most reliable predictor of where toxic waste dumps are located was among communities of color. Three out of five communities of color were at risk from these toxic waste dumps. [1]

Clarke: How did the launch of RP&E come about?

Anthony: At about this time, Luke Cole and I went to a public interest legal conference in Oregon. A thousand lawyers were there, all of whom were white. In reaction to this experience, when we got home we had a little caucus with a few people to talk about [issues that concern] people of color and the environment. We wanted to reach out to others who had similar concerns and to publish them. We were hit by a barrage of stories from all over the country. Apparently, people all over were [becoming] aware that the time had come for this movement. We published their work in a journal that became the forerunner of RP&E.

Then in October 1991, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice convened a conference in Washington [to which] about 600 people came from across the United States. About 400 of these people were actually from communities of color grassroots organizations. The conference managed to synthesize all the different issues and concerns [of the attendees] into 17 principles of environmental justice, which were then published in many journals and books.

Clarke: How did you begin to develop this concept of moving environmentalism into an urban context?

Anthony: Because of the white bias of the environmental movement, there was almost no talk about cities, even though 85 percent of the population of the United States lived in cities and metropolitan areas. The white environmental movement was focused mostly on wilderness protection... on protecting the water, the land, the air; and also increasingly on looking at biological resources. But the fact of the matter is that all this pollution actually comes from the cities.

Even though there was a lot of focus on the issue of toxic pollution, which was becoming a huge problem for everybody in the country in 1990, there was a full range of issues that was not being discussed. Many of the problems in our communities came from the fact that there had been this rapid expansion of the suburbs, which was contributing to sprawl and to the abandonment of the inner city.

I had the honor and the privilege of introducing the issue of transportation justice at the first people-of-color environmental leadership summit along with Eric Mann, who started the Bus Riders’ Union in Los Angeles, and Barry Commoner, who had run for President of the United States under the Peace and Justice Party.

Although we introduced this idea of transportation justice at that summit, the issues go back a long way. It was really a new framing of an old issue. People who know about civil rights realize that transportation justice is deeply embedded in the civil rights movement.

Clarke: All the way back to Plessy...

Anthony: Yes, to Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) and more recently to Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which came to the fore because of the inequitable investment in school busses. And of course, we have Rosa Parks. So, in many ways, it was just us putting a new label on something that people already understood deeply.

One of the really remarkable things that we have grown used to, yet have a very shallow historical perception of, is our over-reliance on automobiles. In 1900 there were, practically speaking, no automobiles, no paved roads. In an incredibly short period of time—just over 100 years—the automobile has changed all the countries and all the people in the world. Freeways have literally paved the way for the abandonment of our cities.

I mean in terms of transportation policy in this country the government has been underwriting people running from each other. Not just from the black people--they’re running from each other.

And this is simply not sustainable because of the direct relationship between this pattern of over-reliance on automobiles as an escape and the CO2 emissions that come from the automobiles. This has to come to an end.

Clarke: As you look at the trajectory of the environmental justice movement, what do you consider some of its key victories over the course of this time?

Anthony: It’s now a worldwide movement. Putting the concept of environmental justice on the global radar screen is one big accomplishment. Also, the whole issue of the intersection of public health and the environment and the growing awareness of the public health challenges of the way we build our cities.

Clarke: In what respect has the movement fallen short? What remains basically unchanged?

Anthony: Well, I’m actually a bit of an optimist about all this. I remember seeing a television program with [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger about two weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall where he said: “This is absolutely stable. This will never fall.” Within two years we saw the demise of the Soviet Union.

I believe that there are changes that take a long time to come [to fruition] but when they happen, they are big. Right now, the biggest challenge that we’re facing is global warming and climate change. And although the climate issue is unique, in some ways, it is still the same old thing. It’s about who’s in power, who makes the decisions, who [reaps] the benefits, and who bears the burden.

Clarke: What are some of the intellectual issues you’d like to see RP&E bring to the fore? And what kinds of discussions do you believe should be engendered amongst the current generation that’s talking about these issues but has not framed them in these terms.

Anthony: I have a funny story about the San Francisco school district. They came out with a report about 15 years ago that said. “Eighty-six percent of the population in the school district of San Francisco are minorities, and sixteen percent are the majority.”

Clarke: New math.

Anthony: Yes, but seriously, this big demographic shift is going to cause us to re-think a lot of things. In California now, the majority population is people of color.[2] By 2023, the children of the people of color will be the majority of children in the United States and by 2043, people of color will be the majority population in the United States of America. This is a radical transformation that we have not quite caught up with. It’s going to make everybody redefine who we are as a people and as a country.

Clarke: In fact, the people who have been running the country have been the minority all along. It’s about three or four percent of the population controlling the key levers of power.

Anthony: Exactly.

Clarke: So, back to the question of what coalition of people could really gain political power to change the direction of this country and the world?

Anthony: All of the social movements that we have thought about over the last couple of decades—the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the labor movement, the indigenous people’s movements—have evolved in the last couple of hundred years and have a common root. This is a global movement. We’re a little behind. The transnational corporations have been two or three steps ahead of us. But we have the numbers—if only we can really begin to understand our relationship to each other. And I feel pretty optimistic about that.

Clarke: But if you look at the fundamental power relationships and the methodologies available to movements to challenge power—the legal track, the legislative track, the popular movement track, the direct action track—which tracks can lead us to that critical moment of the sudden dissolution of the empire?

Anthony: One of the things that came out of my own journey in the environmental movement is that my own sense of time has really expanded. This sense of deep time is something that I really didn’t have before. As an African American, my sense was that everything terrible began in 1619 when the black people were brought over here, enslaved, and forced to work in the plantations.

In order for us to make sense of this, we have to have a story that goes back to the beginning of creation. The crisis that we’re facing globally is actually disturbing the basic patterns of life on the planet and is the worst period of extinction for creatures on this planet in 65 million years.

This is bigger than capitalism. It’s bigger than imperialism. It’s bigger than all the isms, all the movements, and all the struggles we’ve had. And there’s gonna be hell to pay!

As a result, we have a global consciousness that’s beginning to emerge at the grassroots level. People all over the world are engaged in a collaboration even if they don’t know who the other people are. And even though corporate interests—and the one percent of the population that controls over half of the global wealth—are making all the decisions that are putting us at huge risk, there is something much bigger going on.

You know that poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade about the British soldiers who were charging into this battle unaware that there were thousands and thousands of people on the other side of the mountain? They were up against something much bigger than they expected. The British thought the sun would never set on their empire, but it did.

So, you know, as bad as the corporations are at a transnational level, there’s something bigger happening here. And being a part of that is really inspiring for me.

Carl Anthony is the co-founder of Urban Habitat, Race Poverty & the Environment Journal and is also co-founder with Doctor Paloma Pavell of Breakthrough Communities.  B. Jesse Clarke has been the Editor of RP&E since 2005.
Special thanks to Making Contact and the National Radio Project for helping with this recording.

Endnotes

[1] http://urbanhabitat.org/node/5346

[2] According to the US Census Bureau White persons of non-hispanic origin are 42.3%, however as a racial category most Latinos are counted as white. White persons, percent, 2008 (a) 76.6%; White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2008 42.3% "California QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau:". US Census Bureau. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html. Retrieved December 26, 2009.
 

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 1, No.1: Earth Day

By Carl Anthony and Luke Cole

The idea for the RP&E Newsletter grew out of a caucus of interested people at the University of Oregon's Public Interest Law Conference, held March 14, 1990. Caucus participants recognized the importance of increased attention to the nexus of race, class, and environmental issues, and the need for a forum in which to continue their dialogue. The caucus decided on a newsletter as the vehicle to continue our dialogue, and the two of us were delegated the task of putting it out.

Since the meeting in Oregon, we have circulated questionnaires to the original group, and have talked to a number of people about the RP&E Newsletter. Many people around the country are exploring the intersection of race, poverty, and the environment. We come at it from different places. Some of us are environmental designers, some poverty lawyers, others grassroots activists. Some are students; others are part of "mainstream" environmental groups. Some are urban planners, religious workers, health care professionals, government officials. Some of us are low-income, others privileged. Some are people of color, some white, some highly educated, some self-educated. All of us are concerned about the disproportionate impact environmental hazards have on low-income and minority communities. And all of us need information to keep us abreast of activities, articles, events, and people working in the area. We hope that this newsletter will be a source of that information.

The EJ Movement By Robert Bullard It is important for us to talk about the challenges we still face after three decades of the environmental justice movement. When put in context, the environmental justice movement is a very young movement compared to many of the other environmental and conservation movements. The fact that it has evolved over such a short period of time makes it difficult in some ways to compare what it has been able to accomplish over three decades versus the environmental movement, which in some cases is over 150 years old. But I do think the new challenges that we face today include climate change, especially as it impacts the health and well being of vulnerable populations. As new climate policy is implemented, we have to make sure that equity and justice are brought to bear, because the communities that are hit worst, first, longest, and hardest in terms of climate change are the same communities that are also hit hardest, worst, and longest by other environmental problems, such as air quality, hazardous waste, pollution and lead poisoning. Let me give you an example. When we develop our transportation policy, the people  impacted by cutbacks in transit are the same people who do not own cars, oftentimes work at minimum wage jobs or are trying to ?nd work, and who also live in cities where nonattainment is a big problem. So, we have to ensure that our climate policy is based on a good transportation policy and a good energy policy, and also ensure that clean and renewable energy is available to all without regard to socioeconomic status. Just because some people have a lot of money and can afford to install solar panels and retro?t their houses to save energy, they should not be the only ones able to access energy-saving technologies. Those kinds of technologies need to be available across the board, regardless of income, class, or ethnicity. Robert Bullard is a professor at Georgia's Clark Atlanta University and the director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center. This comment is excerpted from Environmental Justice Journal. ©2010 Mary Ann Liebert.

This first issue is by necessity a bare-bones model—we are still in the process of working out what the newsletter should be, how grand a scale we want to attempt, how ambitious we can all be. Like the caucus at which the newsletter was born, we would like the newsletter to be a democratic, relatively free-form dialogue, an honest sharing of stories and strategies, resources and relevant events. The success and health of the newsletter will depend on you, the readers—for contributions in the form of articles, book reviews, stories from your community, resources, upcoming events of interest, profiles of activists; for constructive criticism of our communal efforts; for mailing lists of people who should receive the RP&E Newsletter; and for creative funding ideas so that we can get this thing off the ground. It is up to you. We are willing to be the conduit through which your information passes, but we are not willing to do all the work of tracking down articles and contributors. Let us know what is going on out there.

We operate under several premises: First, that poor people and people of color have long been "environmentalists"—people concerned with the health of their communities—but have been defined out of the "environmental movement" by forces beyond their control. This is not to point fingers, but instead to recognize the historical contributions of poor people and people of color to protecting our environment. DDT was first banned from use not by the U.S. government, but by United Farm Workers' contracts with grape growers in the late 1960s—farmworkers who understood the dangers of pesticides and who today continue the fight for their elimination. As one Latina community leader told a group of white, middle class environmentalists recently, “Welcome to the environmental movement!”

To understand the nexus of race, poverty, and the environment, we must be aware of the way people engaged in struggle view themselves, their culture, needs, and priorities. For many environmentalists, success or failure of a project is measured in specialized ways: legislation passed, a project halted. For people living in communities, the connections must be viewed more holistically. How does the project strengthen local leadership? How does it create new opportunities for cooperation? The RP&E Newsletter will cover proactive neighborhood revitalization strategies, such as tree planting and creek restoration, as well as protest; what people are thinking as well as what they are doing.

Further, we must continue to build the bridges that have been tentatively constructed in the past few years between mainstream environmentalists and grassroots environmentalists, in a way which preserves the autonomy of community groups. One of our primary purposes is to strengthen the networks between environmental groups and working people, people of color, and poor people. Consequently, we seek articles, book reviews, and stories, which highlight a range of interests, attitudes, and practices within such groups: from established national organizations, such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club to grassroots organizers, cultural workers, and communities.

Finally, this movement is broad enough for each of us to make our own niche, so long as we are aware of what others are doing and we are all working in the same direction. Differences in tactics or style should not divide us, nor should differences in culture, color, language, or class background—if this happens, the polluters win. Industry has been successful at pitting us against each other in the past. We must work together in the future.

The Need for New Coalitions By David Brower Our reckless use of energy is creating acid rain, global warming, endangering the ozone barrier, and we're not doing enough about it. What can we do to be more effective? We can try to build better coalitions among people, among nations, among organizations. We must recognize that environmental hazards affect people as well as wilderness. Toxics, pollution, and pesticides especially affect poor people and people of color. We as environmentalists must build bridges to people affected by those hazards if our movement is to succeed. We have begun to build such bridges in our Fate and Hope of the Earth conferences. We've had these conferences in New York, Washington, and Ottawa. Last June, we had 1,200 people from 60 countries at a great conference in Managua, Nicaragua. The next conference will be in Zimbabwe in the fall of 1991. We're trying to get something going in the Soviet Union, Japan, and in other parts of the world. We're trying to get as many different kinds of organizations into this whole act of keeping the earth a livable one. An enormous amount of good can be done if we have multicultural and multi-racial teams—cross-generational, male and female—going around to various spots in the developed nations, as well as the nations of the South, to help them recover from the damage done by the industrial revolution. Their work could focus on the out-of-doors, the soils, and the forest. But it could also help to put the cities back together again, to get the hearts of cities that are deteriorated fixed up. It's a great challenge, one of the most important there is, and also one of the most important opportunities. Building organizational bridges is exactly what the International Green Corps is about and Earth Island is doing everything it can to make this project succeed. David Brower was executive director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He died in 2000.

Several procedural points:
Time. We are proposing that the RP&E Newsletter be quarterly, with the next issue out in July.
Money. This first issue was underwritten by the Earth Island Institute and the California Communities at Risk Project of California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. Production and distribution of the newsletter is expensive however, and this arrangement is not sustainable. We are currently exploring other sources of funding and your ideas are welcome.

Place. A quick glance at this newsletter will betray its West-Coastedness—many of the events listed and players described are from the Western U.S., specifically California. This is not purposeful exclusion of other regions—it's simply that the two of us are "in the loop" for West Coast events, and don't always hear about what is going on around the country. This is also an appeal for you to send us information.

People. This newsletter began out of a group of about 30 interested people and fell onto our shoulders quite by accident. We pulled together some articles of interest with the help of the original caucus; we now rely on you to send us new stuff. Our initial mailing will be to several hundred people around the country. We need your help in building our mailing list. If we want to expand the scope and distribution of the newsletter, an editorial or advisory board may be an important next step.

In 1990, Carl Anthony was a board member of Earth Island Institute and a co-founder of Earth Island's Urban Habitat Program. An architect and development consultant, at that time he served on the board of the Center for Economic Conversion and Urban Ecology.

Luke Cole was the staff attorney and coordinator of the California Communities at Risk Project of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, where he was preparing a report on the impact of environmental hazards on poor people. Anthony continues to serve as a board member of Urban Habitat. Luke Cole died in 2009.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Subscribe to Reimagine Podcasts: RSS FEED  | ITunes

Carl Anthony co-founded Race, Poverty and the Environment in 1990. In this interview with RP&E editor B. Jesse Clarke, Anthony shares his reflections on some of the key milestones that led to the creation of the Journal and its role in the ever-evolving environmental justice movement. Recorded at the studios of the National Radio Project, this interview introduces Radio RP&E—Podcasts and Broadcasts from the national journal of social and environmental justice. Read an edited excerpt below or listen to the full interview.

Jesse Clarke:  Can you talk a little bit about where the environmental movement was on Earth Day 1970?

Carl Anthony: Earth Day 1970 was started, in part, as a result of the work of Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring in 1962. That book and similar research on the effects of DDT sparked a growing interest in the environment that went beyond protecting wildlife and open spaces. In some ways, it was paradoxical, because it became a powerful protest movement that was also distancing itself from issues of race and social justice.

Some proponents of environmentalism sought to use it to put a closure on the struggles of the 1960s and launch a new kind of consciousness about the earth and the environment, without really addressing issues of social and racial justice. But in fact, all these movements were interrelated. Many people, for innumerable reasons, were really upset with the dominant society and the way in which it was destroying both culture and places. Indeed, the new environmental movement owed something to the civil rights movement.

Earth Day was organized as a “teach in” about the earth as proposed by then Senator Gaylord Nelson. The teach-in can be traced back to the anti-war movement and before that, to the freedom schools of the civil rights movement. And so, the first Earth Day actually came out of that tradition.

The anti-war movement [gathered] steam just as the civil rights movement was winding down, and the environmental movement came in and got a lot of energy from the anti-war movement. The environmentalists learned from the civil rights movement how to mobilize a large number of people. But it was mostly a white movement... European Americans.

Clarke: Jumping ahead two decades, in 1990 environmentalism was still basically a white, middle-class movement.

Anthony: Yes, it was. So much so that 150 civil rights groups wrote a letter to the "Big Ten" mainstream environmental groups in January 1990, complaining that the memberships, the staffs, and the boards of directors of these organizations were almost all white. But most devastating of all, their priorities really reflected the issues of [concern to] predominantly suburban constituencies, and not [those] of people of color. Many actually went against the interests of the communities of color.

Then in 1987, the United Church of Christ put out a report [entitled] “Toxic Waste and Race,” which touched off a shift. That report revealed that the most reliable predictor of where toxic waste dumps are located was among communities of color. Three out of five communities of color were at risk from these toxic waste dumps. [1]

Clarke: How did the launch of RP&E come about?

Anthony: At about this time, Luke Cole and I went to a public interest legal conference in Oregon. A thousand lawyers were there, all of whom were white. In reaction to this experience, when we got home we had a little caucus with a few people to talk about [issues that concern] people of color and the environment. We wanted to reach out to others who had similar concerns and to publish them. We were hit by a barrage of stories from all over the country. Apparently, people all over were [becoming] aware that the time had come for this movement. We published their work in a journal that became the forerunner of RP&E.

Then in October 1991, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice convened a conference in Washington [to which] about 600 people came from across the United States. About 400 of these people were actually from communities of color grassroots organizations. The conference managed to synthesize all the different issues and concerns [of the attendees] into 17 principles of environmental justice, which were then published in many journals and books.

Clarke: How did you begin to develop this concept of moving environmentalism into an urban context?

Anthony: Because of the white bias of the environmental movement, there was almost no talk about cities, even though 85 percent of the population of the United States lived in cities and metropolitan areas. The white environmental movement was focused mostly on wilderness protection... on protecting the water, the land, the air; and also increasingly on looking at biological resources. But the fact of the matter is that all this pollution actually comes from the cities.

Even though there was a lot of focus on the issue of toxic pollution, which was becoming a huge problem for everybody in the country in 1990, there was a full range of issues that was not being discussed. Many of the problems in our communities came from the fact that there had been this rapid expansion of the suburbs, which was contributing to sprawl and to the abandonment of the inner city.

I had the honor and the privilege of introducing the issue of transportation justice at the first people-of-color environmental leadership summit along with Eric Mann, who started the Bus Riders’ Union in Los Angeles, and Barry Commoner, who had run for President of the United States under the Peace and Justice Party.

Although we introduced this idea of transportation justice at that summit, the issues go back a long way. It was really a new framing of an old issue. People who know about civil rights realize that transportation justice is deeply embedded in the civil rights movement.

Clarke: All the way back to Plessy...

Anthony: Yes, to Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) and more recently to Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which came to the fore because of the inequitable investment in school busses. And of course, we have Rosa Parks. So, in many ways, it was just us putting a new label on something that people already understood deeply.

One of the really remarkable things that we have grown used to, yet have a very shallow historical perception of, is our over-reliance on automobiles. In 1900 there were, practically speaking, no automobiles, no paved roads. In an incredibly short period of time—just over 100 years—the automobile has changed all the countries and all the people in the world. Freeways have literally paved the way for the abandonment of our cities.

I mean in terms of transportation policy in this country the government has been underwriting people running from each other. Not just from the black people--they’re running from each other.

And this is simply not sustainable because of the direct relationship between this pattern of over-reliance on automobiles as an escape and the CO2 emissions that come from the automobiles. This has to come to an end.

Clarke: As you look at the trajectory of the environmental justice movement, what do you consider some of its key victories over the course of this time?

Anthony: It’s now a worldwide movement. Putting the concept of environmental justice on the global radar screen is one big accomplishment. Also, the whole issue of the intersection of public health and the environment and the growing awareness of the public health challenges of the way we build our cities.

Clarke: In what respect has the movement fallen short? What remains basically unchanged?

Anthony: Well, I’m actually a bit of an optimist about all this. I remember seeing a television program with [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger about two weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall where he said: “This is absolutely stable. This will never fall.” Within two years we saw the demise of the Soviet Union.

I believe that there are changes that take a long time to come [to fruition] but when they happen, they are big. Right now, the biggest challenge that we’re facing is global warming and climate change. And although the climate issue is unique, in some ways, it is still the same old thing. It’s about who’s in power, who makes the decisions, who [reaps] the benefits, and who bears the burden.

Clarke: What are some of the intellectual issues you’d like to see RP&E bring to the fore? And what kinds of discussions do you believe should be engendered amongst the current generation that’s talking about these issues but has not framed them in these terms.

Anthony: I have a funny story about the San Francisco school district. They came out with a report about 15 years ago that said. “Eighty-six percent of the population in the school district of San Francisco are minorities, and sixteen percent are the majority.”

Clarke: New math.

Anthony: Yes, but seriously, this big demographic shift is going to cause us to re-think a lot of things. In California now, the majority population is people of color.[2] By 2023, the children of the people of color will be the majority of children in the United States and by 2043, people of color will be the majority population in the United States of America. This is a radical transformation that we have not quite caught up with. It’s going to make everybody redefine who we are as a people and as a country.

Clarke: In fact, the people who have been running the country have been the minority all along. It’s about three or four percent of the population controlling the key levers of power.

Anthony: Exactly.

Clarke: So, back to the question of what coalition of people could really gain political power to change the direction of this country and the world?

Anthony: All of the social movements that we have thought about over the last couple of decades—the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the labor movement, the indigenous people’s movements—have evolved in the last couple of hundred years and have a common root. This is a global movement. We’re a little behind. The transnational corporations have been two or three steps ahead of us. But we have the numbers—if only we can really begin to understand our relationship to each other. And I feel pretty optimistic about that.

Clarke: But if you look at the fundamental power relationships and the methodologies available to movements to challenge power—the legal track, the legislative track, the popular movement track, the direct action track—which tracks can lead us to that critical moment of the sudden dissolution of the empire?

Anthony: One of the things that came out of my own journey in the environmental movement is that my own sense of time has really expanded. This sense of deep time is something that I really didn’t have before. As an African American, my sense was that everything terrible began in 1619 when the black people were brought over here, enslaved, and forced to work in the plantations.

In order for us to make sense of this, we have to have a story that goes back to the beginning of creation. The crisis that we’re facing globally is actually disturbing the basic patterns of life on the planet and is the worst period of extinction for creatures on this planet in 65 million years.

This is bigger than capitalism. It’s bigger than imperialism. It’s bigger than all the isms, all the movements, and all the struggles we’ve had. And there’s gonna be hell to pay!

As a result, we have a global consciousness that’s beginning to emerge at the grassroots level. People all over the world are engaged in a collaboration even if they don’t know who the other people are. And even though corporate interests—and the one percent of the population that controls over half of the global wealth—are making all the decisions that are putting us at huge risk, there is something much bigger going on.

You know that poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade about the British soldiers who were charging into this battle unaware that there were thousands and thousands of people on the other side of the mountain? They were up against something much bigger than they expected. The British thought the sun would never set on their empire, but it did.

So, you know, as bad as the corporations are at a transnational level, there’s something bigger happening here. And being a part of that is really inspiring for me.

Carl Anthony is the co-founder of Urban Habitat, Race Poverty & the Environment Journal and is also co-founder with Doctor Paloma Pavell of Breakthrough Communities.  B. Jesse Clarke has been the Editor of RP&E since 2005.
Special thanks to Making Contact and the National Radio Project for helping with this recording.

Endnotes

[1] http://urbanhabitat.org/node/5346

[2] According to the US Census Bureau White persons of non-hispanic origin are 42.3%, however as a racial category most Latinos are counted as white. White persons, percent, 2008 (a) 76.6%; White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2008 42.3% "California QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau:". US Census Bureau. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html. Retrieved December 26, 2009.
 

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 2, No. 3/4: The Summit

By Dana Alston

Barely do people get the opportunity to participate in historic events. But each of the 300 African, Latino, Native, and Asian Americans from all 50 states who gathered for the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in late October must have left with a sense that the atmosphere in which environmental issues are debated and resolved is changed for good. And for the better.

Joined by delegates from Puerto Rico, Canada, Central and South America, and the Marshall Islands, those present at the October 24-27 meeting in Washington, D.C., set in motion a process of redefining environmental issues in their own terms. People of color gathered not in reaction to the environmental movement, but rather to reaffirm their traditional connection to and respect for the natural world, and to speak for themselves on some of the most critical issues of our times. For people of color, the environment is woven into an overall framework and understanding of social, racial, and economic justice. The definitions that emerge from the environmental justice movement led by people of color are deeply rooted in culture and spirituality, and encompass all aspects of daily life—where we live, work, and play. This broad understanding of the environment is a context within which to address a variety of questions about militarism and defense, religious freedom and cultural survival, energy and sustainable development, transportation and housing, land and sovereignty rights, self-determination, and employment.

For instance, it has been known that communities of color are systematically targeted for the disposal of toxic wastes and the placement of this country's most hazardous industries—a practice known as "environmental racism." Three out of five black and Hispanic Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites, while about half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans live in such areas. Government, church, and academic research has confirmed that race is the strongest determining factor (among all variables tested) in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.

Even armed with this knowledge, delegates were shaken by the reports of widespread poisoning, oppression, and devastation that communities of color are experiencing—including water, air, and land contamination, which cause cancers, leukemia, birth defects, and miscarriages.

All present were moved by the testimonies of communities, such as Reveilletown, Louisiana, a 100-year-old African American community that was forced to relocate in 1989 due to poisoning from neighboring industries. Even more disturbing were the accounts of the Carver Terrace subdivision in Texarkana, Texas, and the farmworker housing project in McFarland, California, that were built on top of abandoned chemical dump sites.
Economic constraints make it difficult for residents of these communities to "vote with their feet" by moving away from the contamination. Demands for relocation assistance from the government have gone unheeded.

Delegates despaired at learning how Native Americans die at each stage of the development of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, but were energized by hearing how reservations are fighting back. Among the stories told were those of the Havasupai Nation of Arizona and its organizing against uranium mining in the Grand Canyon; of Native Americans for a Clean Environment's efforts to close Sequoyah Fuels' nuclear conversion and weapons plant in Oklahoma; and of the Western Shoshone's civil disobedience aimed at stopping the U.S. government's underground nuclear testing on their ancestral lands in Nevada.

These struggles, some of them more than 15 years old, dispel the myth that people of color are not interested in or active on issues of the environment. On the second day of the Leadership Summit, delegates were joined by another 250 participants and observers from environmental, civil rights, population, health, community development, and church organizations. In addition, academic institutions, labor unions, legal defense funds, and policy makers were represented. Some came to learn, others came seeking partnerships and strategies for coalition building.

17 Principles of Environmental Justice WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives, which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice: Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction. Environmental Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias. Environmental Justice mandates the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things. Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threatens the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food. Environmental Justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples. Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production.  Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation. Environmental Justice affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. It also affirms the right of those who work at home to be free from environmental hazards.  Environmental Justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care. Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide. Environmental Justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination. Environmental Justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and provide fair access for all to the full range of resources. Environmental Justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color. Environmental Justice opposes the destructive operations of multinational corporations. Environmental Justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms.  Environmental Justice calls for the education of present and future generations with emphasis on social and environmental issues based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives. Environmental Justice requires that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible; and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to ensure the health of the natural world for present and future generations. Adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, October 24-27, 1991, Washington D.C.

The issue of partnerships between people of color and the environmental movement was a major topic of discussion during the summit. So-called mainstream environmental organizations are now in a flurry to diversify by actively recruiting African, Latino, Native, and Asian Americans to sit on their boards and to staff their offices. Many delegates feel that the push towards inclusion is a result of the challenges brought by people of color, in particular a series of ground-breaking letters sent in early 1990 to the national environmental and conservation organizations by the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization and the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice.

These letters and the publicity that followed outlined what is perceived as the racist practices of the green movement—which is generally viewed as white, middle- and upper-class, and insensitive to the needs and agendas of people of color. The letters point out that diversification of boards and staffs alone does not guarantee accountability.

Delegates detailed numerous examples where the unilateral policies, activities, and decision-making practices of environmental organizations have had a negative impact on the social, economic, and cultural survival of communities of color in the United States and around the world. A particularly telling example is the controversy between Ganados del Valle, a Chicano rural development organization in Los Ojos, New Mexico, and the Nature Conservancy, the self-styled multimillion-dollar "real estate arm of the conservation movement." The Conservancy purchased 22,000 acres of land in 1975 to preserve biological diversity, ignoring the good land stewardship practiced by traditional communities. Ganados members had used that land for decades to graze sheep for cooperative ventures and preserve an age-old link between culture and land for Chicanos and Native Americans.

Delegates also raised questions about the leadership of the National Wildlife Federation, whose board members include Dean Buntrock of Waste Management, Inc., the nation's largest toxic waste disposal company. Waste Management's subsidiary, Chemical Waste Management has been continually charged with perpetrating environmental racism by locating hazardous waste facilities near communities of color. Chicago's South Side (72 percent black, 11 percent Latino), Sauget, Illinois (73 percent black), and Port Arthur, Texas (70 percent black and Latino), are home to Waste Management's major toxic waste incinerators.

Presently the company is trying to locate another huge incinerator in Kettleman City, California (95 percent Latino). And Emelle, Alabama (90 percent black), is the site of a Chemical Waste hazardous waste landfill—the nation's largest. Summit delegates who are engaged in life and death struggles with Waste Management were hard-pressed to understand why such a corporation is represented on the board of directors of one of the largest and most influential environmental organizations.

For people of color, environmental issues are not just a matter of preserving ancient forests or defending whales. While the importance of saving endangered species is recognized, it is also clear that adults and children living in communities of color are endangered species too. Environmental issues are immediate survival issues.

The clear message from delegates is that if there is to be a partnership made with the environmental movement, it must be based on equity, mutual respect, and justice. The environmental justice movement of people of color rejects a partnership based on paternalism.

Discussions at the leadership summit were not limited solely to reciting a litany of problems. Solutions and processes for developing solutions were an important outcome. For instance, strategy and policy groups convened to create action plans and formulate policy recommendations that would guide future organizing. An international policy group was formed in recognition of the global nature of the environmental crisis and the need for international cooperation to achieve solutions.

It was also decided that the policy recommendations growing out of this session would be presented at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), scheduled for June 1992 in Brazil. Policy recommendations include statements on the ecological impact of war, underground nuclear testing, the international waste trade, and U.S. foreign aid and trade policies. Statements related to paternalistic and oppressive behavior toward developing countries by some northern environmental organizations were also included.

In addition to the strategy and policy work groups, summit delegates went through the painstaking process of formulating the Principles of Environmental Justice. Final agreement on the preamble and accompanying 17 principles was arrived at by consensus-building. Collectively, delegates surmounted the barriers that have historically divided us—regionalism, culture, gender, language, and class. Most important, this victory was achieved in a society that has used racism to pit one group against the other in an attempt to control the whole. By the end of the summit, those gathered spoke with one voice as part of a movement "to eradicate environmental racism and bring into being true social justice and self-determination."

Dana Alston (1951-1999) had a long and far-reaching career as an advocate for environmental and social justice. A highlight of her career was her role as a co-convener of the highly successful first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. At the time, she directed the Environment, Community Development, and Race Program at the Panos Institute in Washington D.C.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Interview by Christine Joy Ferrer

In the summer of 2003 RP&E published Where Do We Go From Here? A Look at the Long Road to Environmental Justice. The young activists of 2003 voiced their aspirations for the EJ movment in “The Next Generation, Youth Voices in Environmental Justice.” Today, the young and the fearless continue to build the movement. In the following article, Christine Joy Ferrer, 24, talks with her fellow activists (via email and in person). She also caught up with two of the 2003 interviewees to see where their lives have led them seven years later. Their original comments and a glimpse of their personal journeys since can be found on the following pages. The wide range of interests and the powerful involvement of youth is a vital indicator that movements for justice are on the rise. We’ll check back in 2020 to see just where this resurgence leads. You can listen to a recorded version of the live interviews at www.urbanhabitat.org/audio.

Youth Roundtable Participants

• Ellen Choy, 25, Youth Engagement Coordinator for the Environmental Service Learning Initiative; co-director, Youth Advisory Board.
• Kari Fulton, 24, Co-founder of Checktheweather.net; National Youth Campaign Coordinator, Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.
• Gier Hernandez, 17, Youth Advisory Board, Environmental Service Learning Initiative.
• Beatriz Herrera, 27, Community Organizer, Women Workers Project at POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco, California. 
• De’Anthony Jones,18, Youth Advisory Board, Environmental Service Learning Initiative; San Francisco Youth Commission, representing the Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods.
• Leah LaCroix, 18, District 11 Commissioner and Mayoral Appointee of the San Francisco Youth Commission, Psychology student at San Francisco State University.
• Annie Loya, 24, Executive Director, Youth United for Community Action, East Palo Alto, California. (See Anna Loya: My Story sidebar)
• Julia Rhee, 25, Former National Youth Organizer, Green for All, first generation movement builder.

 

Christine Joy Ferrer: How have you, your friends and family struggled with issues of transportation, housing, environmental health, jobs, and climate change?

Environmental Health
Choy: My family was living in a really low income community in Hawthorne, California. When I was eight, we moved into a majority white middle class neighborhood near the beach in Torrance. The difference in environment had a really huge impact—I could immediately tell the air was noticeably easier to breathe, our street was a lot quieter, neighbors were quieter. We had more than just one grocery store. Our grocery store in Hawthorne was raided during the LA riots. Not seeing any of that violence or injustice, immediately after moving not even 20 minutes away from Hawthorne, was really powerful. It changed how I perceived my environment and how I saw the people around me and related to them. On top of that, I still had family members we had left behind in Hawthorne and Chinatown. As a young child, feeling luckier than the rest of your family is a really strange thing—the access you have to education and things like that. That’s when I first felt those struggles.

Transportation and Housing
Jones: I have a single mom who waited 18 years on the Section 8 housing list [it has over 3,000 people] to move out of public housing. I’ve lived in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, in the Western Addition and in the Westside Courts public housing complex. I saw the struggles in these communities and how they relate to the environment—socially and physically—from the disconnect within neighborhoods to the old and deteriorating housing. Places like the Hunter’s Point neighborhood with its asbestos and lead. In the Westside, we had mold and mildew on the walls. Even in our new house—we have a Section 8 subsidized duplex that we share—in a Sunnyvale neighborhood, we had to deal with dirty housing. It seems like if you’re low income, there’s no place for you in society, and that shouldn’t be. It should be about getting you to a point where you can make money.

 

2003 Invest in Youth By Roberto D. Nutlouis Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 10, No. 1 Where Do We Go From Here? “The Next Generation: Youth Voices in Environmental Justice.” There needs to be more investment in the youth, especially Native youth. Youth in Indian Country have to deal with the past racist Federal Indian policies and cultural eradication, which has manifested in social ills that plague our Indigenous communities. Currently, Indigenous youth have to deal with many issues that range from identity crisis, drug and alcohol abuse, cultural loss, suicide, depression, and hopelessness. This calls for more support and encouragement of Native youth who are involved with environmental justice work. Native youth are also some of the most marginalized people within the mainstream and Native society. This needs to be acknowledged and addressed. We need to empower our youth and offer them a new way of thinking, knowing and understanding based on the cultural values of our peoples. This does not necessarily mean going back to pre-contact times but learning about the past. By understanding history, we may find the solution to save our people from the current situation that they are in. This calls for innovative ideas and solutions—not solutions from the government or outsiders but from the people themselves. Creativity needs to be encouraged. The local youth leaders also need to be identified. Give them proper training with tools and funds necessary to carry out the work. There also needs to be a network, or coalition-building in place so native youth from all over the globe can keep each other empowered because power lies in unity. In 2003, Roberto Nutlouis was 23 years old, and a member of the Indigenous Youth Coalition of Pinon and Black Mesa Water Coalition.

My mom didn’t have a car, so I grew up—most of my life—using MUNI. It was tough seeing her take me places on the bus and get home late. I’ve lived through those fare increases—it was 34¢, then it went up to 50¢, and then to 75¢. My mom just recently got a new car. Now I’m thankful to have had both experiences—driving and taking public transportation. I think, if I would have grown up with a car, I would have looked down on the public transportation system, like, “That’s for poor people.”

 

Ferrer: Why are these issues—transportation, housing, environmental health, jobs, and climate change—important to you as young leaders?
Choy: Young people not only are going to live with the consequences of the actions of past generations, we’re going to be leading the fight. It’s also important to note that we don’t have to wait to become professionals to start being leaders, we can start right now. We’re able to influence policy, to organize community networks, run our own events, and be peer educators.

 

So, it’s super critical to encourage and support that leadership, especially from youth of color and from low income communities, and to help provide them with resources. There’s other young people’s organizations in the Bay Area—Grind for the Green, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice—that are doing the same work that we are: developing young leaders to be empowered to go and talk to their friends and family and spread the message that way.

 

Environmental Justice

Rhee: Environmental justice is important because it’s the critical nexus where issues affecting communities of color and marginalized folks intersect with the needs of the planet. What’s good for communities of color is often good for the environment and the economy. Green jobs especially present a solution to the dual crises. When people are able to live with self determination, have access to locally grown food, travel less to get to work, reduce their carbon footprint by saving energy through retrofits—then justice will follow.
I believe everyone on this planet is intrinsically connected. As Americans, we can see our energy bills go up as we continue to rely on outsourced dirty fossil fuels. There has to be a point where we accept that all our waste ends up in someone else’s home and backyard. We don’t have to look much further than at what mountaintop removal is doing to the water and air supply of working class communities in the U.S., or how coal extraction is polluting sacred indigenous lands all around.

Hernandez: I see the climate issue as a struggle for survival and not just about hugging trees. If we look at our health issues, climate is really affecting how we are living. We are ruining our environment and it’s ruining us.

Herrera: At POWER, we fight for the rights of domestic workers. Many experience the hazards of working with harsh chemicals every day. They develop asthma, skin rashes, allergies, and other ailments from using cleaners, such as bleach and ammonia. Within the Statewide Domestic Worker Coalition, we are currently working on a resolution that we hope will be a first step towards improving the living and working conditions of domestic workers.

 

2010 Sustain Our Land By Roberto D. Nutlouis I got involved with the environmental justice movement when I learned that our precious water was being depleted and damaged by a coal mining company, Peabody Coal Company. Peabody had tapped into our communities’ sole source of drinking water to transport coal. We developed our own youth-led organization “Black Mesa Water Coalition,” and began organizing to raise the awareness on this issue and get our tribal government to demand that Peabody stop the industrial use of our water. The response from the tribal political leaders was that the operation is needed to generate revenues for the tribal government and provide jobs. They challenged us on how we would replace the revenues and jobs from this economic trap. We began to seriously look into ways to rebuild our communities, guided by the prayers of our ancestors and based on the cultural values taught to us by our elders. We developed projects around Food Security and Natural Earth Building. These projects were designed to create a space where local youth can learn about local skills. This is vital in developing and strengthening sustainable communities. I connected with Indigenous Community Enterprises, which works to provide energy-efficient, culturally appropriate and affordable housing to Navajo families. I am still involved and volunteer with Black Mesa Water Coalition in the Environmental Justice, Green Job Initiative, and Climate Justice work. I am also part of Native Movement and volunteer as a project director during the summer to implement “Sustainable Living: Reclaiming our Traditional Knowledge” back in Pinon. We are advocating for energy-efficient homes for our people in hopes that our tribe can fully support building with r values of 30 and above. As for farming, we are working with local youth to design and experiment with various rain water catchment systems to capture what precipitation we are blessed with and maximize its use through developing the fields utilizing ‘permaculture’ principles. We hope to share this knowledge with other communities later on. Roberto D. Nutlouis, now 30, is project manager at Indigenous Community Enterprises, Flagstaff, Arizona.

 

We organize African Americans in Bay View Hunters Point against displacement. Many people in that community are living with asthma, nosebleeds, and cancer from being near a toxic shipyard. The Lennar Corporation is looking to build luxury condos over this toxic land, which would further endanger the health of the community. We are also fighting a campaign by the San Francisco MTA and the police department to use racial profiling to stop people, tow their vehicles, and check for tickets on buses—with the potential threat of being arrested or even deported.

Rhee: I’m on the Black Eyed Peas concert tour as the Green For All tour ambassador helping to mobilize volunteers at each of the 23 tour stops to build

awareness of the possibilities within a green economy. It’s our chance to invite moreyoung people across the country to join the movement for change and a sustainable future.
Other projects I’ve been involved with are Green For All’s national Day of Action campaign that garnered over 50,000 petitions to push for two equity provisions that would increase green job training access and targeted hire-for-job opportunities in the house version of the ACES climate bill.

Jones: At Mission High School, we had Eco Week where we brought in teachers and their students to teach them about environmental justice. There’s also Dance with the Youth at Mission, which is aimed at making us aware of how we’ve lost our respect for mother nature and women in general. It’s an event to remind people that we have an obligation to respect women and mother nature as well.
As far as housing is concerned, the Youth Commission has been working with SF Hope to get youth input on their project to rebuild some of the housing authority’s oldest properties—Westside, Potrero Hill, and Hunter’s Point. The project is going to hold a Leadership Academy in the summer at University of California Berkeley and will engage youth to work at their sites.

LaCroix: The SF Youth Commission is urging the MTA to not increase the discount fast pass and to create a Life Line fast pass for youth who qualify for free and reduced cost lunch. We want them to keep the fast passes at $20 per month [a $10 increase is scheduled for May 2010] for the fiscal year 2010-11.

Ferrer: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that young people are faced with today?
Herrera: Financial and environmental security. We’re living in the midst of an economic crisis, which has resulted in budget cuts to schools, community organizations, and service organizations that support working class communities of color. We’ve also experienced—in the last few years—a growing list of natural disasters that, I imagine, are only going to increase in size and frequency in the decades to come. Youth are inheriting this climate and will have to work hard to fight the effects of global warming.

Jones: The government cannot keep laying its budget problems on its youth. We are the future. Look at youth as a social corporation. The more stocks you buy in this corporation, the better the corporation, but that’s not happening. They keep treating youth as a 99-cent product and as a result, they have 99-cent features. We can’t just accept a job at McDonalds.

 

2003 Mutual Listening, Mutual Respect By Chi Mei Tam Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 10, No. 1 Where Do We Go From Here? “The Next Generation: Youth Voices in Environmental Justice.” If youth and adults are going to work together, there should be mutual respect. Adults believe they know what’s best. But us youth also know what’s good for us. So we should have a say in how things work. There should be mutual listening. That’s the starting point: listening to each other. I’ve done trainings on adultism, training youth and adults to listen to each other. I’ve helped youth to understand that they do have a voice. I’ve also tried to open their minds by saying, “You have ideas; express them.” It’s important to get youth to become more confident talking to adults and working with adults. I also teach adults about youth ideas and that they should listen to them. Once listening happens, we need to talk about how to work on improving our society and our community. We can go deeper into the issues involving the community, our society—what’s happening in the world, the war—and how to improve them. At that point, we would have more of a dialogue going. We need workshops to educate youth, just to get them to understand the issues. Once they know the issues, we can train them and build confidence and leadership skills. Then we can teach them how to take action. In 2003, Chi Mei Tam was 18 years old and a former co-leader at Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates (AIWA).

Loya: More and more young people are being criminalized and tracked into the prison industrial system. More and more are left feeling hopeless because they can’t find funding to continue post-secondary education. Some can’t even find support to get through secondary institutions. We cannot expect this problem to fix itself or expect young people to lead the country when it is their time. We must believe in youth. Our disbelief is the problem.

Ferrer: How do you see race/class/gender/age affecting the way you do this work?
Fulton: I came into this work because I saw a desperate need to address these issues in my community. I grow in this work because I notice the amount of women who are leading these efforts for a just and real transition to clean, healthy green technology. I know that I am privileged to be in this space talking about these issues but I also know that I come from these issues and live them. It is a constant quest of mine never to forget why I am doing this work. I know that the people I work with, and I, represent fresh voices and ideas on these issues. Sometimes people are not ready to listen to what we have to say when we keep it 100 percent real, but that is the only way we are going to get to real solutions. As an African American young woman I cannot forget that I represent those who will be most impacted by climate change. I cannot ignore that fact any more than I can ignore my hue.

LaCroix: Working as I do with the Youth Commission, I often hear people say: “It’s great to see such young kids working together!” But their tone suggests that we’re toddlers playing with rocks and sticks, pretending to be on some mission that’s world changing. You can really tell when people aren’t listening to you. I haven’t personally experienced gender inequality but I’m sure it will come up. As far as race and class, they do have a big impact on how people are perceived and sometimes judged, especially a young person of color that’s of low-income or working class, doing outreach or community organizing work. However, although it affects how people perceive my work, it doesn’t affect how I actually do my work.

Choy: We have to start from a place of realizing that our country was built on racist principles and policies. Though we’ve had a lot of victories along the way and made some progress, we’re still fighting a lot of those injustices at the political level. Yes, we have a black president, but we’re living in a system of capitalism and consumption that is destroying communities of color first. If we address the problems facing the most impacted communities, we will address the root causes of what has actually brought about the climate crisis and all of the other environmental injustices that we’ve had to deal with. That’s the importance of using communities of color to lead the fight. We haven’t seen that in the traditional environmental movement, which was white-led and very privileged. What we’re seeing now is a really hard effort from a lot of communities to change that framework.

2010 Looking Back By Chi Mei Tam My family was considered to be low-income, but they always had the means to survive. We always had a home, transportation, and enough money to live comfortably. I was involved with an organization called Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates (AIWA) when I was in high school. They did a campaign on improving ergonomic conditions for garment workers. My mother was one of those workers involved with AIWA for quite some time. I joined up with them when they started their youth group back in 2000. I was mostly just a passive participant. My involvement was minimal. Although I’m no longer involved in activism work, I hope that our government, our communities, and the business world understand the importance of a healthy and sustainable environment. We cannot take it for granted, but looking from our current political, cultural, societal, and economic situation, I can't help but see that environmental issues are being put on the back burner for the sake of profit, greed, and even self-preservation. Chi Mei Tam, now 25, is finance and operations manager for McCullum Youth Court in Oakland, California.

Jones: Race, class, gender, and age have all been socially motivated. It’s all man-made. We have to understand that we’re more alike than we are separate. Struggles that low-income African Americans are going through are the struggles of low-income Asian Americans, or low-income Latino Americans, or even low-income white Americans. Our struggle should be the very thing that bands us together, not our income, not our nationality, not our race.

As Ellen had mentioned before, this is what our nation was built upon. Abraham Lincoln fought for the Emancipation Proclamation but it only freed some slaves. It’s funny how we’ve been played against each other. The Fillmore, for example, was primarily an African American district until gentrification came through. But during World War II, the houses of Japanese Americans sent to internment camps were given to blacks at a subsidized price. Now, they turn around and take them away from the African Americans with the urban renewal program.

Even now, we have youth who are willing to kill each other over a street name in the Fillmore. But they’re fighting over a street named after a person who signed the Fugitive Slave Act. If you were a slave and wanted to be free, you escaped to a free state, but people in that free state had to report you or they would be committing a crime. We have to understand what we’re fighting for.

Ferrer: This year is the 20th anniversary of the founding of RP&E and it’s also the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. In 20 years, what kind of state do you think the environment will be in? Or what do you hope it will be?
Choy: Climate intersects all sorts of issues that our community is faced with—racism, lack of health care, our faulty education system. All the injustices grow with climate change, especially for young people, so it’s really important to pay attention.
Hopefully, change starts from communities reclaiming power over their own resources, leading the way to becoming self-sufficient, growing local food, buying and consuming everything locally, even having more of a voice in local politics and therefore, international politics. In general, living much more harmoniously with our natural world and in essence, going back to what our cultural histories have shown us from the beginning. If we can do that, hopefully, our world will look a lot better and our environment will be a lot more sustainable.

Christine Joy Ferrer is the publishing asssitant for Race, Poverty & the Environment.  Thanks to the National Radio Project for assistance in recording this interview.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below the link to the audio mp3.

Interview by B. Jesse Clarke

Penn Loh is a professor at Tufts University's Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. From 1996 to 2009, he served in various roles, including executive director (since 1999) at Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), a Roxbury-based environmental justice group. He holds an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. from MIT. Before joining ACE, he was research associate at the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California.

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Jesse Clarke: What was your involvement with environmental justice in the early ‘90s when you were at the University of California Berkeley?

Penn Loh: I went to UC Berkeley because I realized that much of the work of electrical engineers (I had an undergraduate degree in that field) at that time was really in the military industrial complex. It seemed like the profession, rather than making life better for people, was largely involved in projects supporting war research. So, I started down a different track.

At that time, I saw environment as a secondary concern to other social justice issues. But at U.C.Berkeley I met folks who had just attended the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington D.C. I got involved with that student group and also took a class with Carl Anthony. Suddenly, light bulbs went off and I realized, “This is what I can do to contribute to something positive and which goes real deep with respect to my own social justice commitment!”

Clarke: Is that why you got a job with ACE when you got back to Boston?

Loh: Yes, I jumped at the opportunity to join an organization that was just getting off the ground. It was founded by two lawyers who had been inspired by people like Luke Cole. We were trying to figure out how we could bring legal and technical assistance to grassroots communities and support bottom-up movement building for social change. Our early issues dealt with asthma and air pollution—specifically diesel pollution.

We looked at the work WE ACT was doing in New York City and at what the Bus Riders’ Union was doing in Los Angeles to get a clean bus fleet and we recognized that we were facing exactly the same issues in Boston. So initially, we got into transportation issues from an environmental health standpoint. As we started to deepen our organizing in this area, we realized that we had tapped into a much bigger issue. The riders and folks in the community who relied on these buses every day didn’t see the diesel pollution issue as separate from all the other issues with transit. There was extreme pent up anger and frustration at the transit system. The bus riders felt like they were part of a second class system, as compared to the subways, which Boston touts as being world class.

Clarke: Can you talk a little more about the equity dimension of the transportation system and just how that came to the fore in terms of the politics around it?

Loh: We had done some very focused campaigning around clean buses and ACE was facilitating a Clean Buses for Boston Coalition that included a number of community groups, our youth, and some environmental groups. We targeted the transit authority to persuade them to use alternative fuel bus technologies as they replaced their aging fleet but they didn’t much want to talk to us.
In 1997-98, we held a series of community forums over a five-month period attended by about 500 people. We invited the transit authorities and were able to get their middle management to come out to listen to the people.

People talked about a variety of issues of which two clearly stood out: (1) inadequate and poor transit service and (2) disrespect in terms of how the system treated people in their communities. There was a strong sense of the inequity in the way resources were dedicated to the bus rail and commuter rail systems but there was no organized voice of transit riders, particularly in the transit-dependent low-income and communities of color. We eventually launched the T Riders’ Union—inspired by the Bus Riders’ Union. 

Clarke: A decade later, how has the struggle to equalize transportation investment and access for transit-dependent low-income communities and people-of-color communities been progressing in Boston?

Loh: After about three years of intensive advocacy and organizing, we succeeded in getting the public commitment from the transit authority to switch the fleet over. So, now almost the entire fleet of thousand buses serving Eastern Massachusetts is being converted to cleaner alternatives. We’re very proud of that. Also, we didn’t realize it then but we had really started a movement for transit justice. The T Riders’ Union has really grown and become the voice of low-income riders in the area. 

The biggest battles we’ve had to fight since 2000 are the fare increases because of the structural deficits built into our transit system. We’ve had a cycle of 25-30 percent fare increases across the board, every couple of years since 2000. It’s been quite a struggle to try to keep the fares affordable in a way that also ensures no service cuts.

Over the years, we’ve come to realize that we need broader and deeper solutions. So, about four years ago, we started to advance our own systemic solutions to dealing with the structural deficits. One of our suggestions— which is now part of the mainstream discussion—was to look at how to relieve our transit authority of an inordinate amount of debt on projects, such as the “Big Dig” highway project [a freeway tunnel under the Boston harbor].

RP&E Reflections 2003: Accountability Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 10, No. 1 Where Do We Go From Here? “We Must All be Accountable in a Grassroots Movement” By Penn Loh In 1992, I was a twenty-something graduate student at UC Berkeley who had just joined a student of color environmental justice group, Nindakin, which was an affiliate of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. As a member, I often felt out of place. Not only was I not in my home community (Boston), but I was at an elite university with all its privileges. As a group, we also struggled over our role, par- ticularly one question: Are we fighting our own oppression within the university or are we using our resources to support local community groups? More than a decade later, I work for a community-based EJ group, Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), and those questions persist. During my seven years at ACE, the group has grown from an intermediary organization providing legal and technical support to grassroots groups in Boston to a group that is also organizing communities directly, nurturing youth leadership, building coalitions, and planning to establish a grassroots membership. We are neither a grassroots group nor an intermediary; we are both. I realize now that the divide between “grassroots” and “intermediary” is just a reflection of the root injustices—racism, classism, sexism—that we are fighting against. An intermediary is an intermediary because it has some form of power that the grassroots doesn’t and feels some responsibility to share it. For me, the guiding light for resolving these tensions comes from Dana Alston’s words at the First People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit: “We Speak for Ourselves.” In that statement, she challenged us to build a movement led by those most affected—a goal that is easy to say, but hard to do. If we are a movement led by people struggling locally, then how do we build power and use it to achieve broader change regionally, nationally, and internationally? At ACE, through an ongoing study group with our youth, staff, board, and community leaders, we’ve started to tackle these questions. We agreed that a “movement” has lots of people, each with a shared analysis of what’s wrong. Like flowing streams of water, we’re headed in the same direction, but not necessarily in a coordinated manner. A movement hits critical mass when people can identify with it and take part, yet without necessarily belonging to a group. We concluded that the EJ Movement is still in its infancy, not yet a mass movement but with the potential to be one. With the help of the Environmental and Economic Justice Project (which is based out of the organizing group AGENDA in South Los Angeles), ACE determined that we needed to build power of sufficient scope and scale to achieve systemic change. This discussion has helped us draft a five-year strategic plan that defines our role in the movement. ACE sees itself as part of a movement that is building power from the bottom up, with strong grassroots organizations connected through networks and a broad base of leadership that is representative of, and accountable to, our communities. ACE’S staff has community organizers born and raised in the neighborhood along with lawyers and other professionals from inside and outside the community, white and of color. Yet, none of us has license to speak for the community. As staff, we are accountable to the youth, residents, and community groups we work with. Our constituents currently make decisions about strategy and overall direction as members of our project and campaign committees and our board of directors. As we move to a membership structure, all decisions will flow from our members, who will also elect a majority of our board. Our job in supporting the grassroots is to continually develop leaders who in turn nurture others to follow them. EJ organizations from across the country have agreed that the EJ agenda must be set by those most directly affected and that our first priority is to strengthen the grassroots base. At Summit 11, we went a step further with the “Principles of Working Together,” which sets a code of conduct to ensure the integrity of grassroots leadership while working with all sectors of the movement. The challenge now is to put our shared principles into practice by strengthening grassroots organizations. Change happens through collective action, not through an individual savior or charismatic leader. We must make ourselves replaceable and restrain personal glorification. We must actively combat internalized racism and classism and put into practice meaningful democratic participation. As Gandhi said, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Clarke:  The big debt.

Loh: There was a bunch of projects that the T originally was not paying the debt on but which became a part of the general obligation of the state as a result of its taking on the Big Dig project. The debt was switched over to the T in 2000 when there was a restructuring in finances and what was already a good amount of debt on projects they had wanted to build ballooned out of control to the point where up to 30 percent of the operating budget now is servicing debt. 

We knew that you couldn’t just take the debt off the T’s books, but would have to identify new revenue streams. In the last gubernatorial election in 2006, we were able to advance the idea that we need to find new revenues. Two years ago, the Governor had suggested something that we backed very strongly—it was to increase the gas tax, which had not kept pace with inflation and had not been increased since the early 1990s.

Clarke: Your description of the debt burden in Boston reminds me of the situation in the global south—people are saddled with huge debt obligations for big wasteful projects built by politically connected contractors. The result is that social spending and needed services are gobbled up by “servicing” the debt. On a global level, a lot of the countries that are at the bottom of the carbon sink are trying to win cancellation of such debt to allow for investment in clean energy. It’s interesting that your demands in Boston parallel theirs.  

Loh: With broadening recognition that climate change is something we can’t ignore we are seeing a new framing—that a green economy or a clean energy economy is one of the ways of addressing the climate change issue. What we’ve found at ACE and our work in transit is that to really get to environmental justice, we need to figure out how to build the sustainable infrastructure that can support community health and quality of environment, as well as decent livelihoods.

Clarke: I’m interested in how you are working on the problem of getting equity into green economics. We have a report here from the Applied Research Center (ARC) showing that the percentage of low-income and people of color and women actually employed in the green energy economy are so far below the actual percentages of the population that heavy investment in the green economy might even exacerbate economic inequality in some situations. How are you framing equity into the climate change debate so that it will move towards climate justice?

Loh: I think one of the things that really helped us in talking about to green jobs and the green economy was being rooted in the environmental justice framework, which gave us a good way to really analyze what was going on. We never bought into the notion that it’s just about getting a fair share of jobs, or that somehow the economy is going to fix itself in terms of the sustainability issues and that it’s going to create all kinds of new industries. Our critique goes much deeper, which is to say that the environmental injustices that we’ve been fighting and struggling against are caused by the same factors in the economy that have generated these obscene inequalities in wealth. Environmental injustice has always been connected to economic injustice in that respect. But we’re saying that we have a real role to play in defining what a green economy ought to look like. We don’t think that sustainability and justice can be separated; that you can achieve one without the other.

ACE was one of the founding partners in Community Labor United. About three years ago, we started to work with them on building a green justice coalition on a platform with multiple demands: (1) to see measures and policies enacted that would really reduce our greenhouse gas emissions within the state; (2) to make sure that any public investment in resources for greenhouse gas emissions reductions—particularly in the areas of energy efficiency and energy conservation where people can save money—be available and accessible to lower income communities and communities of color; (3) to have all of the investment in policy done in a way that actually creates decent jobs that are accessible to our communities, especially in places where there’s been chronic underemployment and unemployment.

The Green Justice Coalition now includes  more than 35 entities across the state. We had a pretty good impact on our state’s evolving energy efficiency policy over the last year. Massachusetts now has in place a three-year statewide energy efficiency plan that the utilities are responsible for implementing. By some accounts, it’s the most ambitious energy-saving goal set by any state in the nation. We’re going to see a ramping up of the investment in energy efficiency from about $150 million a year to over $600 million a year in the next three years.

Clarke: Any final comments—for the benefit of the younger generations—on the choices you made at the start of your career to leave the military-industrial complex and join the “nonprofit-industrial complex”?

Loh: I think we should be clearheaded about the fact that the nonprofit sector is not sufficiently tooled up to serve as a proxy for a social justice movement or a mass movement. We need to pilot a lot of other structures of organizing and in particular, of building our own models of economic democracy. In the context of creating a green economy we need to think about creating sustainable economic activity that’s also controlled by our communities. The Green Justice Coalition, ACE, and a few other groups are planning to launch our own community-owned weatherization company. We are trying to figure out how we can actively take ownership and have worker-owned wealth and revenue streams for some of our nonprofits. It’s been a really exciting process and I think a lot of us need to start experimenting with it and figuring out how to do it.

B. Jesse Clarke is the editor of Race, Poverty & the Environment.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below. You can also download the mp3 of the complete speech.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 12, No. 1: Moving the Movement for Transportation Justice

By Guillermo Mayer and Richard A. Marcantonio

When the late Rosa Parks protested an apartheid bus system 50 years ago, transit riders in Montgomery, Alabama, whether black or white, poor or well-off, all rode the same bus. Today’s segregation, while less obvious, is in some ways more pernicious. Affluent whites have left urban bus systems the way most left New Orleans on the eve of hurricane Katrina: in their cars. Of those who commute on public transit, most now ride deluxe rail systems, leaving people of color to rely on a second-class and deteriorating bus system.

This is the scenario many low-income communities of color face in the San Francisco Bay Area, where substandard bus service operates as a “separate and unequal” transit system. Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), filed in April, 2005 by East Bay bus riders and civil rights advocates against the region’s transportation planning agency, challenges today’s pervasive and insidious form of discrimination.

The suit takes its name from Sylvia Darensburg, who lives transit inequity every day. An African American mother of three living in East Oakland, Darensburg fights her way out of poverty by working days and attending college classes at night. Since she cannot afford to own a car, she is entirely dependent on public transit provided by the AC Transit bus system. In the 1970s, Darensburg remembers bus service that was reliable, cheap, and safe. Over the intervening decades, that system has spiraled downward. Inadequate bus service today severely limits Sylvia’s access to many higher-paying jobs that are inaccessible by public transit. Even reaching jobs a few miles away in downtown Oakland is an arduous journey: She rides two buses with long waits for each, a trip that can take an hour each way.

Getting to college classes can take even longer, due to the elimination of bus routes and evening service. And she must walk up to 12 blocks at night to get home from the nearest bus stop in her neighborhood. Even routine errands like grocery shopping are physically draining experiences. “Every day, from the time I get up, I plan to get the bus,” Darensburg says. “This affects your physical health.”

Since most school districts in the East Bay do not provide yellow school bus transportation, thousands of low-income youth also rely on the bus on a daily basis to get to and from school. On top of reliability, affordability is also an issue for many of these youth. In a recent survey of Oakland and Berkeley students, 61 percent said they skip lunch to pay for the bus ride home.
The hardship and frustration that Darensburg and these youth face each day is shared by tens of thousands of low-income African American, Latino, and Asian residents, including seniors and people with disabilities, who rely on bus service provided by AC Transit. As California’s largest bus-only operator, AC Transit provides service to many communities with high poverty rates, running buses from North Richmond through Oakland and into southern Alameda County. Nearly 80 percent of AC Transit’s riders are people of color, and over 70 percent have incomes below $30,000. Nearly 60 percent are, like Darensburg, entirely transit dependent: They have no means of transportation other than public transit to get to essential destinations, such as jobs, school, grocery stores, and social services. Many of those who do have cars own older vehicles that they cannot afford to operate and maintain on a regular basis.

Despite the urgent needs of AC Transit’s overwhelmingly minority ridership, the region’s transportation planning agency, MTC, has continuously under-funded AC Transit over a period of decades, causing a precipitous decline in bus service and repeated fare hikes. MTC controls nearly $1 billion annually in federal and state transit dollars, and in turn controls the quantity and quality of public transit services available to communities throughout the region. Rather than prioritize the needs of its most vulnerable transit users, or even operate in accordance with basic principles of cost-effectiveness, MTC has favored costly rail expansions for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and Caltrain. These deluxe commuter rail systems, linking suburbs to major downtown business districts, serve riderships that are disproportionately white and affluent.

Discriminatory Funding
People of color make up two-thirds, and whites, a third of all transit users in the Bay Area. But whites make up a disproportionate share of BART and Caltrain passengers: 43 percent and 60 percent, respectively. White rail riders also have significantly higher incomes than AC Transit bus riders: 75 percent of BART riders have incomes over $30,000, and 53 percent of Caltrain riders have incomes over $75,000. In addition, 80 percent of BART riders and 83 percent of Caltrain riders own private automobiles.
Fully aware of these racial and income disparities, MTC gives rail riders a significantly greater public subsidy for each trip they take than it gives to AC Transit bus riders. AC Transit passengers receive a subsidy of public funds of $2.78 per trip. By contrast, BART riders receive more than double that—$6.14—and Caltrain passengers receive $13.79, nearly five times more than a passenger of AC Transit. As a direct result, service levels on these commuter rail systems have reached an all-time high, while services continually decline and fares rise for AC Transit bus riders.

1998
East Bay communities and activists have repeatedly asked MTC to change its inequitable funding practices. In April 1998, Carl Anthony, co-founder of Urban Habitat, along with 26 other organizational co-signers, wrote MTC to oppose the agency’s proposed 1998 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP). Questioning the mobility benefits that new highway projects would bring people of color, Anthony’s letter urged MTC to conduct a comparative analysis to see how much of its $88 billion in funding would benefit high-income versus low-income communities, or white communities versus communities of color. MTC rebuffed the community’s criticism and refused to perform the equity analysis requested by Anthony.

2001
In early 2001, a large group of African American ministers in North Richmond wrote to MTC seeking equity in the funding between AC Transit and commuter rail services. The ministers pointed out that MTC itself had ranked an AC Transit bus project in the Richmond area of western Contra Costa County, with a population that is 69 percent minority, as the most cost-effective project considered in MTC’s 2001 RTP. This bus initiative would have cost a mere $0.75 per new rider, and served an overwhelmingly low-income community of color. MTC refused to fund this project despite its small price tag. Instead, MTC devoted $2.3 billion to the least cost-effective projects: two commuter rail projects—one for BART and the other for Caltrain—both designed to serve disproportionately white, suburban populations, at a much higher cost per new rider.
In adopting its 2001 Regional Transportation Plan, MTC again refused to conduct a comparative analysis of the disparity between the benefits its funding conferred on high-income, white transit riders, and those it conferred on low-income riders of color. Indeed, up to the present day, MTC has yet to conduct such an analysis.

2004
In November 2004, MTC was asked to perform just that kind of analysis by its Minority Citizens’ Advisory Committee (MCAC), which adopted a set of simple environmental justice principles. These principles asked MTC to “[c]ollect accurate and current data essential to understanding the presence and extent of inequities in transportation funding based on race and income,” and to “change its investment decisions as necessary to mitigate identified inequities.” MTC has so far failed to adopt, much less implement, these guiding principles. To the contrary, it repeatedly attempted to stonewall MCAC’s efforts by contending that the principles wrongly presumed that inequities existed, and that further study was required “to define ‘inequity.’”  At the same time, it aggressively lobbied the MCAC to water down its recommendations.

2005
In April 2005, AC Transit bus riders of color, in coalition with civil rights and labor groups, filed the Darensburg action in federal court. The suit, brought as a class action on behalf of all current and future AC Transit riders of color, seeks to end MTC’s racially discriminatory funding practices. The suit alleges that MTC violates federal and state civil rights laws by channeling funds to benefit predominantly white rail riders at the expense of AC Transit bus riders of color. In addition to plaintiff Sylvia Darensburg, Vivian Hain from East Oakland, and Virginia Martinez from Richmond are individually named plaintiffs. Two organizational plaintiffs have also joined the suit: Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 192. The Darensburg lawsuit is an important tool in the long struggle for equity in Bay Area transportation funding. But that long community struggle demonstrates the essential role that a sustainable grassroots constituency must play in any long-term solution.

The Bay Area must draw lessons from the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union’s (LA BRU) involvement in winning and implementing their lawsuit against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). After a two-year legal fight, the LA BRU obtained a consent decree in 1996 obligating the MTA to reduce overcrowding on buses, maintain equitable fares between bus and rail, and create a multiyear and county-wide New Service plan to eliminate transit segregation in Los Angeles. But this historic legal victory did not stop MTA from aggressively resisting change. The agency fought the consent decree up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and stubbornly pursued its costly rail projects while simultaneously implementing new rounds of service cuts for bus routes.

MTA’s aggressive tactics have been thwarted thus far by a highly-organized and committed constituency of low-income and minority bus riders who have engaged in massive protests, direct action, and civil disobedience, as well as careful research, analysis and monitoring, to vindicate their legal rights. Their determined effort has ensured that this legal victory bore concrete results: Since 1994, LA BRU, a force of 3,000 dues-paying bus riders, has secured over 2,000 compressed natural gas (CNG) replacement buses, more than 300 new CNG expansion buses, restored Night Owl service from midnight to 5 a.m., and reduced the price for bus passes and fares.

The victorious Bus Riders’ Union campaign illustrates that bus riders know better than anyone else what inadequacies they are facing, and are best suited to monitor conditions, set priorities, and apply political pressure to hold public agencies accountable. Like the MTA lawsuit, the ultimate success of the Darensburg case will largely depend on the existence and participation of a sustainable grassroots constituency of bus riders.
Bay Area transit advocates must also draw on the lessons from Montgomery, Alabama. When NAACP lawyers challenging Jim Crow laws brought suit, they acted in a context created by the mobilization of large numbers of people in boycotts, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. In these earlier struggles, legal strategies were tied to a broad range of other strategies that were primarily spearheaded not by lawyers, but by organized communities. The success of litigation strategies, both in the immediate sense of prevailing in court and in the broader sense of achieving progressive structural change, has always depended on a close link between legal tactics and community mobilization. In instances where inequity is so deeply ingrained and insulated from democratic participation, litigation is often an essential tool to initiate change. But it is organized constituencies that both create the possibility of change and ensure that legal victories are implemented effectively. That is the case today in the East Bay, no less than it was 50 years ago in Montgomery, Alabama. To achieve transportation justice in the Bay Area, we will need the same sort of grassroots coalitions and coordination that were created in 1955.

Guillermo Mayer is an attorney fellow, and Richard Marcantonio is a managing attorney, with the public interest law firm of Public Advocates, Inc., in San Francisco. They serve as co-counsel on the Darensburg case, together with Lieff Cabraser Heiman & Bernstein, Communities for a Better Environment, and Altshuler Berzon Nussbaum & Demain.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

By Richard Marcantonio and Guillermo Mayer

Five years ago—while the Bush administration was in power—Sylvia Darensburg of Oakland filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). On behalf of the class of minority bus riders she represented, Darensburg hoped the federal courts would force MTC to change its funding priorities, which favored affluent rail commuters over transit-dependent people who rely on local bus service for access to employment, education, health care, and other essential services. (See ”Bay Area Transit—Separate and Unequal” on page 30.)

Back then, civil rights and Environmental Justice (EJ) advocates could not have foreseen that it would be a federal regulatory agency and not the federal courts that would step up for equity in the allocation of transportation funding. But that is what happened on February 12 this year when the head of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), citing civil rights violations, withdrew $70 million from a $500 million rail project on MTC’s priority transit expansion list.

The story of how bus riders—with the help of civil rights, EJ, and labor organizations—pulled off this unprecedented victory holds out hope for a much desired fundamental shift in how the Bay Area allocates some ten billion dollars in public funds for transportation each year. It also offers important lessons for regional equity advocates across the country.

Courtroom Drama
Our story begins in a crowded San Francisco courtroom, just a month before the election of President Obama. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte of the Northern District of California had already heard several days of testimony about MTC, the transit agencies under its jurisdictions, and the riders those agencies serve. The testimony showed that the ridership of AC Transit, the largest bus-only transit provider in California, is nearly 80 percent people of color, many of whom cannot afford to own a car. By contrast, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) provides deluxe rail service to a ridership that is much more affluent and approximately 50 percent white.

The court had also heard testimony about MTC’s $17 billion “strategic master plan for transit expansion” known as Resolution 3434. The inclusion of a project in the plan implied a commitment of considerable funds and advocacy muscle for that project. Then on the fourth day of trial, plaintiffs’ transit finance expert, Thomas A. Rubin took the stand to explain how minority bus riders figured into MTC’s “master plan”: 94 percent of the funding was allocated for rail projects and only 4.7 percent for bus projects.

On March 27, 2009 the court issued a decision with a mixed outcome. On the one hand, Judge Laporte acknowledged that MTC’s funding decisions caused AC Transit to raise fares and cut service.[1] She also found that “Plaintiffs have shown that MTC’s practice with respect to Resolution 3434 caused disparate impact... MTC allocates more funding to rail projects than to bus projects, resulting in bus projects proposed by AC Transit being excluded from projects listed in Resolution 3434.” At the same time, the court applied an unusally lax standard in finding that MTC’s discrimination was justified:

“The Court sympathizes with the predicament of the members of the Plaintiff Class, who have experienced declines in bus services on which they depend to meet their basic needs, such as getting to school and work safely and on time. Nonetheless, MTC has met its burden of showing a substantial legitimate justification for the challenged funding practices.”Ultimately, the court did not grant bus riders any relief against the discriminatory impacts it had found. The ruling is now on appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

An “Immoral” Use of Transit Stimulus Funds
Meanwhile, Congress passed its historic stimulus legislation. In anticipation of receiving $340 million in federal “formula” funds, in February 2009, MTC announced its plan to divert $70 million of those stimulus funds into closing a shortfall for BART’s Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project—a 3.2 mile elevated rail “people mover” linking an existing East Oakland BART station to Oakland International Airport. The project would replace an existing bus shuttle service at an estimated cost of nearly $500 million.

MTC’s decision came at a time when Bay Area transit systems, like their counterparts across the country, were imposing draconian service cuts and fare hikes. Community advocates, led by Urban Habitat and Genesis, a regional faith-and-values organizing group, turned out more than a hundred vocal opponents to an MTC hearing that month. Rev. Scott Denman, president of Genesis, asserted that it was “immoral” for MTC to prioritize the needs of people who could afford an airline ticket over those who could barely afford a bus pass. In a lighter vein, he added that the Connector project was “shovel ready, and we should bury it today; I myself will perform the last rites.”

The protesters won over only one Commissioner but in a nod to the urgency of their appeal against bus service cuts, MTC adopted a contingency plan: It would re-allocate the $70 million to the region’s transit systems for existing service in the event that the BART project could not obligate the funds to the OAC project in time to meet federal deadlines.

But questions were already being raised about whether the MTC had met its duty to ensure that BART, one of it its subrecipients, had properly conducted an equity analysis of the OAC project as required by the FTA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The purpose of such analysis is to ensure that low-income and minority populations receive a fair share of the benefits of the project, without being unduly burdened by its adverse impacts. A request from Public Advocates   for the equity analysis under the California Public Records Act determined that BART had not conducted any equity analysis.

In July 2009, Public Advocates, Urban Habitat, and TransForm, a Bay Area transit advocacy organization, brought the Title VI issue to the attention of the BART and MTC boards of directors. Despite that, in August, MTC certified to the federal government that the BART OAC project “has received the full review and vetting required by law.” On September 3, 2009 Public Advocates filed an administrative civil rights complaint under Title VI with the FTA’s Office of Civil Rights.[2]

Advocates Speak Truth to the FTA
The complaint, brought on behalf of Genesis, Urban Habitat, and TransForm, charged BART with failing to comply with its civil rights and environmental justice duties in connection with the OAC project. It noted that two neighborhoods within a half mile of the project area have 95 percent minority and 25 to 33 percent low-income populations, and spelled out clearly why the project would deprive these populations of a fair share of the benefits from this investment:

“The OAC... would charge a one-way fare of up to $6. The rail project would replace an existing bus link with a fare of $3... Situated in an East Oakland community with a very high minority and low-income population, the OAC will traverse a corridor with many low-wage jobs that employ local residents, yet it will apparently be built without any intermediate stops. Even if such stops were added in the future, [the] extremely high fare will exclude low-income riders from the delayed benefits of the new service.”

More than just a procedural shortcoming, BART’s failure to evaluate the equity impacts of the OAC project and weigh appropriate alternatives to find a less discriminatory one, is likely to have disparate impacts on Environmental Justice populations in East Oakland, low-income and minority BART riders, and the many low-wage workers with jobs at the airport and along the Hegenberger corridor in which the OAC project would operate. Those populations either rely on the existing bus connection or would benefit from a low-fare transit option with stops at the airport and along the way.

Voices for Transportation Justice 2010 By Leah LaCriox Transportation is an essential and vital service for cities and its residents. Recently, I’ve seen the inequalities within the San Francisco transit system, and with my position of power within the Youth Commission, I have the opportunity to fight for justice and equality within this system. This youth commission term, I am the chair of the Planning, Land Use, and City Services Committee and this has led me to become involved with the city service of transportation. We have been asking the MTA to not increase the discount fast pass to $30 per month [increase scheduled for May 2010], to create a Life Line fast pass for youth who qualify for free and reduced lunch, and to keep the fast passes the same [$20 per month], for this coming fiscal year 2010-11. One of the biggest challenges young people face today is that during the budget crisis, many human and health services are being cut. Within these services are programs that directly affect youth. Without services, our youth are left in the most vulnerable position because there is no place to turn to. These services allow youth access to some of the basic human needs for living in the city. Yes, I take the bus everywhere I go because my family doesn’t have a car. Public transportation is one of the only ways my family can get around the city . Leah LaCroix is on the San Francisco Youth Commission and a Psychology student at San Francisco State University.

The complaint urged the FTA to investigate these Title VI violations and require BART to conduct the  equity analysis. It also asked the FTA to “place a hold on the provision of federal funds to BART for the OAC project, including the $70 million in ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] funds programmed for the OAC project by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission... pending the satisfactory completion of the required evaluation, mitigation and review of alternatives.” Among the alternatives that BART had refused to analyze was a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system proposed by TransForm that would have provided fast service to intermediate stops for a very low fare at about a tenth of the cost of the OAC.

Civil Rights Action Wins $$ for Community
In December, two FTA civil rights investigators met with BART staff and representatives of the groups that had filed the complaint. In the course of this on-site compliance investigation, BART acknowledged that “it failed to integrate Title VI into [its] service planning and monitoring activities for the Project,” according to a January 15, 2010 letter from FTA chief Peter Rogoff, which also informed BART that it had to submit a “corrective action plan” for the preparation of the equity analysis for FTA’s pre-approval and that the $70 million in stimulus funds were being placed on hold.

After several weeks of failed efforts by BART to negotiate the terms of an acceptable corrective action plan, Rogoff wrote again on February 12: “I am required to reject your plan... Given the fact that the initial Title VI complaint against BART was well founded, I am not in a position to award the [stimulus] funds to BART while the agency remains out of compliance.” Furthermore, he stated, “it is imperative that BART, as a recipient of FTA funds, come fully into compliance with Title VI as soon as possible” and added that MTC must work “to ensure that [stimulus] funds can create and preserve jobs in the Bay Area” through reallocation according to MTC’s contingency plan.

Suddenly, MTC was all but forced to distribute the $70 million among all Bay Area transit systems, including BART. These funds could now be used to help fill the large operating deficits and mitigate, if not entirely avoid service cuts and fare hikes. At last, regional equity and transit advocates had the very outcome they had sought a year ago. Coming as it did at a time of great hardship for minority and low-income bus riders who are the first victims of growing operating deficits, the FTA’s landmark decision has had a profound effect across the country.

Bay Area advocates, however, are not resting on their laurels but working to keep the pressure on BART (which has yet to conduct a proper equity analysis for the OAC) and the MTC (which is facing further FTA scrutiny to determine if its failure to impose Title VI guidelines is part of a larger pattern). Ultimately, advocates hope to ensure that both agencies meet their civil rights obligations and provide low-income communities of color a fair share of the benefits from public funds.

The Obama Administration’s demonstrated commitment to revive civil rights enforcement so that the economic recovery lifts everyone, not just the few, has buoyed advocates into action across the nation. And as Congress moves ahead with its deliberations over the next major reauthorization of the surface transportation bill, the message that increased funding must be accompanied by Title VI protections is gaining traction.

Endnotes
1.    The court’s decision after trial is available at www.publicadvocates.org
2.    The Title VI complaint is available at www.publicadvocates.org

Richard Marcantonio is a managing attorney and Guillermo Mayer is a senior staff attorney with the public interest law firm
Public Advocates, Inc., in San Francisco

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By Juliet Ellis and Mahasin Abdul-Salaam

The Federal Transit Administration  (FTA) pulled $70 million in stimulus funds from BART's Oakland Airport Connector project last month based on our civil rights complaint, finding that BART ignored civil rights laws. Fortunately, the Bay Area didn't lose that funding—it was distributed among the region's ailing transit systems. But the transit administration's action makes it clear that public money must be spent fairly or agencies will be held accountable.

A project isn't "shovel-ready" until it is fair. Agencies receiving federal funds are legally obligated to ensure that low-income and diverse communities share fairly in the benefits of that funding. To do so requires analysis and community involvement. BART failed to live up to these responsibilities. As the project evolved, the anticipated round-trip fare rose to $12 (plus BART fare), and intermediate stops that could have given workers access to hotel and retail jobs en route to the airport were eliminated. But BART didn't study whether those features excluded low-income and minority riders from the project's benefits, and East Oakland communities never had a chance to have their say when the airport tram project was revised.

Our groups expressed our concerns to both BART and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the agency that oversees the regional distribution of federal transportation dollars. But we were ignored, so we took our complaint to Washington. And the FTA backed us up.
Since then, BART has continued to insist it did nothing wrong. But it has also vowed to make its civil rights practices the "gold standard." Now is the time to turn these words into action.

BART can begin by working with the community on an airport connector plan that shares benefits with East Oakland residents as well as airport travelers, which includes seriously studying alternatives like Bus Rapid Transit. Instead of a $492 million slow cable car that dumps passengers in the airport parking lot at double the current fare, the Bay Area can have a faster, cheaper, and more convenient airport connection that also serves the needs of the East Oakland community.

For its part, MTC can thoroughly examine its long list of proposed transportation projects to make sure they promote civil rights. This critical review has never been done. Both BART and MTC can usher in a new era of respect for accountability, transparency, and fairness for all.
Juliet Ellis of Urban Habitat and Mahasin Abdul-Salaam of Genesis represent, along with Public Advocates, Inc. and TransForm, the organizations that brought the civil rights complaint.

Reprinted from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2010.

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Voices for Transportation Justice 2005

Commentary by Juliet Ellis

Fifty years ago, Rosa Parks did not give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Public transportation, and more specifically buses, became the stage from which the civil rights movement was launched. This act of courage is fresh in our minds due to the recent passing of Mrs. Parks. Viewed as a national hero, her body was placed in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol—the first woman ever accorded such a tribute.

The irony is that today, discrimination is alive and well in mass-transit bus service. In the Bay area, for instance, a federal civil rights lawsuit is pending in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charging that the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)—which plans and allocates funding for the area's transit needs—supports a “separate and unequal transit system” that discriminates against poor transit riders of color.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of African-American and Latino AC Transit riders, states that public monies are spent to expand a “state-of-the-art rail system”—BART and Caltrain—into relatively affluent suburban communities, at the expense of a shrinking bus system, AC Transit, for low-income people of color. According to AC Transit's ridership survey, nearly 80 percent of its bus riders are people of color, and more than 60 percent of them have no other means of transportation. In cities across the nation, African Americans and Latinos comprise over 54 percent of transit users, according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Richard Marcantonio, an attorney with Public Advocates, citing data from the federal National Transit Database, noted: “As a result of MTC's knowingly discriminatory funding practices, AC Transit riders receive a public subsidy of $2.78 per trip, BART passengers receive more than double that—$6.14—and Caltrain passengers receive $13.79, nearly five times more than AC Transit riders.” 

And it's not just AC Transit. Just last week, The San Francisco Chronicle published an article detailing the high cost of a commuter train in Marin and Sonoma counties (“New debate over light rail for North Bay,” Nov. 22, 2005). A report prepared by an engineering firm and requested by the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District not surprisingly concluded that the North Bay “is better off environmentally with a light-rail system.”
In 1999 in the South Bay, three weeks after SamTrans agreed to give a $72 million interest-free loan to BART for the construction of the SFO extension, SamTrans cut 15 percent of its bus service. SamTrans has repeatedly cut bus service in the last several years, according to Bay Rail Alliance, as well as increased fares in order to balance its budget.

The issue is not solely buses versus rail. Public transportation receives a fraction of the government funding spent on highways and roads.
Buses are the backbone of our transportation system. The majority of bus riders are transit dependent; that is, they rely on public transit for all of their essential trips—unlike rail commuters, who rely on BART (according to its rider survey) for 25 percent of their essential household trips. BART, light rail, and commuter rail systems depend on buses to get people to and from stations. Without an effective bus system, the rail system will not work. Buses also mean less congestion and less pollution on our roads. 

Why buses over rail? If funded properly, technology exists to make buses fast, clean and quiet. Buses are cheaper to run and can be more flexible in terms of routes. Buses are like gigantic car pools. They do the best job of getting people to their destinations. Buses work within existing road structures, and local and express routes create time efficiencies MTC's own analysis in 2001 indicates that a minimum of $109 million per year is needed to fund the transit needs of low-income riders. It also found that 80 percent of AC Transit's safety-net or “Lifeline” routes were served too infrequently and/or were not served from midnight to 6 a.m. Since then, it has gotten worse. For instance, AC Transit cut 14 percent of its service in 2003. (MTC said it was important to update the Lifeline gap study, but has not done so.)

Transportation justice advocates do not oppose BART or rail; however, we do support equal access and mobility for all. Funding and service cuts in bus service disproportionately affect youth, the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income communities. The MTC must change its discriminatory practices by treating all transit riders equally and subsidizing bus transit at the same level as rail. Everyone in the Bay Area deserves equal access to a first class, safe, dependable public transit system.

Juliet Ellis is the executive director of Urban Habitat, an environmental justice organization in Oakland. Reprinted from the San?Francisco Chronicle of December 1, 2005. Photo: Rosa Parks 1956. ©1956 Topham / Image Works

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Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 6, No. 1: Transportation and Social Justice

By Luz DeVerano Cervantes

Traditionally, labor unions and environmentalists have fought over issues such as urban development vs. growth management, or natural resource extraction vs. preservation. But the lean and mean ‘90s, which are becoming characterized by a growing tendency to privatize public services and roll back environmental protections, makes this a decade to recast our alliances.

For the past two years, I have been participating in exploratory meetings between the Coordinating Council of Bay Area Transit Workers Unions (Coordinating Council) and some of the Bay Area's environmental organizations.* Overall, the group found that there were many opportunities to work together and good reason to move forward. One of the first projects for the group was a jointly crafted vision statement on public transportation. Based on the vision statement the group has begun to identify strategic areas of reform and some general objectives for addressing those targets. (For additional details and the complete article, see RP&E, Fall 1995 at www.urbanhabitat.org/20years/95.)

The Vision Statement
Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area is a significant element in the formation of regional vitality and solidarity. One important aspect of transportation, regardless of its mode, is its capacity to unify or fragmentize communities through accessibility. The existing and future public transportation system must provide that access, and by its nature it must play an integral part in the building of sustainable communities in the Bay Area. Public mass transit is a critical link to reducing wasteful suburban sprawl, increasing socially just urban infill development, reducing reliance on automobiles, improving energy efficiency in transportation, and otherwise improving the social, economic and environmental quality of life of Bay Area communities.

Public transportation is the system that provides mobility to travellers for whom distance proves a hardship and who have no other transportation options. Public transportation is not an isolated system; in fact, its primary function depends on people, on riders. The public transportation “system’’ begins with people and affects local community and regional economic opportunities, affordable housing, land-use development patterns, and environmental quality. The importance of the public transportation system requires that a broad-based coalition be involved in the design of a “public transportation vision.”

Transit workers are the frontline of the public transportation system and work within it on a daily basis. They must be principal partners in creating a regional transportation vision and in implementing steps to improve or otherwise change the public transportation system. This preliminary “vision” of a public transportation system reflects a significant step towards realizing a San Francisco Bay Area region that is socially just and ecologically sustainable. We believe all regional or local public transportation “visions” should include and address the following elements and considerations:

Labor
The transit operators are the frontline of the public transportation system. The operation and maintenance of a public mass transportation system requires the involvement of skilled labor; public transportation should be operated and maintained by union transit workers. More emphasis on mass transit and transportation alternatives can promote job creation, economic opportunity, and environmental protection. The public needs to understand the health, safety, and security issues of transit workers. Public and local government support is needed to operate and maintain the highest quality public mass transportation systems. Public transit workers must be participants in decisions that affect their work; and the public transit workers must have a central role in shaping decisions that affect the public transportation systems. Public transit workers must be informed about financial public transportation support mechanisms created by federal, state, regional, and local government. Public mass transit is an essential public service (like fire and police) and should not be “contracted out” or privatized.

Economic Opportunities
Public transportation invites economic activity to a community. Public transportation can improve the diversity of employment and economic opportunity by increasing accessibility and encouraging multipurpose land uses that meet larger community needs. Some of the mechanisms that achieve these elements are:

1.    Commercial/residential/office/recreation/open space mixed-use and land-use development patterns.
2.    Locating needed services and housing near worksites.
3.    Orienting neighborhoods around distances that one can walk or bike.
4.    Coordinated broad-based community involvement in transportation, land-use, and economic development planning.

Access
Equitable access to efficient and affordable public mass transit systems that serve all regional communities is essential. Transportation access has a particular obligation to first serve those communities least likely to have access to motor vehicles, including the socially and economically disadvantaged, communities of color, low-income and working communities, youth and seniors, and the physically disabled. Transportation systems need to be designed so that jobs, child care services, health services, shopping, and recreation, are easily accessible and in close proximity to one another. Public transportation systems must be “user-friendly” to non-English speaking people and serve the multicultural communities that make up the Bay Area.
 
Environmental Quality
Public transportation is related to environmental quality and as an alternative to motor vehicle use it does the following:

1.    Reduces traffic congestion.
2.    Improves air quality by reducing air toxins produced by auto exhaust and smog.
3.     Improves water quality by reducing urban runoff (water from city streets and sewers carrying oil and soot from motor vehicle   emissions, leaking fluids, battery acids, tires, and other motor vehicle parts containing poisonous substances).
4.    Provides for variety in land-use decisions, including open space, urban core development, and reduction in suburban sprawl.
5.    Reduces the area of land being designated for vehicle use, such as road expansions, additions, and parking lots.
6.    Utilizes energy resources more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Within new and existing communities we need to affirm pedestrian access and mobility and reduce reliance on personal automobile use by promoting and creating safe, fun, and ecologically sustainable pedestrian walkways and bikeways. Transportation and land-use planning must be integrated.

Safety
The public transportation system has an obligation to be safe, secure, and healthy for all—transit workers and the public alike. Additional security needs to be implemented where necessary in order to prevent crimes directed toward transit workers and riders. This security needs to be accountable to transit workers and the public. Environmental health risks associated with transit operation (e.g. exposure to airborne lead, carbon monoxide, etc.) must be reduced. Ways must be found to reduce hypertension and stress among transit operators.

*   The Coordinating Council represents San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni, TWU-250A), Santa Clara Transit (ATU-265), Greyhound (ATU-1225), AC Transit-Alameda County (ATU-192), Golden Gate Transit-Marin County (ATU-1575) Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART, ATU-1555), San Mateo Transit (Samtrans, ATU-1574), UPE-790, UTU-23, UTU-1741, SEIU-707 (Scope), and ATU-1605. Besides the Urban Habitat Program (with whom I work), other participants in these meetings have included Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Greenbelt Alliance, and Urban Ecology.

In 1995, Luz DeVerano Cervantes was a transportation project associate with the Urban Habitat Program.

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Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 12, No. 1: Moving the Movement for Transportation Justice

By John Gibler

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, has always lived a double life, split between its sleek public presentation and its unadvertised purpose. The ad campaigns and lobby efforts supporting the $792 million bond measure of 1962 to finance the system presented BART as a cure for traffic congestion and air pollution. The engineering reports at the time, however, plainly discussed the need for a rapid transit system not to ease traffic jams, but to protect and enhance downtown San Francisco property values and direct urban development.

BART’s schizophrenia is no accident. The system was created by and for the San Francisco Bay Area’s urban elite class—engineering firms, oil companies, and banks that all profited enormously from BART’s unusual design. And neither the schizophrenia nor the profiteering are matters of history: BART continues to absorb about 80 percent of the Bay Area’s mass transit budget, and its recent San Francisco Airport extension and the proposed San Jose extension follow upon the same split between public perception and private intent. To this day, BART remains a transit system that subsidizes land speculators and the mishaps of engineering firms, reinforces the regional dominance of the automobile, and displaces most of the economic and environmental burdens onto low-income communities of color.

BART was the product of the Bay Area Council (BAC), initially a state-funded program to guide post-war development in the area. BAC formed a private, nonprofit organization in 1945, after its first year, and secured annual $10,000 donations from members, such as Bechtel Corporation, Bank of America, Standard Oil of California, Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern Pacific, U.S. Steel, and American Trust Company.

Origins
In 1951, seven years before light rail lines would be removed from the Bay Bridge, BAC formed a committee to study the creation of a rapid transit system for the nine counties of the Bay Area, helping convince the state legislature to create the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission that same year. The BAC guided the rapid transit plan through various research and planning stages, the creation of the San Francisco Bay Area Transit District in 1957, and the 1962 bond campaign that narrowly passed, only after a successful lobby effort to count the vote over the three county area, rather than county by county, and to reduce the necessary overall vote from 66 percent to 60 percent. Aiding in BAC’s BART campaign, San Francisco’s Key System of electric streetcars was purchased by the GM-controlled National City Lines in 1946. Its conversion to bus lines culminated in 1958, when the rail lines were removed from the Bay Bridge.

Throughout the campaign, BART advocates sold the project to voters as a much-needed relief program for traffic congestion and air pollution. Bechtel led the BAC Board of Trustees at the time and contributed $5 million to a Stanford research team and later $15,000 to the BART campaign. Bechtel joined with Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Hall, and Macdonald, the New York engineering firm brought in by BAC to conduct initial studies, and Tudor Engineering of San Francisco, to capture the design and construction contract in a no-bid process.

Bechtel and BAC sought a publicly funded rapid transit project to provide commuter access from the suburbs into downtown San Francisco and Oakland. Such a rail line would vastly increase the property values in the downtowns, spurring the construction of high-rise office buildings in downtown San Francisco and pushing suburban growth out in the East Bay.

The locations of BART stations, combined with the inflexibility of the system, favor driving to BART, outward urban growth, and above all else, protect the property values of downtown San Francisco real estate. The predominantly African American neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland were either cut out or cut in half. Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco’s largest African American neighborhood, is perhaps the neighborhood with the least access to BART in the entire city.

Community groups in West Oakland and Richmond both advocated during BART’s early years for a transit system that would aid in making their neighborhoods into self-sufficient communities. They called for job development within their neighborhoods rather than a transit system to take them to suburban jobs. BART proposed doing the opposite, while in the process, ripping up streets in West Oakland, forcing residents to move, and building its Richmond line on an elevated earthen mound that local critics called the Richmond “wall.”

BART officials denigrated West Oakland, describing it as a slum, “both to mitigate BART’s negative impacts on the community, and to argue that blacks would benefit from better links to suburban jobs, stores, and schools,” writes Joseph A. Rodriguez in his study on BART and West Oakland community groups. “Blacks, on the other hand, argued they had chosen to live in West Oakland and that BART did serious harm to the community, and that they did not want to move or be forced to commute to suburban jobs.”

One West Oakland resident at the time said that the promise of access to suburban jobs was empty. “If we have jobs at all, they are right here.”

Building in Profits
Of the many ways that Bechtel and its partners devised to overcharge taxpayers, the most ingenious, and egregious, is only four inches long. BART’s tracks were designed and built with a width of 5 feet. The global standard for rail track width is 4 feet, 8 inches. BART stands alone in the distance between its tracks—a fact that costs Bay Area residents untold millions of dollars.
“That was the biggest mistake,” says Allan Miller, Executive Director of the Train Rider’s Association of California. “I mean, it wasn’t even a mistake. It was done purposefully, just to raise everyone’s profits. Every time you order anything for BART, you have to not only get different parts, you have to actually build the machines to build those parts. Every machine that builds the parts has to be made from scratch. That’s an incredible expense, and they’ve plagued us forever. There is no way out of it.” 

Another problem with the 5-foot width of BART’s tracks is that it is not compatible with any other rail system. This makes it impossible for BART to link with Caltrain or the San Francisco Municipal Railway. It also makes it impossible for BART to use the tracks of abandoned freight lines. This is one of the reasons BART will cost about $200 million a mile to extend to San Jose, whereas Caltrain could extend along old freight lines for about $2 million.  

BART was initially planned to survive on fares, but already ran a $40 million deficit in 1974. That year, the state legislature temporarily extended the one-half cent sales tax passed to finance BART’s construction. In 1977, the legislature made the sales tax permanent. By the late 1970s, taxpayers were paying two-thirds of BART’s costs through regressive taxation, meaning that low-income Bay Area residents were paying a disproportionate share for a system that primarily served more affluent suburban commuters.  

BART not only caters to the more wealthy suburbanites, it subsidizes their driving by providing “free” parking. Free only means that the individual driver does not have to pay to park his or her car; the cost is spread out over the entire system and hence, disproportionately over low-income area residents. BART has a total of 46,000 parking spaces. The cost to operate and maintain these parking spaces is about one dollar per day per parking spot, or $16,790,000 a year. This is an amazing subsidy for drivers, lowering the overall costs of moving further out and driving to BART.
Transportation justice activists, such as Public Advocates, have denounced the subsidies to BART as part of a pattern of racial discrimination against African Americans and Latinos. They are suing for more equitable funding, but the essential inequity of our current transportation system is built right into the infrastructure of our streets, highways, rails, and bridges by the business-first builders like Bechtel. 

John Gibler is a freelance writer on environmental and social justice issues in California, and a former policy analyst at Public Citizen.
You can find his recent writing in Colorlines and Terrain.

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A speech by john a. powell

john a. powell is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law. This article is an edited excerpt of a speech given at Urban Habitat’s Social Equity Caucus State of the Region Convening on January 15, 2010.

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I grew up in Detroit, in a very large, very loving family. My family was from the South, where my parents were sharecroppers. Which meant, for the most part, they didn’t deal in the cash economy. They dealt in barter. If any of you don’t know about Mississippi and sharecroppers, it’s poorer than poor. Although, I didn’t realize we were poor until I left to go to college at Stanford.

Growing up on the east side of Detroit, I used to hear about all these white people but I couldn’t see very many of them. So I thought it was a myth, until I got to Stanford. Then I started getting a perspective of the community that I had lived in.

In my childhood neighborhood you now see a lot of vacant lots. They are not parks or “open space.” In Detroit, about one-third of the lots—and the houses—are vacant. Today, the average cost of a house is $6,000. Needless to say, the tax base has completely eroded. The people who have left are the people with resources who would help the tax base. They’ve left behind an infrastructure built for two million people that is serving less than a million. The school system has recently been given the dubious honor of being the worst in the country. So, I would say that I grew up in a place where there was declining opportunity—where the chance of succeeding was constantly moving further and further away.

My family had moved to Detroit from the South for the opportunity, but opportunity moved away. Not arbitrarily, but through planning, and the use of public resources to redistribute opportunity in such a way that once again, many families like mine were living in a situation of declining and low opportunity.

I think that the language of opportunity actually is a nuanced way of talking about regionalism—regional equity. How is opportunity distributed throughout a region spatially, socially, and racially? What are the opportunities for low-income communities and communities of color?
First of all, we know that opportunity actually includes a number of things: health care, employment, education, services, healthy environment. If any of them are missing, opportunity is ripped out of the community. But when those things are truly available and accessible—spatially, socially and economically—you have a viable community.

Segregation by Any Other Name
In today’s discourse we don’t talk about segregation anymore. We talk about choice. But no one chooses to live in a low opportunity place. So another way of thinking about segregation is to think in terms of opportunity. Segregation is about isolating people from opportunity and creating situations where they have different access to real life chances.

One way I like to explain this is: imagine some people standing on an escalator going up. Assuming that opportunity is on the third floor, most of the people standing on the escalator (yes, there are always a few knuckle-heads that will fall off!) doing nothing will eventually arrive at the third floor. That’s how our opportunity structure works.

Now imagine some other people on an escalator that is going down. They have to run up the down escalator to get to the third floor. There will always be a few extraordinary people who will do it. However, most of the people on the down escalator will not arrive at the third floor. But we point to the few people who got up the down escalator and say, “Well, what’s wrong with the escalator? It worked for them!” We actually use that phenomenon to justify a system that’s structured in a very unfair way and end up blaming people who don’t go up a down escalator. Not surprisingly, many of the people on the escalator going down are people from poor communities and communities of color.

The Intersection of Poverty and Life Chances
A recent study by Pew Charitable Trusts, Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap by Patrick Sharkey, found that in terms of life chances, living in a high poverty neighborhood has more negative impacts than any other single factor. Whether you have two parents in a household or one is significant, but just living in a poor neighborhood has more negative impacts than just being poor. It depresses the life chances of not only poor families but also middle-income families living there.

And the kicker, which won’t surprise you, is that whether you live in a poor neighborhood or not is determined by your race. So, poor whites are less likely to live in a poor neighborhood than middle class blacks. And about 96 percent of people who live in extreme poverty in urban areas are African American.

I am not saying that poor whites or Latinos don’t have it hard. And we all know that Native Americans get kicked in the teeth coming and going. But African Americans are situated differently in relationship to these structures, which we only understand when we look at how the various factors—income, family status, and the environment that we live in—interact.

Any sociologist will tell you it is hard being poor. But it’s harder being poor in a poor neighborhood. And harder still being poor in a poor neighborhood in a poor city. And yes, it’s hell to be a poor family, in a poor neighborhood, in a poor city, in a poor state! But that’s Detroit with its high school graduation rate of 25 percent—less than 20 percent for African American males.

The rate of incarceration for African American males is over 60 percent at present. So, if you are an African American male living in Detroit, you are three times more likely to go to jail than graduate from high school.
Now that’s an escalator not just going down, but going down fast!

Finding a Way Out
We need to really understand relationships, not just things in isolation. We cannot focus on transportation or housing, but need to look at the relationship between transportation and housing. Or even between transportation, housing, jobs, and schools.

We have to think of the levers that actually move the system and be very deliberate about making sure that these systems actually benefit marginalized communities. To do that you have to make sure that marginalized communities have a voice and an input.

I’m not talking about redistribution or handouts but about bringing folks into the system in a healthy way, so that they contribute to the health of the system. It is crucial to growing and sustaining opportunity for the entire community.

There are ways in which you can rebuild the built environment so that it does not serve the people. Consider Hunters Point in San Francisco. The percentage of people of color—particularly blacks and Latinos—in San Francisco has been on the decline. As San Francisco goes up the escalator, people of color have been going down, pushed further and further away from opportunity—from jobs, good schools, and transportation.

Regionalist Pitfalls and Opportunities
So, what are some positive examples of regionalism focused on equity and opportunity? People talk about Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. All those cities are doing great things but they have three people of color in the whole city! Can you do this in Detroit? Or Oakland? Or Cleveland? It is much harder because race has played such an important part in land-use planning in these regions. I do some work in Portland but I don’t think it’s instructive as to what you would do in Cleveland. Because part of doing this right means you have to have a racial analysis, which is much less important in a place like Portland.

In Cleveland, we got folks to invest in the central city. We have 18 mayors cooperating in increased tax-base sharing. They have created a 100+ million dollar equity fund that helps minority businesses and we’ve got them to build a regional school. Cleveland is the only metropolitan area that I know of where a metropolitan effort in regionalism has been led by the inner city and the black community.

When we started this work five years ago, people were saying it’s not possible because the racial tensions were too great and a relationship between the city and the suburbs couldn’t happen. But it’s happening and now Detroit is asking our help to come up with a platform that will replicate Cleveland. It can be done, but it has to be embraced in a very deliberate way. Cleveland is the only metropolitan area that I know of where a metropolitan effort in terms of regionalism has been led by the inner city and the black community.

A Story for the Future (and How to Tell it)
So what is our vision for the future and how do we get there? We have to apply strategies that open up opportunity in very deliberate ways to families. We must bring opportunities to communities, and take communities to opportunity. We have to have an approach that’s universal but also targeted towards marginalized populations.

If you have a plan to fix the region but you don’t look at how particular populations are situated within the region, they will get left out. It’s not enough to fix a region but ignore marginalized populations. And if you are part of the marginalized populations, don’t wait for the people who are making the decisions to invite you into the conversation. Most of these conversations are public and you are part of the public. Just make sure you are involved in more than name only. And tell a good story. Part of this fight is about what’s the dominant story.

The dominant story right now around subprime lending is that some not very sophisticated African Americans and Latinos took out bad loans they couldn’t afford and almost brought down the whole global economy. Doesn’t matter that it doesn’t comport with facts. That’s the story everyone tells and it’s the story that propels policies.

If you look at what’s happening in refinancing and mortgages, the black community is now actually getting further behind than it was before the crisis. There is no strategy to get appropriate credit to those communities because the strategies are being driven by the stories being told. So we have to participate in telling good stories.

Building Coalitions
No community is powerful enough to work by itself. But how do we build linkages and coalitions across racial and sector groups to make something happen? That something, of course, has to benefit not just your community but the whole region. Otherwise it sounds like a special pleader. If we are concerned about the environment, the earth, the whales, but you are only concerned about the black people in east Oakland, you sound parochial. So, you have to have a story that’s inclusive but also targeted.

Right now the rules of the game are being changed across the country. We are redoing mortgages, credit, education, employment, and transportation. At this time of re-doing, we can write rules that actually deliver. There’s some complexity in that but there are a lot of smart people in the country that you could work with.

Working Upstream to Keep the Jobs Home
We have to participate upstream when rules are being made. When you look at SB375, think about what will be the actual impact of that very important legislation on communities that you serve.

Green jobs, for example, are place-specific in many ways. You have to be in place to install a solar panel. How do we make sure that opportunities deliver? It doesn’t happen automatically, as we learned from New Orleans. They had a lot of jobs in New Orleans but the residents didn’t get them because they brought new people in. Then they made the black community look like they were sitting on the side crying.

How do we structure things to ensure that if they are going to put solar panels on buildings, the people in the neighborhoods actually get the training and the jobs? We need to think about that upstream before the jobs get taken out of the community.

Keeping Race in the Conversation
The dominant discourse in this country is “you don’t talk about race because it’s divisive and truly progressive people don’t even notice race.” It’s based on polling data from the 1980s and ’90s. We need to move beyond polling data and talk about how the mind actually works, taking into account the phenomenon we call implicit bias.

Only two percent of our emotional and cognitive processes are directly accessible to us. When we poll people, we ask what’s in that two percent. But we have seen that the unconscious 98 percent recognizes race very fast. We think about race a lot in this country and it affects the way we design institutions. I talked about this at the Democratic Convention and people thought I was crazy.

I also wrote a piece called “The Race Class of the ‘90s” because in the United States we say, “It’s not race, it’s class,” not understanding that here the two concepts are radically linked because class was formed in an extremely racialized way. In fact, there’s a book by David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, which talks about the formation of the white working class in opposition to the black slave class. So, it’s already racialized even though it’s talking about class. I don’t think, at least in the short term, we can expect the president to really lead on this issue. We have to find a way of leading it and pushing him on this issue. It’s not “if” we talk about race. It’s “how.” 

 

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Volume 11, No. 1: Reclaiming Our Resources—Imperialism and Environmental Justice 

By R.A. Walker

The word “imperialism” is back on the radar of political discourse, after lying dormant for many years, thanks to the Bush administration’s willingness to throw the weight of the United States around with abandon. Imperialism is a useful word. Just as the concept of “internal colonialism” was helpful to people thinking about power and injustice in the 1960s, imperialism can be brought home to good effect for today’s activists and movement leaders. But as an analytical term, it needs to be deepened beyond sweeping statements like, “U.S. imperialism is ravaging the globe”—which are so broad as to be mere slogans—if we are to apply it to conditions of race, poverty, and the environment in California and nationwide.

Imperialism is, above all, a geographic term: the power of one place over another. In the modern world, it came into use to describe the power of the great European countries over far-flung empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. That power was expressed most clearly through political control of territory, or colonization, but it pertained as well to the domination of trade, taxation of the people, land takeovers, and extraction of natural resource wealth. Such exploitation was economic in the broadest sense and not confined to the state and government power. The British Empire was created to advance the cause of capital accumulation, not simply to bring glory to queens and admirals.

Internal Conquests
But imperialism can operate at many scales (geographic areas) and need not be thought of only as external domination. The United States was formed as a continental empire by conquest, which devoured large pieces of the land across the center of North America and absorbed them into one nation-state. This still explains much of the misery of indigenous peoples, whose land was stolen and cultures nearly decimated in the process of Euro-American expansion. It pertains to the tension that underlies Mexican-Anglo relations to this day, due to the historic memory of U.S. conquest of one-third of Mexican territory in the war of 1844-46. That conquest was motivated in large part by the attraction of vast lands for agriculture, mining, and timber. California was the great prize of the Mexican war, yielding up its gold to fuel the appetite of the growing American economy for money in circulation.

California, and particularly San Francisco, then turned around and projected their economic might across a regional empire up and down the Pacific Coast and stretching across the Pacific. This constituted an urban imperialism that sucked the wealth out of the countryside in many forms: silver from Nevada, wood from the Northwest, beef from Southern California, sugar from Hawaii, and commercial and financial profits from every direction.

Cities are huge consumers of natural resources to this day. The tentacles of cities like Los Angeles and Denver reach out hundreds of miles to gather water, electricity, and building materials, and thousands of miles to garner their supplies of oil, gas, and food. When we speak of the United States gobbling up a quarter to a third of the world’s natural resources today to feed its vast appetite for materials and energy, we should remember that a state like California or a city like San Francisco has its own geography of extraction. The legacy of this has been the ruin of many distant places—from Nevada’s ghost towns to Chevron-Texaco’s oil wells in Ecuador—by mines, clear cuts, or oil spills.

This kind of imperial economic conquest and exploitation operates all the way down to the level of neighborhoods and municipalities within today’s huge metropolitan cities. We hardly notice it, but the urban landscape is littered with sites of resource extraction, like the sulphur mine in the Oakland hills, or New Almaden above San Jose, which still leaches mercury into the estuary and makes offshore tuna and crabs dangerous to public health. We also suffer Silicon Valley’s past leakage of cleaning fluids into the groundwater, a legacy of the conquest of Santa Clara County by the electronics industry. The people of Contra Costa County live with the deadly emissions of several refineries turning distant petroleum into locally-consumed gasoline.

Real estate is a critical dimension of internal imperialism, as well. When San Francisco and other Bay Area cities wanted to expand their business, industry, transportation, or housing, they eagerly conquered new space by such devices as filling in the bay, bulldozing hillsides, and even removing the dead outside the city limits to claim the cemeteries. After World War II, the downtown real estate operators looked to the surrounding neighborhoods for potential office and commercial space.

This development marked the era of “urban renewal” projects that devastated historically working class, poor neighborhoods around downtown San Francisco, such as the Western Addition, South of Market, and North Beach, driving out many of the poor and people of color. That process of internal conquest continues to this day, as in the dot-com explosion that made over South of Market, chipped away at the Tenderloin, and encroached on the Inner Mission, leaving many more homeless. A similar process leveled much of central and west Oakland after the war—with a comparable targeting of black neighborhoods—and continues through Mayor Jerry Brown’s campaign to gentrify the central city.

The People Behind Empire
Of course, these instances of local, internal imperialism are not just about places, but about people. Imperial powers are not just national or local governments, but the people behind them. Powerful people, rich people, and most often, in the American case, white people. The Bush Team is not the exception but the rule in that regard. We may think of California politics as more liberal, and the Bay Area as far more liberal than the nation, but when it comes to those at the top of the local business and political hierarchy, their command over space and place is just as fierce and unrelenting as any Bush incursion into Iraq.

The litany is long of business and political leaders  who have led the conquest of local real estate and urban supply lines for profit and prosperity. Among the most famous over the years are the Phelans, Hearsts, DeYoungs, Knowlands, Pardees, Swigs, Shorensteins, and McEnerys. This is not a matter of leading individuals or families, however, but of the leadership of a class. The bankers still need their gleaming skyscrapers, professionals their loft condos, electronics moguls their electricity supply, rich suburbanites their water, business travelers their expanded airport (by bay fill, of course). This class of people is not confined to downtown, by any means, but lives and works throughout the metro area. They guard their geography well, with gated communities like Blackhawk, mansions hidden in the woods in Marin, carefully drawn boundaries like Piedmont. Would that the poor had such privileged access to space and power over their homes and workplaces. They live within the empire but without it at the same time.

R. A. Walker is professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of several articles about the San Francisco Bay Area. His book, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of California Agribusiness was published by The New Press in 2004.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Volume 2, No. 1: Energy

By Carl Anthony

Few people realize the price inner cities have paid for our national love affair with the automobile. But the evidence of devastation is not hard to find. White flight to the metropolitan fringe, driven in part by racism, is linked to destruction of human resources in the metropolitan core, to waste of petroleum energy, pollution of air and water, and degradation of urban biological resources. But older urban neighborhoods can help lead the way to more sustainable cities and suburbs...

The increasing concentration of poverty in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas is linked to the practice of investment in suburban sprawl, and divestment from energy-efficient, inner city communities where people of color live. 

Transportation and energy issues are of critical concern to low income neighborhoods and practitioners of community-based economic development, but advocacy systems for energy and transportation issues are almost non-existent. These systems should be developed. Community development corporations in low-income and minority communities are well positioned to provide a new and potentially powerful national leadership in advocating energy- and transportation-efficient patterns for urban neighborhoods.

Suburban Sprawl and Inner City Decline
White flight to the suburbs has left a host of fiscal and social problems in the inner city. The changes in older neighborhoods started in the 1950s, when an extensive highway system, cheap gasoline, and reliable, and relatively inexpensive automobiles made possible dispersion of the population. White flight shifted the development of housing and jobs out of the cities, into the suburbs.

Housing. By the early years of the decade, the rate of national suburban growth was ten times that of the central cities. Characteristically, suburbs were designed and built as completely detached single family dwellings. Zoning and deed restrictions were used to enforce economic and racial homogeneity.

Industry. Between 1947 and 1972 the central cities of the 33 largest metropolitan areas (based on 1970 census figures) lost 880,000 jobs in manufacturing, at the same time that their suburbs gained 2.5 million manufacturing jobs. These same cities lost an additional 867,000 jobs in retail and wholesale trade, while millions of such jobs were added to the economies of their suburban areas.

Fiscal Impact. White flight also created fiscal problems. From 1970 to 1980, the largest 50 cities lost five percent of their populations, while populations in poverty increased by 20 percent. The result was declining tax bases for cities at precisely the moment when demands for services were increasing the need for more revenues. Out migration of families increased difficulties of sustaining basic urban institutions—churches, banks, stores, recreation facilities—in the face of growing joblessness. At the same time, the demise of these institutions cut off the traditional modes of social mobility and subjective perceptions of opportunity, resulting in a circular process of downwardly adjusted hopes and expectations, and increased isolation of poorer urban populations. Yet, spatial segregation in the metropolitan region cut off suburban populations from any feeling of responsibility for the less advantaged left behind in the cities.

However, past efforts at inner city revitalization have often brought in their wake gentrification and displacement. Economic development does not begin with goods. It begins with people, their education, organization and discipline. The same might be said for energy conservation. To avoid the problems of gentrification we must come to terms with the historical trend and to address the institutional needs of disadvantaged urban communities.

Transportation, Energy, and the Inner City
Transportation and energy consumption patterns of the urban poor are different from those typical of affluent suburban residents. Policies based upon the habits and resources of well-to-do suburbanites do not meet the needs of inner city residents, or address the opportunities for energy conservation in the inner city. In general, city dwellers consume less land, less energy, less water, and produce less pollution than their counterparts living at lower densities in the suburbs. Housing densities in suburbs range from four to six units per acre, while urban housing ranges from 20 units (rowhouses) to 80 units (midrise construction) per acre. Less land is therefore needed for each person. Compact buildings have more shared walls and less exterior surface, and therefore, smaller heating demands. The urban poor more often live in attached dwelling units, row houses, and multifamily housing than do middle- and upper-income whites. Their homes are more often rented. Studies show that although multifamily housing is more energy- efficient as a building type, poor and renting households consistently live in less weatherized units and spend a higher portion of their household income on home energy than the affluent. Cities require less travel distances and automobile use. High density and mixed use makes mass transit viable. Yet we continue to invest in suburban development and inner city abandonment with its concommitant waste of human and natural resources.

Black households tend to own fewer vehicles, use them more intensively, purchase fuel more frequently, and maintain smaller fuel inventories than do white households. They travel less than half the vehicle miles in private automobiles than the national average and use public transportation more frequently than do the affluent. They are thus less likely than suburban whites to benefit from policies which emphasize increased automobile efficiency. Market-based solutions to energy conservation are often unfair to poor people. Policy makers often suggest market-based solutions as a way to encourage energy conservation. Such policies are often unfair to poor people. They ignore the extent to which upper-income groups have benefited by government subsidies, such as the federal tax codes which encourage businesses to abandon old structures before their useful life is at an end. They ignore the influence of federal highway construction or the impact of reimbursement formulas for waterline and sewer construction on the decline of inner cities.

Low-income households pay a disproportionate amount for their energy, up to a third of their total budgets for basic energy services, and pay more for the same services than the average customer because they cannot afford energy investments. Though innter city residents are already suffering the most from the current wasteful energy system, they often bear the burden of policies that on the one hand attempt to account for environmental externalities by increasing the price of energy, but on the other ignore the economic externalities. Out of all population groups, poor families turned out to be the most responsive to price increases, and in some cases this led to more than minor inconveniences. “For some low income families, economizing on home heating meant living with temperatures well below comfort or health levels.”

Policies which would increase the cost of gasoline would hurt the elderly living on fixed income in neighborhoods without adequate public transportation, who have no way of shopping or getting to the hospital other than using their cars. On the other hand, policies which encourage and strengthen the convenience of public transportation and affordable, sustainable neighborhoods could reduce the number of abandoned buildings and the amount of vacant land located close to the existing urban energy infrastructure. Such policies would result in benefits to the urban poor. Increasing the number of people living in underutilized census tracts would strengthen the economic viability of neighborhood services, reducing the need for travel. Such policies would benefit fiscally strapped school boards and public agencies who need to install more energy-efficient furnaces and insulation in old schools and energy wasting public buildings.

A National Energy Policy for Inner City Communities
The Persian Gulf crisis has once again focused public attention on the need for a national energy policy. Inner city community-based organizations should develop strategies of active support of new legislation and policies as solutions to urban energy problems. A new national energy policy is an opportunity to reverse the pattern of urban abandonment.

Advocates of a new national policy, however, should pay closer attention to the intersections between land- use patterns, energy consumption, and social justice. While efforts to increase fuel efficiency of automobiles are important, it is equally important to reduce the need for automobile transportation through intelligent urban design and rehabilitation of older neighborhoods, especially poor neighborhoods. We should redesign and rebuild such neighborhoods for access by proximity—bringing energy-efficient housing, amenities, and services into each community, rather than relying exclusively on vehicles.

One strategy would be developing guidelines to change bank lending practices, to provide additional credit to homeowners in efficient houses in neighborhoods with access to public transportation. An opportunity exists to bring the voice of communities of color and other inner city residents into the process of developing national energy and transportation policies. Community development corporations (CDCs) in low- income and minority communities are well positioned to provide a new and potentially powerful national leadership in advocating energy- and transportation- efficient patterns for urban neighborhoods. Neighborhood-based community development corporations were established in the 1960s to address issues of economic disenfranchisement of the nation’s poorest communities. The location of CDCs in poor, inner city neighborhoods, their ability to undertake educational programs, their knowledge of community needs, and their position in the core of metropolitan regions suggests an important role they may play in providing leadership to the metropolitan region in helping to make the transition away from wasteful, polluting practices to sustainable patterns of land use. CDCs are nonprofit corporations with neighborhood representatives sitting on their boards. Such corporations—many located in inner city neighborhoods—are able to acquire property, build housing, undertake economic development, and provide education and job training.

From 1970 through 1990, CDCs built more low- income housing than the federal government. During the 1980s, despite hostility from Washington, these groups thrived, and new ones were established. Today, there are 1500 to 2000 such organizations around the country, showing surprising vitality and strength. In the light of the need for urban energy transformation, new functions of CDCs could be: energy education and infomation; urban agriculture, canning, and other local food processing enterprises; businesses related to weatherization, heating, air conditioning; retraining; encouragement of energy-efficient new housing construction, including advocacy of compact urban land use, energy- efficient location decisions; diversifying recreational opportunities; using school buses rather than cars; and developing car and van pool systems.

Recognition of the connection between social justice and environmental issues can help us develop a sound national energy policy. It can also assist inner city communities to reclaim and restore forgotten urban neighborhoods. Advocates of social justice should pay more attention to the National Energy Policy debate. Strengthening our understanding of the connection between social justice, energy, and transportation issues may encourage effective collaboration between environmental and social justice movements, which all too often in the past found themselves at odds with each other.

In 1991 Carl Anthony was the director of the Urban Habitat Program at Earth Island Institute.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

A speech by Max Rameau

We have been doing our Take Back The Land activities in Miami since the summer of 2006. Our work began in response to the gentrification of low-income housing. We recognized that we could no longer depend on the government to solve the problems with extreme gentrification and extreme housing prices in our community because they were an integral part of the problem. So, we decided to start a new organization and focus our attention on the internal capacities of our community, rather than figure out what the government can do for us.

Take Back The Land is a collective with a leadership of about five—myself and four women. There’s a larger group of about 20 that we can call on at any time. Given the nature of what we’re doing, it’s very difficult to build a mass organization because at its core, what we are doing is illegal. We can’t have public meetings to say that we’re going to break into this house on this date. There are just too many logistical and legal repercussions. Also, we did not want to seek funding. We got one grant, which we transferred to a nonprofit partner. So, there’s no staff and no budget to speak of.

In October 2006, we took over a vacant piece of land and built the Umoja Village shanty-town in Miami, Fla. It stood for six months before falling to a suspicious fire. We felt that we had built a model but it lacked long-term viability because we had no public policy component to what we were doing. In fact, we had explicitly taken an anti-public policy stance. So, when the Miami City Manager sent one of his minions over to say, “How can we resolve this?” I said, we’re going to give you our demands. When he took out his pen, we said, “We want you to get off our property!” That was our only demand. We felt then—and until recently—that we specifically did not want to have any engagement with the government. But we did not have a public policy piece or alternative institutions in place. You can’t build the movement or create social change that way.

The Opportunity of Crisis
Today, because of the economic and political crisis, we are at a historic point where people are willing to rethink their relationship to the land, the economic system, and the financial system in a way that they were unwilling or unable to do before. If we had tried to do land takeovers five or six years ago, we would have been kicked out by our own neighbors. Now we get great press and community support.
Things that seemed crazy and not possible five years ago suddenly are relevant and mainstream. Consequently, this opens up an opportunity for the social justice movement to offer viable alternatives.

In broad terms, our goal is to fundamentally transform land relationships—the way people, governments, and corporations relate to land and to one another in relation to land. We believe that it’s possible in our lifetime.

If we engage in a protracted, vigorous, and broad political campaign, we can win vast public policy changes, possibly even amendments to state constitutions, which would make housing a human right. A second major goal we can pursue is to introduce new political leadership—particularly people of color, low-income people of color, and specifically, black women.

Nationwide Strategy to Take Back the Land
We are now trying to build a national Take Back The Land movement, bigger and different from the one in Miami where we were able to take advantage of specific situations and benefit from them. We want to build something flexible enough for people to apply those principles in their own communities.

The U.S. Human Rights Network is coordinating the national effort. We have signed on 10 organizations in 10 cities focused on elevating housing to the level of a human right, and at least in the initial stages, on the path of direct action: housing defense and liberations.

Umoja Village LeThe Umoja Village was founded on October 23, 2006 in the Liberty City section of Miami, Florida in response to gentrification and a lack of low-income housing. “Umoja” is Swahili for “unity.” After months of planning, Take Back The Land seized control of a lot that had been vacant for about eight years after low-income housing there was demolished by the city. Take Back The Land erected tents and wood-frame shanties to provide housing for homeless people in the area. Police were unable to evict the residents or organizers because of a 1996 settlement with the ACLU that forbids the arrest of homeless people on public land when there are no beds for them in city shelters. By December, Umoja Village housed approximately 50 homeless people who ran the village democratically. The village enjoyed broad support in the community, so was able to successfully repel numerous attempts by government officials to tear it down. On April 23, 2007, Umoja Village celebrated its six-month milestone with the following actions: the replacement of wood shanties with more durable structures; the building of a water well; participation in local anti-gentrification and pro-housing campaigns; a demand for legal rights to the land from the city; and plans to acquire land and build low-income housing. On April 26, 2007—the day that the first new structures were scheduled to be built—Umoja Village burned to the ground in a mysterious fire. There were no casualties or injuries but Miami police took the opportunity to arrest 11 residents and activists for attempting to remain on the land and the city erected a barbed wire fence around the property that same day. To ward off more protests, the city initially offered the property to Take Back The Land to build low-income housing, but later reneged on its offer under pressure from local power brokers and lobbyists. —Ed.

We think it extremely important to use direct action to challenge the prevailing paradigm around land and land relationships. Consequently, breaking the laws that support the paradigm is a critical part of our model. It’s a tactic designed to reach something bigger, which is to advance public policy initiatives that elevate housing to the level of a human right.

Our position is that progressive public policy in the United States is effectively dead because we cannot move it. And the reason for that is that we have no real leverage; meaning, we have no money to give to public officials. What we do have is our labor and this sense that we should be able to stay in the buildings, and in the homes. Since we have no viable leverage to advance progressive public policy, we have to go on a hard, direct action binge.

Ultimately, our objective is bigger social change through public policy, but I don’t think we can get to that without the direct action. But first, we need a plan. What do we do after we win? In Miami, we were unprepared to cope with victory. In fact, that happened with the home of the Trody family, which was featured in the Michael Moore film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

The bank sent the Trodys a second eviction notice a few months ago, and of course, the next day we were there, ready to take arrests, defending the family’s right to stay. One of our leaders called the bank—U.S. Bank, which got $6.6 billion in bailout funds from the federal government—and after a couple of negotiating sessions, the bank offered us the house for $1. But we had no way to accept the house. Not only did we not have an organization that could deal with victory, we weren’t even clear about what that organization or model should look like. So now, as we build the movement to the point where we have those victories, we need to concurrently build the alternative institutions that can sustain those victories.

Direct Action to Affect Banks
To bring about this kind of social transformation, we have to make it affect the economic self-interests of the financial sector and the government, which also controls large amounts of properties.

We can start by focusing on one bank—Citibank or Bank of America. Say they own $10 billion worth of toxic assets. First they spend money to do a foreclosure, then they spend money to do an eviction, then they spend more money to board the house up, and some more money on upkeep and blight abatement. Then somebody moves into the vacant house and they have to spend on evicting them and boarding up the place all over again.

If we can occupy 10,000 of these homes, the cost of repossessing all of them will be prohibitive. At some point the banks will recognize that it is in their financial interest to just hand the places over to nonprofits. By taking the $10 billion in tax write-offs they will actually come out ahead, financially.

Our direct action has to make it so the banks have a clear financial interest in giving away the foreclosed homes rather than continuing to spend money on getting back properties they supposedly own.

Direct Action to Affect Government
It used to be that when they put a 24-hour eviction notice on someone’s door in Miami, it meant that the police would come the next day or the day after. Now it takes the police seven to 14 business days to follow up on an eviction notice. That’s how backlogged they are.
The Trody family was evicted on a Friday, they spent the weekend in their truck, and we moved them back into the same house on Monday. Seven police cars and eight police showed up in response and stayed for about two hours, but then left without doing an eviction. That happened on February 23, 2009 and the family is still in the house.

If we can mount this kind of action even 10 percent of the time—where they will have to bring in seven police cars—it will back up the foreclosure/eviction process even more.

 

If we're able to force the police to do mass turn  arrests, or leave, the municipalities would be incapable of executing the evictions and they would fail. The municipalities and counties would then be motivated to support turning the properties over.

Our Vision for the Future
If we had a whole new world, what would it look like? We need alternative structures for control (what people normally call ownership). Land trusts and co-ops are a good base to build from. But we need to go further. If we’re going to fundamentally transform the economy as a whole so that housing is de-commodified, we will need to develop alternative financial structures, such as community-controlled credit unions.
At present, we think about land and land ownership in two ways: private and public. We would like to establish a third method of ownership where the community would have some level of control over the land without government involvement.

So, we are asking organizations to join us by amplifying the work that they are already doing and encouraging them to take it up to the next level.
In May 2010, we want to have organizations doing liberations or defenses in several areas. Our goal is to help 100 families in a nationwide campaign where we either move them into places that were previously vacant, or defend them against eviction.
If we don’t do this in a real way, by this time next year we will have missed our chance. 

Max Rameau, a founding member of Take Back The Land, is a Miami-based activist working for land rights and housing. This article is based on a presentation he gave in Oakland in February 2010. Background on Umoja Village is from Take Back The Land’s website: http://takebacktheland.blogspot.com. 

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 15, No. 1: Who Owns Our Cities?

By James Tracy

If you have ever lived in or around a public housing development you would probably agree with the stated aim of the federal Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program: Drastic measures are needed to improve the dilapidated buildings and uplift the lives of the people who live in them.

HOPE VI provides grant money from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to local housing authorities to demolish and reconstruct “distressed” projects. Tenants receive relocation assistance and a portable Section 8 voucher to subsidize their rent in the private market while their public housing developments are demolished—entirely or in part—and reconstructed as mixed-income housing complexes in an attempt to deconcentrate pockets of intense poverty.

In theory, the original tenants are then able to return to their refurbished homes and enjoy a wide range of social and economic programs designed to ease the transition from welfare to work. In reality, what often happens is that the reconstruction is delayed or abandoned altogether, or the “mixed income” residency requirements causes the poorest of the tenants—those most in need of subsidies—to lose their homes.

A Brief History of HOPE that Isn’t
Since 1992, HUD has awarded 446 HOPE VI grants in 166 cities. As of 2006, 78,100 public housing units had been demolished and an additional 10,400 units were slated for redevelopment.[1]

However, a 2004 study by the Urban Institute found that only 21,000 units had been built to replace the 49,828 demolished units. In other words, roughly 42 percent of the demolished public housing had been replaced.[2]

In 1940, President Roosevelt stood in front of Atlanta’s Techwood Housing Project, the first completed federally funded public housing, and said, “Within a very short time people who never before could get a decent roof over their heads will live here in reasonable comfort and healthful, worthwhile surroundings.”[3]

In 1996, despite its special place in history, the Techwood Project was the first to be demolished under HOPE VI to make room for the Olympic village. However, visitors to the Olympics were still able to walk through a virtual reality exhibit of Techwood, but without the annoying presence of its displaced tenants. The original Techwood contained 1100 units—all of them for public housing. Today, only 300 units are available for public housing.

A HOPE Based on Punishment
Under the Clinton and Bush administrations, Republicans and Democrats have colluded to systematically dismantle what was left of the social welfare system ushered in by the New Deal. Throughout the 1990s, the rhetoric of welfare reform blamed “cultures of poverty” and “concentrations of poverty” for poverty itself. Instead of getting tough on corporate layoffs of thousands of people during peak profit time, Clinton decided to show “tough love” to those most likely to be at the receiving end of structural unemployment.

Of course, it would be a grave mistake to stereotype all public housing residents as welfare recipients because public housing tenants are often some of the hardest working but poorest paid people. In 1999, the median income of families living in public housing was $6,500, well below a living wage by any standard. In their essay “Failing, but not Fooling, Public Housing Residents,”[4] authors Jacqueline Leavitt and Mary Ochs point out that both “welfare reform” and “public housing reform,” take a punitive approach to public policy and make false assumptions about the availability of decent-paying jobs and adequate job training. Interestingly, punishment and privatization often seem to go hand-in-hand.

In 1996, President Clinton signed into law a bill designed to accelerate evictions in public housing. Dubbed “One Strike and You’re Out,” it was touted as a way to stop drug trafficking and violent crimes in public housing developments. Since One Strike was a civil procedure, tenants could be evicted even if they were acquitted of criminal charges. In effect, what One Strike did was provide an excuse for eviction based solely on innuendo and allegations of criminal activity. Thankfully, in January 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eliminated those provisions of “One Strike” which allowed evictions of those who were both innocent and ignorant of the crime for which they were being evicted.

Fighting HOPE with Resistance
In 1996, a small group of residents at a North Beach public housing facility in San Francisco who were concerned about being displaced by HOPE VI decided to fight back. They sought the help of the Eviction Defense Network (EDN), which had previously led a successful campaign to prevent evictions of undocumented residents.

There followed a three-year, door-to-door campaign of organizing and educating the tenants about the dangers of relocating for HOPE VI upgrades without a firm promise of a home to return to. Consequently, more than 60 percent of the tenants signed pledges not to move until they had received real guarantees. The San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), fearing that delays and a failure to comply with HUD mandates would cause them to lose $23 million in HOPE VI money, relented. The tenants were offered an “Exit Contract” with legally binding guarantees, most significant among them: one-for-one replacement of all demolished low-income units and a limited number of reasons for disqualifying a tenant from re-occupancy.

Charged by this modest victory, the tenant activists of North Beach drafted a Public Housing Tenant Protection Act (PHTPA) as a citywide ordinance. Although supported by San Francisco Board Of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano, and passed by the Finance and Labor Committee, the measure was eventually killed by Supervisor Amos Brown.

QHWRA: No Hope for the Homeless
The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) of 1998 mandates that all public housing developments should become “mixed income,” meaning, all new housing units are for those making 30 to 80 percent of the median income. In effect, this makes it virtually impossible to exit homelessness via the public housing system.

Partnerships with the private sector are key in reducing federal government costs for low-income housing. According to HOPE VI proponents, the average annual direct costs are reduced by $3.9 million for public housing units redeveloped as mixed-income housing.5 But urban land being at a premium, the HOPE VI process usually results in the privatization of many developments as developers contracted to do the reconstruction generally gain partial ownership (currently estimated at around one billion dollars) of the new housing. So, the poor continue to lose, as corporations, such as McCormack Baron, Sun America, and Bridge Housing Developers make immense profit.

Nationwide, there are now over one million families awaiting subsidized housing (as acknowledged by HUD’s own research) but the federal government continues to cut back on available units.

Spatial Deconcentration as Political Diffusion
The United States Code of Federal Regulations has identified “the growth of population in metropolitan and other urban areas, and the concentration of persons of lower income in central cities” and set a goal to “develop new centers of population growth and economic activity.” Its apparent objective is “the reduction of the isolation of income groups within communities and geographical areas and the promotion and increase in the diversity and vitality of neighborhoods through the spatial deconcentration of housing opportunities of persons of lower income and the revitalization of deteriorating neighborhoods.”[6]

In other words, poverty is a result of poor people living in close proximity to each other—rather than of structural unemployment or the persistence of racism—and “economic integration,” or living close to employed people, will set a good example for the poor.

Is spatial deconcentration a progressive solution to poverty or a hideous experiment in social engineering? One obvious effect of spatial deconcentration is the dilution of the political power wielded by concentrated voting blocks. The other is that it makes more difficult any political organizing for the common economic interests of a community.

Author Yolanda Ward traces the theoretical roots of spatial deconcentration to when President Lyndon Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders commonly known as the Kerner Commission.7 Inner City riots were frequent in the 1960s. (San Francisco’s largest was in 1966—a community response to the police killing of Matthew Johnson, a 16-year-old African American youth from the Bayview.) The Commision was set up to investigate the origins of 160 disorders in 128 cities in the first nine months of 1967.

The Kerner Commission report, released in 1968, recommended traditional liberal solutions to poverty, such as strengthening the social safety net and increasing job opportunities for inner-city citizens. It also suggested spatial deconcentration as a viable strategy to deter urban uprisings.
Whatever the intentions of its promoters, the end result of spatial deconcentration (supported by the Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr., and Clinton administrations) has been the political demobilization of the oppressed as poor residents are scattered to the suburbs.

Pushing the Poor Out of Town
Urban Habitat studies published in the 1990s track the deconcentration process in the Bay Area where displaced low-income residents generally are dispersed to the rim cities of Antioch, Vallejo, San Pablo, Dixon, El Cerrito, and Vacaville. In each of these areas, the number of available jobs exceeds the population. Some, like Vallejo and Alameda, have suffered high unemployment rates as a result of military base closures. So, public housing transplants to these areas often have to commute to the metropolitan areas to find low-wage work.

Overt political racism is another issue that gentrification refugees have to face in the rim cities. A case in point is the early morning raid conducted by a Vallejo city taskforce on the federally subsidized but privately owned Marina Green development in 1997. Over 60 families were rousted from their beds and forced to watch as officers ransacked their apartments for no apparent reason other than that they all received welfare.

The irony of federal housing policy “reform” is that it uses a progressive critique to accomplish completely conservative aims. The HOPE VI program argues against warehousing the poor in substandard areas and many housing authorities actually have self-sufficiency programs for their residents to prepare for gainful employment. However, by abolishing the requirement that demolished public housing units be replaced on a one-for-one basis and cutting funding, Congress has effectively given the federal government an exit strategy out of the public housing business.
As the nationwide housing crisis intensifies and the nation teeters on the brink of a recession, we are faced with the type of economic and political conditions that existed during the Great Depression. We can only hope that they will lead to a re-ermergence of some of the more enlightened and progressive social programs of that era.

Urban Removal: Legacy of Destruction
The term “urban removal” refers explicitly to the government-financed-and-facilitated destruction of inner-city housing. In the case of HOPE VI, the destruction is of government-owned developments but in some cases, the government also seized private property and removed entire communities.

The Western Addition or Fillmore District of San Francisco is ground zero in the history of urban removal. The first removal in that area occurred with the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. The area was then populated by blacks who were aggressively recruited from the southern states to work in the Bay Area building war machines. During the war years, blacks not only enjoyed a degree of economic prosperity, the neighborhood became a center for jazz, blues, and the arts. But when the war ended, the government started a propaganda campaign against the Fillmore, branding it “blighted.” Given the relative prosperity of the Fillmore at the time, the notion of “blight” had little to do with decrepit conditions, but everything to do with racist assumptions and developer profit.

The urban renewal legislation passed by Congress in 1949 and 1954 conferred Redevelopment Agencies with the power to condemn entire city blocks and evict residents, be they renters or owners. The process of eminent domain proved devastating to the roughly 17,000 people displaced during both phases of the project.

Before urban removal, a large portion of blacks owned their own homes. Joyce Miller was nine years old when her family was forced to leave their home under the threat of eminent domain. “They offered the families some money, usually less than what the place was worth,” Miller recalls. “They told you that if you didn’t accept, they would take your home anyhow.”

Although Miller’s family found housing not far from their former home, other residents were not as lucky. “The realtors made sure that if you stayed in San Francisco, you went only to the Ingleside District or the Bayview,” she says. “Everyone else was pushed out of the city.” n

Endnotes
1.    Turner, et al. Estimating the Public Costs and Benefits of HOPE VI Investments: Methodological Report. The Urban Institute. June 2007.
2.    Popkin, et al. A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges. The Urban Institute and The Brookings Institution. May, 2004.
3.    Dedication of Techwood Homes. Archives of Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia, Atlanta. Nov. 29, 1935. http://www.cviog.uga.edu/Projects/gainfo/FDRspeeches/FDRspeech35-2.htm
4.    Leavitt, Jacqueline and Ochs, Mary. “Failing, but not Fooling, Public Housing Residents.” The Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies Working Paper Series, University of California, Los Angeles. 1998.
5.    Turner, et al. Estimating the Public Costs and Benefits of HOPE VI Investments: Methodological Report. The Urban Institute. June 2007.
6.    Title 42, Chapter 69, Sec. 5301. Congressional findings and declaration of purpose.  Section 101 of the Act. http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/communitydevelopment/rulesandregs/laws/sec5301.cfm
7.     Ward, Yolanda. Spatial Deconcentration. www.ecoabsence.org /text/ward.htm

James Tracy is a freelance writer, longtime housing activist, and president of the San Francisco Community Land Trust. 

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 15, No.1: Who Takes Ownership of Our Cities?

By Rick Cole

Forty years ago, as America’s inner cities imploded, the New Yorker ran a sardonic cartoon. It portrayed a smug tower dweller overlooking a vista of tenements. “Ghettoes aren’t a problem, my dear,” he blithely informs his wife. “Ghettoes are a solution.”

Today, the “urban crisis” is metastasizing across the planet. More than half of the world’s 6.5 billion people now dwell in cities—and more than a billion of them survive in desperate slums. This gives global resonance to the environmental, economic, and social equity struggles of American cities. If we are to heed the words of Gandhi and “be the change we want to see in the world,” thinking globally means acting locally. Creating a sustainable planet starts in our own hometowns.

But even those who recognize this responsibility seldom focus on the fundamentally public nature of this endeavor. Unique challenges of organizing city life gave birth to both the democratic and republican variants of self-rule. The very word “politics” is derived from the Greek word for shared urban space.

Moving Beyond Individualized Solutions
No matter how laudable personal and small-scale endeavors may be, planting trees, carrying canvas shopping bags, tending community gardens, and installing solar collectors will not collectively transform America’s cities into models of sustainability. The sheer scale and complexity of the task will require public will, public resources, public policy, and public action. While “all politics is local,” there are some commonly shared misconceptions that deter us from fully recognizing the public sector’s vital role in reshaping our cities.

The most pervasive is the mindset that takes for granted that local government primarily exists to provide specific services. Of course, the traditional municipal functions we now take for granted (such as police, fire, parks, libraries, sewers, roads, and land use regulation) were all originally forged out of social upheaval and political struggle. Those who pioneered these services were crusaders, not functionaries. Today, however, the institutions organized to deliver these services have ossified into underfunded and self-perpetuating bureaucracies. Propping up these inherited structures takes precedence over the bold innovation needed to meet today’s needs. If we were starting from scratch (as Sir Robert Peele did in passing the Metropolitan Police Act in Britain in 1829), would we safeguard peace and order primarily through an armed and insulated caste of uniformed officers? If we were looking to eliminate waste, would we construct elaborate sewage systems and provide weekly collection of garbage? That we have grafted elaborate adaptations onto our entrenched structures (from “community policing” to “recycling”) only underscores their anachronism. This investment in the past in turn reinforces the myth that the public sector is inherently inefficient and ineffective. There was a time when the burning passion of public service could put a man on the moon. Now we wonder whether it can fill potholes.

Another self-limiting mindset is our deep disdain for politics, which has become a shallow, petty, and self-interested game for insiders. The absence of real people in the debate and struggle over the concerns that affect their lives has robbed the public sector of both legitimacy and leverage. A professional political class has gradually supplanted the sphere of citizenship, relegating popular participation to mere voting in elections—and on rare occasions banding together for single-issue self-interest, such as protesting a highway extension, affordable housing project, or tax increase. Without robust and broad-based social and political associations, urban public life is privatized and segregated and governance becomes an arena for mercenaries. Passivity perpetuates the self-fulfilling prophecy that political activity is futile—leaving politics to private interest lobbying.

A less pernicious, but equally misguided attitude, is the notion that public life is unimportant or simply boring. Whether it is the excuse that “people are busy” or the inescapable distractions of so-called “popular culture” (a euphemism for corporate entertainment), public life is neither compelling nor cool to most people. This is quite convenient for perpetuating the status quo. Our cities and our citizens face such tangible and significant questions as:

• How will we get around in the age of peak oil and global warming?
• How do we best utilize urban land to avoid sprawling onto farmland and sensitive habitat?
• Where should public resources be directed—and what investments should we make in our shared future?

Unfortunately, questions like these are avoided by politicians, neglected by the media, translated into bloodless administrative jargon by bureaucrats, overlooked by well-meaning single-issue activists, and end up being virtually ignored by the people whose lives are directly affected by them.

Learning from History: Grasping the Big Picture
Lamenting these ingrained delusions is not the same as changing them. How can they be overcome?
Despite the seemingly unprecedented depth and scope of our urban challenges in the 21st century, we fool ourselves if we think we have nothing to learn from history. Americans are particularly prone to pre-occupation with the present, concocting excuses for why it’s so much harder to make change now than it was in the past. In reality, as abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and never will.”

Our urban history overflows with insight and inspiration relevant to the dangers and opportunities of our own time. How about reviving the public discourse and public spirit that brought us public libraries at a time when education and access to knowledge was confined to the very wealthy? Why not rekindle the enlightened self-interest and open-mindedness that inaugurated public health protection when typhoid, cholera, and dysentery stalked our streets?

As we look past the waning days of the Bush Administration and confront the huge work ahead of us to create sustainable cities, we can’t help but also want to think small. It makes a difference whether we sustain a Head Start program in Albuquerque or improve public school scores in Philadelphia or reclaim a park in Richmond or install solar collectors on a public works facility in Ventura. But the answer to “who owns the city?” lies with who takes ownership of the whole city, not just our part of it. That is the lesson of the millions of citizen activists who have built community and make change by taking ownership beyond their homes, their neighborhoods, and their parochial concerns. It’s the public will behind the public resources, public policy, and public action needed to make great and sustainable cities. 

Rick Cole has been city manager of Ventura, California since 2004. He previously served as city manager of Azusa and as mayor of Pasadena.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Interview by B. Jesse Clarke

Rinku Sen is the president and executive director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of ColorLines magazine. A leading figure in the racial justice movement, Rinku has positioned ARC as the home for media and activism on racial justice. She has extensive practical experience on the ground, with expertise in race, feminism, immigration, and economic justice. Over the course of her career, Rinku has woven together journalism and organizing to further social change. She also has significant experience in philanthropy, as vice chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and Advisory Committee member of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. Previously, she was the co-director of the Center for Third World Organizing.

Jesse Clarke: What kind of organizing for racial justice were you doing in the late ‘80s and early ’90s? How was it different from today?

Rinku Sen: I think the big difference between now and the late ‘80s is that race and racial justice were not considered core factors in community organizing then. It wasn’t something you were supposed to build into your organizing ambitions and your campaign demands. Community organizing took a very race-silent approach then. What we and many colleagues around the country did was change the theory of community organizing to challenge the racial dynamic of the country.

Clarke: How much connection did you experience with the civil rights struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which by then were historical legacies? Or for that matter, with the activists from the Alinsky stream of the community organizing movement, which wasn’t looking at segregation and economic exclusion as fundamental parts of organizing?

Sen: In my perception, there was distance between us and civil rights players, organizations, and leaders who, partly as a result of the success of that movement, had become establishment people. They were school board members, city council members, members of Congress, and essentially, public sector targets for community organizing. The success of the civil rights movement created a more complicated political landscape. You had people of color as well as white people in decision-making power positions that had to be dealt with by community organizations and labor unions.
Another factor was that the civil rights movement was big, and involved many different kinds of people across the country, many of whom moved into community organizing. The major organizing networks were almost all populated—and many were led in the late ‘80s—by white, black, Latino, and Asian people who had cut their teeth on the civil rights movement. At that point, the key intervention to make was a diversity intervention. It was important to move people of color into organizing and for community organizing networks to recognize that they needed communities of color in their mix to be successful and relevant.

It wasn’t until the latter part of the ‘90s that we, as organizers, got a sense that there was more to the race question than who was in the room. There was an analysis that you couldn’t replace simply by putting a particular set of bodies together because simple diversity doesn’t stand in for the analysis that really defines your organizing theory, your practice, and ultimately, what you can win for whom. Over the last 20 years, the work that I am proudest of is having created, not just a diversity paradigm, but an equity paradigm on race.

Clarke: What were the campaigns of the ‘90s, which brought the kind of analysis into the mix that went beyond just diversity?
Sen: One was a multi-year police accountability campaign that involved about seven organizations in different parts of the country. That effort created a participatory research process and a platform of demands that ran counter to the safety campaigns that mainstream community organizations were running. Community organizations, often with good numbers of people of color, were participating in and supporting the war on drugs. They were making deals with the police to increase police presence and helping to carry out the war on drugs in poor communities of color.

Starting in 1992, we worked with community members to look into the effects of that kind of criminalization. Was it actually keeping drugs out of our communities? It didn’t look that way. Was it driving huge numbers of blacks and Latinos and increasing numbers of women into the criminal justice system? So it appeared. Did it result in policies that gave the police greater power in communities of color? That’s how it looked.

By working on the analysis as well as having the people in the room we came up with a set of accountability demands on police departments, which included citizen review. One of the more creative arguments we made and actually won in a couple of cities was to get police departments to pay out civil rights lawsuits from their own budgets rather than the general city budget. That’s a defensive victory but a pretty important one because it makes the police think about the cost of their civil rights violations.

Clarke: Can you talk about the impact of the shifting demographics in the U.S. and the evolution of what racism means within different communities—as a way of controlling people, distributing the workforce, and organizing the social and economic life to the benefit of the elite. What are some of your experiences of working with coalitions—the strengths and challenges?

Sen: At the Center for Third World Organizing we developed the notion that most communities live in a racial hierarchy. Because of the many different kinds of people in the country now, simple demographics take us beyond black and white, so you can’t make blanket statements about all communities of color occupying the bottom of society. In fact, you might have certain Asian groups at the top of the income chain and others at the bottom of that chain. You might have black communities that have some political power but no economic power and Asians that have economic power but not much political power.

We have tried to develop a more complicated idea about how racism plays out and how we get played off against each other. We could create an ethic that says we don’t all have to occupy the same rung on the racial ladder in order to feel committed to taking that ladder apart. The only reason for participating in racial justice work cannot be: “My people are at the bottom!” because your people are not always at the bottom. That’s not a very sustainable motivation for acting and contributes to some real conflict in multiracial organizing situations. Everybody competes to be at the bottom in order to get their people’s attention and get them involved. But we need a higher level of motivation and a baseline understanding of why we’re all in the work. We need to deal with the realities of the time that we’re living in.

When I was in college, there was the notion that all white people are racist because they’re all racially privileged. I still hear this in a number of anti-racist trainings. Or that people of color can’t be racist because they never had enough power to act on their racism. In a world where you have Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, it’s insulting to say that every person of color in a position of power is some white man’s tool. It just absolves those people of all responsibility for dealing with racial equity, and I don’t think we can let them off the hook. I think addressing racism is more complicated than just being anti-racist, which is a defensive posture. We need a proactive, affirmative, forward-looking vision of what racial equity means and what the country can gain from establishing it.

Clarke: So, even if you’re a person of color, you can act on behalf of a racist and unjust economic system. But some earlier theories of economic analysis posit the somewhat simplistic idea that “The differences between the African American working class and the white working class are negligible, so we need to work primarily on the class relationship.” In some circles there is a reductionist tradition in racial analysis. Can you share with us your view of the relationship between class and race and how organizing multiracial coalitions and dealing with economic justice are influenced by your class analysis of the situation?

Sen: Call me Pollyanna, but I just don’t understand why class, race, and gender analysis can’t exist together. Why do we have to decide that one thing is really the thing and everything else is tangential? That just isn’t the way things work. I really object to a race-silent class analysis. As a young organizer, the theory of racial solidarity that I used was “We’re all in it together—we’re in the same boat.” As I’ve grown older and had more exposure, I’ve come to understand that actually our boats aren’t designed the same way, so we’re not exactly in the same boat. Understanding those differences is key to solving the problem and to doing good multiracial organizing.

Just to give you an example, we work closely with the Idaho Community Action Network, a statewide organization of poor- and moderate-income white, Latino and American Indian, working people. The organization decided recently to test the signing up system for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Initially they thought, “Everybody has the same set of problems with that system, so we don’t need to have a racial analysis.” But then they decided to try to figure out if there are, in fact, racial differences in how people get screwed by the system. So, they sent in 27 people—nine sets of white, American Indian and Latino families. What they found was that 26 out of the 27 applicants got denied. So clearly, everybody gets screwed by the SCHIP system.

But, Latinos were the only people to be asked inappropriate questions about the immigration status of their kids. “Where did you have your child?” “How did you get across the border?” All the questions that government workers are not supposed to ask. If they hadn’t done that study with a racial lens, they would have simply shortened the application form and changed the hours—problems that everybody faced—but not dealt with the questioning process that targeted only Latinos. Consequently, they would not have solved the problem for everyone and thus strengthened their multiracial relationships by clearly understanding how each party was affected differently.

Clarke: Can talk a little bit about how gender has figured into your analysis of racism, power, and class?
Sen: I did a training in the ‘90s for lead organizers that had a bunch of campaign planning activities to do. Just as a lark, we split the group into men and women. What we found was that the men focused in on the higher level strategy questions and were finished in half the time that I had alloted them. But they didn’t do all of the exercise: they skipped over all of the questions about how to build relationships between people and how to manage the details of the campaign—the scheduling, the tracking of assignment, etc. They just skipped all those things that mostly women end up doing in organizations.

The women, on the other hand, spent so much time on the relational questions and on logistical details that they didn’t have a whole lot to say about the overarching strategy. I think that’s a division of labor that closely mirrors the division of labor among men and women in society. I don’t think that the answer is to let everybody do what they’ve already learned how to do, but rather to train organizers to be good at all of the things they have to be good at. And to be aware of how their societal training and family training or their gendered training affects their ability to take on new skills in that mix.
Gender constructions themselves are racialized. Our overarching notion of what is a good man and what is a good woman, are based on white people being good people and people of color being bad people. So, if you look at the welfare debate, for example, that debate is full of gender judgments: The men aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, the women aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They are highly racialized definitions of what a man is and what a woman is. What a good man is, what a good woman is.

I do think it’s important not to mush everything together as if race and gender and class all work in the same way. They don’t. There are important differences in the way that the systems get set up and perpetuated. But there are so many more connections between them; so many more fundamental ways in which they influence each other that we tend not to pay attention to. When we don’t pay attention, it really limits our ability to frame the issues that we’re working on.

Clarke: What kinds of issues can and should be organized so that the questions are framed in a way that is also liberationist with respect to gender and which can advance a campaign that would expose gender and sexism as fundamental aspects of our cultural matrix and part of the equity problem?

Sen: I think that most issues have a gender element, a gender dimension, just as I think most issues have a racial dimension. I think a good example is “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military policy around sexuality and being out, which in its actual application disproportionately affects black women. When you hear about the policy, you imagine white Army guys kind of forced to be in the closet and then forced out of the military. That’s not who’s actually getting a four star in the military under “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It’s black women. That means that there’s a racial and a gender, as well as a sexuality factor. It also means that black communities, particularly black women, might have a real stake in undoing that policy. But hardly anybody even knows that fact and very few people talk about it in relation to that debate. So, whatever stake black communities might have in changing that policy, goes totally under the radar.

Clarke: Can you talk a little bit about the fact that women of color are taking on leadership positions in different places now and have established some solid time under their belts.

Sen: There are lots and lots of really impressive women of color working in the field and taking on critical leadership roles, running big networks. Sarita Gupta is the head of Jobs with Justice, National Network of Labor Community Alliances. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the head of Green for All. I could go on. I think it’s really important to recognize the accomplishments of those women and the skills of those women. But, at the same time, I also hear many stories of women of color who stepped up into leadership positions in multiracial organizations and are just abandoned by all of the white people.

I have heard lots of stories about organizer training programs that train white graduates and graduates of color—mostly women, because it’s women who do this work. The white graduates of the training program are hired immediately while the women of color either end up starting their own thing because they don’t have another option or, are hired as the outreach person at a white organization, or end up not getting hired at all in organizing.
I think that there are still characteristics that make some of us more palatable leaders in the progressive world than others. You can’t be too confrontational. You can’t be too focused on race, for example. You can’t be too insistent that gender always be in the mix of analysis. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “you can’t be” because I think I’m all of those things, but you have to make every decision extremely strategically. There’s not much room for mistakes to be made, certainly not the kind of room that white men have in progressive politics. You can lose and lose and lose and still be the top strategist of major democratic campaigns, for example. That just would not be true for women leaders of color.

Clarke: Moving forward, what’s the central racial justice challenge for building power for communities of color?
Sen: The environmental justice frame and the intellectual work that that movement did revealed how racism can work as a system even if the individuals within it are not consciously racist. Even if Union Carbide doesn’t have consciously racist executives deciding, “We're going to make sure every community we target is a community of color because we just hate them.” Even if that’s not happening, the activities of Union Carbide have that impact, have the result of not just disproportionately creating health problems and poverty for people of color but actively exploiting those communities so that money can be made by someone else.

I think the biggest problem is that Americans don’t understand how racism actually works today. They define it as interpersonal and explicit and blatant. So, if there’s not a noose hanging somewhere, there’s no racism involved. Communities of color also have that same definition. We’re more sensitive to horrible interpersonal interactions. If we have the experience of discrimination it changes our outlook some, but our essential definition of racism is not systemic, it’s individual. Until you get to a systemic definition, very little is going to change. We need everybody to embrace that systemic definition, regardless of their political position or their color.

I think it has been an enormous mistake to pursue short term gains—to win this election or that ballot measure. We have made lots of decisions about what we will not say because the “public” can’t tolerate it, or is too stupid to understand the complexities of racism. We’ve based all kinds of political strategy—from school board races to budget fights to presidential campaigns—on the idea that Americans are too stupid to understand how a system works.

What we’ve done is let the muscle that can grapple with racism atrophy for 30 years. You know, when you exercise, you have to push yourself, not just maintain your resting heart rate. We have stopped engaging in the exercise and we have lost that muscle. I don’t single out politicians of color as being better or worse than anyone else in this regard. But I do think that we have to pose that challenge wherever we can—to politicians, to government administrators, to teachers, to doctors, and to ourselves as activists.

B. Jesse Clarke is the editor of Race, Poverty & the Environment.Thanks to the National Radio Project for assistance in recording this interview.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

Earlier this winter, Ron Dellums, mayor of Oakland, California did something that spoke volumes about the nature and effect of political power in that Bay Area city. In his annual State of the City address before a packed City Hall, he pointedly avoided using the “b” word—“b” as in black or black people. Instead, Dellums used a word more common in the modern progressive lexicon—the "d" word—diversity. It's a telling difference.

Although many cities have tried to solve their social problems simply by moving some of their residents out of the city, Dellums said that this was not going to happen on his watch. In Oakland, the mayor said, we celebrate and welcome diversity.

Dellums, once described by Van Jones as “the legendary congressman who personally helped speed Apartheid’s demise” in South Africa, wanted to go on record as reversing the gentrification policies of his predecessor, Jerry Brown, under whose watch the exodus of African Americans from the city escalated at a rapid pace. But he did not appear to want to spell out that it was African American residents he was looking to retain.

The action was no aberration. Four years ago, a multiracial coalition of Oakland citizens began a petition campaign to convince Dellums to come out of retirement as a public official and run for mayor. But it was the African American leaders within that coalition who had begun the original “Run, Ron, Run” chant at a meeting of Oakland black activists, which sparked the petition campaign that was subsequently taken up by other ethnic and racial groups.
“Because Ron was a black politician, if blacks had been prominent in the forefront of the petition drive it would have been identified as a ‘black campaign,’ the press would have jumped on it, his opponents would have attacked it, and it would have hurt Ron’s chances,” explained one activist who had drafted Dellums.

In the city that was once the unofficial capital of black radical political action when it was the national headquarters of the Black Panther Party four decades ago, in an area (San Francisco Bay Area) still considered one of the most progressive in the nation, too close an identification with “black” by black politicians and political activists can sometimes become something of a liability.

In reality, the history of political power in American cities is flush with examples of ethnic solidarity. Communities elect politicians from their own ethnic group who, in turn, dole out jobs, programs, projects, and favors to their community members, thus enhancing the community‘s political clout. The Irish in New York, Boston, and Chicago and the Italians in New York and San Francisco are examples. Even in Oakland, Latinos and Asian Americans are continuing that trend with little contention. In fact, the city only recently ended the practice of treating the At-Large City Council seat as the unofficial Asian seat after Asian Americans showed that they could win seats without such a set-aside. But for African Americans in Oakland, the process appears to have reached a dead-end.

The Role of the Black Panthers in Oakland Politics The root of the problem with African American politics in Oakland goes back to the successful 1977 campaign of Lionel Wilson, the city’s first black mayor, according to Geoffrey Pete, an African American business leader. Four years prior, after the Black Panther Party sponsored a 1972 voter registration drive that put several thousand new voters on the books for Alameda and Contra Costa counties, Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale had run for Oakland mayor. He shocked political observers by coming in second in the first round of voting and forcing a runoff against the incumbent white mayor, John Reading. With Reading choosing not to run again in 1977, Wilson won the mayoral election in a runoff. “The Black Panther Party helped [Wilson] get elected more so than the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” says Pete. “Lionel admitted that, and his quote was printed in one of the Black Panther Party papers. It was just a fact. They were organized. They were at the pinnacle of their powers and development at that particular time.” In the normal course of events, the Black Panther Party would have used its organizational power to put pressure on Wilson to address specific African American interests and issues in the city. But Panther co-founder Huey Newton had just returned to Oakland from exile the year of Wilson’s election as mayor, setting off a fierce turmoil and infighting within the Black Panther Party, which led to the ouster of Seale and Elaine Brown—Panther leaders and architects of the party’s foray into electoral politics. Under Newton, the Black Panther Party veered away from electoral politics—including coalition politics with the newly-elected mayor—and the Party itself fell into disarray, eventually imploding and disintegrating. “Because the Panther Party was gone, they never held Lionel responsible and [they failed] to remind him who he was beholden to,” said Pete. “So Lionel went the other extreme. That’s not to say that he didn’t advocate for African American interests, but the blueprint [for advancing black interests in the city] was never cemented.”

Testing The Limits of Black Power
The strongest indication of the limits of black political power in Oakland came in 1996, when African Americans held a majority on the seven-member Oakland Unified School District board and four of the nine City Council seats, including the mayor’s office. Recognizing that African American students in Oakland schools were falling behind in achievement—in part because many of them spoke a unique dialect known to American linguists as Ebonics—the school board directed the school district to set up training programs for teachers so that they could instruct African American students using Ebonics. The idea was to help the students in learning both, standard English and other subjects, while maintaining “the richness and legitimacy” of Ebonics. The school board suggested that funding for the proposed Ebonics program could come from federal education funds earmarked for students whose primary language is not English. What happened next is documented in a feature article entitled “Double Talk” that I wrote for the San Jose Metro newspaper at the time:

“In a fierce-hot reaction that rolled over the country and back with interwarp speed, Oakland’s Ebonics policy was both ridiculed and denounced on talk shows and op-ed pages and in newsgroups everywhere. A spokesperson for California Governor Pete Wilson called it a ‘ridiculous theory’ and a ‘dubious plan.’ North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth called the use of Ebonics as a public teaching tool ‘absurd... It’s teaching down to people.’ State Senator Ray Haynes of Riverside accused the Oakland board of ‘want[ing] to institutionalize bad speech patterns.’ But certainly the most damaging blows to the Oakland plan came from national African American leaders. Jesse Jackson initially called the Ebonics proposal ‘an unacceptable surrender borderlining on disgrace.’ Poet-educator Maya Angelou was quoted as saying she was ‘incensed’ by the plan, and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume called it ‘a cruel joke.’”[1]

It was some time after the controversy had died down that American linguists and education specialists  began expressing public support for the Ebonics proposal because, in their expert opinion, the underlying linguistic assumptions and educational roadmap were based on sound fundamentals. But by then the political damage had already been done. The Ebonics program was never implemented, Oakland’s black leadership became a national laughingstock, and no African American political officeholder from Oakland has come out with an overtly pro-black program since.

As a matter of fact, in cities around the country, there is a clear decline in the ability and willingness of African American political officeholders to deliver direct and specific political benefits to the core constituency that largely helped put them in office.

Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson’s  Black Majority
In his New York Times obituary for Maynard Jackson, the first African American mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, reporter David Halbfinger wrote “...it was [Jackson’s] fiery advocacy for the new black majority that had elected him [in 1973]—in particular, by setting up affirmative-action programs for hiring city workers and contractors, and by giving neighborhoods a voice in city planning—that constituted a political revolution in the heart of the South. Seemingly overnight, it transformed Atlanta into a mecca for talented, aspiring blacks from across the country.”[2]

The signature black advocacy event of Jackson’s mayoral tenure occurred during the expansion of the Atlanta airport. As Jackson took office, Halbfinger wrote, Atlanta “was becoming the air travel crossroads of the South, Atlanta’s airport was expanding to meet the needs of a major hub, and Mr. Jackson demanded that black workers and contractors receive their fair share of the business building and operating its new terminals at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport.” Jackson refused to move forward with the terminal building until those demands were met, and though the city’s white business leaders initially balked, they could not outlast the new mayor.

Halbfinger also noted that “Mr. Jackson often boasted that the airport was built ahead of time and under budget, even as the city contracts granted to minorities duly soared from less than 1 percent in 1973 to nearly 39 percent within five years. He also boasted that Atlanta gained dozens of new black millionaires, many thanks to joint ventures of minority-owned and white-owned companies at the airport.”

It was the perfect yardstick for how black political power should work to support black business and black workers who, in return, throw their political support back to black political officeholders who can perpetuate the cycle. But 15 years after Jackson left office, that cycle appears to have been broken.

The Shrinking Black Voter Base
In a December 4, 2009 online piece on Atlanta’s mayoral race, Errin Haines of the Associated Press writes that after four decades of African American leadership, with the election of Atlanta’s fifth consecutive black mayor, “...the fissures in the [city’s black political] machine were exposed, its future viability cast in doubt... Atlanta’s black population has shrunk and its white population grown since its current mayor, Shirley Franklin, was elected in 2001. Its voting rolls are filled with newcomers unfamiliar with Atlanta’s habit of assigning its business interests to whites and its political interests to blacks. The reality is sinking in that black political power here is not as strong or united as it once was, and is destined to weaken as more whites seek office and more blacks shed their civil rights-era sentimentality.”[3]

“A major challenge to the machine is the thought, rapidly taking hold, that black leadership has not always meant black progress in Atlanta—the city still has a poverty rate of 22 percent, far more than the national average of 13 percent,” Haines points out.

In New Orleans, the loss of black political power came directly from the inability of key black officeholders to hold on to black people. Following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Ray Nagin, the city’s fourth consecutive black mayor, was either unable or unwilling to rebuild the communities devastated by the floodwaters, particularly in the city’s majority-black Ninth Ward. Once dubbed “the Chocolate City” by Nagin, New Orleans’ black population dropped by the thousands following Katrina, resulting in this year’s election of the city’s first white mayor since 1978.

Perhaps the best chance to translate black political victories into sustained black political power along the Irish and Italian models was lost with the 1987 death of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington of a heart attack just months after being elected to a second term. Washington—who understood ethnic power politics well—was elected in 1983 after a registration campaign that pulled in 100,000 new African American voters with a thinly disguised Black Power slogan that said, “It’s Our Turn Now.” That the next African American politician from Chicago to emerge into national prominence after Washington is Barack Obama—who represents the very essence of diversity and coalition politics and is the antithesis of a black politics that openly and specifically goes after black-identified issues—is symptomatic of the times.

The reason why black political power has traveled a distinctly different road from America’s other ethnic and racial minorities has been well documented: No other racial or ethnic group suffered the cultural and institutional disintegration that African Americans did under slavery and, therefore, are as vulnerable to continued outside manipulation and disruption. African Americans served as the battering ram to open the door for the rights of other Americans—many ethnic and racial groups, women, gays—but it left the African American institutional and group infrastructure seriously weakened. Whether African Americans will rebound from these setbacks or the direction that that rebound will take is a tale yet to be told.

Jerry Brown’s Promise to Oakland
For the moment, the Oakland experience seems prototypical of the national trend: In 1980, African Americans constituted 47 percent—the largest racial bloc—of this multiracial city. That black plurality resulted in two consecutive African American mayors—Lionel Wilson and Elihu Harris—between 1978 and 1999 and at one point, a majority-black Oakland City Council and Oakland School Board. But those years of black political power in Oakland resulted in a backlash, and an August, 1999 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Mayor Jerry Brown in his campaign had “promised to dismantle the African American-dominated political machine that presided over much of the city’s decline since the 1970s.”

Brown won with 59 percent of the vote—a large chunk of it African American—against several black candidates. And ironically, though he was the only candidate who openly targeted the power of another racial group, a City Journal article of August 1999 speculated that Brown’s election “may signal the waning of Oakland’s counterproductive race politics.” A Salon.com article from June 1999 notes that “[m]uch of [Oakland]’s black leadership, and a plurality of its black voters, seemed prepared to elect this white man mayor, judging that his track record on issues of concern to African Americans more than made up for his lack of melanin.”

Some of the city’s African American leadership had warned that a Jerry Brown administration with its ambitious plans to move 10,000 new residents into the city’s downtown area would lead to gentrification—and a loss of black lower-income residents. They had a point. Mayor Brown’s development plans became so synonymous with gentrification that Oakland activists began calling the phenomenon “jerryfication.” Though Oakland had already been losing its African American population before Brown was elected—it dropped by 21,000 between 1990 and 2000—during his two terms in office that trend accelerated and the city lost another 34,000 blacks from 2000 to 2008. Many left because of a lack of jobs, others because they could no longer afford the rents in their neighborhoods, yet others because many of the lower-income African American neighborhoods have been unable to rise above the squalor, drug dealing, crime and violence for years. It is one of the largest movements of a population in California since African Americans poured into Oakland during World War II to work in nearby factories and shipyards.

Whites now make up about 37 percent of Oakland and outnumber African Americans by about seven percent. The numbers of Latinos and Asian Americans also rose in Oakland during Jerry Brown’s eight-year term. This is the Oakland that elected former congressman Ron Dellums mayor in 2006.

The Age of Dellums
During his tenure as Oakland’s congressional representative, Dellums was something of a progressive icon because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam and Apartheid rule in South Africa, but was always forced to subvert overtly-black political issues within his own district because he was one of the few blacks to serve in a non-majority black congressional district. Whatever his personal beliefs, Dellums always underplays the black agenda, either from habit or political survival instincts. And while his administration’s programs are often of direct benefit to African American interests—a highly-successful re-entry program that helps find jobs and other support for the mostly black ex-prisoners returning to the city, and reforms within the Oakland Police Department (OPD) that are helping to close the longtime split between blacks and the OPD, for example—Dellums himself rarely, if ever, speaks of the programs as having direct black benefits.

Geoffrey Pete, an Oakland business leader and Dellums supporter who has been active in city politics and African American organizations for many years, and who led the original “Run, Ron, Run” chant that eventually led to the Dellums mayoralty, thinks the current political conditions in Oakland make black politicians leery of being too openly identified with black-specific causes. Pointing out that Oakland runs on coalition politics, Pete says, “Coalition politics means that you work with Asians, you work with Latinos, you work with unions, you work with environmentalists, you work with gays. That’s good, and it’s necessary, and we should be doing it. But the black interests are sometimes swallowed up in that process.”

Endnotes
1    www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.27.97/cover/ebonics1-9709.html
2    www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/us/maynard-h-jackson-jr-first-black-mayor-atlanta-political-force-dies-65.html
3    http://blog.taragana.com/politics/2009/12/04/atlantas-black-political-machine-intact-but-battered-after-narrow-victory-in-mayors-race-4670/

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

By Michelle Alexander

Over since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.”  Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality.  There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—permanently relegated by law to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys. 

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades—they are currently at historical lows—but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal—complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods—but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.  Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes—sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.  

Facing Facts
But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s—the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war—nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time—a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.
Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers—not to mention president of the United States—causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come. 

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure—the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.
This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare. 

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness  (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. This article was previously published at tomdispatch.com.

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The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits

To order the print edition of "The 20th Anniversary Issue" use the back issues page. To download or view a pdf of this article use the link in the lower left below.

Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 14, No. 2: Just Jobs? Organizing for Economic Justice

By Jaron Browne

The United States has once again surpassed its own world record for incarcerating the highest percentage of its population. According to a report released by the Bureau of Prison Statistics, one out of every 32 adults was in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005. But the crisis of mass incarceration is not felt evenly in the United States: Race defines every aspect of the criminal justice system, from police targeting, to crimes charged, and rates of conviction. African American men between the ages of 20 and 39 account for nearly one-third of all sentenced prisoners.[1]

Over the last three decades, the explosion of the prison population in the United States paralleled the stagnation in the global economy. In the early 1970s, the United States and the G7 nations began implementing neoliberal policies, moving production from the North to the global South, pushing entire sectors of workers in the United States out of the economy. As the economic role of the working class in the United States shifted from manufacturing to staffing a rising service industry, African American workers faced staggering rates of unemployment. The mid-1970s is also the first period when the incarceration rate in the United States began to rise, doubling in the 1980s, and doubling again in the 1990s.

It may surprise some people that as the number of people without jobs increases, the number of working people actually increases—they become prison laborers. Everyone inside has a job. There are currently over 70 factories in California’s 33 prisons alone. Prisoners do everything from textile work and construction, to manufacturing and service work. Prisoners make shoes, clothing, and detergent; they do dental lab work, recycling, metal production, and wood production; they operate dairies, farms, and slaughterhouses.

United States Prisons mirror Free Enterprise Zones in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the prison is a reflection of the Third World within the United States. Prisoners are not protected by minimum wage laws or overtime, and are explicitly barred from the right to organize and collectively bargain. In fact, the conditions for the overwhelmingly black and Latino men and women inside the United States prison system are so similar to that of workers in the maquiladoras and sweatshops of the global South that in 1995, Oregon politicians were even courting Nike to move their production from Indonesia into Oregon prisons. “We propose that (Nike) take a look at their transportation costs and their labor costs,” Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix explained in an interview with researcher Reese Erlich, “We could offer [competitive] prison inmate labor” in Oregon.[2]

Rooted in Slavery
To understand the conditions that have allowed such an exploitative industry to develop, we have to look at the origin of the United States prison system itself. Before the abolition of slavery there was no real prison system in the United States. Punishment for crime consisted of physical torture, referred to as corporal or capital punishment. While the model prison in the United States was built in Auburn, New York in 1817, it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War, with the official abolition of slavery, that the prison system took hold.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery for all people except those convicted of a crime and opened the door for mass criminalization. Prisons were built in the South as part of the backlash to black Reconstruction and as a mechanism to re-enslave black workers. In the late 19th-century South, an extensive prison system was developed in the interest of maintaining the racial and economic relationship of slavery.
Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison illustrates this history best. In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.

Black Codes and Convict Leasing
When slavery was legally abolished, a new set of laws called the Black Codes emerged to criminalize legal activity for African Americans. Through the enforcement of these laws, acts such as standing in one area of town or walking at night, for example, became the criminal acts of “loitering” or “breaking curfew,” for which African Americans were imprisoned. As a result of Black Codes, the percentage of African Americans in prison grew exponentially, surpassing whites for the first time.[3]

A system of convict leasing was developed to allow white slave plantation owners in the South to literally purchase prisoners to live on their property and work under their control. Through this system, bidders paid an average $25,000 a year to the state, in exchange for control over the lives of all of the prisoners. The system provided revenue for the state and profits for plantation owners. In 1878, Georgia leased out 1,239 prisoners, and all but 115 were African American.[4]

Much like the system of slavery from which it emerged, convict leasing was a violent and abusive system. The death rate of prisoners leased to railroad companies between 1877 and 1879 was 16 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Arkansas, and 45 percent in South Carolina.[5] The stories of violence and torture eventually led to massive reform and abolition movements involving alliances between prisoner organizations, labor unions, and community groups. By the 1930s, every state had abolished convict leasing.[6]

Chain Gangs
As the southern states began to phase out convict leasing, prisoners were increasingly made to work in the most brutal form of forced labor, the chain gang. The chain gangs originated as a part of a massive road development project in the 1890s. Georgia was the first state to begin using chain gangs to work male felony convicts outside of the prison walls. Chains were wrapped around the ankles of prisoners, shackling five together while they worked, ate, and slept. Following Georgia’s example, the use of chain gangs spread rapidly throughout the South.[7]
For over 30 years, African American prisoners (and some white prisoners) in the chain gangs were worked at gunpoint under whips and chains in a public spectacle of chattel slavery and torture. Eventually, the brutality and violence associated with chain gang labor in the United States gained worldwide attention. The chain gang was abolished in every state by the l950s, almost 100 years after the end of the Civil War.[8]

Prison Labor Exploitation in the 21st Century
Just a few decades later, we are witnessing the return of all of these systems of prison labor exploitation. Private corporations are able to lease factories in prisons, as well as lease prisoners out to their factories. Private corporations are running prisons-for-profit. Government-run prison factories operate as multibillion dollar industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison system. In the most punitive and racist prison systems, we are even witnessing the return of the chain gang. Prisoner resistance and community organizing has been able to defeat some of these initiatives, but in Arizona, Maricopa County continues to operate the first women’s chain gang in the history of the United States.[9]

Shifts in the United States economy and growing crises of underemployment and poverty in communities of color have created the conditions for the current wave of mass incarceration, and the boom in prison labor exploitation. In the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco, a historically black community with an estimated 50 percent unemployment rate, the community is facing criminalization, incarceration, and mass displacement as a result of gentrification. San Francisco, along with eight other counties in California, is implementing gang injunctions—curfews, anti-loitering, and anti-association laws that function very similar to Black Codes for black, Latino, and Asian youth—using the pretext of gang prevention to track young men into the prison system to become prison labor, while preparing the community for redevelopment and gentrification. People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) is building power among Bayview residents and fighting for economic development that addresses the interests of the black community, which will create alternatives to prison labor exploitation.[10] Struggles like this are being waged all across the country and provide an opening to link the demands for worker rights, community rights, and prisoner rights.

The fight against the exploitation of prison labor is at once a fight against racial profiling and mass incarceration, and also for genuine economic development in black, Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities. The labor movement in the United States has a responsibility to support prisoner unions such as the Missouri Prison Labor Union (MPLU), which is fighting for higher wages and collective bargaining, and to challenge labor unions who dismiss prisoners as stealing jobs from the “good law-abiding workers” on the outside. As Sidney Williams of the MLPU states, “In this struggle we seek to regain our human dignity.” That is the demand of the slavery abolition movement of the 21st century. 

Endnotes

1.     There are more than 46 black men in prison nationwide per 1000 black men in the population, whereas the rate for white men is four per 1000. Democracy Now, “United States prison population jumps 3.7 percent to two million; Increase of 700 inmates every week.” Wednesday, July 30, 2003.
2.     Erlich, Reese, “Prison Labor: Workin’ For The Man.” Covert Action Quarterly #54, Fall 1995.
3.     In Tennessee, for example, African Americans were only 33 percent of the prison population in 1865, by 1877 the number had swelled to 67 percent of the total prison population. Shelden, Randall G., “Slavery in the 3rd Millennium: Part II—Prisons and Convict Leasing Help Perpetuate Slavery.” The Black Commentator, Issue 142, June 16, 2005.
4.    Green, Fletcher M., “Some Aspects of the Convict Lease System in the Southern States.” Essays in Southern History, vol. 31, (Durham: University of North Carolina Press), 1949, pp. 116-120.
5.     Hartnett, Stephen, “Prison Labor, Slavery & Capitalism In Historical Perspective” (c. 1997). Referencing Novak, D.A., The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor After Slavery.
6.     Lichtenstein, Alexander, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: The Negro Convict is a Slave.” The Journal of Southern History, (Athens, Georgia: Southern Historical Association), 1993, p. 87.
7.     Wilson, Walter, Forced Labor in the United States, (New York: AMS Press, Inc.), 1933, p. 68.
8.    Prison Law Office, The California State Prisoners Handbook, Section 3.17, pp. 79-80.
9.     Reuters. “Sheriff runs female chain gang.” www.cnn.com. October 29, 2003.
10. POWER is a San Francisco-based multiracial organization of low-wage workers and tenants. For more information, see www.unite-to-fight.org.

Jaron Browne is an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER).   

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Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 14, No.1: Just Jobs? Organizing for Economic Justice

By Steven Pitts

Globalization is not a new phenomenon. The transatlantic slave trade was a manifestation of “globalization.” The carving up of Africa, Asia, and Latin America into colonies of Europe was a manifestation of “globalization.” Twenty-first century globalization shares some features with these previous eras, chief among them, the reality that the costs and benefits of a global economy are distributed unequally and, hence, our true challenge is building organizations and alliances with sufficient power to force a redistribution of these costs and benefits.

These issues of power and control are particularly important when fighting for quality jobs. Most jobs are not inherently good or bad; the key question for workers is the power to control the terms of work. Jobs in the auto and steel industries became “good” jobs because workers organized unions, which brought better wages, benefits, and dignity. Jobs in the casinos of Los Vegas became jobs that could sustain families because workers formed unions, and their collective action forced casino owners to redistribute their winnings. The victories of janitors in Houston, which led to the recognition of their union, will give them the power to improve their jobs.

The crisis of bad jobs in the United States is simply a domestic manifestation of 21st century globalization. The policies which harm many people in other countries are closely linked to the policies which harm many people in the United States. Just as people and nations are battling to transform structural policies with respect to international economic forces, there is a need to transform certain structural policies in this country. In the area of work and employment, this means a need to develop campaigns to transform the jobs which workers in the United States currently hold.

There are two essential economic elements of twenty-first century globalization: the rapid movement of technology, capital, goods and services, and people across space (“the world is getting smaller”); and the subsequent changing of the global division of labor. Production, which used to be exclusive to the United States, Europe, and Japan can now take place in most countries throughout the world. Also, during previous globalization eras, dominant countries contained most manufacturing and colonies and other lands were sites of raw material extraction. Now, manufacturing can occur in countries with cheaper labor forces and the production of services play a larger role in the economies of the global North. In addition, these policies have led to a change in the relationship between corporations, governments, and workers. This new relationship can be called neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism and What it Means
Key features of neoliberalism include a reduction in the role of government in regulating the economy; a greater role for the market in determining economic and social outcomes; and less protection for workers and citizens provided by governments. International economic institutions, such as the World Bank, reward countries that privatize national assets and balance budgets, even if these actions harm citizens. Transnational corporations seek those countries where markets are free of government regulations. The drive to balance budgets and have “business friendly” climates result in the elimination of needed social programs.

These features should sound familiar to activists in this country. Starting (with the Carter administration) in the late 1970s, the federal government has cut back its role in the economy and deregulated numerous industries, including trucking, telecommunications, and airlines. Local governments respond to insufficient revenue with cutbacks and contracting out. In the face of healthcare and pension crises, the Right calls for “market-based” solutions. Education is underfunded and welfare “reformed” to the point where former recipients are forced to take poverty level jobs.

What do these changes mean for jobs in the United States? Among the many impacts, three can be singled out. First, the rising importance of manufacturing in foreign countries means a greater role for the “goods movement” industry in this country. This industry includes the ports, which receive the goods, the trucks and trains, which move the goods off the docks, and the warehouses, which temporarily hold the goods. Second, the rising importance of a number of service industries, including hospitality, healthcare, and building services. A special feature of these jobs is that they cannot be shifted overseas because they involve people-to-people contact. Third, the strain on budgets cause local governments to use their land-use policies to increase revenue streams. Thus, the retail industry becomes a special target for subsidies, with the resulting increase in retail jobs.

Given these domestic manifestations of neoliberalism, what lessons can be drawn by activists? Many advocates reference a so-called “Golden Age” of the United States economy between 1945 and 1973, when blue collar workers could earn decent incomes and the government had social programs to address poverty, healthcare, and retirement. In addition to the fact that this era was more complicated than depicted, it is important to note that the benefits of this period reflect a confluence of many factors, including the dominance of the United States in the international division of labor; the relative strength of labor, civil rights, and other social justice movements; and a range of social protections provided by the State. The first factor, United States pre-eminence following World War II, cannot be replicated. (Nor is it clear that we would want to return the world to such a state.) However, the other two factors reflect the conscious efforts of activists.

As we move forward, the battle for quality jobs in goods movement, services, and retail industries is a key arena where social justice activists should place their energies in the struggle against neoliberalism. Strong labor and social movements can indeed win direct concessions from employers and from the State, and force a redistribution of the gains from globalization. 

Steven Pitts is a labor policy specialist at the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, where he focuses on strategies for worker organizing and labor-community alliances.

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Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 14, No.1: Just Jobs? Organizing for Economic Justice

By Gerald Lenoir

The year 2006 will go down as a watershed year for the immigrant rights movement in the United States. Bringing millions of immigrants and their families and supporters into the streets was a huge accomplishment. But much more needs to be done to consolidate a fragmented movement and bring on new allies.

Last April, a group of African Americans and black immigrants in Oakland, California came together to form the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). “BAJI was founded to support the demands of the immigrant rights movement and to engage African Americans in a dialogue about the underlying issues of race and economic status that frame United States immigration policy,” says co-founder Rev. Phillip Lawson.
But why are African Americans taking up the cause of immigrants, many of whom are breaking United States law just by being in this country? “We believe that African Americans, with our history of being economically exploited, marginalized, and discriminated against, have much in common with people of color who migrate to the United States—documented or undocumented,” Rev. Lawson explains.

There is a long history of blatant discrimination against the people attempting to migrate from Latin America, Africa, Haiti, China, and other regions, in favor of Western Europeans. Historically, as now, immigrants of color have been scapegoats for the economic ills of the United States and been subjected to exclusionary laws and racist violence.

BAJI’s goal is to organize a core group of African Americans prepared to oppose racism in all of its forms by actively building coalitions with immigrant communities and immigrant rights organizations, to further the mutual cause of economic and social justice for all. To succeed in the long run, activists must build a movement that incorporates all social justice movements, including immigrant rights and civil rights.

Formula for a Disaster
A public opinion poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in April 2006 found that a large majority of African Americans feel that immigrants are hard-working (79 percent) and have strong family values (77 percent). African Americans were more than twice as likely as whites (43 percent vs. 20 percent) to support public benefits for undocumented immigrants. Two-thirds of whites and 79 percent of African Americans said that the children of undocumented immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools.

Yet, more African Americans (22 percent) than whites (14 percent) say that they, or a family member, have lost a job, or not been hired, because an employer hired an immigrant. In fact, 34 percent of African Americans, as compared to 25 percent of whites, say that immigrants take jobs from United States citizens.

Despite the concerns of many African Americans, the high unemployment rate endemic to their communities is not the consequence of immigration. Rather, its root cause, like the root cause of current mass migration trends, lies with the worldwide phenomenon called globalization. Through its domestic and international policies on trade, lending, aid, and investment, and its military policies and actions, the United States government and its corporations are the main promoters (and beneficiaries) of an unjust economic system that is negatively impacting poor people, locally and globally.

Since the 1970s, globalization has meant the de-industrialization of the United States, with union jobs in manufacturing being moved to low-wage countries in Latin America and Asia. More recently, it has meant the corporate outsourcing of jobs in the high tech and service industries. Add to that the historical employer biases against African Americans, the deterioration of the tax base due to white flight from inner cities, and the systematic public and private disinvestment in urban areas, and you have the formula for the devastation of black communities across the United States.

The True Cost of Free Trade
A clear example of the bilateral and multilateral international policies of the United States that force migrants to risk their lives to come to the United States in search of a better life is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ratified in 1996, NAFTA forced Mexico to open up its markets to subsidized food crops from the United States. As a result, 2.8 million Mexican farmers could not compete with cheap United States commodities and lost their land and their livelihood (according to The New York Times). Many of those farmers and their dependents have migrated to the United States, looking for employment.

Consequently, African Americans and immigrants of color are pitted against each other for the proverbial crumbs on the table. This competition is a result of the normal operation of an unjust economic system.

The United States is now attempting to impose a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on countries in the region. Similar, so-called free trade agreements are also being proposed or implemented in many countries in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean.
The United States media loves to show images of a few African Americans protesting “illegal immigration” with rightwing groups, such as the Minutemen. With classic, blame-the-victim logic, these misguided individuals have ironically cast their lot with modern day Ku Klux Klansmen.
So what are we to do? BAJI says that African Americans must join forces with immigrants to fight for economic and social justice for all.

A New Model for an Old Struggle
Unite Here Local 11 has set an important precedent for our struggle. In its latest settlement with the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, the 5,000-member, predominately Latino and immigrant union won a contract obliging the hotel to increase wages, maintain an employee health plan, and hire more African Americans. The victory is a model for negotiations with other Los Angeles hotels.

“The tensions between African Americans and immigrants will not be lessened until you increase the quantity and quality of jobs for African Americans,” says Steven Pitts, an economist at the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. “It’s good that one industry is taking baby steps in that direction.”

Pitts maintains that African Americans would benefit if undocumented immigrants were granted legal status, citing recent studies, which show that legalization would improve wages and working conditions for both, immigrant and non-immigrant workers.

The African American struggle for civil and economic rights has never been waged without allies. Conversely, the struggle of immigrants for recognition of their human rights cannot be won without friends and supporters. If they join together, the two movements can take giant strides toward victories now and for future generations. 

Gerald Lenoir is coordinator of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and a long-time anti-racist activist.

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Reprinted from RP&E Vol. 16, No. 1: Everyone has the Right to...    

By Bill Ong Hing and David Bacon 

When the Obama administration reiterated recently that it will make an immigration reform proposal this year, hopes rose among millions of immigrant families for the “change we can believe in.” That was followed by a new immigration position embraced by both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win unions, rejecting the expansion of guest worker programs, which some unions had supported.

As it prepares a reform package, the administration should look seriously at why the deals created over the past several years failed, and consider alternatives. Beltway groups are again proposing employment visas for future (post-recession, presumably) labor shortages and continued imprisonment of the undocumented in detention centers, which they deem “necessary in some cases.” Most disturbing, after years of the Bush raids, is the continued emphasis on enforcement against workers. We need a reality check.
For more than two decades it has been a crime for an undocumented worker to hold a job in the United States. To enforce the prohibition, agents conduct immigration raids, of the kind we saw at meat packing plants in the past few years.

Today, some suggest “softer,” or more politically palatable, enforcement—a giant database of Social Security numbers (E-Verify). Employers would be able to hire only those whose numbers “verify” their legal immigration status. Workers without such “work authorization” would have to be fired.
Whether hard or soft, these measures all enforce a provision of immigration law on the books since 1986—employer sanctions—which makes it illegal for an employer to hire a worker with no legal immigration status. In reality, the law makes it a crime for an undocumented worker to have a job.
The rationale has always been that this will dry up jobs for the undocumented and discourage them from coming. Those of us who served on a United Food and Commercial Workers commission that studied Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at Swift meat packing plants across the country learned that the law has had disastrous effects on all workers. Instead of reinforcing or tweaking employer sanctions, we would be much better off if we ended them.

Raids and workplace enforcement have left severe emotional scars on families. Workers were mocked. Children were separated from their parents and left without word at schools or daycare. Increased enforcement has poisoned communities, spawning scores of state and local anti-immigrant laws and ordinances that target workers and their families.

Employer sanctions have failed to reduce undocumented migration because NAFTA and globalization create huge migration pressure. Since 1994 more than six million Mexicans have come to the United States. Ismael Rojas, who arrived without papers, says, “You can either abandon your children to make money to take care of them, or you can stay with your children and watch them live in misery. Poverty makes us leave our families.”
Attempting to discourage workers from coming by arresting them for working without authorization, or trying to prevent them from finding work, is doomed to fail. To reduce the pressure that causes undocumented migration, we need to change our trade and economic policies so they don't produce poverty in countries like Mexico.

Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney wrote to President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Harper, reminding them that “the failure of neoliberal policies to create decent jobs in the Mexican economy under NAFTA has meant that many displaced workers and new entrants have been forced into a desperate search to find employment elsewhere.” The new joint position of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations recognizes that “an essential component of the long term solution is a fair trade and globalization model that uplifts all workers.”
Continued support for work authorization and employer sanctions contradicts this understanding. Even with a legalization program, millions of people will remain without papers. For them, work without “authorization” will still be a crime. And while employer sanctions have little effect on migration, they will continue to make workers vulnerable to employer pressure.

When undocumented workers are fired for protesting low wages and bad conditions, employer sanctions bar them from receiving unemployment or disability benefits, although the workers have paid for them. It's much harder for them to find another job. An E-Verify database to deny them work will make this problem much worse.

Workplace enforcement also increases discrimination. Four years after sanctions began, the Government Accountability Office reported that 346,000  employers applied immigration-verification requirements only to job applicants with a “foreign” accent or appearance. Another 430,000 only hired applicants born in the United States.

Despite these obstacles, immigrant workers, including the undocumented, have asserted their labor rights, organized unions, and won better conditions. But employer sanctions have made this harder and riskier. When raids and document verification terrorized immigrants at Smithfield's huge packinghouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, it became harder for black and white workers to organize as well. Using Social Security numbers to verify immigration status makes the firing and blacklisting of union activists all but inevitable. Citizens and permanent residents feel this impact because in our diverse workplaces, immigrants and native-born people work together.

Low wages for undocumented workers will rise only if those workers can organize. The Employee Free Choice Act would make organizing easier for all workers. But “work authorization” will rob millions of immigrant workers of their ability to use the process that the act would establish.

The alternative to employer sanctions is enforcing the right to organize, minimum wage, overtime, and other worker protection laws. Eliminating sanctions will not change the requirement that people immigrate here legally. ICE will still have the power to enforce immigration law. And if a fair legalization program were passed at the same time sanctions were eliminated, many undocumented workers already here would normalize their status. A more generous policy for issuing residence and family-unification visas would allow families to cross the border legally, without the indentured servitude of guest-worker programs.

Immigrant rights plus jobs programs that require employers to hire from communities with high unemployment can reduce competition and fear. Together they would strengthen unions, raise incomes, contribute to the nation's economic recovery, and bring the people of our country together. Employer sanctions will continue to tear us apart. 

Bill Ong Hing is Professor of Law and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is Defining America through Immigration Policy. David Bacon is a freelance writer and photographer.  His newest book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants is published by Beacon Press. This article first appeared in The Nation magazine.

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