The Nation
Strange Lands
Taxicabs speed down Broadway near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 42nd street in Times Square, Thursday, May 5, 2005 (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
Recently, after years of avoiding New York City—or, more accurately, not being able to afford it—I traveled there from the small, middle-of-nowhere Midwestern town where I teach writing. I was going to give a few readings, meet my new agent, whom I somehow managed to sign with without stepping foot in New York, and hang out with friends. I was terrified. I knew I wouldn’t be chic enough or thin enough. In the car on the way to the hotel, we were stuck in traffic. It was warm out. Radios blared and exhaust filled the air. Certain things about the city never change. My driver was on the phone having a heated conversation in a language I couldn’t recognize. He was clearly on the losing end of the argument. I called my mother to tell her I had arrived safely.
In the 1970s, she and my father came from Haiti to New York, separately, my father by way of Montreal. They met at a wedding in New York. They fell in love in New York. They married in New York. I was even baptized in New York, though I’ve never lived in the city. Back in the day, my parents lived in the Bronx, when it was all burned up. I remember this detail because they remember this detail, quite vividly. They had little nice to say about the borough, but when they first came here, they were overwhelmed—new place, new language, so much cold and concrete.
My mom asked me how things were going and I said, “Well, the traffic is interesting.” She laughed. She said, “Your father can no longer tolerate that city for long periods of time. He doesn’t understand why people would live on top of each other like that.”
For a moment, I felt this pang of… envy, or maybe wistfulness, because so many of the important moments in their lives happened in New York, because some part of me very much understood why people would live like that.
Throughout my childhood, even though we sometimes visited family in New York, the city seemed more like an idea than a real place—an idea I very much wanted to be a part of—bright lights, big city.
Because of my father’s job, we moved often and always lived in suburbs or rural places that bore little resemblance to the sights and sounds of The City. We were in Nebraska, or the suburbs of Chicago, or the outskirts of Denver. We were in the land of sprawling malls, and new construction and chain restaurants that advertised with catchy slogans. There was more: we were always the only people who looked like us in our neighborhoods, at school. Not only were we of a different race, we were of an entirely different culture—Haitians in the middle of America, strangers in a strange world.
My mother has a sprawling family, nine brothers and sisters. My father has four brothers and sisters. When their families immigrated to the United States, most of them settled in New York City, in close proximity to one another. They were determined not to be strangers in a strange land, alone. We’d fly to the city on holidays and cram into my maternal grandmother’s apartment, so many of us, my grandmother at the stove cooking Haitian food, making fried plantains in a manner no one else can replicate (the secret is to soak them in salt water before frying), and clucking over her children and grandchildren with great fondness.
Her couches, covered in plastic, the air in her apartment thick with life, us kids always being shushed so we wouldn’t disturb the neighbors as if it were possible not to disturb the neighbors when there were twenty or thirty people in a small apartment. New York was my cousins, who all seemed so sophisticated, who knew the latest slang and wore the latest fashions—Girbaud jeans and leather high tops and baseball caps. They had sharp haircuts and talked fast, so fast, my brothers and I could barely hold on to anything they said.
New York, then, was Flushing, Queens. It was the 7 Train when graffiti flourished—spray-painted bubble words and images stretching from one end of a subway car to another. New York was the Busy Bee market, which was little more than a chaotic swap meet—bright, loud people with thick New York accents selling knock off bags and shoes, hideous costume jewelry, off-brand toys, cheap electronics—things I had absolutely no use for but considered treasures and embraced, arms wide open. New York was eating real Szechuan food for the first time and understanding that Chinese food prepared anywhere but in New York was not really Chinese food. New York was Times Square, on the cusp of being cleaned up by an ambitious mayor, still dirty enough to be terribly interesting to a young girl.
Men on corners thrusting squares of glossy paper into my hands, bright shining lights, throngs of people as far as the eye could see. Filthy sidewalks and overflowing trashcans; homeless people asking for money and breaking my tender heart. Broadway, the marquees, the names of amazing performers in shining lights, Phantom of the Opera, a boat floating across a stage filled with illuminated candles, voices soaring through the theater and right into me, because tragic, somewhat unrequited love is the best kind of love. There was Starlight Express and actors rollerskating on stage.
More than anything, New York was seeing people, so many different people, so many beautiful shades of brown, so many different voices, a place where my brothers and I could actually see reflections of ourselves in others, where we didn’t feel so strange in the strange land. New York was everything, and the time we spent in the city was never enough.
In high school, I became determined to attend college there. It was something of an obsession. If I went to school in New York, surely, all my problems would be solved. I would learn how to be chic and glamorous. I would learn how to walk fast and wear all black without looking like I was attending a funeral. In adolescence, I was becoming a different kind of stranger in a strange land. I was a theater geek, and troubled, and angry and hellbent. In New York, I told myself, I would no longer be the only freak in the room because the city was full of freaks.
I applied to six or so universities, and one of them was New York University, NYU, the only three letters that existed to me for a time. I was going to go to NYU and major in technical theater and pre-med. It made no sense but that was the plan. When I was accepted to NYU, with a merit scholarship no less, I was thrilled. My perfect future was within my grasp. Soon, I was going to be in the city. I was going to be part of it all. I was going to find my people.
Alas. My parents had other plans for me. They worried that in the city I would be distracted from my studies, and the point of college, in their minds, was to study. They were worried about safety. They were just plain worried. I remained in a very deep state of denial even after they made me agree to attend a different university—a fancy one even, that I was damn lucky to attend. It was a state of denial so deep I still haven’t recovered from their denying me the choice to attend college in The City. I feel a pang of… something, whenever I see an NYU T-shirt, or read something about the school. The City is the one that got away.
In college, New York was just a couple hours away by train—Metro North, New Haven to Penn Station. New York was spending the weekend at my roommate’s family’s apartment, and eating bagels from H&H and gourmet delights from Zabar’s, and reading The New York Times (in New York!), and men shouting “DIANETICS” and thrusting the books of L. Ron Hubbard into my hands, and a Haitian woman mistaking me for a well-known voodoo priestess on a sidewalk while my American friend looked on, bewildered, and Limelight, and dancing all night, and hungover breakfast at The Time Café, and walking through Greenwich Village wide-eyed, and Broadway, so many new shows, so many new shows, the performers so glamorous, glittering from the stage, their voices clear and bold, and me, always watching, always wanting desperately to be part of it all, always feeling like “it all” was still just beyond my grasp, wanting so desperately to feel a little less strange.
I wrote my first story on a napkin when I was four, and eventually advanced to using paper like a normal person. As my writing ambitions grew so did my fantasies of living in The City, in a lovely apartment with brick walls, lined with books. I’d spend my days in cafés and coffeshops, with a well-worn notebook and my laptop and the latest important book. I would attend readings and rub elbows with the writers I admired most. I’d have cocktails with the editor of The New Yorker, and he would be so besotted, he’d ask to see some of my work and I would finally catch my big break. Then I was an adult, or so I was told. I was a writer, or I had always been a writer and finally reached the point where other people knew I was a writer. I was finally more comfortable in my own skin; I had finally learned how to feel less strange in a stranger land. I had learned the difference between being a writer, which can happen anywhere, and performing the role of Writer, which in my very specific and detailed fantasies could only happen in New York.
New York City is the center of the writing world, or so we’re told. New York is where all the action happens because The City is where the most important publishers and agents and writers are. New York is where the fancy book parties happen, and where the literati rub elbows and everyone knows (or pretends to know) everything about everyone else’s writing career. At some point New York stopped being the city of my dreams because it stopped being merely an idea I longed to be a part of. New York was very real and very complicated. New York had become an intimidating giant of a place, but still, I worried. If I wasn’t there as a writer, was I a writer anywhere?
During my most recent visit I stayed at a hipster hotel, The Ace, because it was the most affordable, which is to say it was not very affordable at all. There appeared to be an unspoken requirement for all staff members to look impeccable in expensive jeans and adorn their bodies in tattoos. The lobby was like a nightclub at all hours of the day—loud music and expensive, but delicious drinks—a place to see and be seen, whether you wanted to or not.
Somewhere in New York was my agent’s office. I don’t understand how Manhattan works even though much of it is organized into a rather logical grid. All I can tell you is that the office was on a street off a major avenue. The office was also very chic. It looked like a set for an agent’s office on a television show or in a movie. The chairs were modern and fancy and it seemed complicated to even sit. I was very out of place, or I felt very out of place, though I had a good reason to be there. My agent was as chic as her office. I couldn’t stop staring because she is very pretty, like magazine pretty, and I hadn’t realized. I felt that way most every moment of every day in New York—the writer from the middle of nowhere, surrounded by glamorous and well-dressed people with interesting eyewear.
My agent and I talked for more than an hour, like we were old friends. I left feeling like I was a Writer For Real. I felt fancy. And then I was walking around trying to find a certain street and it started raining, and I was lost, and miserable, and confused and no cabs would stop for me. The fancy feeling quickly wore off.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
That’s what New York was becoming now that I could choose to be in the city or not. There were teaching jobs and other opportunities in New York. I had, just before the visit, turned down an editorial position at a magazine because I couldn’t fathom living in the city on the offered salary. In my 30s, I’ve found that I am not as interested in struggling or suffering as I once was, at least not from one day to the next. During that trip, I finally realized I need at least one part of my life to be easy. I may hate living in the middle of nowhere, but there’s a lot of wide open space for that hate to thrive.
For every lovely moment with lovely people in New York there was a deeply humbling moment that revealed to me just how big and overwhelming the city was, that showed me how New York had always been more than an idea even if I wasn’t able to see that, how even New York was a strange land, and I was still a stranger and would always be one. The rest of the visit was fun. The city was good to me and I looked forward to returning and soon, but when my plane took off and I knew I was going home to the middle of nowhere—a strange land that I realized, with startling clarity, felt less strange than the city—I was relieved.
* This essay appears in Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, which will be released on October 8, 2013.
Roxane Gay writes about the underepresentation of minorities in American literary magazines.
Students Demand End to NYU Ties With Deathtrap Factories in Bangladesh
(Courtesy of Student & Labor Action Movement)
On Tuesday, September 17, members of NYU’s Student & Labor Action Movement (SLAM) led a group of fifteen students in delivering a letter to the NYU administration demanding that the university cut ties with all apparel organizations that fail to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.
The accord is a binding legal document that would force brands to ensure acceptable levels of safety in the Bangladeshi factories that manufacture their goods, and would also give workers more power over conditions in their factories. It was after last April’s Rana Plaza collapse, in which over 1,000 Bangladeshi workers were killed after being forced to work in a building known by both management and workers to be unsafe.
“We know that a real solution to these kinds of deadly working conditions has to start with worker power,” said Lucy Parks, a member of SLAM’s coordinating committee, “that’s why it’s so important for students to stand with Bangladeshi workers to demand that these companies sign on to this accord.”
Students tried to deliver the letter to President John Sexton’s office in Bobst Library. President Sexton was unavailable, but Senior Vice President for University Relations Lynne Brown spoke with students and received the letter.
SLAM is demanding that NYU revise its University Code of Conduct to stipulate that NYU will not sign apparel contracts with corporations that refuse to sign the Accord. Like many American universities, NYU currently has contracts with several apparel manufacturers with operations in Bangladesh, including the VF Corporation, which has not yet signed the Accord.
Attention College Students: Get six months of The Nation's digital edition absolutely free!
By pressuring universities to cut their contracts, students can put meaningful pressure on international corporations to respond to the demands of workers. “At SLAM we recognize that the struggles that students face, like debt and unemployment, have a deep relationship to the problems that workers across the world are dealing with,” said SLAM member Robert Ascherman. “We’re both losing out if the economy keeps moving in the direction it’s going now, and we can only get what we need if we work in solidarity with each other.”
Obama Administration Announces Expanded Labor Protections for Homecare Workers
A homecare worker in Miami Florida (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
Nearly two years after promising to make the change, the Obama administration announced today that it will extend minimum wage and overtime protections to the nation’s homecare workers. The workers, most of them women, were previously not covered due to the “companionship exemption” in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The new protections will take effect in January of 2015.
Activists have been pushing for the change for quite some time. As Bryce Covert has pointed out, an expansion of the FLSA was even included among the demands of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In the fifty years since the march, homecare work has become one of the fastest growing fields in the country, while remaining one of its lowest paid. Homecare workers make an average of $9.70 an hour and nearly 40 percent rely on Medicaid or food stamps.
Beginning in March of this year, Nation readers joined the growing call for President Obama to fulfill his promise with an open letter that garnered many hundreds of signatures. One reader, a homecare worker herself, listed the demands of her job: “I have provided physical rehabilitation care, wound care, emotional and psychological care (counseling/listening) for families and their loved ones,” she wrote, “I have provided Hospice care, pet care, plant care, personal care, yard care and I could list much more.”
While the changes will greatly expand the protections offered homecare workers, there is still much to be done to improve the lives of domestic workers more broadly. Andrea Mercado, the Campaign Director for NDWA, pointed out over email that, while the changes are important and “long overdue,” they “do not solve all of the issues that domestic workers face.” The NDWA and other organizations will continue to push for more labor protections for domestic workers through Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation passed on the state level.
Nation readers have also joined that campaign, sending nearly 900 letters to their state legislators asking for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in their state. New York and Hawaii have already passed versions of the law and a bill in California was recently passed by the legislator and is awaiting the Governor’s signature. If your state hasn’t gotten on board yet, take a minute to join the campaign. And if you live in California, call Governor Jerry Brown at 916-445-2841 and demand that he sign AB241 to expand labor protections for California’s domestic workers.
America the Possible
What is the new American Dream? In a new book and companion video, noted environmentalist Gus Speth breaks it down in simple, inspiring language and details how we can start incorporating a fundamentally new set of values in our homes, streets, neighborhoods, and cities.
Speth identifies a dozen features of the American political economy—the country’s basic operating system—where transformative change is essential, and explains how structural change can be brought to America. Watch and share the video and heed Speth’s urgent call to arms.
Reading the Stakes in Syria
A man reacts in front of houses destroyed during a recent Syrian Air Force air strike in Azaz, some twenty-nine miles north of Aleppo, August 15, 2012. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevic)
The world is a fragile and often incomprehensible place. Syria has been embroiled in a civil conflict since March 2011. According to United Nations estimates, more than 60,000 are dead. There are 1.5 million Syrian refugees who have sought safety in neighboring countries. The Assad regime offers no indication it will cede power and the rebel opposition may not provide a viable alternative if they defeat Assad.
The Syrian conflict is complicated by so much circumstance. World leaders don’t want a repeat of the Iraq war but they also don’t want to sit idly by, bearing silent and impotent witness so that another genocide on the scale of what happened in Bosnia occurs. Syria is, unfortunately, not so much a country in the minds of many. It is a political problem or opportunity and most of the proposed solutions to the Syria problem serve the interests of everyone but the Syrian people.
It is a peculiar privilege to be able to have an opinion on fraught international conflicts, to be able to declare that you are for or against American military intervention or sanctions or arms support or humanitarian aid while knowing that your life probably won’t be affected. And still, the world is as small as it is big. Syria is a world away but we are bound to her people by our common humanity. Even if we don’t dare offer an opinion on what should be done, it is important to cultivate an understanding of the Syrian conflict.
In The Syria Dilemma, edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, writers and thinkers including Richard Falk, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Fareed Zakaria, Radwan Ziadeh, Rafif Jouejati and Afra Jalabi offer a range of perspectives about the Syrian conflict and how it might come to an end. Some of the essays are overly academic and ideological, but, overall, the collection offers sober and well-considered opinions. The Syria Dilemma does a particularly good job of identifying what’s at stake for Syria, her people, and the global powers with a vested interest in the region.
In “Syria Is Not Iraq” Shadi Hamid, director of research for the Brookings Doha Center argues that the United States is so wary of intervention after Iraq that we are ignoring the human cost of the Syrian conflict. He asks, “Why exactly is 60,000 people not enough? Sure, the use of chemical weapons should be a red line for national security reasons, but why should strictly national security considerations be a red line, when the killing of tens of thousands isn’t?” It’s a rhetorical question but a useful one, in trying to understand what it takes to draw a line in the sand.
Asli Bâli and Aziz Rana argue that, “There is likely no form of direct or indirect military involvement in the conflict that will spare civilians or advance either side towards a decisive victory—there are too many interveners and too many strategic interests at stake for any side to allow too great a tipping of a balance.” This frank assessment reveals just how impossible, how much of a dilemma the Syrian conflict presents world leaders.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Is the solution to do nothing in the face of such impossibility? Afra Jalabi offers the perspective of several Syrian activists in “Anxiously Anticipating a New Dawn.” She rightly notes that “the Syrian people have been doubly hijacked,” first by Assad and then by the global powers prioritizing their own needs and desires over the Syrian people’s as they consider intervention. Jalabi’s essay offers hope because she shares the voices of activists on the ground who still have faith that change is possible and though of differing minds, are all invested in Syrian democracy on Syrian terms.
In “Syria is Melting, Rafif Jouejati reaffirms what the Syrian revolution is truly about to many Syrians. She says, “our revolution is not about replacing one dictator with another; our revolution is about freedom, dignity, and democracy for all Syrians. To ignore our voices, or pass them off as naïve, is to ignore the will of most Syrians.” There are no easy solutions to the Syrian dilemma, but whatever world leaders decide to do, we can only hope that the will of the Syrian people is not ignored.
Read Max Blumenthal’s account of the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
Reagan Republicans Freak Out Over ‘The Butler’ and Race
Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines in a scene from Lee Daniels’s The Butler. (AP Photo/The Weinstein Company/Anne Marie Fox)
Have you heard about the right-wing outrage over The Butler, the movie about the faithful White House retainer who served under presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan, and transforms himself from a Booker T. Washington to a W.E.B. Du Bois under the tutelage of his civil rights activist son?
The movie presents a sort of Forrest Gump journey through the American civil rights movement, from Eisenhower’s anguish over whether to send federal troops to escort black students past the racist mobs into Little Rock High School to the 1980s protests over apartheid. When I heard about it, I was skeptical. I wrote on Facebook before the first time I tried to see it (it was sold out; my mostly black neighborhood is crazy about the thing) that I “will try to keep open mind but dollars to donuts my dominant impression will be: ‘When there’s finally a movie about a white man serving as foil to the moral development of a black man—then, and only then, Dr. King’s dream will be on its way to fulfillment.” You know the kind of thing I was afraid of: the “Magical Negro” narrative, in which a black character “who often possesses special insight or mystical powers” exists only to come to the spiritual aid of the white protagonist.
It turned out to be far richer than I’d expected—not another Bagger Vance retread but in fact a refreshingly pointed examination of political conflict within African-American families. In a key plot setup—spoiler approaching—Cecil Gaines, the hyper-competent, hyper-compliant butler played by Forest Whitaker, is inspired by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. to present himself to his martinet boss, played by an icy Jim Gleason, to complain that black White House employees are paid less for the same work and are denied opportunities for promotion. In response, he hears the glorious battle cry of freedom beloved of American bosses everywhere: if you don’t like it, you can quit.
Soon, though, comes the reign of Ronald Reagan, and a second key plot development (spoiler alert). The second time his boss refuses his protest, Whitaker’s butler responds that he’ll be sure to tell the commander-in-chief, Mr. Reagan, about his objections. The boss’s jaw, proverbially, drops, the black staffers get their raises and promotions, and the wisdom of Booker T. Washington’s advice to generations of black men—that the best way to advance is to do your job exceptionally well and to cultivate powerful white patrons—is affirmed. Then, however, in one of the fictionalized film’s few accuracies, Nancy Reagan personally invites him to a state dinner—which ends up (back to fiction again) cementing his turn to Du Bois–ism: he feels the sting of shame at witnessing how his butler-friends are forced to display obsequiousness toward him; almost simultaneously, he overhears President Reagan forcefully asserting his intention to veto South African sanctions. He soon quits, and—spoiler! spoiler! spoiler!—ends up in jail with his son for protesting American accommodation with apartheid.
Cue wingnut outrage.
Columnist Mona Charen offered a quiz: Reagan or Obama, “Which president did more to help black Americans?” Why, Reagan, of course: “The black labor-force-participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent.” Case closed. She writes: “The Butler… misrepresents President Reagan (as I gather from those who’ve seen it [sic]) as, at best, insensitive to blacks, and at worst as racist.” Michael Reagan chimed in: “There you go again, Hollywood. You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies,” he wrote on Townhall.com. “If you knew my father, you’d know he was the last person on Earth you could call a racist.” In The Washington Post, three historians who earn their paychecks as professional conservatives weighed in with a brief about the Gipper’s “sensitivity to racial discrimination.” (“While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa…”)
Nation readers don’t need much persuading about how dubious this stuff is—how disastrous Reagan’s policies as president were for struggling African-Americans, how (to indulge the argument ad Hitlerium) even a certain German was nice to his dog; personality is not policy. And in this magazine last July, Sam Kleiner explained how soft Reagan and Reaganites were on apartheid.
Yes, there’s plenty that’s historically haywire in the picture: chronology that’s out of order, a character dying in Vietnam eleven months after American involvement ended, made-up dialogue from people like Martin Luther King, misappropriated historical credit. But personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I’m willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct. (Richard III, after all, probably never actually said as he lay dying on the battlefield, “My kingdom for a horse.”)
And on Reagan, The Butler’s poetry is acute. Has there ever been an American who so doted upon his kindness to individual African-Americans, who did more to disadvantage them as a class?
It was a core component of the man’s amour-propre: “I am just incapable of prejudice,” as he said on his debut on Meet the Press, in 1966, and many, many times after. Yet he distrusted civil rights laws (like the 1964 act outlawing discrimination in public accommodations that he called “a bad piece of legislation”) as unwarranted intrusions of federal power into the lives of individuals. A man who was raised by a Protestant mother who married his Catholic father in an anti-Catholic age; who played side by side with black boys; who was raised in a church that preached racial brotherhood; whose mother took in released prisoners, black and white, to convalesce in the family sewing room—how could he be racist?
There was the time he wanted to see Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan blockbuster. “My brother and I were the only kids not to see it,” he would say, reciting his father’s words: “The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum. And I want no more words on the subject.” And the time his father was working as a traveling salesman and the desk clerk at the only hotel in a small town proudly informed him that the place didn’t serve Jews; Jack announced they wouldn’t be serving this Catholic, either, and slept a winter’s night in his car. There was the time when a visiting team could find no hotel to stay in, for they had two black players, and were welcomed into the Reagan home instead. It was precisely such magnanimous gestures on the part of individual whites that could solve any lingering racial problem and, since Americans were magnanimous, would solve the the problem.
“There must be no lack of equal opportunity, no inequality before the law,” as he said in the televised opening speech of his 1966 gubernatorial campaign. But “there is a limit to what can be accomplished by laws and regulations, and I seriously question whether anything additional is needed in that line.” (In Washington, a new civil rights law banning housing discrimination was then being debated; in Chicago, marching through the city’s white bungalow belt in favor of the principle, Martin Luther King was jeered by swastika-wielding protesters and had knives and rocks thrown at his head.) The next year, while visiting Eureka College to dedicate a new library, he asked the students at his alma mater a rhetorical question: “The problems of the urban ghetto are the result of selfishness on our part, of indifference to suffering?”; the answer was plain. “No people in all the history of mankind have shaped so wisely its material circumstances.” Speaking again at Eureka in 1973 he marveled at those who claimed America was still marred by racism: Hadn’t Los Angeles just elected a black mayor?
It was part of his liturgy of absolution on, for instance, the subject of “law and order.” “The phrase has become unfashionable,” he said on one of his radio broadcasts in the summer of 1975. “Those who have made it so began looking askance at anyone who used the words. Their arched eyebrows were a reaction to what they would inform you that ‘law and order’ were ‘code words’ that really meant a call for racial discrimination…. Well, I think this inference of bigotry is in itself bigoted…. Are they not implying that our fellow citizens that happen to be black are so given to crime that a call for law and order is automatically a call for a curb on the black community?” He went on to cite an unidentified “survey done in the nation’s capital” that found more blacks than whites wanted “sterner action against criminals”—proving, he concluded with an extraordinarily artful rhetoric inversion, that “ ’law and order” is not a code word to blacks. It’s a cry for help—and we’d better join them.”
Indeed, in 1968 when a black questioner asked him why she never saw blacks at Republican events, he politely but forcefully replied that it wasn’t Republicans who were racist but the supposedly liberal Democrats, “a party that had betrayed them…. The Negro has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a Federal plantation and ignore him.” (We’d hear that one again…) The New York Times reported, “Reagan handled the situation so smoothly that some of the newsmen aboard his chartered 727 suggested, half-seriously, that the Reagan organization had set up the incident.”
He hadn’t always handled such questions so smoothly. He almost never lost his temper in public. He did once, however, during his 1966 gubernatorial primary campaign. A delegate at the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica said, “It grieves me when a leading Republican candidate….” He then shocked the assembly by slamming down his note card and shouting, “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature. Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group.”
He slammed his fist into his palm, muttered something and walked out of the convention.
He knew better than to blow up again. He learned to respond with pleasing stories about racial uplift instead. There was, for example, the incredible moment two days after he announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. He was in Charlotte, North Carolina. In his speech he preached a homily on racial reconciliation: “When the first bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor there was great segregation in the military forces. In World War II, this was corrected. It was corrected largely under the leadership of generals like MacArthur and Eisenhower…. One great story that I think of at that time, that reveals a change was occurring, was when the Japanese dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor there was a Negro sailor whose total duties involved kitchen-type duties…. He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of a pier blazing away at Japanese airplanes that were coming down and strafing him and that was all changed.” This was news to the more historically minded reporters, who knew the armed forces integrated only under an executive order from Harry Truman, in 1948, three years after the war ended—and that segregation only ended in the rest of society after concerted protest and civil disobedience. In the press conference that followed he was asked whether he had approved Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience tactics.
No, he responded: “There can never be any justification for breaking the law.”
Then, someone followed up, how could blacks have ever gained their civil rights in places like North Carolina?
He undertook to explain, in response, “where I think the first change began…. I have often stated publicly that the great tragedy was then that we didn’t even know that we had a racial problem. It wasn’t even recognized. But our generation, and I take great pride in this, were the ones who first of all recognized and then began doing something about it.”
Reportorial ears surely pricked up at that: this was going to be something.
“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting Major League baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, ‘Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
And indeed, he had called attention to that supposed fact, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy. But if in the interim anyone had bothered to point out to him since that there was no such “official baseball guide” reading “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen”; or pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 but that the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947; nor that no Iowans who heard him back then could recall him ever raising the subject on the air, the intervention clearly didn’t take, for he was still telling the story in the Oval Office nine years later.
That was Reagan on race. “Eugene Allen, the actual White House butler on whom the film is supposedly based, kept signed photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his living room (pictures of the other presidents he had served hung in the basement),” Mona Charen writes. I don’t doubt it. Reagan was usually nice to individuals (though not so much if they were his children: don’t forget that he didn’t even recognize his own son Michael Reagan, so eager to defend his dad now, when attending his high school graduation, instead introducing himself, “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”) In the film they accurately depict his practice of writing checks to individual citizens who wrote to him with sob stories, enlisting loyal Cecil to help him hide the practice—“Don’t tell Nancy!”—from his embarrassed staff and wife. But if The Butler is brilliant about anything, it is in grasping how this is actually the opposite of racial progress—because it makes racial progress seem unecessary. It’s the whole point of the movie. Which unsurprisingly conservatives have proven unable to grok.
Poverty Rate and Income Stagnate as Conservatives Attack the Safety Net
A map at Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that depicts food distribution points across the state. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)
Exactly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, income data released this morning by the Census Bureau indicates that the spike in poverty triggered by the recession has become the status quo. Middle-class incomes are stagnant, too.
The numbers come as House Republicans move to kick as many as 4 million Americans off food stamps by cutting $40 billion from the program. In their budget proposals, conservatives are also proposing to maintain the deep sequestration reductions that have cut tens of thousands of young children out of Head Start, as well as childcare assistance, Meals On Wheels for seniors, unemployment benefits, and housing assistance.
More than 46 million Americans lived in poverty last year, representing 15 percent of the population. For three years now there have been more Americans in poverty than at any other point since the Census Bureau began collecting data in 1959, and the poverty rate is hovering at its highest level since 1997. While many economists had hoped to see a small decrease in the poverty rate, the only statistically significant change was the additional 300,000 elderly Americans who fell below the poverty line.
“This far out from the great recession it would have been really nice to see gains to income, and reductions in poverty and large increases in health insurance coverage, and we didn’t see any of that,” said Elise Gould, an Economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, she said, the Census figures show that the economic recovery has passed over most Americans. “When I think about economic growth, I think about economic growth for everyday Americans. There we’re talking about median households, median families; we’re also talking about people at the bottom.”
The numbers show that poverty grips women and children particularly fiercely. More than a fifth of all children live in poverty; one in three poor Americans are children. Inequality across race persists, too, with more than a quarter of black and Hispanic Americans living in poverty, compared to just 9.7 percent of whites.
While the poverty rate rose for both women and men during the recession, the percentage of men in poverty last year was still lower than it has ever been for women. Joan Entmacher, the vice president of Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center, said that decades of unequal wages along with the uneven effects of the recession account for the gender gap. “The jobs that are coming back in this recovery, especially for women, are very low wage jobs. And there aren’t enough of them,” she said.
Entmacher also pointed to the Census’ finding that nearly half of children living in single-parent families headed by women are poor. “If you’re concerned about child poverty and the way it stunts children’s life chances then you have to be concerned about the poverty rate for women,” she said. Reductions in social programs like food stamps and Head Start are particularly devastating to mothers. “Childcare…is absolutely critical if low income women are going to be able to enter and stay in the labor force, but those supports have been cut back,” said Entmacher.
The entrenchment of poverty in American society is alarming on its own, but it is particularly striking in the shadow of a massive rebound in the stock market and in corporate profits. The Census’ measure of inequality in 2012 is on par with the all-time high found the previous year.
The recovery has simply missed most Americans, with the upturn’s benefits accruing largely at the upper echelons of society: the top 1 percent has captured 95 percent of the income gains made since the recession. While income grew by more than 30 percent for the 1 percent between 2009 and 2012, all other Americans together made gains amounting to less than half-of-one percent.
The median income in 2012 was $51,017, still about 8 percent lower than in the year before the financial crisis. But incomes were already falling before the crash; in fact, the peak median income came in 1997. Poverty, too, has been rising since the late 1990s. “It’s really not surprising that we’re seeing flat or stagnant incomes and poverty rates because employment growth has been so modest,” said Gould. “This recovery…[is] really on the tail of thirty years of policies that have been put in place that aren’t really benefiting everyday Americans.”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
President Obama acknowledged as much in his speech on Monday. “The trends that have taken hold over the past few decades of a winner-take-all economy…have been made worse by the recession,” he said, and went on to make the case that “what happens up on Capitol Hill” during the current budget showdown is critical to reversing the slide.
Instead of pursuing policies to promote employment and wage increases at the bottom and middle, however, Congress is poised to enact fiscal policies that hit the vulnerable even harder. The proposed Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program cutbacks are particularly outrageous, but even President Obama’s budget proposal includes a change to the way inflation is calculated that would amount to both a benefit cut and a tax increase for seniors. The tax reforms coming together in the Senate Finance Committee will likely include a lower corporate tax rate, without doing much for poor and middle-class families. It seems unlikely that Congress will lift the sequester anytime soon, which means continued reductions in the social safety net.
The Census figures show that such spending is more essential than ever, as it is these programs rather than the uptick in the economy keeping heads above water. According to the Census, 1.7 million people avoided poverty last year thanks to unemployment insurance. Although neither SNAP benefits nor the Earned Income Tax Credit are counted in the poverty rate, the two programs lifted a combined 9.5 million out of poverty in 2012. And though the full effects of the Affordable Care Act haven’t yet been felt, the level of uninsured Americans continued to fall last year, and the number of uninsured children reached an historic low.
Allison Kilkenny on the Occupy movement’s second anniversary.
GOP Madness on Display
(Courtesy of Flickr user mar is sea Y)
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Five years after the onset of the worst financial collapse in our history, we still have not recovered. President Obama used the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse to remind Americans of the “perfect storm” he inherited, and of the steps he took to save the economy from free fall, rescue the auto industry and save the financial system.
He would understandably like a little credit for the 7.5 million new private sector jobs, the passage of comprehensive healthcare reform and the changes in the tax code that left those earning over $450,000 paying a bit more in taxes.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Much was done, but in the end, far too little. The economy has not recovered the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession. The rate of job creation has barely been able to keep up with new entrants into the labor force. Over 20 million people are still in need of full-time work. The top 1 percent has captured virtually all of the rewards of growth coming out of the collapse, while the majority of Americans have been left out of the recovery. Wages for most Americans aren’t keeping up with costs. The big banks are more concentrated and larger than ever. Derivatives remain a largely unregulated weapon of financial mass destruction.
In his statement Monday, President Obama acknowledged this reality. The trends that were undermining the middle class before the Great Recession, he noted, have grown worse since the downturn. “We’ve cleared away the rubble,” the president said, but we have yet to build “a new foundation” for growth, good jobs and widely shared prosperity.
Obama used this backdrop to set the terms of the coming debate on the budget. The Republican right is once more gearing up to hold America hostage, threatening to shut down the government or default on our debts to get its way.
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
Occupy Celebrates Two Years Of Resistance
All photos by Allison Kilkenny
On the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, hundreds of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park to celebrate the group’s history, and also to lend solidarity to movements like that of the fast food workers who have been striking in cities all across the country.
In the morning, activists gathered in front of a McDonald’s down the block from Zuccotti in support of fast food workers, and to demand that the minimum wage be raised to $15 an hour.
Tony, an activist, said he attended the action because “we need work, we need jobs, we need better minimum wage for everyone.”
“No one can survive on $7.25,” protesters chanted outside the building, as NYPD officers flanked the McDonald’s entrance.
Police guard the McDonald’s entrance
“We are uniting with Fast Food Forward and calling for $15 (or more) and the workers’ rights to form a union without interference because we believe jobs should pay workers enough to afford food, clothing, and rent,” Occupy declared in a written statement. “Lifting wages will help bring more economic justice to workers and improve their quality of life and living standards. This will be the beginning of an independent and grass roots campaign to bring awareness to the plight of fast food and low wage workers in a city where nearly half of its residents live near or below poverty.”
Some protesters expressed frustration with organized labor’s lack of interest in supporting striking fast food workers. Activist Joshua Stephens said organizers couldn’t get the AFL-CIO to call them back regarding the fast food action, but the labor group did retweet updates from the event.
Caleb Maupin, an International Action Center organizer, was arrested during a couple Occupy Wall Street protests and participated in the original General Assemblies.
“I’m here because there’s a small group of very wealthy people who own the banks, the factories, the natural resources, and they have all the power,” said Maupin. “They have the government in their hands and we need to oppose that. We are the 99 percent. We sell our labor to survive. Right now, people desperately need jobs, they need employment.”
Maupin expressed concern over the US government’s priorities.
“The government is talking about another war, against Syria. We need to stand up for working people against the super-rich,” he said.
He added that he believes Occupy has established a lasting legacy and continues to serve as inspiration for people everywhere.
“People all across the country, and all across the world, saw what Occupy was doing, and and were inspired by it, and got the idea that they wanted to do something,” he said, adding that he believes resistance to economic injustice is growing, though the protests might not always occur under the Occupy banner.
“The basis of Occupy was the economic suffering going on. Young people don’t have jobs. The young people who do have jobs are making very low wages. And if you look at what’s happening in Spain and Greece, people say Occupy is over, but things like Occupy will continue to happen because people are upset, and until people have jobs and schools and things they did, there’s going to be unrest,” he said.
And there are lots of reasons to still be upset. The typical American family makes less than it did in 1989, and the poverty rate held steady at 15 percent in 2012, according to the latest numbers from the US Census Bureau.
Protesters consistently expressed distress that nothing has been done to address economic disparity and injustice, but they also marked the anniversary of Occupy by celebrating a movement that gave them support and purpose.
Journalist Chris Hedges joined the protesters at Zuccotti briefly to speak about the NDAA lawsuit he participated in (and won) in court, and to also offer encouragement to the activists.
“Any form of resistance is never futile,” he said to the crowd.
Bill Johnson, a popular Occupy activist, addressed the crowd at Zuccotti: “Two-and-a-half years ago, I lost my home to a legal system that does not believe in justice for all,” he said, and then described how he lost his second home during Hurricane Sandy.
“I’ll fight for justice until it kills me…. I used to think I was alone. I love you all,” he said.
In the afternoon, protesters marched around the financial district, and the NYPD responded by implementing a series of strange and seemingly arbitrary rules that acted to thwart many of Occupy’s most popular visual imagery. For example, officers declared that cardboard signs weren’t allowed in the park, and many activists expressed surprise at this new rule, since bringing cardboard in Zuccotti has never been a problem in the past (poles and physical structures are not permitted, but cardboard was permissible).
Officers also consistently told protesters they could not carry the Occupy Wall Street banner horizontally as they marched along the sidewalk because it “obstructed pedestrian traffic,” even though the presence of the banner has never previously been addressed.
Protesters were told to remove any masks (especially the popular Guy Fawkes masks), and while this isn’t a new demand by officers, the extent the NYPD went to enforce the rule certainly is. One activist was arrested simply for wearing a mask on top of his head, and not actually concealing his face.
Protester arrested for wearing a mask on top of his head
Occupy commemorated its anniversary by giving space to a whole host of issues, ranging from raising the minimum wage to ending evictions to investigating general public corruption.
The protest will cultivate this evening at Zuccotti Park for the Justice for the 99% Assembly.
Occupy Wall Street stated:
“On this great evening after a full day of action we also come together to share community, and rebuild not only a resistance movement, but a pro-active movement that seeks to re-create the commons, secure open space for all, and build a movement that speaks in the interests of the people over the corporations and their puppets.”
Allison Kilkenny has previously blogged about the legacy of Occupy Wall Street two years later.
Thirty Years Late to a Class War
Writing Contest Winner
We’re delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s eighth annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to answer this question in 800 words: It’s clear that the political system in the US isn’t working for many. If you had to pick one root cause underlying our broken politics, what would it be and why? We received close to 700 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists total. The winners are Jim Nichols (no relation to The Nation’s John Nichols), an undergraduate at Georgia State University; and Julia DI, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Darnestown, Maryland, and Bryn Grunwald, a recent graduate of the Peak to Peak Charter in Boulder, Colorado, who were co-winners in the high school category. The three winners receive cash awards of $1,000 and the finalists $200 each. All receive Nation subscriptions. Read all the winning essays here. —The Editors
John Maynard Keynes noted that the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. I would argue that Keynes’s words are as relevant as ever before as we seek a culprit to the political dysfunction facing our nation. Looking around I see direct links to the rise and dominance of market liberalism, an agenda which Keynes battled in his own time. In my own day-to-day life, in both the workplace and political arena, I have witnessed the predominance of market liberalism. I am sure that you too, dear Nation reader, have witnessed this encroachment as well.
The past three decades of market liberalism’s predominance has had a devastating impact on civil society. The transition and return to a more feudal arrangement that Hayek and others of a libertarian ilk have aspired to over the past seventy years is nearing completion. The strains of market liberalism—a utopian project from its very origins, as was noted long ago by Karl Polanyi—have eroded the fabric of civil society. We face a moment in history that calls for us to reflect and revisit fundamental social questions unaddressed by adherents of this ideology, an ideology which commodifies everything into market arrangements to be priced.
From the dramatic rise of food insecurity to the rapid decline of well-paid jobs, from the massive incarceration rate to the student debt crisis, economic and cultural tensions of our times are reaching a point of fracture. The passionate pursuit of deregulation, liberalization and privatization from both sides of the aisles of government and across the boardrooms of corporate America did not just create a cadre of Occupy activists but a much deeper malaise and discontent across our nation that transcends age, race, class and political affiliation.
Not only have we as a society lost many of the principles of popular participation in decision-making that are fundamental to democracy; many of our citizens are completely unaware even of what has been lost. Over the past five years as I worked to finish my degree I would get up every day at 2 am to join many of the working poor in my area to load up big brown UPS trucks. For a large portion of my co-workers, civil society and the social bonds that keep society functioning have completely disappeared—as have the hopes, dreams and aspirations of better days. Far worse, their own capacities to recognize this state of affairs and do anything about it are in disrepair. When a person lacks knowledge of the basic functioning of the political process, when one lacks the economic stability required to engage and take part in building a vibrant political movement, then not only are political questions passed over, but questions of political solutions are totally eradicated from one’s vocabulary.
In 2010, between class-time, I took some union support and some hits to my GPA and beat the Democratic Senate Caucus’ candidate in a State Senate primary here in Georgia. Just like other Democrats in 2010 I got shellacked on Election Day. But the fundamental lesson it taught me was that the political apparatus to acquire political power is still accessible to left-wing candidates. What we lack, and what would be required to pass through legislatures the systemic and anti-corporatist reforms our times call for, is a mobilized and agitated democratic movement. My experience within the Democratic Party tells me we do not need a radical overthrow of political institutions, we need a radical re-engagement by citizens into politics and a willingness to use means which cannot be priced by markets.
In our current crisis we must not seek out the best leaders, we must rebuild a culture that seeks to nurture the best in all of us. “The real question to be propounded is, ‘What can workingmen do for themselves?’ The answer is ready. They can do all things required, if they are independent, self-respecting, and self-reliant,” noted Eugene Debs long ago. Independence, self-respect and self-reliance—three things lacking in many of my co-workers, cohorts in the classroom, and voters I met on the campaign trail.
My campaign experience made me feel that a specter is haunting America, that of our citizens’ inability to see, understand, or act—as autonomous individuals in a collective manner—to challenge their own decline. Now is the time to nurture independence, self-respect and self-reliance within the ranks of American citizens. Market liberalism is nothing short of an agenda to destroy fundamental bonds that tie us together as humans. Eradicate the stranglehold of market liberalism on the political process, and the rest will take care of itself.
Latest
-
October 2, 2013 - 12:51 PM ET
-
October 2, 2013 - 12:20 PM ET
-
October 2, 2013 - 11:58 AM ET
Blogs
