Onwards and upwards, but not for all

Trigger warning: gun violence, racism

Yesterday, ten people died and seven were injured in a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Motivated by the public outcry, President Obama gave a speech on the event and the issues it raises yesterday which still dominates my newsfeed and in all likelihood yours as well. He laid out a basic argument for gun control and against a hypervigilance for over-regulation of firearms and related weapons:

We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston.  It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.  Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out:  We need more guns, they’ll argue.  Fewer gun safety laws.

Does anybody really believe that?  There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country –they know that’s not true.  We know because of the polling that says the majority of Americans understand we should be changing these laws — including the majority of responsible, law-abiding gun owners.

That is understandably deeply moving. It taps into one of the great beliefs in the United States about this country – that we are an evolving country, tethered by traditions but not ensnared by them. We can – and do – blaze forward, the story goes, changing ourselves in order to make life better. This story is sometimes about this type of regulation on a product, but can also come in the form of appeals to how the franchise has expanded, widening the voting population towards something today considered to be an approximation of universal suffrage. Obama is, I suspect, quite consciously marrying those two tales together, crediting the ostensibly safer and healthier life of the average US citizen to the theoretically democratic achievements of this country. We can literally vote ourselves to safety.

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly unclear that any part of this narrative is true. Past regulations on firearms and present day regulations on cars and other products Obama later mentions were opposed at almost every step by a major industry if not several. Those two are some of the most successful campaigns for that matter. Even as cars have reduced the dangers in an accident, they’ve gotten better at concealing their emissions, disguising the threat they pose to a stable and useful climate for us and ultimately everyone else in the world. Almost all of these improvements are rooted in economic bottom lines. It’s better to make a product that doesn’t easily and regularly kill your customers – that’s just basic business sense. But longer term damage to its consumers, to their descendants, and to the broader world can just be “externalities“, at least for much longer than that other kind of threat.

When it comes to more general issues of social and economic security that same statistics crop up repeatedly showing that many problems have lingered or even worsened. Food insecurity remains prevalent in the US. Union membership – long a bulwark for lower and middle classes to protect their interests – has drastically declined, as has (for that and other reasons) the political effectiveness of unions. Fear of poverty, of want, and of homelessness are barely considerations in the economic and political system in which we live, and so have at best been allowed, and at worst encouraged as “motivation“. The idea that we have become safer than those before us downplays these concerns and denies the observable reality that sometimes things actually have gotten worse.

Suffrage, still full of historical holes like felon disenfranchisement, has recently taken a hit from the dismantling of the pre-clearance system. Already, Alabama appears to be coordinating mass suppression of voters of color in advance of the 2016 election with no effective federal oversight. Other states are likely to follow suit. Even before that structural link in US democracy crumbled, we were already facing an effective plutocratic check on at the very least national elections, and by one study’s standards, were no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy. A majority of people in this country – citizens or not – might want basic regulations on weapons, but does that mean anything? For years, in spite of popular outcry, it hasn’t.

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, from here.

Further along in his speech, Obama presented what he viewed as a few analogues to what he hopes we could accomplish on gun control, saying among other things, “When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer.” One needs only point to Katrina as an example of how limited those improvements often can be. Over a thousand died, and over a million were displaced. More valued populations threatened by later hurricanes have been better protected, so perhaps the government learned something from that disaster. But those lessons learned in catastrophe haven’t been applied to repair the still hurting (and specifically Black) communities in New Orleans, but to preserve the business centers of Houston and the greater New York area. In fact, as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina created the opportunity for a wealthier and Whiter demographic to move in and replace dead or displaced residents, parts of New Orleans seem poised to attain a similar status, only without the people who originally lived there.

Progress appears to be a privilege, increasingly reserved only for some in this society. It seems vital that we ask who gets left behind, and not only when the answer is “almost everyone.”

The year that environmental racism started to get noticed

TW: racism, erasure of people of color, classism, colonialism, Israeli occupation

I wrote on-again-off-again about a phenomenon over the course of 2012, where historical and present realities of racism and colonialism created economic and environmental conditions for people of color that put them at greater risk in changing climates.

That August, there was a bit of joking about global warming at the 2012 RNC that was primarily met with Democratic criticism that in the future that will seem foolish. At that time it seemed pertinent to remind people that global warming was already making indigenous Alaskan communities more food insecure, as fishing times and spots had begun shifting in relation to new weather. In Fall, with Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in Haïti, it seemed important to highlight how the poverty in that country meant that buildings and infrastructure were both more likely to fail and more likely to not be rebuilt. In fact the 2010 earthquake hadn’t been dealt with, exacerbating both the fallout from the hurricane and the subsequent cholera epidemic as untreated water became a normal backdrop in Haïti. After Sandy made landfall in the US, the media seemed to wholly erase what had happened years before to predominantly Black communities in the Gulf as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The intersections between global warming, systemic racism, and poverty were there, but were seldom being connected.

To a degree, 2013 was an improvement on that, with environmental issues and the realities of racism and classism sometimes being introduced in tandem. The Idle No More movement, originally founded in 2012 by First Nations (ie, indigenous) activists in Canada became an international phenomenon in 2013, which both attracting indigenous peoples to its activism in other countries but was widely reported on. By the end of the year, a common narrative had formed. The pattern of communities vulnerable to economic and environmental exploitation attracting companies, foremost minerals extraction ones, then facing police violence in response to protests had become established. Most painfully, against Mi’kmaq protesters in Canada in late 2013. The role that racism played in these communities being selected for environmentally questionable policies and actions and later the racism that informed the police response was unfortunately largely implicitly referenced in major media.

There were additional limitations sadly imposed on this type of story, however, with them often conforming to a set formula. Overwhelmingly, it was only indigenous groups, not other ethnically marginalized people who were covered, and the near exclusive type of exploitation highlighted was mineral extraction often in association with fossil fuel companies in Canada or the United States. Just as in previous years, the on-going reality of ethnically and economically marginalized populations in South and Southeast Asia whose their ancestral lands can and often are selected to be flooded as a result of damming projects have remained largely overlooked.

(From here.)

We still haven’t quite gotten to the point where the global connections between poverty, racist and colonial practices and histories, and climate change are part of typical media reporting on a number of events worldwide, but we’ve edged closer. Can we wait for more people to make this connection on their own, so that it’s not a shock to them for media to cover it in that way? While we’re sitting here, the reality the Philippines were hit by a hurricane categorically stronger than any storm on the planet in more than thirty years, which sounds silly until you read the stunning wind speeds recorded as it passed through a densely populated portion of the Philippines, a former Spanish colony and US territory. The Philippines’ Climate Commissioner released a petition in the midst of attempting to contact his family, but his request for not even any specific policy change but for the largest contributors to carbon emissions to “acknowledge the new climate reality” that the Philippines now know all too well. That garnered less attention than the disaster itself, however.

More recently, unusually heavy rains flooded the Gaza territory in Palestine, whose infrastructure couldn’t handle the crisis under the weight of Israeli occupation and other international factors. Our failure to connect these forces costs isn’t just threatening people’s futures, but presently costing lives.

Bullies

TW: racism, classism, cissexism, sexual assault, heterosexism

I’m tired of Michael Brown being allowed to publicly joke about the horrendous conditions he helped create in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which still haven’t been fully resolved. His newest “joke” only makes sense if you automatically assume that the people of New Orleans are innately unstable and unable to deal with basic technical delays. That tells you something about how he interpreted their anger at being abandoned for days with little food and clean water.

(The partially blacked out stadium during the Superbowl, from here.)

I’m tired of MTV giving air time to cissexist speculation in front of a young transgender woman about her sexual assault and identity that was then broadcast across India. Their speculation that Sherry identified as female for this reason or that wasn’t so much asked as announced. Her own story of who she is and why and what it all means was swept away in favor of a cisgender man being able to tell her what was really going on. Of course, the excuse is that all of this is an experiment in terms of seeing how Sherry would respond to pressing circumstances. Because the difficulties and nervousness that accompany a technical performance are the same as having your gender identity dismissed and defined for you on national television?

I’m tired of having powerful academic institutions willingly participate in the political targeting of a well-known queer programmer-activist. MIT has been revealed as essentially having cooperated with the federal investigation against the expressed interests of many of its faculty and students as those of the actual company (JSTOR) whose intellectual property was “stolen”. What seems to have upset them is that someone fought against their control of information distribution.

I’m tired of straight people from straight families saying they should be the ones to decide legal definitions of parenthood and accompanying policies to the explicit exclusion of members of queer families.

I’m tired of bullies. Aren’t you?

All this has happened before and will happen again…

TW: racism, hurricane-related damage, erasure of Black people from national narratives, erasure of Indigenous people, class warfare

Over at the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, who until recently was one of their main Europe-based correspondents, has written an intriguing (and free to read) take on the situation in New York following Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. In a nutshell, it’s a very meandering look at how this is, or at least should be, some sort of a wake-up call about the massive toll our national infrastructure is going to take over the coming years. Ultimately it concludes that the substantive investment required to make adjustments as the climate changes will only be available to the wealthy, namely in Manhattan. On the other hand, the working and middle class neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and eventually even the Bronx will probably receive public assistance only to rebuild, rather than to retrofit for new sea levels.

The problem is of course that Kimmelman treats these facts as things that have only just now rudely erupted into the national discourse. But, it seems obvious that the low-lying coastal edges of New York would face chilling new risks as the climate changed and that assistance would be concentrated in the well-to-do neighborhoods when you think about it. After all, there’s already been an example of an almost identical series of events, just with more Black people involved.

(Apparently what New Orleans looked like when the levies broke after Katrina went down the memory hole. Originally from this article which discusses the way post-disaster investment was primarily directed at wealthier residential districts and business areas.)

I don’t want to pick on Kimmelman, but that is a pretty glaring omission. To his credit, he has done some really important and interesting reporting on issues that affect Black communities in various cultural contexts, but that’s precisely the problem: his coverage in both articles has treated the experiences of primarily Black individuals in isolation. He appears to be able to cover négritude or Katrina with sympathy and interest in the lives of Black people, but importantly he stops there. The reality of Blacks in France, in the US, or anywhere in the world are in these writings exclusively that – about Black people. They aren’t analyzed as part of the larger culture, perhaps because like many people still today Kimmelman might not think of Black people in those terms. Alternatively, Kimmelman might draw connections between primarily Black experiences and national events, but shy away from writing about it, fearing that his readers will reject any such article for treating Black people as part of the larger country.

Regardless of cause, the effect is that the national consciousness is bleached. The regrettable tragedies this year in New York and New Jersey eclipse the equally appalling devastation in 2005 in New Orleans. The former are something that affects the national consciousness of all Americans, while apparently the latter was a “niche” disaster. Just like the new hurdles imposed by climate change on economically disenfranchised Native American communities, apparently Katrina didn’t happen to “real” Americans.

Admittedly, Kimmelman does imply that there’s interplay between race and class, especially in the demographic distinction between Manhattan and the other boroughs. He does that with a single line in the recent piece, in which he noted,

That billions of dollars may end up being spent to protect businesses in Lower Manhattan while old, working-class communities on the waterfronts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island most likely won’t get the same protection flies in the face of ideas about social justice, and about New York City, with its open-armed self-image as a capital of diversity.

In Kimmelman’s eyes, that appears to be the extent to which the way Black people and other people of color can contribute to this national realization of the dangerous interplay between inequality and climate: as additional flavor to the class war. And remember, if there’s not enough White people involved, it falls off the radar, so vague association is supposedly the best that people of color can hope for, at least from Kimmelman and those who think like him.

Climate change and the class war are nearly engaged at this point

TW: the class war, colonialism, international inequality, pandemic diseases, food insecurity

You’ve probably heard about how Hurricane Sandy has now damaged much of the Mid-Atlantic US coast on a scale unprecedented since modern innovations in meteorology. A small but consistent number of reports have talked about whether, like Katrina, global warming can be seen as a contributing factor in the increased danger to Americans posed by hurricanes. Less frequently, has it been noted that the capacity of the storm to disrupt people’s daily lives including their ability to participate in the upcoming election is uneven. Not only was the damage geographically concentrated, but the impact disproportionately falls on less powerful socio-economic classes. As one opinion piece before the storm hit warned, “If the storm were to make it harder for lower income Americans to participate in the election than middle and upper income Americans (eg, by knocking out public transportation), then we would expect this to hurt the vote for Obama.”

Even scarcer still has been any sort of analysis of how global-warming-enhanced severe weather might unequally impact people on a global scale, where living standards are even more divergent.

(One of the “tent cities” that sprang up after the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince experiencing flooding as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Originally from here.)

Just as global warming has been connected with more dangerous hurricanes for a while now, the connections between class and vulnerability to climate change have a lengthy history of theorization. At what point though, do we declare a seeming connection? When a hurricane threatens Haïti with starvation and cholera? When dengue fever seasons in India are longer and more severe? It seems impossible to pinpoint the exact turning point where poverty and colonialism give way to climate change and neo-colonialism. It’s often been said that a widespread political response to global warming won’t be produced until after a critical mass of climatological instability is reached. But what if the reality’s more insidious than that? What if we don’t even recognize climatological instability because our attentions are held elsewhere? Or we gloss over climatological processes as a contributing factor to crises?

Are international inequality and global warming tag teaming us already?

Gary Johnson: after all this time?

TW: references to domestic violence, abilism, 9/11 attacks, Iraq War and occupation, and Katrina

It’s hard to believe it at first, but Gary Johnson, in spite of being supportive of same-sex marriage, has the potential to spoil the 2012 election for Romney in spite of being so far to his left. He’s arguably also to Obama’s left on certain issues – namely the death penalty and the on-going occupation of Afghanistan – yet he’s still threatening to siphon off just enough of the vote from Romney in a few key swing states that he could clearly impact the election.

Between his third party presidential candidacy and the seemingly endless stream of scandalous Republican gaffes, there’s been an uptick in anti-Republican views. The details of each incident vary, but it’s the same inevitable horribleness each time. Republican Walter Jones was the first congressional representative to appear as a guest on a disturbingly popular White Nationalist radio program.  Republican supporter Pat Robinson joked that a man should move his family to Saudi Arabia so he could discipline his wife with domestic violence. “Birther” attorney Orly Taitz is now suing any state or person that she can for the flimsiest of reasons. Republican Virginia Legislator Bob Marshall has insisted that God punishes women who abort their first born with disabled children. And today, the Republican Presidential Candidate has politicized the murder of the American ambassador to Libya. All of that has come to pass in merely the last few weeks following the major parties’ conventions.

In this cesspool of Republican hatred, it’s easy to see why former New Mexican Governor Gary Johnson wants to run as a Libertarian, rather than Republican. You see, it’s a recent thing, all the terrible policy-influencing nonsense the Republicans have started peddling. As a result, it makes sense that he initially ran as a Republican in the primaries this spring. As he mentioned in a recent interview:

“I don’t feel represented by the Republican Party. I have always had to defend the social side of the Republican Party by saying that it’s not the majority, that it’s not their focus, when everything suggests just the opposite.” (emphasis in original)

Of course, his argument is less coherent when earlier in the same interview Johnson explains,

“They [Republicans] have a huge demographic problem. The notion [is] that most people in this country are fiscally responsible and socially accepting, I don’t see the Republican Party matching up with those demographics at all. I see the demographics increasing, and by that I mean the notion of social acceptance is growing, not decreasing; I think the notion of fiscal responsibility is growing, not decreasing. And Republicans seem to be moving further away from those two categories [of voters] than closer.”

So how much of this move is calculated? How much of his sudden allegiance to the Libertarian Party is because he sees, much like the extremists remaining in the Republican Party, an unstable if not inadequate electoral coalition? The sudden “foot-in-mouth” epidemic facing Republicans is relatively new, but it follows years of failure. Did Johnson support the socialists who alone called the 2000 electoral debacle a constitutional crisis? Did he counter his party on its disregard for the security of the American people? Did he call out the Bush Administration for building the case for an illegal war with known forgeries? Did he even join the mass outrage over the countless drowned in the utter failure to prepare or respond to Hurricane Katrina? Did he break from his party because of its role in destroying the United States’ economy? Did he defect when the Republicans made clear that their first priority was undermining and criticizing the Obama Administration rather than fixing the crises their policies had created?

No. He didn’t. He switched parties after someone offered him a Presidential bid and he realized that his current party was an electoral dead end. He remained a member of an institution while it was responsible for negligence and demagoguery that cost thousands of lives, but he later switched allegiances, because he wanted an electoral future that the Republicans couldn’t offer him.

If you want a brave, third party truth teller who recognized the events of the past decades for what they were, try Jim Jeffords. Or better yet, Bernie Sanders.