sublation: a blog

“In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” – Walter Benjamin

Reflecting on the life and tragic death of Martin Luther King, Jr. is now a four-decade long American tradition. Every tradition, warns Benjamin, risks “becoming a tool of the ruling classes”. In the case of Dr. King, this risk has become reality.

During his life, Dr. King was a controversial figure who opposed US militarism in Southeast Asia, supported guaranteed employment and income for all Americans, and believed that organizing a social movement of disempowered people was the only way to create real social change. In his death, the Reverend’s memory  has been appropriated by those in power – those whose interests Dr. King fought against. As a result, we are fed an image of a man who had no politics, who wanted for his children to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” because – we are told – our society should no longer acknowledge race.

Dr. King was shot in Memphis while supporting striking Black sanitation workers. After participating in a movement that ended the worst forms of legal segregation and discrimination, King knew his work was not nearly complete. In its next phase, he hoped to bring poor people of every race together to demand economic justice for all. The Poor People’s Campaign was in its early stages when the shot was fired. The campaign went on in his absence but fizzled out, as did the dream of meaningful social equality.

Dr. King would be amazed that his struggles bore the fruit of a Black president. But he would be pained to know that 43 years after his death, economic inequality is far worse now than when his life was cut short. He’d be shocked to know that black families have 20 times less wealth than white families. And that a quarter of young black men are either in prison or on parole or probation.  And that our wars in West Asia have taken countless innocent lives.

Even before Glenn Beck quite ridiculously pronounced Dr. King as one of his own or a multinational corporation used “I Have a Dream” on their TV ad, MLK’s memory was co-opted by institutions that perpetuate racial and economic inequality rather than fight them. Boston University, the school I currently attend memorialized Dr. King today as it does every year. But what would the former School of Theology student  think about BU’s military technology research? Or their denial of institutional grants to undocumented students (including the scholarship that bears King’s name)?

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, Dr. King wrote about the need to rock the boat to make social change in the face of injustice. Now, Dr. King has been taken aboard the boat. We need to keep pushing until he is back at the sides of those who fight for racial justice.

Whenever I come back to visit Long Island, the intensity of suburban apartheid never fails to strike me. Back in 2002, a study cited in the NYTimes found Long Island to be the most racially segregated suburban area in the United States. Reflecting on the stories I’ve heard from my family members and many others who moved to LI during the 1970s, this information doesn’t surprise me. The whole purpose of migration from New York City to Long Island was to escape as white neighborhoods and schools were becoming ‘bad’ (read: black). While housing discrimination on the basis of race was outlawed in 1968, racist policies around mortgage lending and zoning helped to keep segregation entrenched.

I attended de facto segregated public schools from kindergarten through high school. I remember the first (and probably only) time in my life when someone called me racist. I was in third grade and noticed a black boy who I’d never seen before. As there were only about three black students in the school, I said something to the effect of “I didn’t know we had another black kid”. A sixth grader admonished me for saying something racist, though I made the statement out of curiosity rather than prejudice.

When it came to high school, segregation was an elephant in the room. At Kennedy High School, only 1% of students are black or Latino. Just one town over at Roosevelt High School, 99% of the students are black or Latino. While I was in high school, there was some major fear among Kennedy parents because Roosevelt’s school was failing. The state was threatening to shut it down and its students would be bussed to neighboring school districts. I remember hearing this discussed many times, including by teachers and school social workers. While some seemed to be well-meaning liberals exploring the idea of ‘tolerance’, no one dared to acknowledge the issue was about color. In the end, the state knew better than to unleash the wrath of the white mobs and decided to keep Roosevelt HS going.

A few months ago I realized that school demographic data is available online. I decided to take an amateur sociologist’s look at racial segregation at high schools in Nassau County. Here is what I came up with:

Click to make bigger

The graph above shows the distribution of the county’s 18,000 black and Latino high school students between its 55 high schools. A perfectly even distribution (no segregation) would look like the blue line. The actual distribution is in red. As you can see, the distribution is highly unequal. 51% 0f the black and Latino students attend just 6 of the schools. There is also an abundance of white-dominated high schools like mine, though Kennedy is one of the most segregated. The whitest 30 schools cater to only 10% of the county’s black/Latino population. If you were betting on the nation’s most segregated school system, Nassau County would be a good place to put your money. Speaking of money, I was surprised to see that school funding did not significantly differ for black and Latino students as compared with whites. Presumably this is because of state equity funding, but I don’t know enough about state education policy to say so.

I often wonder about the effects of segregation on a young white person’s development. Though we learned about the Civil Rights Movement in many of our classes, our experiential education taught us about people of color only through their absence, through their exclusion from our schools. I took the Civil Rights curriculum very seriously. By high school, I took notice of the dissonance between the values I had learned in class and the kinds of people who were in (and not in) the classroom. This angered me, but also fueled my curiosity and made me want to learn about other people’s experiences.

But what about all of those white students who where were not curious?

All of this makes me think of the book I’m reading, Edward Soja’s Seeking Spatial Justice. In it, he describes the dialectic between society and geography. Yes, social values shape the landscape, as urban underinvestment, discrimination, and white flight created the particular pattens of Long Island’s development. But, in turn, Long Island’s ‘consequential geography’ (Soja’s term) also shaped my social experience, along with that of all of my peers. This spatial influence may have serious implications on how we interpret our society, approach democracy, or understand ourselves.

It was the summer of 1971. Like many Jewish teenagers growing up around NYC, my mother’s parents sent her off to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. She had gone to camp before, but this year she was old enough to be a counselor-in-training. She was excited to spend the summer with her best friend at a new camp – Camp Betar – which was promised to feature horses, a lake, and the natural beauty of the Catskill Mountains.

As the summer unfolded, things started going wrong. First, her friend broke a leg and had to stay home. Then, heading to camp alone, my mom encountered a few more disappointments: no lake, no horses, no campers for her to look after, and no bungalows. Living in a tent and spending her days mostly staring into space, she started to notice some strange occurrences.

Shooting practice at Betar

One such occurrence took place under the umbrella of the “cultural and spiritual Jewish activities” that Camp Betar advertised. Seeking distraction from her boredom, my mom decided to check out the meetings that the older campers and staff would attend. At these meetings, she discovered that they would talk rather fervently about defending Israel from the Arabs, even bragging about bombings that had taken place in the name of Zionism.

Beyond these meetings, the camp featured weapons practice for the campers on what they’d refer to as “shooting days”. They also staged kidnappings during the latest hours of the night. They would have campers patrol the territory, watching for putative anti-Semites who had infiltrated the area. Hours later, the supposed hostage would mysteriously appear with stories of having been taken away in a car.

Betar, as it turns out, is a right-wing Zionist youth movement that dates back to Eastern Europe in the 1920s. It indeed appears that they used explosives and other weaponry against Palestinian residents before Israeli statehood. Though the camp is no longer around, Betar is still an active international organization and even is affiliated with Israel’s Likud party, which is currently leading parliament there. Here is a glimpse as to what they are currently up to:

My mother tried to convince her parents to take her home. But they were going to Europe that summer so that was not a possibility.

Just remember, if you are ever looking for a camp for your child, to do some research first.

During his July 1 speech, President Obama described the “two poles” that frame the immigration debate. At one end, xenophobes would like to deport all undocumented immigrants and fortify the barriers – legal and physical – to entering the US. At the other end, immigrant rights activists would like to grant legal residency to all of those without papers. Obama’s loosely proposed approach to immigration reform would be some compromise between these two ‘extremes’. Listening to his speech however, I can’t help but think how absolutely irrelevant the whole immigration conversation is to Lupita, Armando, Mary, Fichas, Ana, or any of the other youths I met in Tamaula.

Youth in Tamaula on día de los reyes

Tamaula is a small village on a hilltop in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. In this town of about 300 residents, you can find many senior citizens, children, goats, chickens, dogs, donkeys, and horses. It would be far more difficult to come across a man between the ages of 18 and 50. To find these men, you would have to go to the agricultural fields of North Carolina, chicken processing plants of Georgia, or landscaping crews of Washington state. Increasingly, adult women and boys as young as 14 are taking part in the stream of migrant labor as well.

Tamaula’s youths know that they will all live in the US at some point. But attaining legal residency is not their primary concern. The fact is that most of them would prefer to not have to leave their community in the first place. What they want is access to a high school education, a well to provide them with potable water, and – most importantly – a way of making a living that does not separate them from their families or endanger their lives. But the national, state, and municipal governments have been reluctant to fund infrastructure projects or education in their community. Factory jobs are located too far away and the campesinos can’t compete with the high school-educated workers from the nearby city of Irapuato.

There was a period of a few decades in Mexico when political leaders used economic policy in an effort to achieve full employment along with universal access to infrastructure and services. That period abruptly ended in 1982 when the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates to 21% and Mexico announced that it couldn’t repay its loans. Wall Street had heavily invested in Latin American debt during the 1970s and Reagan even made plans to nationalize banks like Citigroup should they fail as a result of the Mexican default. But they did not fail. Instead, the International Monetary Fund provided billions of dollars in bailout loans under the condition that the Mexican government drastically restructure its economy.

Since the restructuring, which limited government spending, the size of the public sector, and the ability of the government to nurture local industries, Mexico’s economy has grown more slowly and much more unequally. Wages have fallen. Neither the state nor the markets can provide people with a decent safety net. Financial products, goods, services, and people now flow across national borders with increased regularity. Only the flow of people is criminalized.

On our side of the border, the national debate has only focused on the migration of people into the United States. We have not addressed the causes of migration and we’ve posited many false assumptions about the motives of the migrants. This has led to policies with unintended consequences. The militarization of the border, for example, has not kept people out, it has kept people in. It was only after Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 that a majority of Mexican immigrants decided that they would probably not try to return to Mexico (according to a Mexican Migration Project study).

An immigration policy that addresses a few aspects of legal status is not “comprehensive”. Obama’s speech sets us up for more of the “patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions” that he derides.

A few ideas of what real comprehensive immigration reform should mean:

- Establishment of transnational labor citizenship.

- Enforcement of the modest worker protections that exist.

- Allowing nations to subordinate economic policy to social development goals.