Showing papers in "Social Justice in 2003"

Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness

Abstract: IN RECENT YEARS, A PATTERN HAS EMERGED, A SEEMINGLY SELF-EVIDENT TREND toward restricting, regulating, and removing from public view persons commonly referred to categorically as "the homeless." I first encountered these processes in a variety of scholarly and journalistic sources and, most acutely, in my then place of residence, Tempe, Arizona, a southwestern "college town" of just under 200,000 that is often seen as the social and recreational center of the Phoenix metropolitan area. While exploring these questions theoretically and pragmatically, I discovered that rather than an "emerging" trend, patterns of spatial exclusion and marginalization of the impoverished that have existed throughout modern history have reemerged. As such, this study attempts to locate contemporary manifestations of these patterns in their historical contexts, comprising a theoretical overview of anti-homeless legislation and regimes of spatial control. Moreover, these inquiries are grounded in events and activities observed in practice, drawing upon various media publications, government and corporate documents, participant observations of homeless communities, and open-ended interviews with street people in Tempe (approximately 75, conducted over a three-year period from 1998 to 2001). In the end, both my theoretical exposition and grounded case study conclude that homeless street people have been frequent subjects of demonization and criminalization, and that contemporary trends reflect even further "advancements" in patterns of regulatory fervor and casual brutality. Accordingly, this study aims to illuminate these trends, to raise awareness about and encourage activism around the implications for the homeless and the public spaces they often occupy, and to make "legible" the violence that pervades such social policies. What is it about the homeless that inspires such overt antipathy from mainstream society? What is so special about their particular variety of deviance that elicits such a vehement and violent response to their presence? After all, "the homeless" as a class lack almost all indicia of societal power, posing no viable political, economic, or military threat to the dominant culture. Of course, as studies of deviance have continually borne out, a society's response to "deviant" elements is rarely linked in a direct way to any actual or credible threat. The threat is more one of perception than reality, more of a societal preemptive strike against an as-yet-unborn threat that often originates within the dominant culture itself, but finds concrete expression in some abject, powerless element of society. As such, depictions of "deviant subcultures" in the mainstream media are likely to feed into stereotypes of danger, disorder, disease, and criminality, helping to construct "the other" as inferior, inhuman, unsympathetic, deserving of their fate, and perhaps even requiring punitive measures. That all of this arises more from perception than fact testifies to the power of human emotions and collective consciousness, as well as to their horror. It is, after all, a short journey from diversity to deviance, from deification to demonization, and from sanctification to criminalization. Demonization and Disease As Henry Miller (1991) has observed, there have been times in history in which the image of the homeless beggar was one of sacrificial piety and mendicant holiness. Nevertheless, such characterizations have been the exception, and, at least since the enclosure of the common lands in 16th-century England, almost nonexistent. Once domains of private property began to dominate the cultural and physical landscape, "vagrancy began to be seen as a threat to the order of things"; later, as urban centers began to develop and market economies took hold, "vagrancy was to be perceived as a threat to capitalism" (Ibid.: 9). This was particularly true in the developing United States, where a version of the Protestant Work Ethic is intimately connected to the national mythos of equal opportunity and free-market meritocracy (cf. …

Multicultural Service-Learning And Community-Based Research As a Model Approach to Promote Social Justice

Abstract: THIS ARTICLE PROPOSES TO INCORPORATE MULTICULTURAL SERVICE-LEARNING AND community-based research into curricula offerings to more effectively train future service providers who work with diverse populations in disenfranchised communities. Community-academic partnerships are presented as a model to help to create systemic change in academic institutions and communities. Benefits of the model include increasing the cultural competency of professionals-in-training through their application of theory and methods within a multicultural context. Case examples designed to empower marginalized communities are presented. Last, to inform the work of educators, researchers, and community activists, I provide a series of recommendations that are designed to enhance the potential of these models to promote social justice. Social justice and multicultural awareness are inextricably linked. Sleeter (1996: 239) defines social justice as "having the perspective that allows one to take social action against social structural inequality and an understanding of oppression and inequality which allows greater insight into methods of eradicating them." I argue that social justice work can be operationalized in various ways, such as any action to: (a) eliminate or reduce disparities based on various social categories such as race or ethnicity; (b) promote equality in educational, health, and legal services; (c) advocate for disenfranchised and underserved groups, and (d) promote and evaluate the delivery of culturally competent services and systems of care. Furthermore, I argue that multicultural service-learning and community-based research (including empowerment evaluation) can raise awareness of various social justice issues and promote action geared toward social change. Through application of these approaches in a community context, student learning is enhanced in a way that promotes increased understanding of social inequities. According to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC, 1995: 1), service-learning is an "instructional methodology [that] integrates community service with academic instruction as it focuses on critical, reflective thinking and civic responsibility." Other authors have emphasized the critical role of reflection in processing the affective, personal, and empathic dimensions of student experience to bring about a deeper understanding of social problems (Eyler, Giles, and Schmiede, 1996). Research has shown that service-learning is an effective method for increasing civic engagement, commitment to service, and motivation to reduce social inequities (Furco and Billig, 2002; Eyler, Giles, and Schmiede, 1996). Multicultural service-learning promotes the strength and value of cultural diversity and focuses on equitable distribution of power among racial and ethnic groups, as well as between those providing service and those served. There has been a wealth of recent research in teacher education on service-learning as a method to help educators bring about increased understanding of diversity, culture, difference, and power (Boyle-Baise, 2002; O'Grady, 2000; Clark and Clark, 1996; Furco, 1996). A number of authors have differentiated service-learning, volunteerism, community service, and internships (see, e.g., Furco, 1996; Sigmon, 1994). Furco (1996) developed a continuum based on the intended beneficiaries (i.e., provider or recipient) and focus of the activity (i.e., learning or service). For example, internships tend to benefit the provider (i.e., the student) with learning as the primary focus. On the other hand, volunteerism tends to focus more on service with an emphasis on recipient benefits (i.e., the community organization). Service-learning is an approach that balances these criteria in a way that benefits providers and recipients equally (Ammon, 1998). Similarly, Sigmon (1994) emphasizes that service and learning goals should be of equal weight and that each should enhance the other for all participants. …

Hawaiian Hermeneutics and the Triangulation of Meaning: Gross, Subtle, Causal

Abstract: "IF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, THEN UNDERSTANDING IS LIBERATION." WHAT DOES that really mean, and how does that relate to indigenous research issues? What is hermeneutics and what do we bring as indigenous people to the dialogue? Can the experience of hermeneutics escort us into Paulo Freire's "Critical Consciousness" phase in his Theory of Conscientization? Will we wake up or stay asleep with regard to how best to research/understand and thus educate our children in this time of homogenization, fear, and standardizing intentions? To start this discussion of interpretation and why this focus aids us as indigenous educators and researchers, I believe we need to begin with the idea of need, or how best to be of service to our community. What are the needs we must address within ourselves, our family, our community, and within our distinct and evolving cultures? What, truly, are the issues we need to understand? That is what hermeneutics teaches me. Research for us is not simply about asking "burning questions" we wish to resolve, but rather, we are answering a call to be of use. We must first develop the correct orientation to ourselves and our place. The very idea of knowledge is now in question across all nations, and as we develop a deeper experience of our own epistemology, do you see where we are heading? We are heading into our own radical remembering of our future. This is where I live now: in a fully lucid present that experiences the "deeper significance of the things seen" (Nityananda, 1997). A practical example of this is allowing your students to write their research into a useful document that helps to secure funding for projects our communities so often are desperate for. I can recall vividly the day that two brilliant Hawaiian educators were in my office and we were discussing topics for their final M.A. paper. We decided that they would research and write on the needs of their Hawaiian communities and include it in a statewide Charter School grant application. They received their M.A. along with the funding and today two creative, innovative, and culturally driven schools exist because of this paradigm change. I remember feeling filled with clarity as we spoke in my office: "Yes, why not make research useful? Why not link what we do in our institutions of higher education with the needs of our communities?" The answer has changed three lives and, now, many more. Did you know that in some Hawaiian communities, 80 to 100% of all teenagers are addicted to ice? We also have rural communities in which Hawaiians make up 100% of their special education population. Some of our very best and brilliant Hawaiian educators are still not licensed as public school teachers because of their inability to pass the Math Praxis Test--a nationally standardized test without any correlation to teaching excellence. This emphasis on one type of mathematical understanding has become a cultural gatekeeper for teachers in many states. The disparity can no longer be kept hidden. The rift between human efficacy and what it means to be smart in today's society is defined via caricature. We are becoming cardboard cutouts of what it truly means to feel, to be alive, to think. We see this disconnect in the lust of public schools for homogeneity and control and in our Hawaiian private schools' preoccupation with capitalism, competition, and national standards. Who knows, perhaps the basic contradiction of education in Hawai'i will now be answered: How best can we educate our unique and diverse children via mass colonial education? You can bet the answer will not be found in typical special education classes. A dialectic focus weaves within our research at this pivotal time in history and it holds the potential to liberate us. The polemic preoccupation--that is, our preoccupation with arguing a point instead of listening to what the point may be--no longer holds sway in my spirit. …

The False Allure of Security Technologies

Abstract: THE SECURITY INDUSTRY TRADE MAGAZINE, AMERICAN SCHOOLAND UNIVERSITY, BEGAN an article about school safety with the following real-life scenario (Kennedy, 2001): As students were enjoying recess on the playground in the Plano Independent School District, Texas, a suspicious man sitting in a parked Cadillac tried to lure some of the children over to the car. When the teacher on duty saw what was happening and began to approach the car, the man drove off. That might have been the end of the incident, except that the teacher was carrying a two-way radio. She called back to the school office, and someone immediately called 911. A few minutes later, the man was in custody. "He was caught before he got out of the neighborhood," says Ken Bangs, director of police, security, and student safety for the Piano district. "Did we dodge a bullet? I believe that we did." For Bangs, it was more proof that the district's increasing use of radios was paying dividends in safer campuses, and more secure students and staff. "Having these radios makes a ton of difference," says Bangs. Like many articles that appear in American School and University, Security Technology and Design, Security Management, and other trade magazines of the security industry, the use of technology is described as a boon for school safety, and the newest advances and improvements in technology are regularly featured in articles and represented in advertisements that appear in the magazines. In addition to radios, these technologies include metal detectors, scanners, close-circuit televisions (CCTVs), iris recognition systems, and other forms of surveillance, detection, access control, and biometric equipment. Many of these items depend on technologies (such as digitalized networks and lasers) that were developed by military and security industry scientists beginning in the 1940s primarily for police and national security purposes during the Cold War. Today, the prevalence in high schools of what Devine (1996) called "techno-security" is an example of how these developments in technology have altered our public spaces, institutions, and homes. In the case of schools, the use of techno-security epitomizes fear of violence as well as fear of legal liability that convinces school district administrators that security technology is worth the expenditures. However, it also epitomizes the inroads that security businesses have made in the public school market. Peter Blouvelt, the executive director of the National Alliance for Sate Schools, remarked about security vendors: "Schools have become a major market for these guys. The proliferation of security equipment for schools has taken off" (cited in Light, 2002: 3). Schools are just one example of people's increased use and acceptance of security technologies in the United States. Government buildings, stores, offices, workplaces, recreation areas, streets, and homes have also been outfitted with CCTVs, biometric equipment, scanners, detectors, not to mention alarms, locks, and intercoms. At a security industry conference I attended as part of the research for this article, a spokesperson for a security corporation told conference participants that, according to research, in New York City an individual was likely to be caught on a security camera about seven times each day without knowing it; in London, the number was double that. Although the use of security technologies is often explained as a need during times of wanton violence and crime, the allure of technology and humans' fascination with gadgets and equipment partly explain why security technology is rapidly becoming a fixture in even the most idyllic areas. In the case of schools, though proponents of technologies warn against their misuse, they still believe that CCTVs, scanners, and other advanced technologies are essential for any overall school safety plan (Townley and Martinez, 1995; Kosar and Ahmed, 2000; Trump, 1999; Fickes, 2000). …

Nomadic Justice? Restorative Justice on the Margins of Law

Abstract: PRACTITIONERS OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE OFTEN DESCRIBE THEMSELVES AS OPERAT ing on the margins of the formal justice system. However, they differ with regard to how they problematize this marginal status. Some embrace what seems tantamount to a nomadic existence and view their outsider role as an opportunity to challenge the norms and values of the criminal justice system; others see greater inclusion in the formal justice system as their ultimate goal. What is the basis of this claim to marginality? In this article, we examine the tensions that exist within the restorative justice movement as it seeks to construct for itself a collective identity and define its broader goals. Our main contention is that the "marginal" status claimed by most restorative justice practitioners, and their fears of cooptation, are more imagined than real; indeed, restorative justice programs appear largely as "outsiders within" the criminal justice system. Nonetheless, it may be possible for restorative justice programs to pursue a specific form of nomadism ? a politics defined by the creation of "subaltern counterpublics" (Fraser, 1997) that would serve as the basis for transformative interventions into the criminal justice system. In this manner, a "transformative politics" of restorative justice would involve a distancing from, and engagement with, the criminal justice system to challenge and rewrite the retributive codes of this system without becoming a mere appendage to its normal operation. Nomadic Justice The postmodern critique of the "will to totality" defined the dominant paradigms of social theory (e.g., Marxism, Parsonian functionalism) and brought into prominence the interpretation of social phenomena as decentered, frag

Community-Building and Reintegrative Approaches to Community Policing: The Case of Drug Control

Abstract: THE OFFICER AS COMMUNITY-BUILDER IS ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR THEMES OF THE community policing movement. It is based on the assumption that the officer can act as an organizer who works to mobilize the "social capital" of a neighborhood to prevent social disorder and thereby crime (Pint, 2001; Sampson, 1999; Lyons, 1999; Crank, 1994). Nevertheless, the community-building process is a tall order for the police, both politically and bureaucratically. A traditionally insulated service sector that is often an object of controversy in its own right, a community-building orientation requires law enforcement to forge partnerships with a wide variety of community-based and other government organizations, as well as to engage in social outreach (Thracher, 2001; Kleinenberg, 2001). In this context, community policing assumes that the police will restrain their reactive, crime-fighting orientation to create room for more collaborative and innovative crime prevention and "problem-solving" strategies (Bureau of Justice, 1994: 17). Whether the police are willing and able to live up to these reforms, and how they problem-solve, are matters open to question (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997; Maguire, 1997). Different methods of community policing imply different ideas about community-building, although they all grow out of a common philosophical assumption that social disorganization leads to crime and must be minimized. Here we limit our discussion of the community-building concept to understanding the ways in which different policing practices and crime prevention partnerships work to include or exclude socially marginal populations. For example, the most common police response to their community-building role has been to intensify and broaden their preexisting order-maintenance function. One approach, "aggressive order maintenance," is philosophically rooted in Wilson and Kelling's (1982) now classic piece on "broken windows" as a metaphor for the association between physical disorder, social disorganization, and crime (Kelling and Coles, 1996: 158). Aggressive order maintenance involves arrests, "field interrogations," and "stops and frisks" as methods to suppress minor crimes and "untended" behaviors, such as public intoxication and panhandling, with the intention of preventing larger problems of crime and disorder (Ibid.; Crank, 1994: 343; Harcourt, 2001: 173). One consequence of this approach is the increased regulation of "disreputable" or "obstreperous" persons such as "panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed," because they are viewed as a threat to community organization and stability (Wilson and Kelling, 1982: 30; Crank, 1994). A second approach, "problem-oriented" policing, is analogous to broken windows theory in that it frequently targets environmental and social disorder because it is believed that these conditions give rise to crime (Goldstein, 1990). This model advocates more indirect approaches to control, avoiding the use of arrests and the targeting of specific groups when possible, and instead focuses on ecological solutions. "Grime-fighting" and "nuisance abatement" campaigns that work to remove the "environmental cues" believed to attract crime, such as unkempt lots or abandoned cars, are popular problem-solving strategies (Taylor, 2001: 5; Sampson and Raudenbush, 1999: 605). The police may also work with code enforcement agencies to demolish or rehabilitate properties suspected of harboring drug traffickers (Eck, 1990; Eck and Spelman, 1987). Whatever the method, order maintenance policing is seen as a community-building tool because it is said to reduce the fear and actual incidence of crime and to reinforce law-abiding and conventional norms (Sykes, 1986). Much has been written on the successes of community policing in the United States as it pertains to order maintenance, particularly when initiatives are organized around the enhanced regulation of public space (e. …

The Racial Economies of Criminalization, Immigration, and Policing in Italy

Abstract: OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, EUROPE HAS MOVED TOWARD MORE REPRESSIVE immigration laws and strict enforcement measures. The intensifying policing of national borders has created state-sanctioned practices of targeting particular immigrant groups, especially women from South America, sub-Saharan African countries, and nonimmigrant groups such as the Roma community, as potential "criminals." Additionally, in Italy and the rest of Europe (much like the United States), discourses on immigration are joined with the rhetoric of crime and prevention in such a way that migrant populations are popularly viewed as clandestine or "illegal" and therefore prone to criminal behavior. Not surprisingly, then, discourses on crime and on who commits it are saturated with the language of citizenship, social class, gender, and race. Issues of immigration, like those of crime and criminals, are viewed as public policy dilemmas in which themes of immigrant criminality are salient to the point that the criminalization of migrant minorities is now "relatively uncontroversial" (Keith, 1993: 198). Likewise, Biko Agozino (1996: 103) argues that the societal imagination already regards immigrants as criminals because "spatial mobility is expected to imply anomie." The climate of anti-immigrant rhetoric relies on the dual discourses of criminalization and cultural difference. In Italy, immigrants of color are very visible and their numbers are few (roughly 2.2% of the population), thus making them easy targets of criminalization. In this essay, I will explore the discourse on criminality as it affects the lives of migrant African women in Italy. I demonstrate how law enforcement agencies and policymakers in Italy resorted to targeting particular immigrant groups, based on race, gender, and national origin. To be sure, much of this practice is informed by what W.E.B. Du Bois and others recognized as world-historic and systemic phenomena of race and gender that are globally enforced. The thrust of this essay is to illustrate how the culture of suspicion, hostility, and criminalization of African women in Italy is locally produced and understood. African immigrants in Italy, as racially marked subjects, are affected by the discourses of race and criminalization. Rather than discuss immigrants in Italy's social landscape generally, my focus is on policing strategies (by the state and the populous) and forms of racism that have been on the rise as immigrant populations in Italy become more visible. To understand how the conflation of race and criminalization occurs, we must see beyond the commonsense formations of Third World migration in Italy and Europe. Conceptions of race and belonging found in traditional narratives of colonial contact can also be rooted in declining national economies. On the one hand, this recognition frees one from the fetishizing analyses of what Hall (1996) calls the "post-colonial chickens coming home to roost" scenario, which does not always speak to Italy's emerging West African population, or to migration waves in other parts of Europe. It also challenges scholars and students of immigration into Italy to address the emergence of discursive and practical notions of race and racism within Italy's borders. Ann Laura Stoller's (1995: 60) evaluation of Michel Foucault's analysis of race and racial discourse suggests that for Foucault, "racial discourse consolidates not because of Europe's imperial ventures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but because of its internal conquests and invasions within the borders of Europe itself." Moving away from the narratives of colonial contact allows for a reading of contemporary racial and immigration politics that does not rely on the dominant trope of the race and ethnic typologies that began there. Rather, in the case of Italy, we are challenged to look both internally and externally at Italian views on race. These views are shaped by the history of the miscegenation and "race" laws of 1938 (Sbacchi, 1985), notions of the perceived cultural and racial differences of Southern Italians, and the experiences of discrimination faced by Italian immigrants around the world. …

Mapping Political Violence in a Globalized World: The Case of Hindu Nationalism

Abstract: A Gujarat Gaurav Rath Yatra on the streets of New York City? This is the suggestion given to [Gujarat's] Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, by Non-Resident Gujaratis [NRGs] settled in the United States.... The president-elect of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, Sudhir Parikh, a consulting allergist in the U.S., expressed concern over the soiled image of Gujarat abroad following the communal riots and suggested that Mr. Modi take out "gaurav rath yatras" on the streets of New York and other cities in the U.S. to help improve the State's image (Dasgupta, 2003). (1) ********** THE ABOVE NEWS REPORT FROM A LEADING DAILY IN INDIA INDICATES THE exchange of culture and identity politics in a globalized world. The communal riots that have tarnished the "image of Gujarat abroad" refer to the extreme violence unleashed against Muslims in the Indian western state of Gujarat in February and March of 2002 that killed between 800 and 2,000 people. Although tensions and conflicts between various religious and ethnic communities are not new phenomena in India, political commentators and scholars agree that the recent campaign of extreme violence in Gujarat is a departure from previous episodes of communal violence in India (Human Rights Watch, 2002; Mander, 2002). Following from this, the two questions we explore in this article are: (1) What is the ideological basis of this new and extreme violence against minorities in India, particularly against Muslims? (2) How do we understand the support for this violence from the Indian community in the U.S.? The conjuncture we seek to address has deep historical roots and is tied to rapidly changing economic conditions in India. We focus on the specific violence in Gujarat (hereafter referred to as "Gujarat 2002") to highlight the ideology of the Hindu nationalist movement that makes such violence possible. In addition, we outline the contours of the Indian American community's investment, material and ideological, in furthering the movement's cause. This allows us to suggest new directions for research on the global nature of political violence. The first section of the article provides details of the seven days of horrific carnage of Gujarat 2002, and the continued violence and environment of fear that persists to this day. The brutality and systematic precision of the pogrom of February 28 to March 6 that spread rapidly from the cities to the villages of Gujarat is a window into the Hindu nationalist movement and its widening sphere of influence. The second section highlights the racialized discourse of the movement, which rests on a fabricated history of persecution and victimhood of Hindus, while Muslims are presented as the main perpetrators of violence in this mythical history. (2) The final section discusses how an important sector of the Indian diaspora in the U.S. foments this violence, straddling a minority and majority identity simultaneously and cleverly using the former to augment the latter. In conclusion, we suggest that an analysis of political violence should take into account the transnational and global relations by which dominating ideologies are reproduced and sustained. "Crime Against Humanity": Gujarat 2002 On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati Express was attacked a few minutes after it pulled out of the Godhra station in central Gujarat, allegedly by a Muslim mob. One carriage, numbered $6, caught fire and 58 passengers were trapped inside and burnt alive--a large number of whom were Hindu religious volunteers returning from a controversial temple-building project sponsored by the militant Hindu nationalist movement, Hindutva. (3) Beginning February 28, the State of Gujarat witnessed unimaginable acts of cruelty and violence as large mobs of Hindu nationalist cadre roamed the streets and systematically massacred the Muslim community in Gujarat. No one was spared: young, old, men, women, children and newborns, the disabled and the destitute, Muslim members of the Opposition Party, and business establishments. …

The Diversity Rationale in Higher Education: An Overview of the Contemporary Legal Context.

Abstract: WHILE U.S. SOCIETY PORTRAYS ITSELF AS ROOTED IN A HISTORY OF EQUAL opportunity, institutionalized forms of discrimination limit the life chances of minority populations in the United States. The social struggles of the 1960s resulted in the formalization and expansion of social policy interventions intended to promote equal opportunity for socially oppressed groups (Aguirre and Martinez, 1993; Woodhouse, 2002). One of these social policy interventions became known as affirmative action. This public policy has been controversial since its inception in the 1960s because it challenges the racialized production of merit by trying to "close the gap" between the privileged majority (white) and unprivileged minority (non-white) in U.S. society (Greenberg, 2002). It is also controversial because it attacks unequal access to opportunity in society by trying to implement remedies that redress the "lingering effects" of discrimination against racial and ethnic minority persons in U.S. society (Cunningham et al., 2002). Broadly conceived, affirmative action is a term that refers to measures or practices that seek to terminate discriminatory practices by permitting the consideration of race, ethnicity, sex, or national origin in the availability of opportunity for a class of qualified individuals that have been the victims of historical, actual, or recurring discrimination. With its roots in the Wagner Act of the 1930s, affirmative action became racialized in the 1960s, and since then has been the focal point of white Americans concerned with the rise of reverse racism, the stigmatizing effects of affirmative action, and the need for color-blind policies in society (Platt, 1997). The Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), represents the first major attack on, and the first major defense of, affirmative action in the courts and is generally regarded as the nexus for sociolegal discussions of diversity and affirmative action in higher education. Opponents of diversity and affirmative action measures in higher education have used Bakke to challenge the use of race, ethnicity, sex, or national origin in student admissions, financial aid, and staff and faculty employment. In the 1990s, conservative political forces used Bakke as a symbolic tool for promoting statewide referenda, such as California's Proposition 209 and Washington's Initiative 200, to reverse the civil rights gains from the 1960s and 1970s. Our purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of major court decisions that have challenged the context for diversity and affirmative action initiatives in higher education. It is our intent to construct a conceptual framework that guides the reader through the contested terrain of diversity and affirmative action in higher education. The Notion of Individual Merit The notion of individual merit has coexisted with racial privilege in the United States since the country's inception. That notion holds that achievement should be recognized and rewarded as the outcome of individual effort, and should be the principal basis for the system of rewards in American society. For Vargas (1998: 1502), the association of merit with racial privilege in American society is rooted in the white ethnic immigrant myth: "The white ethnic immigrant myth--that hard work, assimilation, and virtue can overcome any adversity, including racism--has become the dominant American cultural narrative. The white ethnic immigrant myth is hegemonic because it mandates assimilation, dismisses the power and subordination dynamics of racism, demands conformity with 'American values,' and ultimately constructs a racial/cultural binary that pits the virtuous white assimilated ethnics against the nonvirtuous 'raced' and the culturally different." The white ethnic immigrant myth has resulted in a system of privilege in U.S. society that empowers the majority (white) while denying opportunity to the minority (nonwhite). …

No Promotion of Marriage in TANF

Abstract: Executive Summary WE OPPOSE THE WELFARE MARRIAGE PROMOTION INITIATIVE BECAUSE IT violates women's right to shape their own intimate lives, diverts valuable resources, and does nothing to address poverty. The TANF marriage promotion initiative: l. Puts governmental pressure on women's intimate decisions; 2. Fails to support women's family choices and caregiving work; 3. Discriminates against same-sex couples, single parents, and parents who choose not to marry their partners; and increases the chance that TANF recipients will be exposed to religious proselytizing; 4. Perpetuates the myth that single mothers, especially African-American and Latina women, are to blame for poverty in the United States; 5. Shifts needed resources away from women's economic empowerment and codifies the specious claim that marriage itself can solve poverty; 6. Exacerbates the risks and problems of domestic violence; 7. Wastes taxpayers' money on conservative anti-feminist, anti-choice, and anti-lesbian-and-gay organizations that promote marriage. Poor single mothers should not be subjected to moralistic propaganda in exchange for their benefits. We oppose this measure in solidarity with the poor, in support of poor single mothers and in a feminist, anti-racist and pro-lesbian-and-gay rights spirit. Preamble The following position paper summarizes our views about the welfare marriage promotion measure that will be included in upcoming legislation. We have formulated these arguments as a result of our own activism and our extensive academic research. We call upon poverty advocates, feminists, civil rights activists, and leading lesbians and gays to work together to defeat the TANF marriage promotion initiative. We invite Americans from all walks of life to join us in saying no to marriage promotion in welfare law! The Problem: The 2003 Welfare Bill and the Promotion of Marriage The major welfare reform bill passed in the mid-1990s, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, set the federal government on the marriage promotion path. It established that the welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), ought to "end the dependence of needy families on government benefits by promoting ... marriage." TANF law came up for reauthorization in 2002. The Bush administration announced its proposal to spend $300 million each year to promote marriage for TANF recipients in February 2002. The Republicans subsequently introduced legislation in 2002 that would have implemented this proposal. Their TANF reauthorization bill would have earmarked funds for the states to pay for pro-marriage advertising aimed at the general public, and for marriage preparation classes and divorce avoidance classes for TANF recipients. The 2002 bill, however, was one of the many pieces of legislation that died at the end of the session. The House Republicans introduced and passed a TANF reauthorization bill, HR 4, in one day on February 13, 2003. The bill appears to earmark $100 million per year--a total of $500 million over five years--for the promotion of marriage as a solution to poverty. In addition, HR 4 conceals the fact that federal spending for the promotion of marriage as a solution to poverty could go much higher. First, the $100 million in federal funds under the promotion of marriage section are to be provided to the states on a matching grant basis. The states must provide at least 50% of the grant for each marriage promotion project. However, the state can elect to earmark part of its federal block grant money that it receives for its entire TANF program and have those funds counted as its "own" half of the marriage promotion grant. In other words, the state can direct federal TANF block grant funds--money that could have been spent on job training, education, child care, and so on--toward its marriage promotion program grant projects, ask the federal government to count those federal dollars as the state's contribution, and then request the same amount again of federal dollars to "match" the "state" contribution. …

Race, Sexuality, and Political Struggle: Reading Soul on Ice

Abstract: THERE HAS BEEN A RECENT REVIVAL OF CRITICAL INTEREST IN "IMPRISONED intellectuals" (in the form of a conference and anthology) as sources of theoretical and practical instruction, as well as figures of political inspiration. However, this trend is highly unlikely to grant pride of place to the prison writings of Eldridge Cleaver, published together as the well-known Soul on Ice. Samples of his writings and reflection on his impact for the (intellectual) history of radical politics are curiously absent from both occasions. His leadership in what remains the "organizational icon ... of black militant resistance to white domination and terror" (James, 1999: 141) in the post-civil rights era notwithstanding, the ambivalence attached to our collective memory of his tumultuous life seems to diminish whatever critical contact we might maintain with his earliest intellectual endeavor. As a result, his criticisms of postwar capitalism, U.S. imperialism, and white supremacy are overlooked; more important, I think, is the likelihood that we will maintain the official silence about those aspects of his life, work, and thinking that we find embarrassing, inexplicable, or simply reprehensible. This difficulty of thinking with him and about him today, a difficulty that is perhaps a scandal, is the reason we should understand his writings to be absolutely essential to our engagement with imprisoned intellectuals in the 20th and 21st century U.S. Cleaver is something of an anomaly and his inclusion for present purposes has in no way been taken for granted. Quite the contrary. In a telling moment, the discussant in the panel at which this paper was initially presented described my reading of Soul as "a rescue mission," implying, I think, Cleaver's assumed status as simply beyond the pale. Any attempt to meditate upon his historical impression and significance, then, faces the inevitable, perhaps compulsive question: Why Eldridge, why now? We might reply: because his wholesale engagement with the black liberation struggle (unquestionably risking imprisonment, exile, and death), however short-lived and confused, was so deeply marked by all those political tendencies with which the move to revolutionary struggle against the state can forge dubious partnership. One of the enduring challenges of resisting state violence is liberating black radicalism from its historical entanglements with various forms of sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny, from its frequent reliance on the strictures of homophobia and heteronormativity, and from its highly ambivalent and deeply problematic relation to the sexual color line. In each respect, the figure of Eldridge Cleaver presents a highly instructive case in point, not for the exemplary success of the story, but for the extremity and wildness--as well as complexity--of its failures. I believe we can learn something important about the complicated logic of this connection between certain traditions of black liberation struggle and their often conservative, sometimes-reactionary political commitments regarding the intersections of race and sexuality. Perhaps it bears repeating that such a connection is historical and contingent and not inherent or structural, which is to say, it is capable of being undone provided it is carefully worked through. Cleaver is important to the critical engagement with imprisoned intellectuals for another key reason. The unseemliness of Cleaver in the present forum calls into question the criteria by which we determine who is or is not an "incarcerated, progressive author and theorist" (1) deserving of our attention. (This is attested to by the numerous questions I have received thus far, not about the substance of my critical reading of Soul per se, but of my sense of Cleaver as historically important. One conference participant, for instance, remarked that he could not even read the book.) Cleaver's apparently poor fit with the general themes of the conference ("contributions to . …

White Supremacy in the Movement Against the Prison-Industrial Complex

Abstract: WHITE SUPREMACY IS DEFINED AS A "HISTORICALLY BASED, INSTITUTIONALLY perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege" (Martinas, n.d.). It is deeply embedded and entrenched in the foundation and social institutions of the United States. I wish to explore the role and various manifestations of white supremacy in leftist politics, specifically in the emergent movement against the prison-industrial complex. I posit that white supremacy is (re)produced and perpetuated by most white, self-proclaimed activists who fight different aspects of the prison-industrial complex. Through various forms of paternalism, reformist politics, romanticizing struggle and violence, exotification and exceptionalism, and neocolonial divide-and-conquer tactics, whites propagate their privilege and power in their organizing and activism. I use the terms "we" and "white activists" almost interchangeably, for this article is primarily directed to an audience of white progressives, a group of which I consider myself a member. The crux of my argument is not that white supremacy is an inevitable evil that is the undoing of any social movement. Instead, I attempt to critique white progressives whose actions, though well intentioned, are laden with manifestations of white supremacy and challenge them to embrace a more radical politics, one that makes anti-racism a central tenet in any analysis and subsequent action against a white-supremacist state. We cannot begin to fashion a creative blueprint for a struggle that attempts to actualize a world free of domination without fundamentally understanding the ways in which our various actions, as white individuals and organizations, perpetuate the hierarchies and oppressions against which we wage our battle. Proceeding without fundamentally questioning the forms of oppression that are reproduced in our "activist" work ultimately relieves the state of the need to take an active role against our efforts. That is, we will have already fulfilled the prophecy of white supremacy and ensured the failure of true freedom. We must not deny or make light of its power to destroy movements for justice. Therefore, we must be consistent, disciplined, and cognizant of ourselves, which means being unafraid to check the reproduction of privilege on the part of fellow whites. In this fast-track, fascistic police state, in which racist sentiments of nativism and xenophobia are becoming as American as apple pie, there is an ever-present need for white activists to dedicate themselves to an anti-racist struggle. They must reframe and interrogate their roles within the larger movement. Before we can begin to transcend the barriers of race, we must understand the deeply rooted nature of white supremacy and the various forms of oppression faced by different peoples of color. The movement against the prison-industrial complex is multifaceted in its efforts to dismantle and combat different evils. Thus, hundreds of organizations throughout the nation are working on issues such as the death penalty, detention of immigrants, police brutality, health care within prisons, policing of youth, and the militarization of public schools. This work is necessary to build a mass movement that seeks to destroy the prison-industrial complex, and ultimately the state and its founding principles (capitalism, white supremacy, and male supremacy), but we must critique the methods and politics of many white liberal individuals and organizations involved in this work. The international movement around political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is a perfect example in terms of its ability to highlight the various manifestations of white supremacy. A large percentage of Abu-Jamal's supporters were galvanized by the conflicting "facts" used to convict him of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. …

Applied Research in the Pursuit of Justice: Creating Change in the Community and the Academy

Abstract: THIS ARTICLE DELINEATES THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN BASIC, APPLIED, AND CLINICAL sociological work and the role of applied research in the development of the discipline. (1) I argue that the call for social science research to be "value-free" is untenable and that a legitimate role for the sociologist involves using one's disciplinary perspective and research to inform program and policy development in an attempt to improve the quality of life for marginalized groups. Drawing from my own research experiences, I make the case that the distinction between basic and applied research is frequently overdrawn and that attempts to support an objective and detached research identity within the context of community-based projects may undermine the success of interventions and weaken understanding of social life and processes. The challenges of integrating applied work into an academic career are acknowledged, given prevailing academic norms related to faculty responsibilities. The promising role of service learning and applied sociological research in developing socially conscious students, engaging faculty in the community, and contributing to incremental change geared toward social justice are discussed. Last, strategies for altering the faculty recognition and reward structures to support and encourage applied work directed toward social change are highlighted. What Distinguishes Basic, Applied, and Clinical Sociology? DeMartini (1989) argues that basic sociological research is discipline oriented, focused on knowledge production, and geared toward fellow sociologists. In contrast, applied sociological research is client oriented, focused on problem solving, and dedicated to the persuasive use of data to respond to diverse stakeholders (DeMartini, 1989: 137). He further emphasizes the distinction between basic or "sociology as social science" and applied or "sociology as problem solving" and points out that the two types of work are often difficult to merge. This perspective is not shared by Alexander Boros, the founder of the Society for Applied Sociology (SAS), who argues that for sociology to be "workable" and prosper, it must validate its knowledge and theories through practice in the real world (1997: 41). In other words, Boros envisions basic and applied research as complementary and mutually beneficial in refining our understanding of social life. Straus (2002) conceptualizes applied and clinical sociology as two elements or components of sociological practice. Under this model, he and others (e.g., Fritz and Clark, 1989) define applied sociology as problem-solving research that utilizes sociological concepts and methods, whereas clinical sociology is distinguished by the "application of sociological concepts, perspectives, and methods to interventions for individual and social change" (Straus, 2002: 17). In my experience, the distinctions between applied and clinical sociology are frequently not transparent given that applied research often results in recommendations that the sociologist/ practitioner may be invited to help initiate or implement. In short, we can think of basic, applied, and clinical work as existing along a continuum without clear lines of demarcation in either their conceptualization by sociologists or in the way they are actually practiced, Iutcovich (1997: 15) points out that these divergent definitions result from "the process of identity formation and legitimation." The nature of this "contested terrain" has led to my own preference for a rather broad conception of applied work, such as that offered by Steele (1997: 87): "Any use (often client-centered) of the sociological perspective and/or its tools in the understanding of, intervention in, and/or enhancement of human social life." History of Applied Work in Sociology It is interesting that early sociologists at influential institutions such as the University of Chicago would have viewed the distinction between basic and applied sociology as "redundant" given their concern with social progress and reform (Du Bois, 2001; Iutcovich, 1997). …

Toward a Holistic Anti-Violence Agenda: Women of Color as Radical Bridge-Builders

Abstract: THE PUBLICATION OF THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY Back was a cause for celebration and reflection among women of color in the U.S. (Moraga and Anzaldua, 2002). First printed in 1982, the bridge metaphor captured the challenges facing women of color as they negotiated the radical social movements of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Expected to act in feminist spaces (as if gender were the primary oppression structuring their lives) in radical movements of color (as if the struggle against white supremacy were the only meaningful engagement) and in leftist organizations (as if gender and race were distractions to the fight against capital), women of color struggled to generate a politics that could honor the complex intersections of race, class, and gender in their lives. Working with white women to challenge violence against women, and with men of color to defend their communities against police brutality and institutional racism, women of color frequently found themselves acting as the bridge between a multiplicity of social movements. Yet this role, while critically important as a basis for coalition-building, was also draining--as Kate Rushin (2002) succinctly communicated in "The Bridge Poem": "I'm sick of seeing and touching/Both sides of things/Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody.... I explain ... the white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks/To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the/Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends' parents/I do more translating/Than the Gawdamn U.N." Women of color who identified as feminists or addressed gender issues in communities of color risked being labeled "traitors," "lesbians," or "white-identified." If they challenged racism or admitted working alongside men of color in feminist spaces, they risked being labeled "male-identified" or "divisive." Twenty years later, much has changed. The intersectional politics elaborated by women in This Bridge, once a marginal and controversial perspective, have been mainstreamed and there are even textbooks to explain them to the beginner (Anderson and Collins, 2001). Women writers of color, who once were limited to small radical publishers like Kitchen Table Press, are now published by mainstream imprints that expect to sell significant quantities to women's studies programs across the country. Anti-racist white feminists and pro-feminist men of color have joined women of color in critiquing racism in the women's movement and sexism in the anti-racist movement. Yet, the Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement (see below) is testimony to the living legacy of women of color as bridge builders. In the post-September 11 era, many women of color have tired of seeking to transform liberal identity-based movements that claim to represent all "women" or "African Americans," for example, but remain entrenched in the politics of imperial feminism or patriarchal and heterosexist rights for black men. Instead, many of us have focused our attention in two complementary directions: building our own organizations based on an intersectional analysis of violence, and participating in and building coalitions within issue-based movements, such as the antiwar, prison abolitionist, political prisoner, police brutality, racial profiling, and domestic violence and sexual assault (DVSA) movements. Walking in the footsteps of the contributors to This Bridge, activists from the prison abolitionist and DVSA movements have come together to write the Critical Resistance-Incite! statement below. The seeds of the statement were sown at the first Critical Resistance conference, which took place in Berkeley, California, in fall 1998. Among the organizers of that conference were women of color who had been active in both the prison abolitionist and DVSA movements. The conference brought together 3,500 activists, students, academics, former prisoners and their families, former political prisoners, and cultural workers to launch a new broad-based abolitionist movement based on a critique of the prison-industrial complex. …

Political Consciousness and New Social Movement Theory: The Case of Fuerza Unida

Abstract: Introduction THE GOAL OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO ASSESS NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY'S treatment of race, gender, and social class with respect to contemporary social movements. In this article, I develop an alternative framework that will address some limitations of new social movement theory by using theoretical concepts derived from discourse theory. New social movement theory addresses limitations in resource mobilization theory, but its post-industrial bias does not adequately account for social inequality (especially in terms of racial, national, gender, and class inequality) in identity formation. Moreover, its evasion of ideology makes it difficult to theorize the operation of power in identity formation. The post-Marxist bent of many (though not all) strands of new social movement theory also fails to take seriously the relationship between social class and identity formation. Finally, new social movement theory models are insufficient in terms of explaining the political action of non-Western actors. This article applies theoretical concepts derived from discourse theory to the case of Fuerza Unida, (1) a Mexican/Mexican-American social movement of former garment workers. In discussing this case, I will compare the explanatory power of new social movement theory and discourse theory. In addition, it will be argued that focusing on language and culture is not only important for sociologists, but also for union and social movement organizers. In sum, the goal of this essay is to assess the extent to which discourse theory can be of use to scholars of social movements who aim to theorize the connections between identity, discourse, and political economy. New Social Movement Theory and Its Historical Context In post-World War II America, sociological theories of political action and protest were based on a deviance model (Buechler, 1993). During the 1960s and 1970s, academics sympathetic to the era's large-scale protest movements developed "resource mobilization theory" (Ibid.), which challenged the deviance models of social protest by proclaiming that social movements were not "deviant" but "rational." According to Buechler, resource mobilization theorists argued that social movements consisted of rational actors and were just an extension of traditional politics. Beginning in the early 1980s, scholars (mostly European) began to discuss "new social movements" (Laclau and Mouffe, 1988; Melucci, 1995; McAdam, 1994).2 New social movements refer to movements and organizations that deal primarily with issues of identity and meaning, in contrast to traditional class-based organizations such as unions or political parties. New social movements that began to form in the post-1968 era, such as the feminist, environmental, and gay and lesbian rights movements, are "new" because of their concern with post-material goals such as creating shared meanings around collective identities and alternative lifestyles. New social movement theory is distinguished by its emphasis on shared meanings and identity politics over the politics of distribution. Its theorists study "postindustrial societies" and the subject of such theories is, generally speaking, the middle-class actor. The middle-class Western actor no longer worries about the politics of distribution. His concerns now are about identity, meaning, and culture (Buechler, 1995). Although some new social movement theorists have been influenced by neo-Marxism (Castells, 1997), the bulk of the literature focuses on identity and meaning rather than structural issues. Challenging resource mobilization theory, Johnston, Larana, and Gusfield (1994) stress the importance of the symbolic in collective and individual identity formation within the context of a postindustrial society. In the view of Larana, McAdam, and Gusfield, social justice struggles, whether for national liberation or economic equality, are old struggles that have been displaced by new struggles for identity and meaning. …

The Imagination to Listen: Reflections on a Decade of Zapatista Struggle

Abstract: In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. --Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination ON JANUARY 1, 2003, DURING THE COMMEMORATION OF THE NINTH ANNIVERSARY of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) uprising against the Mexican government in the state of Chiapas, more than 20,000 Zapatistas, their faces covered with ski masks and red bandanas, marched into the central plaza of the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas. From the main avenue, Insurgentes, the Zapatistas poured into the town's center in a procession that lasted several hours. As they arrived, each person raised machetes in the air to remind the world that the rebellion continues despite the lack of a solution to the protracted conflict. After six years of mobilizations exclusively focused on the recognition of indigenous rights, this historical march served to resituate the Zapatista demand for the recognition of differences as an integral part of broader anti-globalization struggles and to reinforce the rebel army's participation in such global processes. In the words of EZLN comandante Mister, one of the seven comandantes present, The mal gobierno [the evil, corrupt government] thinks that we, as indigenous people, don't think about what happens globally. But we know the world, because we have met the women and men from all the countries that have come here and that have spoken to us about their struggle, of their worlds. With their words we have traveled. For that reason we tell the powerful of the world that if they are to globalize with the globalization of death, then we will also globalize for freedom. For that reason, rebel brothers and sisters, we struggle for democracy, liberty, and justice for all the pueblos and nations of the world. With these words, the Zapatistas broke an almost two-year silence and positioned themselves in dialogue with anti-neoliberal social movements in Mexico and around the globe. These words echoed a sentiment proclaimed a decade ago when, on January 1, 1994, the same day NAFTA took effect, a primarily indigenous army declared war on the Mexican state. The government responded by sending troops and, after numerous clashes and hundreds of thousands of people throughout Mexico calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, a ceasefire was achieved 12 days later. Since that time, the EZLN has carried out various attempts at negotiating with the Mexican government. It has engaged in a continuing series of dialogues with what is loosely referred to as a national and international civil society---that amorphous entity once described by Mexican cultural critic, Carlos Monsivais (1987: 79), as "community efforts of solidarity, the space independent of government, strictly speaking the zone of antagonism." Ten years of dialogues with members of civil society have contributed to the construction of political practices and discourses against neoliberal relations, in favor of radical democracy, and for "un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos [a world where many worlds fit]." This has taken place despite the presence of 60,000 elements of the federal army and the constant harassment and even assassination by military-trained paramilitary groups, within a context of low-intensity warfare. (1) One way to reflect on the past decade of failed negotiations with the state, dialogues with civil society, and low-intensity warfare would be to describe the transformations and challenges of Zapatista-state political relations. Such reflections typically appear in the media and simply narrate state-EZLN interactions by focusing on the suspended peace talks and on the eventual unilateral state-initiated constitutional reforms. Such a narrative would begin with the Peace Dialogues of San Andres Sak'amchen de los Pobres at the end of 1995, discuss the eventual signing of the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture on February 16, 1996, describe the reasons for the suspension of further negotiations, and conclude with the Mexican Congress' approval of constitutional reforms in 2001 that recognized a limited set of indigenous rights. …

Learning to Kill by Proxy: Colombian Paramilitaries and the Legacy of Central American Death Squads, Contras, and Civil Patrols

Abstract: Introduction IN THE 1980s, WARS RAGED IN CENTRAL AMERICA. IN NICARAGUA, THE UNITED States waged a proxy war against the Sandinista government with the U.S.-backed Contras (see Brody, 1985). Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads, begun by the United States in the early 1960s, brutally attacked all protest against these Central American states, both peaceable and insurrectionary. (1) Although the history of paramilitaries in Colombia is often traced to the 1997 unification of paramilitary groups under the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or United Self-Defense of Colombia) or to the "private" armies of large landowners, drug traffickers, and other elites of the 1980s, paramilitarism in Colombia is neither new nor haphazard. This article traces the founding of Colombian paramilitaries to the Cold War era when the United States helped the Colombian and Central American governments establish proxy paramilitary forces in its fight against "international Communism." I then summarize the devastating effects this paramilitarism had on Colombian and Central American society during the 1960s to the late 20th century. I begin with an ethnographic description of paramilitarism in the Uraba-Choco region of Colombia and then provide a testimonial account from a young, Colombian paramilitary in 2001. A concluding section provides an update on the impact of paramilitarism on human rights in contemporary Colombia, and on the implications for peace in the region. The Colombian State and Its Proxy Forces In the Uraba area of Colombia, the paramilitaries control the northern part of Uraba, Antioquia, and Cordoba; the paramilitary leader Carlos Castano dominates this area. (2) Paramilitaries in Uraba and elsewhere support local economic powers and move freely from north to south in their areas of control (except for mountainous areas dominated by the guerrillas). At its multiple margins, the state becomes legible as its relationship with paramilitary forces is revealed through army maneuvers and paramilitary checkpoints. Indeed, in Apartado, army street patrols guard the restaurants and bars where off-duty paramilitaries eat, drink, and dance. In July 2001, while traveling on public transportation with human rights workers from Apartado to the beach town of Necocli, our bus was stopped or waved through five times at paramilitary checkpoints as army vehicles moved up and down the highway. Army platoons also patrolled the highway at the periphery of each town less than a kilometer from each paramilitary checkpoint. The infrastructure of Colombian army patrols, troop maneuvers, and security checkpoints lend protection to the paramilitaries and allow them safe freedom of movement and action. This relationship between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries, which is mutually beneficial on a strategic level, unveils a power arrangement that is intended to remain hidden, that is, proxy paramilitaries of the state operating in the anonymity of the margins of the state. Thus, what initially appears to be simply a privatization of state violence is revealed in practice as state violence by proxy. Displacement in the Uraba area can be traced to the regional consolidation of the paramilitaries between 1994 and 1995. (3) Indeed, the largest barrio in Apartado is Barrio Obrero, which was founded by civilians displaced between 1995 and 1997 by paramilitaries. Today, Barrio Obrero is controlled by paramilitaries and sicarios (thugs for hire). (4) In this way, marginalized communities on the urban peripheries also become the margins of the state and sites of contention where the state reconstitutes sovereignty through violence and surveillance; and, as is the case in other areas, (5) it does so using proxy paramilitary forces. The paramilitaries have used displacement as their central military tactic in rural areas. On the urban peripheries, paramilitaries most often use threats, disappearances, and assassinations in their exercise of state power. …

The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the U.S

Abstract: The Attack Sequence ON OCTOBER 7, 2001, THE U.S. LAUNCHED A MASSIVE MILITARY ASSAULT ON Afghanistan that effaced its political structure and created an enormous refugee situation. From the middle of 2002, the U.S. threatened to do the same thing to Iraq, running through a spectrum of reasons that changed as each previous argument collapsed. After giving up on efforts of U.N. inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction in that country, the Bush administration's inability to do so dissolved that pretext as well. The assault on Afghanistan, mounted in response to the events of September 11, 2001, was part of a two-decade-long series that included Grenada (1982), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), and Yugoslavia (1999). Each assault had its own peculiarity, and violated certain principles of democracy and international law; yet, each received overwhelming support in the U.S., at institutional and popular levels. Though its moments differ, they reveal a common structure and the series as a whole poses an enveloping question concerning its general acceptability. To discern the structure of these assaults, let us begin with September 11, 2001, when two hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York City, causing those buildings to collapse, killing around 3,000 people. A third plane flown into the Pentagon left it in flames for days; a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. All were ostensibly hijacked, all within hours of each other. Though no one took credit for this coordinated act of destruction, the U.S. government immediately claimed, without evidence, that a Saudi expatriate allegedly living in Afghanistan was responsible, and that 19 men of Middle Eastern origin, whose names the FBI published two days later, had committed this act of collective suicide and mass murder. Evidence of who had taken control of the planes and turned off their transponders was lacking since all who knew died in the crashes. Osama bin Laden was ordered arrested, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was instructed to extradite him. That regime was then militarily driven from power for refusing to comply. The Taliban was declared guilty by association, and the nation of Afghanistan punished as a result. There is something amiss with the "bare-bones" scenario that befits a judicial style consistent with a warrant for bin Laden's arrest. In reality, nothing unfolded in this manner. Though in violation of international law (the Geneva Accords and U.N. Charter), the military assault on Afghanistan constituted the first act in what was declared to be an "endless war." (1) The massive bombing of Afghanistan created a civilian death count considerably beyond that of the World Trade Center; whole villages were obliterated, and an already critical refugee and starvation situation was exacerbated, stretching well into Pakistan. In place of the Taliban organization, an interim government was invented. Though objection to this assault in the U.S. was small, it was repressed: public figures who spoke against the attack were vilified, people were fired, students suspended from school, social programs closed, university professors sanctioned, etc. (2) All to arrest one man. The assault on Afghanistan, according to military experts, would have required at least three months of logistical preparation; indeed, plans for the assault had begun the previous July. (3) If so, the arrest of bin Laden was merely a legalistic pretext for a prior political project, the change of regime in Afghanistan. As such, the idea of avenging September 11 was intended for popular consumption. A military policy predicated on the absence of evidence signified that mainstream support for the "revenge" assault required no evidence. Neither the restraint called for by the antiwar opposition, nor the horror of subjecting Afghanistan to mass destruction, had any moderating effect. More than vengeful blood lust was at stake in the context of a pre-planned assault. …

Passion through the Profession: Being Both Activist and Academic

Abstract: Introduction I WRITE THIS ESSAY MORE FOR MYSELF THAN FOR OTHERS, BUT I OFFER IT IN THE HOPES of addressing what I am convinced are common issues that arise with faculty engagement in social justice work. Such work frequently takes the academic out of the classroom into the community to make a difference in the life chances of those who are marginal in our society. These social justice issues typically concern conditions of basic human rights in employment, shelter, nutrition, health, and recreation. This article is an appeal to define the academic role as one that integrates activism and research in response to one's passion. My own experience has been that volunteer community work grows into an activist's commitment to specific social change, from which applied research is then generated. Recognizing the demands that emerge from these commitments will clarify what can be conflicting roles of each. The Activist Academic: Responding to Uncontrollable Events I have been working with a group of committed volunteers to abolish the death penalty since 1987--first as cofounder, then as president, and now as chair of the fund-raising committee. You can imagine the group's excitement as we heard rumors that Governor George Ryan of Illinois would commute the sentences of at least some of that state's death row prisoners as he was leaving office in January 2003. During the semester holidays, several of us worked feverishly on a news release that would be our response whenever the governor acted. Not certain of the date of his announcement until the week before, we stayed near the phone so as to be available to the media. During this time, we also got word of a Missouri execution scheduled for February 5 and that another one of the prisoners currently on death row (1) was having an unprecedented second habeas hearing at the state supreme court on February 4. Each of these events was largely beyond our control and required major efforts to mobilize the community. Finally, in the same week that classes began for the new semester, Governor Ryan pardoned four persons and commuted the sentences of 167 others, thereby emptying death row in the State of Illinois. These events happened just as our city began a week of events to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. A call came from the chair of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference urging a press conference organized to encourage our governor to follow the lead of Governor Ryan. My hours were consumed coordinating meetings, making phone calls, assigning tasks to volunteers, securing speakers for the press conference, and managing responses from the public. The following week, the coalition board was meeting and I agreed to conduct the orientation for the new members. It took an entire day to prepare packets of information, so that the meeting itself could be spent reviewing the written material and answering questions. The next week the death penalty frenzy continued as an earlier planned "Lobby Day" took place at the state capitol on January 29, the interim report for a grant was due January 31, and this article was due February 1. During this time, I was also teaching my classes, attending department meetings, and finishing the revision of another article (Burnett, 2003). The coalition work had taken over too much of my time. Things felt as if they were out of balance. Why was I the person to make everything happen? Was it because I was connected with other abolitionists around the state and so it was my responsibility to communicate to those in our local group? Was it because I was on a semester break from teaching my classes, giving the illusion of having "free time," able to attend impromptu meetings? Was it because I was the one who had obtained the grant and needed to be accountable to the funder? I have come to the realization that working with a social movement means going with the flow of events, even when the stream becomes a flood. …

Legitimizing Empire: Racial and Gender Politics of the War on Terrorism

Abstract: I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag.... My world has died, and I write to mourn its passing. --Arundhati Roy ("The End of Imagination," an essay written after India's nuclear test in May 1998). MANY OF THE IDEAS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE EMERGED FROM DIALOGUES with friends and activists who shared the experience of living on the wrong side of right America. An all-too-brief meeting with the brilliant Sunera Thobani, the "first brown woman who spoke out," inspired many of the ideas in this article, as well as the conference on "Afghan Women and Transnational Activist Networks" held at Mr. Holyoke College. Given the dramatic changes in political contexts during 2002 and 2003, I am rearticulating some of the arguments upon which this article, as an initial reaction to the war, was based. From the ashes and public grief of the month of September in the year that erased history, America's ruling coterie wrested a new flag. Inscribed with the image of the smoke-wrapped World Trade Center, the new flag represented the imagined community of a whole new nation, a remasculinized America, a new race whose politically correct color composition was homogenized through the monoculture of patriotism. Flying this flag, patriotic America went to war in October 2001 to bomb one of the poorest nations in the world. At the World Trade Organization negotiations in Qatar in November 2001, corporate America extracted more gains from impoverished countries even as it sought to fast track free trade and laid off thousands at home. In March 2002, military America declared hostile intentions toward an "axis of evil" that includes Iran, Iraq, and the little communist nation of North Korea. In addition, the new nuclear policy places China, Syria, Sudan, and Libya on the expanding list of dangerous nations. The Bush administration's war envisaged a politically renewed project of global expansion of U.S. military power allied to its capitalist agenda as we move into the resource crunch of the 21st century. The intimidation of non-Western nations in Africa (Libya, Sudan), the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Syria), and Asia (China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea) is part of a larger project of economic and cultural recolonization in collusion with the dominant classes and antidemocratic groups in these nations. The U.S. foreign policy tradition of supporting antisocialist repressive regimes in Asia and the Middle East has acquired a dangerous and aggressive edge in the Philippines and Indonesia, where insurgent movements have been crushed with fresh vigor after the U.S. military presence in the region. Anti-Muslim sentiment has run high in India after September 11, legitimating the bloodbath initiated by Hindu fundamentalists who slaughtered over 600 Muslims in March 2002, even as the state has enacted a new "antiterrorism" ordinance that outlawed groups fighting for social justice. The new war ensures the strategic presence of U.S. bases and forces throughout the world even as its corporate salesmen demand more and more profit-making provisions at the negotiating tables of the World Trade Organization. By enforcing an international political culture that suppressed dialogue, debate, and dissent, and by strengthening national security states and repressive regimens in the non-Western world, the United States and its neoconservative allies across the world challenged political and civil rights that were won by anticolonial and antiracist movements over the last century. The conservative think tank project of building an American empire is dangerous not just to Americans who have been bearing the brunt of corporate privatization and militarism since Ronald Reagan, but to democratic movements and alliances for social justice the world over. It constitutes an attack on large sectors of Americans who have been struggling for class equality, racial justice, and gender reforms by silencing or bringing them under a new cultural regime of imperialist nationalism. …

The Reality of Political Prisoners in the United States: What September 11 Taught Us about Defending Them

Abstract: DEFENDING THE "UNPOPULAR CLIENT," THE CLIENT WHO HAS BEEN TARGETED BY the government as a terrorist, a cop killer, a bank robber, a revolutionary, or the "the sole white member of the Black Liberation Army" does not get you nominated to the list of America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers. Nonetheless, the Constitution and accepted ethical and criminal procedure norms guarantee that every defendant is entitled to legal counsel and zealous advocacy. That is what is taught in law school, but is that what is meant? Recent legislation has raised serious doubts as to whether we can continue to take these principles for granted. How else can we explain the recent unprecedented arrest and indictment of New York lawyer, Lynn Stewart, a zealous advocate who is well respected among members of the bar and bench? (1) Ms. Stewart has represented numerous "unpopular" clients. Some of them have clear political ideologies, such as David Gilbert, who was charged as a former member of the Weather Underground with the 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack, New York. Also included were Bilal Sunni-Ali, a member of the Republic of New Africa, who was charged in the 1981 Brinks case in a federal prosecution and Richard Williams, who was alleged to have conspired with members of the Ohio 7 to blow up several military buildings and offices of major corporations. Gilbert and Williams were convicted in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and remain incarcerated today as political prisoners. Sunni-Ali was acquitted in an emotional and political upset for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. At that time, none other than Rudolph Giuliani directed the office. Ms. Stewart has been a thorn in the side of prosecutors for over two decades. It seems that the time for revenge has arrived. No wonder the U.S. attorney general boldly announced at a press conference following her arraignment that the federal government has been monitoring conversations between Stewart and her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, from at least as far back as May 2000. Even the most conservative observer would concede that the U.S. Patriot Act was not signed into law until October 26, 2001. A scrupulous review of its provisions will reveal no specific reference to monitoring of attorney-client communications. Upon what authority did the government rely in determining that it could monitor undisputed attorney-client communications in May 2000? Attorney General John Ashcroft shamelessly admitted that Ms. Stewart's conversations with her client were surreptitiously wiretapped during a prison visit that took place two years ago. Before October 30, 2001, the Bureau of Prisons regulations on institutional management authorized the Bureau to impose special administrative measures with respect to specified inmates. These administrative measures had to be based on information provided by senior intelligence or law enforcement officials, where it was determined to be necessary to prevent the dissemination either of classified information that could endanger the national security or of other information that could lead to acts of violence and terrorism. (2) However, those regulations did not contemplate that communications between an inmate and his or her attorney would be subject to the usual rules for monitoring of inmate communications. On October 30, 2001, the Department of Justice instituted new regulations that amended certain key provisions. Beyond extending the time during which a prisoner could be subjected to special administrative measures from 120 days to up to one year, the new regulations provide, d) In any case where the Attorney General specifically so orders, based on information from the head of a federal law enforcement or intelligence agency that reasonable suspicion exists to believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of terrorism, the Director, Bureau of Prisons, shall, in addition to the special administrative measures imposed under paragraph (a) of this section, provide appropriate procedures for the monitoring or review of communications between that inmate and attorneys' agents who are traditionally covered by the attorney-client privilege, for the purpose of deterring future acts that could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons, or substantial damage to property that would entail the risk of death or serious bodily injury to persons. …

Academia, Activism, and Imprisoned Intellectuals

Abstract: Reading prison writing must ... demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.--Barbara Harlow (1972), Barred: Women, Writing, and Detention. The radical intellectual, struggling for her own place in an academy already under siege by market forces and political interference, may lack the stomach for engaging in external conflicts that are deemed "controversial" by the media projectors of the status quo; for even radical intellectuals must eat; and to eat means to affiliate with aggregates of intellectual organization and power (universities), if one wants to teach.... Nothing written in this essay will relieve the tension between one's fear and one's conscience, for nothing is more controversial in the American context than the state's role in determining whether its purported citizens should live or die.--Mumia Abu-Jamal (2003), "Intellectuals and the Gallows." Love and Rage IN A RECENT LETTER ADDRESSING MY QUERIES ABOUT A TRADE BOOK BY ONE OF HIS former attorneys, death row author and intellectual Mumia Abu-Jamal succinctly signed his missive. Describing his emotional response to his former activist-attorney's breach of trust and commodification of Abu-Jamal as a spectacle for the marketplace and the executioner-state, he closed: "Love and Rage--Mumia." Love and rage initially seem paradoxical, coupled as oddities. They are assumed by some to appear in exclusive sites, as distinct and unrelated experiences and feelings. But they coexist, with a dynamic ability to metamorphose or shape-shift, one into the other. Love and rage are the impetus for much reflection, agonizing, action, and risk taking. They also seem to fuel considerable thoughtlessness and inactivity, either in abstract or maudlin sentiment or in pyrotechnic performance, and their respective sterility illuminates their shared characteristics. Love and rage constitute the organizing force behind this gathering coordinated during expanding wars. Love for community, freedom, and justice, for the incarcerated and for the "disappeared"--for those dying or surviving in war zones. To the extent that love for humanity leads to rage against injustice, we also must ask and answer: Where does rage lead us? For now, we can remember that in our national context, love and rage led to resistance in antiracist, antiwar, and anti-gender/sexual violence movements. Resistance was met with further repression, in the context of the United States, aptly administered by the Federal Bureau of investigation and its COINTELPRO or counterintelligence program. (1) These repressive government measures surveilled and destabilized the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which was seeking to stop death squads funded by our tax dollars. COINTELPRO also violently dismantled radical groups and formations such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, as well as various antiwar and anti-intervention militants. The political prisoners currently contained in U.S. penal sites present us with difficult questions and challenges as critical thinkers and actors: What is our relationship to the "imprisoned intellectual"? Who or what is s/he? Who or what are we in relation to visionary, risk-taking struggle? That is, what is our relation to visionary struggles for justice that are neither consumed by rage nor performance radicalism, struggles not shrugged off as insurmountable, but embraced as worthy of theoretical and organizational commitments? Perhaps such struggles bring into question all vanguard sites and formations, whether academic or activist. Given that communication is likely just another way of speaking about ourselves, we might as well start responding to the queries by scrutinizing the site(s) we currently occupy. …

Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements in the Global Context

Abstract: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN AND OROMO MOVEMENTS HAVE BEEN ANTICOLONIAL struggles, and they have aimed to dismantle racial/ethnonational hierarchies legitimated by the ideology of racism in the hegemonic state of the United States and the peripheral and imperial state of Ethiopia. The African American and Oromo ethnonational minority groups are similar in numerical size, and different in political strength. Each population numbers about 30 million. However, African Americans constitute only 13% of the U.S. population of 270 million, while Oromos make up about 50% of the Ethiopian population of 60 million. As the African American movement developed in opposition to American slavery, racial segregation, and underdevelopment, the Oromo movement emerged to fight Ethiopian settler colonialism and its institutions, and underdevelopment. The two movements emerged in opposition to colonial domination, a racial/ ethnonational hierarchy, economic and labor exploitation, cultural destruction and repression, and the denial of individual and national rights. The capitalist world-system that produced modern slavery, colonization, genocide or ethnocide, cultural destruction and repression, and continued subjugation also facilitated the emergence and development of the African American and Oromo movements. Initially, African Americans and Oromos resisted slavery and colonization without systematically organizing themselves. Their cultural and political resistance continued after their enslavement and colonization because in Ethiopia and the United States, these two peoples were assigned the status of slaves and colonial subjects and second-class citizens. Moreover, since the early 1950s the United States has sided with the Ethiopian state to suppress Oromo society (Jalata, 1998; 1999). Although the national struggles of these two peoples represent a continuation of previous resistance, they emerged from certain social-structural, historical, and sociological factors. This comparative essay historically situates the emergence and development of these two movements and elaborates on the gradual transformation of resistance to slavery, racial segregation, colonial domination, and underdevelopment into the African American and Oromo movements--their phases and objectives, similarities and differences, and successes and failures. By using a comparative-historical approach, we critically and comparatively examine the causes, processes, and outcomes of the African American and Oromo movements. The African American Movement The African American movement developed as a mass movement during the mid-20th century. A cultural, intellectual, ideological, and political movement, its purpose was to achieve civil equality, human dignity, and development by overthrowing white racial and colonial dictatorship. This development was facilitated by the cumulative struggles of the previous generations and social changes and conjunctures. Various forms of individual and group resistance struggles and proto-nationalism existed in African American society before the 20th century. The ancestors of African Americans, individually and in groups, resisted enslavement in Africa and fought against slavery on slave ships and later on American plantations. They fought culturally and some ran away, while others engaged in mutinies and armed resistance. Clarke (1976: 41) notes that African culture "sustained the Africans during the holocaust of the slave trade and the colonial system that followed it.... African culture, reborn on alien soil, became the cohesive force and the communication system that helped to set in motion some of the most successful slave revolts in history." There were about 250 slave rebellions in America between the 17th and 19th centuries (Colston, 1979: 234). About 50 maroon communities were formed by thousands of runaway slaves and their descendants between 1672 and 1864 in the forests and mountains of Southern states (see Aptheker, 1947; 1979). …

Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the Anti-Authoritarian Tradition

Abstract: OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, PROGRESSIVES HAVE PRODUCED MUCH USEFUL AND astute analysis of the buildup of the police state (the prison-industrial complex, police seizure of assets, the rollback of civil rights, etc) as a means of managing an increasingly disenfranchised working class At times, however, these analyses have adopted the framework of the power structure in discussing "crime" and "criminals," and have de-emphasized the ways in which some forms of "crime" may also be about resistance to corporate power This period witnessed the emergence of organized crime as an increasingly global corporate (and state sanctioned) entity in areas such as the drug traffic In turn, analysis tended to adopt the framework of "crime" as a problem and then suggested its own ways of contesting the established need for dealing with that problem, instead of questioning the entire framework in which the problem was defined This was not always the case on the part of progressives In the mid-1940s in Hollywood, a series of films validated not the gangster or organized crime, but the ordinary citizen, both working and middle class, who, either through the conditions of his or her everyday life, or, arbitrarily, seemingly by chance, ran afoul of the law These films, with their dark, gloomy city streets and constant images of horizontal lines and bars framing down-on-their-luck lead characters, are most often referred to as film noir They come directly out of a period of intense class struggle in Hollywood and the nation as a whole and represent certain left attitudes growing out of the Popular or Cultural Front era led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) The films represent a moment of resistance to an increasingly centralized and anti-labor state and, later, a critique of a rapacious economic system whose representatives waged a frontal assault on Depression-era collective values of the 1930s and those of the wartime period of the 1940s This article will delineate how these films encouraged strong sympathy with their outside-the-law protagonists against social and corporate authority in a brief moment when, within one genre, in the heart of the culture industry, left ideas were hegemonic The sympathetic fugitive's journey outside the law paralleled that of labor as a whole in the postwar period, when unions and wildcat strikers were criminalized first in a massive strike wave and later as victims of legislation (the Taft-Hartley Act) and governmental investigations (HUAC) that retroactively outlawed their actions during the strikes This sympathy for working-class rebellion was systematically rolled back within the crime film, which emerged in the early to mid- 1950s at the height of the Cold War and labor's enlistment in the corporate state In this period, the dominant form of the crime film was the police procedural, where the audience was positioned in the front seat of the squad car tracking down the sympathetic fugitives of the previous era, with outside-the-law characters now portrayed as "psychotic" The sympathetic fugitive persistently reemerged, however To illustrate this, I will look at three instances in which the character reappears in the crime film to engage in dialogue with more authoritarian tendencies This includes a 40-year producer's duel in television between the anti-authoritarian creations of Roy Huggins ("Maverick," "The Fugitive," and "The Rockford Files") and the reassertion of authority in the work of Jack Webb ("Dragnet," 1950s and 1970s, and "Adam-12") The second instance was the reemergence of film noir in the 1980s and early 1990s, with its values of critique, in reaction to Reagan and Bush administration policies and the conventional Hollywood support for those policies Third was the temporary emergence of the fugitive government agent in the television series "24," which was initially critical of the workings of a secret government This thrust was reversed at the height of the post-September 11 rollback of the suspense series and the positive restoration of home-front surveillance by domestic agencies (the forensics unit of "C …

Agents of Repression: Withstanding the Test of Time

Abstract: NEARLY 15 YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE JIM VANDER WALL AND I WROTE AGENTS of Repression. Of course, many things have happened during the intervening period that reflect upon the book's content and might thus be considered worth including in a South End Classics Edition. Incorporating such material would, however, have necessitated a substantial reworking of the book, and thus have detracted from the idea of a classic edition, per se. Moreover, none of the additional information would have altered any of the basic arguments and conclusions originally advanced. Rather, it would serve only to reinforce, amplify, and in a few cases clarify lingering ambiguities with respect to what we had already said. Brief summaries of some of the more significant developments since 1988 should prove sufficient to make the point. In some respects, most important is the fact that Leonard Peltier, whose blatant frame-up forms one of the central themes discussed, remains entombed within the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas (27 years and counting). That this is so despite his prosecutor's open admission before the Eighth Circuit Court that the government had "no idea" who had actually committed the acts for which Peltier was convicted (see pp. 324-325), as well as the court's consequent determination that much of the "evidence" resulting in Peltier's conviction had been false (p. 325), results not least from the FBI having taken the historically unprecedented step of dispatching several hundred agents to conduct a public protest outside the White House at a time when it seemed likely Bill Clinton might commute Peltier's sentence to time served. (1) More or less simultaneously, it seems certain that ranking FBI officials put Clinton on notice that a pardon for Peltier would translate into a concerted investigation of the president himself once he had left office in January 2001 (allegations included everything from perjury in conjunction with the Lewinsky affair, to profiteering from Whitewater and related scams, to criminal abuses of authority committed amid the myriad cover-ups attending everything else). (2) These maneuvers were coupled with an attempt by the FBI to rewrite the broader narrative of its counterinsurgency operations on Pine Ridge during the mid-1970s. That rewriting centered upon a pamphlet prepared and distributed at taxpayer expense in which the Bureau purportedly rebutted on a case-by-case basis the roster of fatalities among American Indian Movement (AIM) members and its supporters compiled by Vander Wall and me and attributed to the FBI's "reign of terror" on the reservation (see pp. 199-218). (3) In almost every instance, and all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the pamphlet asserted that each death had been investigated "whenever [it was] appropriate" for the FBI to do so, that all resulting cases had long since been satisfactorily resolved, and that, for the most part, there had been no indication of murder in the first place (e.g., several victims allegedly died from "shooting accidents" or "hit and run" incidents involving "unidentified perpetrators"). (4) Apart from the obvious utility of its doing so vis-a-vis the Peltier case, there are additional motives prompting the Bureau's renewed desire to confuse or distort popular appreciations of what transpired on Pine Ridge and why. It seems, for example, that the FBI retains a strong institutional interest in obscuring the truth of what actually happened to Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, an AIM activist from Canada killed execution-style on the reservation in late 1975 or early 1976. Given that Aquash was demonstrably bad-jacketed by FBI provocateur Douglass Durham in the months before her death, it has always been generally understood that she had fallen victim to this most well-refined and insidious of the Bureau's many "political neutralization" tactics (see pp. 211-217). Suspicions have remained rife in AIM circles, moreover, that the role of FBI personnel was far more direct than merely setting the victim up to be murdered. …

Civics as Applied Sociology

Abstract: THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN APPLIED SOCIOLOGY AND democracy. (1) Those who identify, at least in part, as practitioners are well aware that sociologists do many things in addition to teaching students to become sociologists who will in turn teach students to become sociologists. During the past several years, I have worked in a private consulting practice, taught non-sociology majors to be more sociological in their careers as engineers, school teachers, city planners, and the like, and have been active in the Society for Applied Sociology. Through this experience, I have learned that nonacademic sociologists actually pursue a wide, indeed an almost disorientingly diverse, range of activities. Nevertheless, underlying much of this diversity is a kind of commitment that distinguishes the practicing sociologist from his or her counterpart who may be involved in similar clinical, evaluation, or consulting work, but whose educational background is in marketing, health care, statistics, or other technical fields. This is the commitment to promote inclusiveness and to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality in the contexts in which they work. In a related manner, as I continue to deepen my understanding of the history of our field, it becomes increasingly clear that from the very beginning sociology was conceived as a technology as much as a science (Weinstein, 1981). The development of sociology and the related social sciences from the cradle of classic moral philosophy and political economy was clearly driven by an attempt to apply scientific knowledge to improve human relations. Indeed, the idea that sociological insight and method ought to guide social behavior in matters of democratic governance and in civil society generally is hardly novel. Comte and the other founders clearly had this purpose in view, as we will discuss presently. The sociologist/planner Sir Patrick Geddes made this case as succinctly as anyone has ever done in a speech delivered in 1904 to the Sociological Society in London. In it, Geddes argued that when put into practice the findings of sociology provide the most rational and most democratic foundation for the conduct of human affairs. As stated in the title of his speech, which I have appropriated for this essay, we should therefore consider "Civics as Applied Sociology.'' (2) Moreover, it is no coincidence that the intellectual movements that propelled sociology from its philosophical roots to its status as a serious, albeit unusual, academic discipline in its own right occurred during the great age of democratic revolution in Europe and North America. To avoid misunderstanding, let me quickly add that although the current and historical ties to be discussed here are not accidental, I am not attempting to argue that sociology is inherently pro-democratic. In many times and places, including our own, competent--even outstanding--sociologists have both pursued their craft and have supported totalitarian causes of the Right and the Left. In fact, the scientific side of sociology would be less than authentic if the methods and theories of the field could not fall into the "wrong hands" and function nevertheless. If there can be "evil" physicists and "evil" biologists, then there certainly can be "evil" sociologists; and, in a perverse way, we should be proud of this. At the same time, however, there is a definite "pull" or orientation to sociological thinking and technique that can incline one toward pro-democratic partisanship. This is especially evident when we take this thinking and technique into the real world where, as Howard Becker (1967) so eloquently observed nearly four decades ago, we are simply forced to decide, "whose side are we on?" It is my goal in the following pages to explore the nature of this "pull." Defining Our Terms A few years ago, I published an article in the Journal for Applied Sociology (Weinstein, 1996) that argues in favor of a close connection between sociology and democracy. …

In Defense of Good Work: Jobs, Violence, and the Ethical Dimension

Abstract: Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.--Albert Camus ON JANUARY 29, 2002, PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH DELIVERED STATE OF THE Union Address to Congress. One of his key messages was the importance of employment creation: "When America works, America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs" (Bush, 2002). Throughout his address, he used the concept of a "good job" without ever defining it. Given his actions as president, it appears that a "good job" is simply a synonym for a "job." Such an interpretation would be consistent with macroeconomic theory, which considers the creation of new employment, any employment, to be a healthy economic sign. More jobs mean less unemployment, which in turn assumes that there will be a more dignified living for a larger percentage of the population. As long as jobs are created, regardless of the product or service delivered, or the consequences to individuals, communities, or ecosystems, the economy and the society as a whole are viewed as progressing. In recent decades, many authors have sought to reclaim the nobility of work and its sense of social responsibility (e. g., Terkel, 1975; Roszak, 1979; Schumacher, 1979; Bellah et al., 1985; Martin, 2000; Gardner et al., 2001). They differ in their analyses of the roles of the economic system, new forms of technology, and a consumerist society in degrading work to a profiteering and numbing enterprise, but they all agree that work devoid of an enlarged sense of ethics is a mediocre activity at best. This article continues this critical view by supporting the concept of quality of work, as opposed to quantity in the abstract. Although I accept the importance of full employment, it must be analyzed hand in hand with the type of work that is done. Is it work that ennobles the individual, seeks to improve community living, and protects the integrity of rivers, mountains, and deserts? Or is it work that deadens the soul, destroys community life, and poisons the environment? This article will not focus on the more conventional "professional ethics," a series of principles of conduct that all members of a profession should abide by (e.g., be competent, display prudence, avoid carelessness, protect the welfare of clients). Although these principles are commendable, work is not just about following the highest standards of one's profession, or even about a living wage and better working conditions. Work is also about self-discovery and discovery of the universe. Work, when it is dignified and interesting, is about losing oneself in the task at hand and realizing that people's identity exists within the chore itself and beyond it in a wider world. Good work is ultimately a morally infused endeavor directed toward the social good. This article encompasses three sections: the first explores the notion that professional ethics are important, but are insufficient for bringing forth the wider "reverence for life" necessary for dealing with the current social and environmental malaise (Schweitzer, 1955). The second section critiques the belief that in the name of self-interest, technique, or efficiency, any production process or its end result is acceptable. The third section focuses on the difficult choices poor people face when deciding between self-preservation and self-actualization. Professional Competence Versus Ethical Mysticism An acquaintance of mine, whom I will call John, works for Lockheed Martin, the world's largest military contractor. A highly competent aerospace engineer, he graduated from a prestigious university. He designs, develops, and tests components for various military and civilian products. As an African American from a working-class background, he is proud to be the first in his family to graduate from college. Thanks to his salary, he helps to support his parents and he bought a large, comfortable house in the suburbs. …

Reflections on the "Policy-Relevant Turn" in Research

Abstract: AS RESEARCHERS, WE FACE INCREASING PRESSURE TO MAKE OUR WORK policy-relevant Some of the impetus comes from within the academy as we try to make our work more usable and useful; other pressure comes from funding agencies, which demand that policy relevance be addressed in proposals and reports In this article, we challenge the assumption that this "policy-relevant turn" in research has only positive implications and reflect critically on how the demands for policy relevance can influence our work Throughout the discussion, we identify some of the potential subtle influences that the policy-relevant turn may have in shaping decisions and activities at each stage of the research process Over the past decade, researchers have been increasingly asked to make research "policy-relevant" (Wilson, 2002; Auriat, 1998; Shahidullah, 1998) This is true not only for those of us working around issues of social justice, but also for social science researchers across multiple disciplines Certainly, the focus on policy relevance is not completely new (see, eg, journals such as Social Policy, Health Policy, Policy Sciences, and Journal of Public Policy and Marketing) However, recent years have seen interest in policy relevance become more "mainstream" in academia For instance, concern for addressing policy relevance is increasingly found in disciplines such as political science (Candler, 2000; Lijphart, 2000; Hart, 1998), sociology (McDonald et al, 2000; Rehg, 2000; Schrader-Frechette, 2000), and economics (Erard and Ho, 2001; Block, 1999; Cameron and Ndhlovu, 1999; Turner et al, 1998) Likewise, policy relevance emerges as an issue in cross-disciplinary work, including immigration and migration studies (McDonald et al, 2000; Portes, 1999; Duncan, 1998), poverty studies (Korpi and Palme, 1998; Marcoux, 1998), criminology (Braga, 2001 ; Bridges et al, 1997), religious studies (Carroll, 2000), rural studies (Hodge and McNally, 1998), and ecology (Vaughan et al, 2001; Urquhart et al, 1998; Parsons and Daniel, 1988) The current impetus for policy relevance comes from many quarters, including researchers themselves as they strive to ensure their work makes a difference (see, eg, Baldwin, 2000) Further, commissioned work requires action-oriented outcomes; government and agency contracts demand concrete recommendations; and research agencies increasingly request that investigators identify policy relevance in proposals and final reports This "policy-relevant turn" has crept into our work in a way that impels researchers to think carefully about the potential outcomes and use of our research and, in many cases, to specifically outline plans for communicating findings to communities, decision-makers, and policymakers in a language and format that make results "accessible" Endeavors such as participatory processes (Nichols, 2002; Mathie and Greene, 1997) and empowerment evaluation (Fetterman, 2001) attempt to include alternate voices and more applied outcomes in many research venues Much of this work recognizes the importance of values in the conduct of research (House and Howe, 1999) and of ensuring ethical approaches in policy-relevant work (Neale et al, 2003) The policy-relevant turn generally assumes that making research findings accessible and applicable in the "real" world will bring only benefits Policy-relevant research provides funders and society with "bang for their buck" through solving problems and using research to "change the world" This is especially important as researchers and funders seek concrete ways for research to make a real difference in society and in the lives of the people with whom we work However, as policy relevance becomes more mainstream in research, we ask: What are some of the potential dangers of the policy-relevant turn and how may it subtly change how investigators approach their work? In this article, we invite researchers to think critically and reflectively about the influence of the policy-relevant turn in their research …

Toward a New Civic Leadership: The Africana Criminal Justice Project

Abstract: Introduction THE EXTRAORDINARY GROWTH AND CARCERAL THRUST OF UNITED STATES criminal justice policy and procedure over the past quarter century has led observers to label this a "prison nation" (see Abramsky, 2002; Wacquant, 2001). There is hardly a more fitting description for how the prison in particular, and criminal justice system in general, have emerged as dominant fixtures on our cultural, economic, and political landscape. Our leaders offer mass criminalization and incarceration as surrogate responses to persistent poverty and unemployment, drug abuse, violence, mental health problems, failing public schools, and other American dilemmas. Its beneficiaries notwithstanding, the ascendance of a fundamentally inhumane, fiscally absurd, and socially dysfunctional criminal justice apparatus signals the failure of societal leadership, and a call to civic action. In this essay, we briefly consider how mass criminalization and incarceration have affected African-American individuals, families, and communities, particularly in terms of civic capacity and participation. We follow this discussion with an overview of the Africana Criminal Justice Project, a research, education, and organizing initiative aiming to help identify and eradicate dimensions of racialized social and political exclusion that are generated, reproduced, and intensified by past and present U.S. criminal justice policy. Through this work, the Africana Criminal Justice Project seeks to reframe academic and policy debates on issues of race and criminal justice, and help to mobilize initiatives to address the crisis of racialized mass incarceration. Critical research and education initiatives within Africana Studies can contribute to this effort, but especially important will be organizing civic leadership among former prisoners themselves, and within communities facing the staggering collateral consequences of the overdevelopment of the prison. Birth of a Prison Nation: A Brief Overview The ascent of our prison nation is apparent wherever one turns, and equally daunting in its quantitative and qualitative proportions. Researchers have documented that more than two million adults are currently incarcerated in this country, a result of over two decades of continually increasing rates and terms of incarceration. In 1972, 93 of every 100,000 adults in this country were incarcerated. By 1998, the rate had more than quadrupled to 452 per 100,000, with many prisoners facing longer mandatory sentences (Zimring, 2001: 161-162). To house this inmate population, there are now over 1,000 state and federal prisons, an average of more than 20 facilities per state. Many of these are new facilities. Between 1817 and 1981 for example, New York opened 33 state prisons. Then, in the relatively few years between 1982 and 1999, New York built 38 more prisons. Nationally, approximately 700 new prisons have been built in the past 20 years alone, most of which are located in rural communities, many miles from the urban centers where most prisoners and their loved ones dwell. The prison has become a sort of backward frontier in a land of ever-diminishing opportunity, a destination drawing busloads each day. Since 1998, about 600,000 people have returned from prisons to their communities each year (Sentencing Project, 2002). This growing population of prisoners is hardly a societal cross-section. Rather, the U.S. prison and jail population is disproportionately comprised of young, poorly educated, under- and unemployed people of color. Nearly two-thirds of all state prisoners in 1991 had less than a high school education, and one-third of all prisoners were unemployed at the time of their arrest. About one-half of all prisoners are African-American. The rate of incarceration among African-Americans was so high in 1989 that it surpassed even that of blacks living under the apartheid regime of South Africa. Mass criminalization and incarceration increasingly affect women of color. …

Recovering, Amplifying, and Network? ing the Voices of the Disappeared ? Political Prisoners on Internet Media

Abstract: POLITICAL PRISONERS HELD BY THE U.S. HAVE MUCH TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE ENTIRE range of our progressive movements. This includes their personal examples of resistance to state violence and oppression, the militant history of political movements from the 1960s to today, analyses of those movements' strengths and weaknesses, and eloquent visions of a more humanitarian world. Although they have much to say, their messages are not heard by many. The state's considerable power is used to deny them their voices and to wall them in, to the point of nearly disappearing them. Marilyn Buck's poem, "Incommunicado," included in this issue, details the extreme isolation imposed on a number of them following the September 11 attacks. (1) Routine and daily restrictions are placed on visiting and phone calls, legal mail is interfered with, and interviews are denied. Support movements tend to idealize a few political prisoners (preferably charismatic and obviously framed, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier), objectify them, and ignore the others. If Mumia's supporters were to take his words seriously, they would also be supporting Ruchell Magee, Sundiata Acoli, and Sekou Odinga (among others). (2) It is necessary to take them seriously as leaders and participants in political struggle. (3) This essay describes attempts to use alternative media to make the voices of political prisoners more accessible and immediate. The heart of these efforts is to let the prisoners speak for themselves. This is an essential step in opposing their demonization (as "common criminals" and, more recently, as "terrorists") by the state and supporting efforts to obtain their release. More widely, our movements are strengthened by their participation, by building communication and community in support of human rights across the razor wire. The Freedom Archives (4) and the websites of the Prison Activist Resource Center (5) and the Jericho Movement (6) are examples of projects that serve this purpose. Audiovisual Media and Alternative Distribution Though writing remains the primary medium available to political prisoners, audiovisual media can add significant dimensions. The Freedom Archives, for example, has access in many cases to the personal histories and the social contexts out of which the political prisoners arose, struggled, and were captured. On their Prisons on Fire CD, for example, contemporary interviews are combined with historical sound to reflect upon and deepen the listener's understanding of the events and their ongoing relevance. The widespread availability of digital technology and the rise of an "indy media" network allowed the two radio programs comprising the CD to be distributed at low cost by satellite, cassette, and Internet to stations in several states, as well as in Africa and Europe. At times, the voices of political prisoners have been recorded on videotape, a powerful tool for humanizing the stories and communicating the politics of these locked-down activists. For example, The Freedom Archives produced a video of Albert "Nuh" Washington shortly before his death in the New York prison system. (7) As Mumia Abu-Jamal has written, "Nuh (the Arabic form of Noah) was a committed member of the Black Panther Party and later, after the notorious FBI-engineered East Coast-West Coast split, worked with the Black Liberation Army (BLA), in defending the lives and dignity of black folk.... For over 28 years Nuh [was] held in California and New York gulags, and repeatedly punished for his political ideas" (Abu-Jamal, 2000). As a veteran of this crucial era of Black history, Nuh's insights are invaluable: To the oppressed I am the angel of deliverance To the oppressor I am the angel of destruction So who I am Depends on who you are ... The state has conceded that I have committed no act but that I taught political education classes. For that I have been sentenced to life imprisonment and subjected to the tightest security, not only in the states of California and New York, but in the country as well. …