Race, Class & Activism

I don't know about you, but I'm over Gates-gate.  You?  The more I listen to Professor Gates, the more I get concerned by his apparent recent realization of how f*cked up our incarceration rates of men of color are.  Anyway, I'll leave you with this Radio Boston podcast on the case and wish you the best coming to your own conclusions about this fiasco.

One of the things I've found so frustrating about it as it drags on is how so many legitimate perspectives abound in our varied interpretations of this fairly murky case, and how difficult it is to reconcile those.  If you're a person of color or a white ally and deeply familiar with experiences of racial profiling or police violence, it's really hard to remove that lens in looking at this case.  If you're not as knowledgeable about this brutal history of ours, and believe that the police have a case-by-case right to act as they deem appropriate, you may think this professor got his just deserts.  If you're familiar with Cambridge (and Boston) class politics, you may see it as an arrogant professor being taken down a notch.  If you're a woman, you may think, why do men need to have these chest-bumping competitions in the first place?  Our identities and lived experiences color how we interpret this event, and getting past those situated experiences to reach a common understanding is damn tricky.

There's a tangential and much more in-depth, interesting conversation happening now at Open Left on class and how it shapes "lifestyle activism" and "lifestyle politics."  In a nutshell, middle-class folks turning their own individual behaviors (e.g., recycling) into a political issue can reap changes that don't actually improve social equity.  (Apparently, recycling's a totally inefficient way to reduce waste.  Who knew!)  In the worst case, their behaviors cum activism cum a political project can actually make life worse for their low- and working-class targets, such as is evidenced in one of my favorite books, Black on the Block by Mary Pattillo, which is discussed in that second link above.

I've already gone on too long, but Pattillo's book analyzes the outcome of middle-class blacks "settling" a low-income community and trying to improve the lives of their working-class black neighbors by modeling behavior and policing (literally and figuratively) the actions of their poorer neighbors.  This has real consequences for the latter, such as limiting their access to needed affordable housing.  Pattillo is participating in the discussion and I highly recommend joining in.

I want to leave you with a key comment she makes, one with which I agree completely and humbly try to fulfill here as best I can based on my own limited personal experiences:

I think the most powerful way to change people's perspective is to remind them of the humanity of folks who struggle everyday against serious odds...talking to people face to face is the best. The more we can convey this humanity of poor and working class people (and that no matter how virtuous and hard-working they are they still hit up against societal barriers to making ends meet) the more I think people's minds can be changed.

And by "people's minds" she means middle- and upper-class taxpayers who think they have the sole right by virtue of their own unexamined class position to decide who gets what in terms of society's goodies (education, housing, jobs) and how much and when, where and why.  She talks about us middle-class types getting uncomfortable - yep.  I'd also recommend we quiet down, and listen, for a change.  Hopefully this is what Gates plans with his aforementioned documentary idea.

Here, we've got loads of commenters who can teach many of us a thing or two!

(Photo of "North Beach Place HOPE VI, built 2004. anchor tenant is Trader Joe's" - by Payton Chung)