Jena, Louisiana

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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.”

Posted in: Autobiographical, Online Places, Writing

Labor Takes a Seat in the Classroom

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The resources to teach students about America’s storied labor history are there. It’s up to educators to connect young people to a story that could have a lasting impact. “You want the people who read history, young people or people of any age, to recognize their own power and to recognize themselves in history,” says [Howard] Zinn. “After all, most of the people who are going to be reading and studying history are not going to be business executives. They are going to be working for a living.”

Labor Takes a Seat in the Classroom
By Adam Doster

When I taught in a ‘brick and mortar’ classroom I was alway searching for ways to teach my students to ‘see’ class. (I have included a few of these assignments in the ‘Teaching Materials’ section of this site.) I would get them to use the American Fact Finder, for example, to create an economic history of their families and the communities in which they lived.

I would also get them to interview their parents and grandparents about education and work. At least in the short term, I think many did start to see the patterns of class mobility and stasis over the course of the last twenty or thirty years. Almost every semester a student would tell me that he or she saw their family’s history in an entirely new light.

Introducing Labor history into the classroom is another, perhaps less individualistic, way to teach class awareness. Doster offers several other examples of how we can put labor back into circulation as an important part of our heritage. There’s now an “American Labor Merit Badge,” for example. The Boy Scouts have a wiki, MeritBadge.org, where you can find a description of the requirements.

Doster also mentions, “Hardball and Handshakes,” a set of classroom activities that explore the reasons behind unions in professional sports. That can be found on the American Labor Studies Center website, along with information about Women and Labor, and a special section on Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. among other things. The ALSC is in Troy, New York.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Online Places, Professional, Union, Writing

The Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer

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Many women, myself included, have been affected by cervical cancer or Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at some point in their lives. In this series of four articles, I will examine HPV and Gardasil — the facts, the hype, and what Merck stands to gain; the marketing campaigns promoting Gardasil in the U.S. and the media’s lack of attention to concerns about the rush to mandate vaccination; the role of the non-profit group Women In Government in promoting mandatory vaccination against HPV; and what is going on outside of the U.S. on this issue.

Setting the Stage: Part One in a Series on the Politics and PR of Cervical Cancer
Judith Siers-Poisson

This piece is worth reading because it is one of those often too rare moments of insightful self-criticism from a progressive point of view. I for one will admit to being completely caught up in the idea of a vaccine against cancer.

I thought the commercials were silly, too, mostly because it was hard to believe that no one had heard this ongoing story about a virus that can cause cancer. Why not put this vaccine on the list of childhood vaccines?

As Siers-Poisson shows in great detail there are lots of good reasons to re-think the vaccine. It doesn’t prevent many cancers at all, as it turns out. Most importantly, the hype behind the drug turn out to be one of those classic behind the scenes arrangements designed to ensure profits.

Merck has only about a year before competing vaccines appear, cutting its profits. “Merck’s greed, ” Siers-Poisson, concludes in the third of a four part series, “and the willingness of its partners to go along with an industry driven campaign, have compromised the actual promise of the vaccine.”

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Writing

America’s Best Colleges 2008

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America’s higher education system was built on an important public policy consensus: Investing in higher education is good for everyone. Beginning with the GI Bill and reaching its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, this policy consensus resulted in strong state support for public institutions and an impressive array of two-year, four-year and graduate programs, as well as an extensive system of federal financial aid to equalize educational opportunity. Our nation attracted the best faculty and staff in the world because our institutions of higher education provided good jobs and the freedom to work without outside interference.

August 07, 2007, Chicago
AFL-CIO Executive Council statement

I have to be careful not that this site doesn’t become “annals of of the underemployed…” Still, since I work in education I wanted to note the AFL-CIO’s recent statement here because it hints at a new agenda for the union movement in which education plays a key role. I would argue that education has to play a central role in any successful progressive movement. It’s helpful to contrast these ambitions with the banality of the U.S. News “best colleges” report, issued today.

It’s also important to emphasize that the role of education in a progressive agenda necessarily has two sides: one, making higher education accessible to everyone (It should be free, of course, and we are getting there very very slowly) and two, ending the ongoing exploitation of teachers generally and university teachers in particular. It would great to have a ranking that focused on those two factors. Exploitation is not too strong of a word, either.

“Today, 48 percent of all faculty serve in part-time appointments, ” according to the American Association of University Professors, “and non-tenure-track positions of all types account for 68 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education.” It’s a ‘class war from above‘ that has succeeded in creating a hollowed out education system. Imagine the outcry if almost half of the doctors in hospitals were hired part time without any job security or benefits. We need unions and a union movement more than ever.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Economics, Language, Union