Thursday, April 7, 2011

Tokyo Today, Melissa Harris-Perry: Are We All Black Americans Now?,

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/159597/are-we-all-black-americans-now

Are We All Black Americans Now?

Melissa Harris-Perry | March 30, 2011

In the months following September 11, my colleague Cornel West offered this insight: national political elites used the devastating attacks to promote the “niggerization of the American people.” West understood that long before 9/11, African-Americans were intimately familiar with terrorism. Through the Jim Crow century, they were routinely and randomly brutalized and murdered by well-organized groups of whites acting beyond the confines of the official state but with the tacit consent of their society. Under the shadow of lynching, black Americans learned what it meant to feel, as West describes, “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated for who they are.” After 9/11 far too many Americans, unaccustomed to this sense of collective intimidation, felt helpless to halt an unjustified war or the erosion of civil liberties. Thus, whether or not they were black, Americans were “niggerized” by the attacks.

In recent months, I have been reminded of Professor West’s analysis because one way to read our current moment is as a blackening of America. The social, economic and political conditions that have long defined African-American life have descended onto a broader population, and it has been instructive to watch how the nation has responded.

Initially, conservatives argued that Tea Party activists had every right to be disgusted with national leadership and to demand swift economic intervention to combat the near 10 percent unemployment rate. Since the mid-1970s, except for a brief dip between 1998 and 2002, unemployment among African-Americans has routinely exceeded 10 percent, yet African-Americans were rarely encouraged to blame systems or organize collectively. Instead blacks were stereotyped as lazy and undeserving. This characterization has been an effective ideological tool for politicians intent on limiting social programs, cutting welfare, ignoring cities, slashing job training and neglecting housing.

Within months, the Tea Party shifted its focus to the deficit. As it did, policy debates about the poor and unemployed came to mirror decades of discourse about black Americans. Extensions of unemployment insurance were decried as “creeping socialism.” Echoing theories of dependency leveled against African-Americans for decades, one conservative blogger suggested that extending unemployment benefits would create “a permanent entitlement and would perpetuate unemployment.” Perhaps, in this moment, Americans understood how dangerously corrosive the characterization of the poor as “idle” is for black people.

This past November the TSA introduced screening procedures that many Americans—liberals and conservatives alike—deemed intrusive, random and demeaning. But for decades urban police forces have regularly employed race-based traffic stops and pedestrian stop-and-frisks in African-American communities. These policing practices have done little to make neighborhoods safer, but they have contributed to massive incarceration rates for black men. Justifying their racially punitive behavior as a reasonable response to potential crime, police forces have acted largely with the consent of white Americans, some of whom later decried the TSA’s new procedures. Perhaps, for a moment, they felt the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies black life.

Few events more clearly demonstrated the blackening of America than the standoff in Wisconsin. Like the nineteenth-century leaders of Southern states who stripped black citizens of voting rights, public accommodation and civic associations, Wisconsin’s Republican majority dismantled the hard-won basic rights of Wisconsin workers. Like those Confederate leaders, the Wisconsin GOP used intimidation, threats and even the police against demonstrators and rival officials. As the saga unfolded, many Wisconsin citizens felt stunned that their once-secure rights might be eliminated. For a moment, perhaps, they glimpsed the experience of black men and women who watched the shadow of Jim Crow blot out the promises of emancipation.

The 1880s were also the decade when efforts to create corporate personhood were initiated by wealthy railroad barons. In a 2010 article, James and Tomilea Allison (psych professor at Indiana University and former mayor of Bloomington, respectively) traced how these corporate interests misrepresented past cases so that the Supreme Court eventually relied on nonexistent precedent to twist Fourteenth Amendment protections intended for newly freed slaves to instead offer shelter for profiteering corporations. More than a century later, these arguments were crucial to the Citizens United decision, which putatively endowed extraordinarily wealthy corporations with an “equal” right to electoral influence but in practice gave them breathtakingly unequal representation. Perhaps, as they are reduced to a fraction of a citizen, other Americans now catch a glimpse of what it means to be codified as only three-fifths of a person.

Today corporate greed, conservative ideology, manufactured right-wing populism and progressive complicity are making more and more Americans into, as Professor West might characterize them, “niggers.” Rather than try to escape the pain of experiencing some small familiarity with blackness, Americans could choose to learn from generations of African-Americans who resisted dehumanizing processes of domination and inequality. During the 2008 election Obama’s detractors tried to smear him by suggesting that “Hussein” was a terrorist’s moniker. As a demonstration of solidarity, thousands of Americans informally declared that they too would be known by the middle name Hussein. It was purely symbolic, but it rested on a belief in the power to change meaning by embracing rather than eschewing that which is labeled subordinate, alien, dangerous and shameful. By embracing our collective blackness, perhaps we can find the fortitude and creativity necessary to face the continuing erosion of our national social safety net in the face of a persistent economic crisis.

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From: Scott Braley [mailto:scottb@igc.org]
Subject: Tokyo today

 

April 6, 2011

California friends:  What follows is an email from the person who runs a list I read/contribute to, on conditions in Tokyo, more than 150 miles from the quake center and the leaking nuclear plant.   Japan generally has an infrastructure better than the US and is much more prepared than we are, for disasters.

Best, Scott

 

 

Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures.

Claim no easy victories. 

 

          Amilcar Cabral

 

BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE:

Since I got so many private messages about the situation in Tokyo,

I just like to share that we moved to Germany, for the safety of

my daughter, who was just 5 weeks old as the earthquake hit...

 

People who don't have a small child and live in Tokyo might not

understand that the situation here became very complicated, we

had warnings that the drinking water was not safe for consumption

by babies or breastfeeding mothers and had to rely on bottled water.

Unfortunately it was sold out everywhere and every day you could find

more desperate mothers on bicycles scouting the neighborhood and

all vending machines, but it was very hard to come by. Good friends and

family came all the way to bring us water, which was really nice,

but this situation was hard to sustain long term.

 

Even basic necessities like diapers and toilet paper were sold

out everywhere - we literally left after using the very last roll

from our emergency pack, which we bought around 6 years back.

 

We also had more than 500 (!) after shakes since the big one and

the permanent threat of the atomic reactor only 250km away from

our location was a bit much. We and practically everybody we talked

to suffered from 'Jishin Yoi', which can be best translated as

'Earthquake Sickness' and totally affects your balance system. It

was hard to differentiate between a real earthquake and an imagined

one….it just felt like shaking all the time. Even on the way to

the airport there were two Magnitude 6 earthquakes - not something

you read in the news, because they are minor compared to the magnitude

9 earthquake which started all of this.

 

One of the problems is that you can read all kinds of numbers

and charts with measurement terms like Millisievert or Becquerel,

but nobody really knows what this all means. However, if there

is a loudspeaker car (one of the most low-tech media available)

driving in your neighborhood all day shouting warnings that you

should not drink or give water to small children, you listen up.

 

Additionally to the earthquakes and the side effects, the economy

and jobs for freelancers instantly imploded and there was not much

to do about this in the short term, so we donated most of our stuff

and sold or threw away the rest and got a one-way ticket to Germany.

Currently we are staying at my mothers place in the countryside,

but move to Berlin in the next week and start from scratch.

 

That was neither my or my wifes favorite choice, but looking at my baby

sleeping right next to me, we know its best for her. We can imagine

going back to Tokyo in a few years, but not before we know that

things settled down and the situation becomes more stable and

safe again…..

 

I really call Japan much more my home than Germany, even I

come from here...and my wife is Japanese and only ever lived

for a year in the USA, so she probably has a hard time to

adapt...but we might go back to Japan if the situation becomes

better again.

 

The problem is that its not over yet, the nuclear reactor

situation is not at all under control and mostly a man-made

disaster, which got triggered by a natural disaster...and the

economic situation is downright scary, my wife's brothers

travel agency specialized in 'pleasure trips' for Japanese

customers going to Hawaii, Guam and Saipan probably goes

bankrupt because nobody travels anymore. My favorite bars

in the Shinjuku district have no customers anymore. Weddings

get canceled or postponed. TV repeats calls for advertisements,

because nobody want to show commercials between bad news.

Blackouts will affect the greater Tokyo area probably until

Summer, etc. etc. etc.

 

Eventually Tokyo will recover and coming out stronger than

before, but until this happens a lot of suffering will take

place. Especially the mental and psychological after effects

will come out much later - for example they currently bury

the Tsunami victims instead of cremating them, because they

don't have enough gas and capacity...this completely breaks

with traditions and 'closure' in a religious context and

creates already a lot of suffering on top of losing loved

ones. Its all a bit harder to understand if you never lived

in Japan before, but being here 12 years and having an

extended Japanese family allows me…the

'gambaru' ('Lets do it' pep talk in Japanese) mask. Its very

hard on the people there and far from over yet.

 

I always made jokes about my wife protecting at all costs her

emergency pack, I just never thought we might even need it...

One of the weirdest experiences was really to find shelves empty

in Tokyo based supermarkets, usually you can buy here everything,

its downright scary to find out how fast this can change….

 

Thank you!!

 

Juergen

 

 

 

 

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