Research
Race, Class & Activism
Published July 24, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
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.
New Federal Tenant Protections Passed
Published July 23, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
...Though immigrants find their civil and constitutional rights were violated by ICE "cowboys", according to a new report.
From Foreclosurebuzz.org:
The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act, PL 111-22 became effective May 20, 2009. It applies to foreclosures through December 2012 when the law sunsets. ... The new federal law enables a bona fide tenant (defined in the Act) who is leasing premises that are foreclosed upon to continue occupancy through the FULL TERM of the lease unless the new owner intends to use the property as his primary residence (in which case the new owner still must give the tenant 90 days notice to vacate).
Read the whole thing to understand the full extent of the new rule; the bill text is here (pgs 29-31).
Now if only we could do more towards expanding affordable rental housing and homeownership in the first place. The New America Foundation looks at Obama's 2010 asset building budget and concludes:
Despite these promising proposals, the landscape of asset-building opportunities for low- and moderate-income Americans remains limited. Not only do most tax subsidies go to those who already engage in the asset-building behavior that government wants to encourage, but few subsidies exist for asset building by people with lower incomes.
I'm working towards an afternoon deadline, so I'll leave it to all of you to discuss these developments.
Skip Gates on Race, Class & the Criminal Justice System
Published July 21, 2009 @ 06:52PM PT
"this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system..."
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
If you haven't heard, one of the most prominent scholars in the world, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. of Harvard, listed as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997 by Time, was arrested on the porch of his Harvard Square home last week for alleged disorderly conduct. Returning home after a trip overseas to find his front door jammed, he and his Moroccan cab driver were attempting to open it when his neighbor, a white woman employed by Harvard, called the cops over 2 suspicious black men at the house down the street.
Did I mention Gates is black? Anyway, the cop who showed up to investigate pretty much hassled Gates in his own home, which ticked Gates off, who hassled him right back. As Gates followed the cop outside to get his identification, the cop arrested him before a crowd of passersby and other cops and wrote up a report justifying his decision in light of Gates's apparently alarming, "loud and tumultuous" behavior.
Did I mention Gates is about 60, walks with a cane, and is around 5 ft 7? Ferocious!
"Urban" Woes Hit the Suburbs and Rural America
Published July 12, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Quick, lock those gates!
As we've "revitalized" cities to attract the middle-class, our gentrification efforts have pushed working-class and low-income families beyond the city limits, to aging housing stock in older inner-ring suburbs and distant exurbs far from job centers. Over time, the suburbs have become home to a higher number of people living in poverty, even though cities remain home to a higher concentration of poor residents overall. So it should come as no surprise now:
Rural and suburban homeless make up about 1/3 of the overall homeless population, compared to less than 25% in 2007. West Coast states have the highest proportion of homeless residents, due to the foreclosure crisis.
Tellingly, a report from UNH found that children living in rural, cohabiting households almost doubled since 2000, whereas in cities the growth has been about 1% (the percentage of kids in cohabiting houses overall is quite small). Study authors think this is an "economic survival strategy" by single, rural mothers:
"We think that growing economic stress in rural America is in part driving this rapid increase of cohabiting in rural households," says report author William O'Hare, a Carsey Institute policy fellow and senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The jump in the share of rural children living in cohabiting households has occurred since 2000, when economic conditions in rural America began to deteriorate."
O'Hare and his co-authors Wendy Manning, Meredith Porter and Heidi Lyons state that for single rural women with children, joining a household with a man may be an economic survival strategy. While cohabiting families have poverty rates double those of married-couple households, they are less than half those for single-mother households.
The first step in warding off homelessness, perhaps?
(Photo of an abandoned farm by James Jordan)
Discrimination & Unequal Benefits Lead to Higher LGBT Poverty
Published July 11, 2009 @ 06:59AM PT
Actually, no surprise here, given our gender inequality in the U.S., this is really an issue of poverty among lesbians and transgendered individuals.
I hope you saw our tremendous announcement this week that Change.org together with gay rights organizations negotiated an agreement with Rockstar energy drinks that affirms the latter's commitment to LGBT equality and contributes $100,000 to LGBT rights organizations. That $100,000 could really go a long way towards fighting the higher rates of poverty among gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgendered people* resulting from the prohibition of full benefits based on their sexual orientation. After the jump, some critical data and policy prescriptions, and a note on the need for a more inclusive, representative leadership among gay rights advocates.
Food Deserts Benefit From Farmers Markets
Published July 09, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Many have come to realize that the problem of food deserts is not that there is no food to eat at all, but rather, that fresh, affordable and healthy food are much harder to come by than the fried chicken and Big Mac's found on nearly every street corner. It is a problem of access and affordability more than anything else.
With the knowledge that Tennessee is one of the most food insecure states (particularly in regard to children) in the entire country, Vanderbilt University graduate student Darcy Freedman decided to conduct research to determine how to address issues of childhood obesity, family nutrition and food security issues in four of Nashville's underserved communities.
What she found was that families do not only need help accessing fresh food, they also need help learning how to eat healthy and understanding why it is so important to their health. And thus, the Veggie Project was born.
On Economic Mobility & Poverty Thresholds
Published July 02, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Following up on my earlier post on downward economic mobility and rising economic insecurity, new data, described below, shows just how economically vulnerable the majority of middle-class households are in the U.S. Once again I wonder, will this trigger us to do something about how we measure poverty in the U.S., now that so many of us hover at its door? Knowing our national myths of a bootstrapping, classless society, we'll probably just redefine it down even further to renew the distance between ourselves and our poorer neighbors! After all we've vilified them so much, we certainly don't want to become one of them now!
But we really need to come to grips with how few of us can afford what should be basic rights for all of us: housing, education, and a livable wage and healthy work-life balance. I add that "balance" because the right to work shouldn't be backbreaking, enslaving, or heart-attack inducing - especially since we're working harder and harder for less and less money. As the middle-class disappears, we need to confront the poverty they - we - face in this country.
