The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (22 page)

W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic 1903 work
The Souls of Black Folk
opens with “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois helped form the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which just celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, knows much about the color line—not only from his life’s work, but from life experience, including last week, when he was arrested in his own home.

Gates’ lawyer, Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree, said in a statement that the arrest occurred as Gates returned from the airport:

Professor Gates attempted to enter his front door, but the door was damaged. Professor Gates then entered his rear door with his key, turned off his alarm, and again attempted to open the front door. With the help of his driver they were able to force the front door open, and then the driver carried Professor Gates’ luggage into his home.

Both Gates and his driver are African-American. According to the Cambridge Police report, a white woman saw the two black men attempting to enter the home and called police.

Ogletree continued: “The officer . . . asked Professor Gates whether he could prove that he lived there and taught at Harvard. Professor Gates said that he could, and . . . handed both his Harvard University identification and his valid Massachusetts driver’s license to the officer. Both include Professor Gates’ photograph, and the license includes his address.” Police officer James Crowley reported that Gates responded to his request for identification: “Why? Because I’m a black man in America?” Despite his positive identification, Gates was then arrested for disorderly conduct.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, more than sixty mostly African-American and Latino children attending the Creative Steps camp were disinvited from a suburban Valley Swim Club, which their camp had paid for pool access.

Suspicions of racism were exacerbated when Valley Swim Club president John Duesler said, “There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion . . . and the atmosphere of the club.” The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor were permeated by the race question, especially with white, male senators questioning her comments on how a “wise Latina” might rule in court. If confirmed, one of the first cases she will hear will be that of Georgia death-row prisoner Troy Anthony Davis, an African-American.

As it moves into its second century, the NAACP is, unfortunately, as relevant as ever. It is confronting the death penalty head-on, demanding Davis’ claims of innocence be heard and asking Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the case of Pennsylvania death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Another new NAACP initiative asks people to record instances of bias, discrimination, and police brutality with their cell-phone cameras, and upload them to NAACP.org.

At the group’s centennial, longtime board chair Julian Bond said, paraphrasing Jay Leno: “When I started, my hair was black and my president was white. Now my hair’s white, and my president is black. I hold the NAACP responsible for both.” Though the Cambridge Police Department has dropped the charges against Gates, his charges of racial discrimination remain. W. E. B. Du Bois’ color line has shifted—but it hasn’t been erased.

September 9, 2009

Van Jones and the Boycott of Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck was mad. He’s the right-wing talk radio host who has a television program on the Fox News Channel. Advertisers were fleeing his Fox program en masse after the civil rights group Color of Change mounted a campaign urging advertisers to boycott Beck, who labeled President Barack Obama a “racist.” As the campaign progressed, Beck began his attacks against Van Jones. Jones was appointed by Obama in March to be special adviser for green jobs. He co-founded Color of Change four years ago. After weeks of attacks from Beck, Jones resigned his position at the White House last Sunday.

Beck said on
Fox & Friends
, the network’s morning show, July 28: “This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people. . . . This guy is, I believe, a racist.” This inspired ColorOfChange.org to launch its campaign urging advertisers to drop their sponsorship of Beck’s Fox program. The campaign had a powerful impact, with companies like Progressive Insurance, Geico, and Procter & Gamble immediately pulling their advertising. Since then, more than fifty companies have joined, including Best Buy, Capital One, CVS, Discover, GMAC Financial Services, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Travelocity, and Walmart.

Van Jones was named one of
Time
magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2009. His book,
The Green Collar Economy
, was a national best-seller. A Yale Law School graduate, Jones didn’t go after the lucrative jobs that were available to him, but moved to San Francisco, where he founded Bay Area PoliceWatch, a hot line for victims of alleged police brutality. He then founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, based in Oakland, California, “a strategy and action center working for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America.” The center thrived, growing to a staff of more than twenty and building a solid record of fighting police violence and youth incarceration, along with spearheading green-job initiatives. The fusion of racial justice and economic and environmental sustainability is at the core of Jones’ work.

Jones told me last October: “The clean energy revolution . . . would put literally millions of people to work, putting up solar panels all across the United States, weatherizing buildings so they don’t leak so much energy . . . you could put Detroit back to work not making SUVs to destroy the world, but making wind turbines. We think that you can fight pollution and poverty at the same time.”

Beck alleged Jones was a former black nationalist and communist, that he signed a petition calling for a congressional investigation into the events of 9/11, and that Jones referred to Republicans as “assholes” in a February 2009 talk. (Beck failed to note that Jones referred to himself in the talk with the same term.) Jones apologized for the remark, which is more than George W. Bush did when recorded referring to
New York Times
reporter Adam Clymer with the same term in 2000.

Jones said Beck’s attacks were a “vicious smear campaign . . . using lies and distortions to distract and divide.” Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, “The only thing more outrageous than Mr. Beck’s attack on Van Jones is the fact that there are sponsors that continue to pay him to provide this type of offensive commentary.” He recalled Beck’s 2006 radio attack on a seven-year-old African-American girl, when Beck, responding to her poem about her heritage, said: “You want to go to Africa? I will personally purchase your airfare. I’ll do it. It’s one-way.”

Glenn Beck may claim a notch in his belt, but he’s also helped push Van Jones back into an arena where he can be much more effective, as a grassroots organizer working for progressive change from outside the administration. And with groups like the NAACP paying more attention to Beck, the advertiser boycott of his show is unlikely to just go away.

January 13, 2010

Holding Corporations Accountable for Apartheid Crimes

A landmark class action case is under way in a New York federal court, with victims of apartheid in South Africa suing corporations that they say helped the pre-1994 regime. Among the multinational corporations are IBM, Fujitsu, Ford, GM, and banking giants UBS and Barclays. The lawsuit accuses the corporations of “knowing participation in and/or aiding and abetting of the crimes of apartheid; extrajudicial killing; torture; prolonged unlawful detention; and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Attorneys are seeking up to $400 billion in damages.

The late anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus, who died just weeks ago, is a listed plaintiff. Back in 2008, he told me that “for [the corporations], apartheid was a very good system, and it was a very profitable system.” As the U.S. observes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, marks the first anniversary in office of the first African-American president, and ponders the exposure of a racial gaffe spoken by Sen. Harry Reid, the issue of race is front and center, making this case timely and compelling.

The Alien Tort Statute dates from the U.S. Revolutionary War era and allows people from outside the United States to bring a civil suit against another party for alleged crimes committed outside the United States. Cases have been brought in recent years to address forced labor on an oil pipeline in Burma, the killing of labor organizers in Colombia, and the killing of activists in the Niger delta. This suit alleges that the apartheid regime could not have succeeded in its violent oppression of millions of people without the active support of the foreign corporations.

Ford and General Motors built manufacturing centers in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where Dennis Brutus grew up. He told me, “They were using . . . very cheap black labor, because there was a law in South Africa which said blacks are not allowed to join trade unions, and they’re not allowed to strike, so that they were forced to accept whatever wages they were given. They lived in ghettos . . . actually in the boxes in which the parts had been shipped from the U.S. to be assembled in South Africa. So you had a whole township called Kwaford, meaning ‘the place of Ford.’”

Likewise with IBM and Fujitsu. The complaint states, “The South African security forces used computers supplied by . . . IBM and Fujitsu . . . to restrict Black people’s movements within the country, to track non-whites and political dissidents, and to target individuals for the purpose of repressing the Black population and perpetuating the apartheid system.” Black South Africans were issued passbooks, which the apartheid regime used to restrict movement and track millions of people, and to enable politically motivated arrests and disappearances over decades.

UBS and Barclays, the suit alleges, “directly financed the South African security forces that carried out the most brutal aspects of apartheid.” The United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid stated, in 1979, that “we learn today that more than $5.4 billion has been loaned in a six-year period to bolster a regime which is responsible for some of the most heinous crimes ever committed against humanity.” Banks (including UBS) were punished for helping the Nazis during World War II, so precedent exists for reparations in the case of apartheid.

One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Michael Hausfeld, told me: “Who is a corporation and what are its responsibilities? If companies can affect lives in ways that make those lives worse, so that people are suppressed or terrorized . . . you are basically ascribing to eternity the fact that companies can act with both impunity and immunity.”

South Africa went through a historic process after apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Thousands of people took responsibility for their actions, along with scores of South African corporations. Not one multinational company accepted the invitation to speak at the TRC. The case, says Marjorie Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, which is filing the lawsuit, “takes forward the unfinished business of the TRC.”

The election of Barack Obama, the son of an African, was a historic moment in the fight against racism. But unless U.S. courts are open to addressing wrongs, past and present, corporations will still feel free to go abroad and profit from racist and repressive policies.

April 29, 2010

Boycotting Arizona’s Racism

Arizona was the only territory west of Texas to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy during the Civil War. A century later, it fought recognition of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. This week, an anti-immigrant bill was signed into law by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 empowers state and local law enforcement to stop, question, and arrest whomever they suspect may not be in the state legally. The law is an open invitation to sweeping racial profiling and arbitrary detention.

The law ostensibly offers “cooperative enforcement of federal immigration laws throughout all of Arizona.” It provides that a “law enforcement officer, without a warrant, may arrest a person if the officer has probable cause to believe that the person has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States.”

Thus, if a police officer suspects a Latino person of being an undocumented immigrant, he or she can lock that person up. Day laborers are targeted. The new law makes it illegal to offer or accept a job in some roadside settings, and even makes “communication by a gesture or a nod” in accepting a work offer an arrestable offense. S.B. 1070 goes further, facilitating anonymous reporting of businesses that anyone suspects has undocumented employees.

President Barack Obama denounced the bill, saying: “Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others, and that includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe. In fact, I’ve instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil-rights and other implications of this legislation.”