Young Folks
Jena, Louisiana
As the rally began to unfold this morning, it became clear that it would attract huge numbers of people, perhaps even the 40,000 that some organizers had predicted. They came to protest the case of the “Jena 6,” black youths who were charged with serious crimes for an attack on a white youth not long after white teens who had targeted blacks were let off with a slap on the wrist. White supremacists reacted with a strange mixture of anger and admiration for the organizing behind the rally.
But the dominant response was violent rage. “I think a group of White men with AK rifles loaded with high capacity magazines should close in on the troop of howler monkeys from all sides and compress them into a tight group, and then White men in the buildings on both sides of the shitskinned hominids shall throw Molotov cocktails from above to cleanse the nigs by fire,” wrote “NS Cat” on VNN. Another poster fantasized about a terrorist attack in Jena today: “Wouldn’t that be sweet? Gosh darn, wouldn’t that be sweet? Good LORD wouldn’t THAT be SWeeeeEET? Boom, Boom, no more Coon! Well? A White man can dream can’t he?”
Mark Potok on September 20, 2007, from Hatewatch
I was born one year after Central High School, in Little Rock, Arkansas, was integrated with the help of the National Guard. “On the morning of September 23, 1957,” according to the National Historic Place website, “nine African-American teenagers stood up to an angry crowd protesting integration in front of Little Rock’s Central High as they entered the school for the first time.”
I was reminded of this over the last week as I was watching the march on Jena, Louisiana, and reading about the debates it has engendered, and then thinking about the anniversary of the Central High integration. What’s so striking is that it is so easy to believe that Jim Crow belongs in the very distant past, instead of my childhood.
We all want Jim Crow to be a part of the past, of course, and I think people get resentful when they are reminded that in too many ways the legacy of segregation is still with us. There’s nothing trivial about the use of the confederate flag, or making a “joke” by hanging a few nooses in a tree that was unofficially reserved for whites. Calling it a joke is just a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.
And then I go to Hatewatch and hear about the most virulent forms of white supremacy. I was born in the South, though, and I know that these attitudes– the racists’ macho bravado– is still very common and very dangerous. I’m sure that you could have heard versions of it all over the country after the march last week. I heard a polite echo of that in Reed Walter’s famous threat to the students of Jena High school: “See this pen in my hand? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.”
An Interview with Philip Dine: the Sate of the Unions and Higher Education
You may already know Phillip Dine’s work. According to his official biography, he “covered the labor beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for two decades. “ Among his many achievements are two Pulitzer Prize nominations; more recently he won the 2007 National Press Club Edwin Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the 2007 Society of Professional Journalists Dateline Award for Investigative Reporting.
His first book, published this year, is called, State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence. Dine believes that unions need to play a more important role in the U.S. “What’s lacking,” he has written, “is not relevance but rather a way for labor to strengthen itself…” I was curious about Dine’s thoughts on labor and higher education and sent him a series of questions via his publicist. His answers were somethings brief– he has got to be a busy man!–but provocative nonetheless.
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RW: Do you think higher education largely reproduces or challenges class structures in the United States? Has this changed as union membership has decreased? Would it change again if union membership rose?
PD: Higher education largely perpetuates class structure in this country, and that has not changed much as union levels have decreased. Why? Because unlike in countries such as France and Italy, labor in the United States never has challenged the class structure or the economic system. Rather, unions seek to increase the pie and provide a place at the table for their members. They aim to make the system work better and be more fair, rather than trying to dismantle it. There have been a few threads in the labor movement that have leveled more fundamental questions about the class system over the years, but they generally been short-lived. Ironically, the stronger unions are, the better the current system works, because it meets the aspirations of a broader segment of the population.
RW: Do you believe that the union movement in general has an interest in seeing higher education unionized?
PD: Clearly the union movement is interested in seeking higher education — academics, staff, even students — unionized, for the same rationale it wants other sectors of society organized. Moreover, doing so in the education sector would have even a broader impact, given the influence educators have and students will eventually have.
RW: How do you see the role of unionization in American Higher Education? Do professors need unions? If so, why? Professionals often resist unions because they are so vested in individual systems of merit. How can unions begin to change these entrenched attitudes, particularly in higher education?
PD: Complex questions. On one hand, academia doesn’t lend itself to what at times can be the lowest-common denominator, mass-production approach of unions whose emphasis can be on protecting workers who need it rather than rewarding those who merit it. At the same time, the problems created by administrators who are incompetent or worse can sometimes require that professors have some built-in recourse or collective clout to stand up for their rights. There already is pressure for unions to back off their tough stand against merit pay in secondary education, and the questions that poses are not dissimilar to those you raise here.
RW: Some researchers estimate that more than 60% of all university teachers are adjuncts. How might unions help to alleviate this situation?
PD: Good luck. This is happening in various forms in a host of industries or economic sectors, including two-tier structures for journalists. But unions might have more success in education, because the balance of power hasn’t shifted as much and the employers aren’t as profit-driven.
RW: Online proprietary schools are the fastest growing sector of higher education in the United States today, yet many have argued that they represent the ‘Wall-Martization” of the university. Do you see parallels between the rise of Wall-Mart and the more recent rise of proprietary schools such as Phoenix and DeVry? Is it possible for unions to be organized at online proprietary schools?
PD: There are definite parallels. The diffusion of personnel and impersonality of interaction involved here make organizing all the more challenging.
Les Naturally 7 dans le métro à Paris