The Oyster Knife

The shooting that maimed twenty people on Mother’s Day in New Orleans has been classified as “strictly an act of street violence” by the FBI. This hurts my heart. Calling the violence inflicted upon our lives “street violence” disregards the precious value we hold as human beings. When violence takes place in a working-class neighborhood or community of color, by a member of that community, it is called street violence. The treatment the community receives is vastly different than when it is classified as a mass shooting or act of terrorism.

Who am I and where am I coming from? I am a sister of a homicide victim, who’s stolen life was classified as street violence. I’ve helped to bury young bodies, raise money for surviving families, stayed up many long nights, lighting candles, cooking, rubbing backs and holding space for grief to come out in gut-wrenching wails from the deepest hollows of lungs. I’ve supported a few through the trenches of court proceedings and felt the agony of having to just sit in the devastation and pray to come out the other end alive.

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First off, let me get this off my chest: Fuck this article.  And all others like it.

Here’s why:

I grew up spending weekends with my dad’s family in what was then rural North Georgia.  My dad and grandparents would often wish aloud that “those Yankees would just go back home”.  This sentiment embarrassed me when I was little, as I perceived it to arise out of a 150-year old frustration over the loss of the Civil War.  However, I was also always puzzled that my family used the term “Yankee” to refer to someone from anywhere other than the South (ie Californians were certainly included).  I was also confused because my mom and my stepmother were both “Yankees”- sometimes when my siblings and I did something that he did not approve of, my dad would disdainfully call us “half breed Yankees”.  Today, I recognize these sentiments as representing my family’s frustration with the condescending approach that people who are not from the South (Deep South in particular) tend to take towards those of us who are.

So often, those that have not had the pleasure of growing up here and having the nuanced realities of our lives and history imprinted on their bones, their consciousness, their beings, decide that they need to go on an expedition to “discover” what those realities are.  Often, there are uninformed and arrogant prescriptions made about how to make us better.  Sound familiar?  And then they write (or paint or photograph etc) about those “discoveries,” which occasionally gains them a great deal of notoriety- often at our expense. These reflections frequently miss the mark, as Ms. Aronowtiz’s piece has.

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This piece was written after guest contributor Nicky Gillies participated in the NOLA to Angola bike ride, a fundraiser for the Cornerstone Builders’ Bus Project, which helps people in Louisiana travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones. 

This October I spent three days pushing through the 160 winding bike miles from my home in New Orleans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.  It is still a functioning plantation, much as it has been since the time of slavery.  Angola spreads across 18,000 acres of lauded farmland tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River.  Roughly 5,000 people live and work and eat and sleep and write and shit and dream and shower there, not counting the employees.  Most of those 5,000 people are Black men, young and old, and the vast majority of them—almost 90%—will die inside barbed wire.

Intellectual discussions of the 13th amendment and years of participating in prison-related organizing did not prepare me for the heartbreak and outrage of seeing farmland that is still tilled by a captive and almost 80% Black population.  This is not an antiquated system.  Slavery is contemporary, although it has been refashioned several times, and prison labor is integral to the US economy.  Activist lawyer and former prisoner Paul Wright wrote that simultaneously removing over 2 million incarcerated people from the work force and employing another million as guards “is the most thoroughly implemented government work program in American history since the New Deal.”  Knowing this, seeing Angola—endless barbed wire and guard towers and prison uniforms and eerily beautiful fields stretching in all directions—is devastating.  It is an atrocity.  It is also mundane.
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Photo credit: racialicious.com

About a month ago, my family received news that my father (who was diagnosed with Stage 4 Colon Cancer in mid-2009) had just a couple weeks to live.  His medical team had run out of treatment options. I immediately became a full-time caretaker to my father as he moved into home hospice care and a caretaker to my mother as she faced the immediacy of losing her life partner of more than 30 years. Together, we helped my father to die-surrounded by love. On December 4, my father died-as my mother and I held his hand and each other’s.  Helping my father to die is the largest, hardest energy exchange I have ever experienced.  I never thought at 27 I would be grieving my father’s death.

Grieving is extremely hard. You experience so many emotions: you move in and out of presence and emotions so quickly, all while planning a homegoing service for your loved one. Like so many other processes, it is impossible to grieve outside of the socio-political framework we live in. Social constructs and internalized forms of oppression don’t just stop because we are grieving a loved one. Oftentimes, these factors affect the validity, form, and space within which you are able to grieve. Read More

Charmel and Kate both have lots of experience with the hiring process in the non-profit world.  Here is a recent gchat conversation we had in regards to the peculiar and maddening things some folks choose to do when they apply to work with us:

kate: if a job posting says “no emails”, why in the fuck would you email?  what is WRONG with people?!

November 6, 2012.  Historic occasion.  1st reelection of a Black president.  We won.  Again!

So outside of that little riot at Ole Miss, there didn’t seem to be a lot of excitment.  No wild parties.  No naming babies Husein.   No declarations of post racialism in America.

Instead, the streets were empty.  Our president looked tired and we still aren’t clear about what type of work he’s going to we’re going to help him get done.

So over the next four years, what will be our President’s top 4 agenda items?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

1. Appoint a legal scholar to the Supreme Court.  I vote for retired Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Sears, but I’d be happy with California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or Judge  Jacqueline Hong-Ngoc Nguyen.

2. Mobilize the Obama For America machine to shift power in the House in the 2014 elections.  People may not have been partying in the streets after this election, but the Obama camp may have created a generation of progressives (who might be Democrats).    The connectedness shared by this group of progressives exist to shifting our existing stale conversations around class, race, gender and economic equality.  If our President can maintain the structure for the 2012 campaign’s historic GOTV effort the House could be under Democrat control in 2014.

3. Stop kicking people out of the country.  We all know immigration laws have to be reformed.  It’s the only thing besides not raising taxes that Dems and Repubs agree on. I’m not sure if our President’s idea matches the ideas of all those brown folks who voted for him.  Let’s do something really radical and keep all kinds of reforms on the table (unlike what happened in the health care debate).  I’d love to see an examination- BY THE ADMINISTRATION INSTEAD OF HARD WORKING NOT FOR PROFITS- of the biases built into the immigration system.  The economic argument underlying the policy that allows more people from Western European nations into the country has disappeared.  This policy should be reformed first.

4. Give us our civil liberties back.  Sure, we’re excited that we’re mostly out of a set of wars in the Middle East, but the war against our own civil liberties has left Americans as losers.  Our President extended the Patriot Act, wire tapping has increased under DOJ’s leadership and whistle blowers keep getting locked up.   Bill Quigley’s 2011 piece, “Twenty Examples of the Obama Administration’s Assault on Domestic Civil Liberties” makes the case that we are losing our rights and not even noticing.   I, like most social justice lawyers on Gulf Coast, listen when  Bill Quigley talks (or writes in this case).

So why did you decide to vote President Obama in for the next four years?  What are the four (or maybe just one) thing you’d like to see accomplished?

Today we’ve got a guest post from Lydia Pelot-Hobbs.  Lydia lived in New Orleans until this summer, when she moved to New York City to pursue a PhD.  She’s written a beautiful article about her reaction to Sandy and lessons that need to be informing all of our organizing.

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As committed as I am to abolishing the prison industrial complex, I’ll be the first to admit that I jump at the chance to veg out during Law and Order marathons whenever I visit mom. This time around though, there was a series of highly irritating commercials in heavy rotation that kept distracting me from the innovative and unpredictable plot lines of crime drama shows. The commercials were for the Tide Loads of Hope program.

 
If you’ve never heard of Loads of Hope, it’s basically a portable laundromat that Tide transports to disaster affected areas so that people can have clean clothes even when they might be in precarious living situations. I believe that the program started after Hurricane Katrina.

 
Simple, kind, and well-intentioned, right? I’m sure people devastated by disasters really do appreciate the service. But as a Gulf Coast resident, this feels like a marketing ploy driven and sustained by our suffering. When it comes down to it, how much more money is Tide spending on airing television spots about Loads of Hope than on funding the portable laundromat and supplies? How has this campaign improved Tide’s corporate image, and how many people buy bottles of Tide with yellow caps because they like the idea that their money is funding a program like Loads of Hope?  And how much money that could have gone directly to local non-profits engaged long-term in disaster recovery has been redirected to Tide as it passes through the Gulf Coast? Read More

My friend called me last week to tell me she was getting laid off.  The reason?  She doesn’t have a bachelors’ degree.  This disturbing news made me wonder, how many other people are losing work, not for poor performance, or even economic woes their employer may be enduring?  Why is she losing her job and I feel secure in mine?  In 2012, what it really comes down to is changes to our country’s Medicaid program, and the fact that I have two letters that I can place after my name: B.A. Read More