Spokane Racism

A week after the November 2004 presidential elections in the United States, I put a home made “Nader 2008” sticker on the back of my car. It is there to this day, though the harsh winter this year has taken a toll on it. I voted for Ralph Nader for President in 2000 and 2004. Now that Ralph Nader has announced for the Presidency again in 2008, I will vote for him again.

Why? Because someone must speak truth into the vacuum of silence and ruling class consensus created by the major media, the two-party political machine, and the corporate money which buys our candidates and the electoral process. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, noone in the Democrat Party was willing to do so and Kucinich — when he would not shut up — was simply excluded from debates by the corporate-owned Democrat Party. Perhaps former U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney will run as another voice of truth which can not be shut up. In that case, I will consider voting for her. The important thing is that we must not spend the next 8 months listening to the voices of corporate and ruling class rule in this country, to the exclusion of the true dreams of the U.S. people — peace, prosperity, equality, justice.

The only candidate worthy of my vote — and your vote — is a candidate willing to courageously stand and speak the truth about the United States as an aggressor imperialist nation, an international pariah, a nation ranking low in comparison with other industrialized world (and even in comparison with some developing nations) in many measures of societal well-being, as a racist nation perpetrating war on non-European peoples both abroad and at home.

Nader vs. Wolf Blitzer– http://youtube.com/watch?v=BiYYNfkVGSo&feature=related

VP candidate Matt Gonzalez — http://youtube.com/watch?v=UaoncB-akQY&feature=related

ballot-access.org

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Millions Without a Voice

By Amy Goodman

As I raced into our TV studio for our Super Tuesday morning-after show, I was excited. Across the country, initial reports indicated there was unprecedented voter participation, at least in the Democratic primaries, several times higher than in previous elections. For years I have covered countries like Haiti, where people risk death to vote, while the U.S. has one of the lowest participation rates in the industrialized world. Could it be this year would be different?

Then I bumped into a friend and asked if he had voted. “I can’t vote,” he said, “because I did time in prison.” I asked him if he would have voted. “Sure I would have. Because then I’m not just talking junk, I’m doing something about it.”

Felony disenfranchisement is the practice by state governments of barring people convicted of a felony from voting, even after they have served their time. In Virginia and Kentucky, people convicted of any felony can never vote again (this would include “Scooter” Libby, even though he never went to jail, unless he is pardoned). Eight other states have permanent felony disenfranchisement laws, with some conditions that allow people to rejoin the voter rolls: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming.

Disenfranchisement—people being denied their right to vote—takes many forms, and has a major impact on electoral politics. In Ohio in 2004, stories abounded of inoperative voting machines, too few ballots or too few voting machines. Then there was Florida in 2000. Many continue to believe that the election was thrown to George W. Bush by Ralph Nader, who got about 97,000 votes in Florida. Ten times that number of Floridians are prevented from voting at all. Why? Currently, more than 1.1 million Floridians have been convicted of a felony and thus aren’t allowed to vote. We can’t know for sure how they would have voted, but as scholar, lawyer and activist Angela Davis said recently in a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mobile, Ala., “If we had not had the felony disenfranchisement that we have, there would be no way that George Bush would be in the White House.”

Since felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-American and Latino men in the U.S., and since these groups overwhelmingly vote Democratic, the laws bolster the position of the Republican Party. The statistics are shocking. Ryan King, policy analyst with The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., summarized the latest:

About 5.3 million U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote due to felony disenfranchisement; 2 million of them are African-American. Of these, 1.4 million are African-American men, which translates into an incredible 13 percent of that population, a rate seven times higher than in the overall population. Forty-eight states have some version of felony disenfranchisement on the books. All bar voting from prison, then go on to bar participation while on parole or probation. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote from behind the walls, as does Canada and a number of other countries.

The politicians and pundits are all abuzz with the massive turnouts in the primaries and caucuses. There are increasing percentages of women participating, and initial reports point to more young people. The youth vote is particularly important, as young people have less invested in the status quo and can look with fresh eyes at long-standing injustices that disenfranchise so many. In this context, one of The Sentencing Project’s predictions bears repeating here: “Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.”

The Sentencing Project’s King said: “We are constantly pushing for legislative change around the country. But public education is absolutely key. There are so many different laws that people simply don’t know when their right to vote has been restored. That includes the personnel who work in state governments giving out the wrong information.”

I called my friend to tell him he was misinformed. He hadn’t been on probation or parole for years. “You can vote,” I told him. “You just have to register.” I could hear him smile through the phone.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080206_felony_disenfranchisement/

Author Sandra Cisneros has called Martin Espada “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors”. He has won many awards including the American Book Award and was invited to Chile as part of the Neruda’s centenary.

At Eastern Washington University on May 30, 2008, Espada will give a lecture in the afternoon and later that evening read from his poetry.

Winners of the “Diversity with Diversity” writing contest will also participate in the evening reading event.

The February 20, 2008 online edition of The Easterner ran the following information on the event in an article by Easterner staff writer Russell Stahlke:

“Diversity within Diversity,” an essay/poetry writing contest, is currently accepting submissions. The due date is April 4, 2008. Entries can be delivered to the Writers’ Center in PUB 354, or submitted via e-mail at writers.center@mail.ewu.edu.

Essays can be a maximum of 2,000 words, and should be double-spaced and written with 12-point font. Poems can be a maximum of two pages with the same specifications.

“An essay is always non-fiction in nature,” said Dani Ringwald, one of the Writers’ Center Responders. “There are all types of essays: personal, argumentative, descriptive, cause and effect, compare and contrast, division and classification, and we welcome all approaches,” said Ringwald.

“This contest is also open to the various forms that poetry provides,” said Ringwald. “For inspiration, students might want to look up Martin Espada’s poetry, or stop by the Center and take a look at the bulletin board we’ve created to celebrate his work.”

Winners of the contest will have an opportunity to read their work at a community reading on May 30th alongside award-winning poet and essayist Martin Espada, as well as receiving a $100 gift card for Eastern’s bookstore. Also, the winning submissions will be published in an anthology.

“We invited Martin Espada, ‘the Latino poet of his generation,’ to come to EWU as our guest speaker because of his dedication to using writing as a tool for democracy which fit exactly with our intention for this diversity project,” said Ringwald.

“All of the winning authors will be invited to read at the public community reading in Showalter Hall the evening of May 30th,” said Ringwald.

For more information on the writing contest, go to www.ewu.edu/writerscenter

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Amy Goodman interviews Martin Espada on Democracy Now about the life and works of Pablo Neruda. (Available in print, audio and video on the Democracy Now website).

Do people in Spokane still remember what, according to Spokesman-Review writer Doug Floyd’s 1997 article in the American Journalism Review, “continues to be referred to in Spokane as ‘the Karen Boone incident’ “?

Do people remember the concerns about mistreatment of minority groups and racial profiling in Spokane expressed loudly by Spokane communities of color in 1997 and 2001 and 2003 and as recently as the summer 2007, mistreatment and profiling experienced, felt and discussed on a daily basis up until today?

Does anyone recall in 2001 former Spokesman-Review editor Ken Sands writing: “In Spokane, racial profiling by police is accepted as fact in the small minority population, and greeted with much skepticism by the vast white majority”?

Do you think that the experience of racism described over and over by minority members of this community and the sentiments unleashed in 1997 against courageous community members like Karen Boone simply disappear overnight?

What about the Spokane law enforcement recently referring to a fast gas owner as a “gypsy” and a “Hindu”?

What about Spokane Police illegally strip searching a black man?

What about the police killings of boys and men from diverse Spokane communities — Eagle Michael, Jerome Alford, Otto Zehm, and others?

Is Spokane a racist town?

Can you imagine what would have been the outcome of the incident of Spokane Police Officer Jay Olsen shooting Shonto Pete in the head if Pete had been killed by Olsen rather than having survived as he did having been shot in the back of the head?

I will tell you what the outcome would have been. They would have sobered Olsen up, put him back in his uniform, strapped him into his squad car, and said, “Get back in there white boy, we need ya”.

Does a decade make any difference? How do we know? What is the report from the man and woman and boy and girl in the street? In the classroom? In the welfare office? In the opera house? In the cathedral? In the mall? In the hospital?

Do we know? Do we care? Do we think it matters?

Or would we rather it just all go away?

A Sacrifice for Civic Journalism

American Journalism Review (July/August 1997)

By G. Douglas Floyd
G. Douglas Floyd is an interactive editor at the Spokesman-Review.

Karen Boone agreed to write a column, not pull the pin on a hand grenade. Call it her sacrifice for civic journalism.

A 37-year-old African American in the 92 percent white city of Spokane, Washington, Boone was convinced to voice her opinions about her community’s diversity (or lack thereof) in the local paper, the Spokesman- Review. In a February 26 (1997) column she related a poignant tale of her participation in a community leadership group, an experience that led to her painful realization that even she had become desensitized to the feelings of ethnic invisibility faced by minorities in Spokane.

The paper’s editors felt her story was a perfect fit for the S-R’s “Your Turn” column, a feature created during a February 1994 overhaul of the editorial pages with the intention of providing a forum for Spokane citizens who felt they were being overlooked in the paper’s coverage (see “Climbing Down from the Ivory Tower,” May 1995). Boone was reluctant to contribute at first, fearing her privacy would be at stake. But eventually she decided she owed it to herself and to other minorities in the community who felt, as she did, that the local paper did not accurately represent them.

In her column, Boone described the “psychological loneliness and isolation” she experienced as a teenager growing up in Spokane, and her “diligent attempt” to adapt culturally to life in the city. “I must ultimately find a way to maintain my ethnic authenticity while seeking to find my way of life in Spokane,” Boone wrote.

The end result of Boone’s effort to enlighten Spokane’s mainstream shocked Boone and her editors alike. Her 400 words in the S-R ignited intense community debate about Spokane’s racial attitudes that continues to ripple.

The backlash took the form of an incendiary letter Boone received the day after her column ran. “You niggers really piss me off. Bitch & complain is all you worthless assholes are good for,” it began, going on to suggest Boone go “back to Africa & swing with the baboons.”

Concerned but not frantic, Boone called the paper to tell of what her column had wrought. She faxed in a letter to the editor in response to the hate mail. A local human rights group called Unity in Action got word of what continues to be referred to in Spokane as “the Karen Boone incident,” and challenged the paper to publish not only Boone’s response but the hate letter itself.

On March 11, the Spokesman-Review published both letters, along with an editorial denouncing the hateful act and telling readers how to get involved in local human and civil rights activities.

“Our responsibility was to continue what we’d started,” says S-R Editor Chris Peck. “We were trying to get real voices in the paper talking about what it’s like to be a person of color living in Spokane, and the events that unfolded added another chapter to that story.”

And another and another, it seemed to Boone. As she tried to get beyond the incident and focus her energy on her new job as head of Spokane’s Institute for Neighborhood Leadership, people kept coming to her with their personal stories of wrangling with racial issues. Blacks revealed to her their daily experiences with prejudice. Whites unburdened their long-repressed consciences.

As Spokane citizens mobilized in support of Boone, keeping her story alive by flooding the S-R with letters and calls on her behalf, members of Unity in Action organized a public rally in a downtown park and enlisted Boone as a speaker.

“We wanted to let people know we’re not going to take it,” says Robert Lloyd, one of the rally organizers and publisher of the African American Voice, an alternative paper.

Boone still feels overwhelmed with stress, and her teenage children, one of whom opened the hate letter thinking it was addressed to her, struggle with anxiety.

But the incident galvanized the community, and provided a fitting backdrop for a much-needed public discussion about racism. Lloyd, a 23-year resident of the city, says the Spokesman-Review handled the incident well. The only criticism he’s heard, he says, is the one Boone herself has expressed to the paper: Somebody should have warned her what would happen.

“I probably would have done it anyway,” she now says, “but I would have liked to have been better prepared for what happened.”

Peck says preparing guest writers for unpleasant replies is one of the reasons the paper has “interactive” editors — to serve as allies and mentors and to connect with readers. Another reason is to build bridges to sectors of the community, including minority populations that don’t feel the newspaper reflects their
interests.

Lloyd says the Spokesman-Review has made headway, but not yet enough to be widely embraced by the city’s black community. “The S-R is like a guy whose wife caught him with somebody else,” he says. “It’s going to take a long time to win trust.”

www.historylink.org

Source: Henry M. Jackson Foundation

Senator Henry Jackson overwhelmingly defeats peace candidate Carl Maxey in the Democratic primary on September 15, 1970.

On September 15, 1970, Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (1912-1983) easily wins the Democratic Senate primary by defeating peace candidate Carl Maxey (1924-1997), a Spokane attorney and civil rights leader. Maxey, the champion of the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party, has fiercely denounced Jackson’s outspoken support for military spending and the Vietnam War. Maxey finishes a distant second to Jackson in the primary, but still wins far more votes than Republican nominee Charles W. Elicker.

The 1970 campaign was waged against a background of great political turbulence, as the Democratic Party, the state, and the nation were rocked by deep and bitter divisions over the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. The divisiveness frequently spilled over into street protests in Seattle and across the country, reaching a crescendo in May following President Richard M. Nixon’s (1913-1994) announcement that the U.S. military would enter Cambodia. The Cambodia incursion triggered massive demonstrations, and the killings of four anti-war protestors at Kent State in Ohio and two demonstrators at Jackson State in Mississippi led to even greater protests.

Anti-war Challenge

Jackson, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1940 as a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) New Deal, remained firmly liberal on domestic policy for his entire 43-year Congressional career, sponsoring ground-breaking environmental legislation and championing social welfare programs. These progressive credentials meant little in 1970, when the great divide within the country and within the Democratic Party was between pro-military “hawks” and anti-war “doves.” Jackson’s career-long advocacy of increased military spending and his die-hard support for the war made him a leading hawk and anathema to the increasingly dovish liberal wing of the party.

National Democrats active in the peace movement, including Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (b. 1916), Representative Allard Lowenstein (1929-1980), and economist John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), encouraged state Democrats in the Washington Democratic Council (WDC), an anti-war group, to mount a primary challenge to Jackson. However, no established Democratic politician would take on Jackson, who was not only the most successful vote-getter in the state’s history, but had aided many of them in their political careers.

Carl Maxey

In the end Carl Maxey, the WDC chair, resigned his position to run against Jackson. The first African American to become an attorney in Eastern Washington, Maxey was born in Tacoma and spent much of his childhood in a Spokane orphanage. After serving as a medic during World War II, he won an NCAA boxing championship while in college and earned a law degree from Gonzaga University. As a lawyer, he defended minorities and fought for civil rights, supporting the NAACP and often taking on police, prosecutors, and other local government officials.

By the mid-1960s, Maxey was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, which he saw as unjust and unnecessary and as unfairly impacting African Americans who were drafted into the military at disproportionate rates. Maxey admired Jackson’s domestic views, especially his support for labor, and had worked for Jackson in his first three Senate campaigns. But he abhorred the senator’s support for the war and the draft and his opposition to military spending cuts.

Maxey’s criticism of Jackson was biting. He called him “a Napoleonic little senator,” denounced Jackson’s “platform of a continued draft that kills sons and brothers,” and stated, “Leaving peace in the hands of Henry Jackson is like leaving a lion to guard the Sunday roast” (Prochnau and Larsen, 314).

Attacks Sting, but Jackson Wins Easily

The Maxey forces shocked Jackson and the party establishment by winning the endorsement of the King County Democratic Convention, held in May during the uproar over the Cambodia incursion and Kent State, and by enacting an anti-war, anti-draft platform at the state party convention held in July in Spokane. Jackson was shaken and angered when a demonstration by Maxey delegates disrupted his speech at the Spokane convention.

The repudiation of his positions in the party platform and the harsh attacks, demonstrations, and heckling he endured on the campaign trail embittered Jackson toward his opponents within the party. Despite his liberal domestic record, he increasingly positioned himself as a moderate, declaring frequently “I’m proud of the fact that during my term in the Senate I opposed both McCarthys” (Prochnau and Larsen, 319) — a reference linking anti-war Eugene McCarthy to anti-communist Republican Joe McCarthy who led the witch hunts of the 1950s.

While the attacks by Maxey and the anti-war forces stung Jackson they did not reduce his support among primary voters and may even have increased it, given Washington’s blanket primary system that allowed Republicans to vote in the Democratic race. Jackson beat Maxey in all 39 counties, winning re-nomination with 497,309 votes to the challenger’s 79,201. However, Maxey far out-distanced the remaining seven primary candidates, which included two other Democrats and five Republicans. State Senator Charles Elicker gained the Republican nomination with only 33,262 votes, a showing that foreshadowed Jackson’s record-setting victory over Elicker in the November general election.

Sources:

Abstract of Votes, Primary Election Held on September 15, 1970 (Olympia: Secretary of State, 1970); Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 218-21; William W. Prochnau and Richard W. Larsen, A Certain Democrat: Senator Henry M. Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 6-10, 310-21; Bill Morlin, “Spokane Loses a Champion: Carl Maxey – 1924-1997 He Defended Civil Rights and Controversial Clients,” The Spokesman-Review, July 18, 1997, p. A-1; Jim Camden, “Principles Governed His Politics: Maxey Embraced Long-shot Challenges for Chance to Influence Public Debate,” Ibid., July 18, 1997, p. A-8; “Jackson Says: Party Planks Repudiated,” Ibid., September 17, 1970, p. 7; “Favorites Win in Contests for Congress,” The Seattle Times, September 16, 1970, p. A-1; Marsha King, “Maxey Was An Inspiration: Black Attorney’s Example of Activism Cherished,” Ibid., July 18, 1997, website accessed August 13, 2003 (http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com); David Wilma, “Weeks of protests erupt in Seattle beginning on May 1, 1970 against U.S. entry into Cambodia and to protest the killing of four Kent State students,” HistoryLink.org Timeline Library (www.historylink.org). By Kit Oldham, October 29, 2003

Henry (Scoop) Jackson (1912-1983), 1970

Photo by Paul Thomas, Courtesy MOHAI (Image No. 1986.5.51941.1)

Carl Maxey (1924-1997), 1965

Photo from The Spokesman-Review via www.historylink.org

1986 — (quote) The Spokane Police Department’s Gypsy File, a document half an inch thick, has determined that crime constitutes our very culture: “scams, theft and confrontations with law enforcement officials is a way of life with Gypsies” (dated 1986, on page 9). (end quote) http://www.radoc.net:8088/RADOC-31-PROFILING.htm

[Recently, as they harassed a Hispanic woman in the Spokane Valley, Spokane Vally Police and Spokane Sheriff's Deputies referred to an Asian-American fast gas owner on Broadway in the Spokane Valley as a "Gypsy" and a "Hindu". Police racism in the Spokane area is an undeniable fact, verifiable simply by speaking with members of minority communities in the area].

Spokane Police officer: “I have a job…to get these shit bags out of the park”

You may have read the Spokesman-Review article about the September 19, 2007 forum/chat with Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick. The article referred to Carmen Jacoby, an outreach worker from the Community Health Association of Spokane (CHAS).

I was present at the forum when Jacoby told of being on a “bridge walk” with WSU nursing students at the 4th and Monroe Bridge Park. She described how a Spokane Police officer showed up. Jacoby told Chief Kirkpatrick and the public how she attempted to ask the officer a question to which he responded, “Who are you?”

Jacoby answered the officer, at which point he told her, “I have a job to do. I have to get these shit bags out of the park“.

Offended by the officer’s remark, Jacoby asked the officer for his badge number. The officer then told her to move back or he would put her in the back of his patrol car.

The Spokesman-Review’s report on Jacoby’s statement to the Chief at the forum reads, “Jacoby said the officer used an obscenity to refer to the homeless”.

The obscenity used by the officer to refer to the homeless was “shit bags“.

Chief Kirkpatrick is known for promoting her “zero tolerance policy” on misconduct. Apparently it does not apply either to calling citizens “shit bags” (or “faggots” for that matter) nor does it extend to threatening to put community professionals in the back of your patrol car for asking for your badge number.

Would it be exaggerating to say that the Chief’s once impressive little PR line about “zero tolerance” and her other little ditty about “you lie, you die” are starting to sound a little hollow?

The Washington State Bar Association publication Law and Politics (June/July 2003) ran an article entitled “Gaining and Retaining Diversity: How well do law firms keep their promise of a diverse environment?” by Paul Freeman.

The article and graphic were based on a survey of Washington State law firms conducted by the Washington State Latina/o Bar Association, the Loren Miller Bar Association, and the Asian Bar Association of Washington.

Several law firms did not respond, among them Spokane based firms Lukins & Annis, P.S. (35 attorneys); Witherspoon, Kelley, Davenport, and Toole, P.S (50 attorneys); and Paine, Hamblen, Coffin, Brooke & Miller, LLC (55 attorneys).

It is not difficult to see why these firms would not have responded to the survey.

A look 5 years later at the websites for these large Spokane-based law firms shows that they have no attorneys of non-European ethnicity whatsoever. (On the WKDT and PHCBM websites you will have to click on the names of the individual attorneys.)

And this despite the presence of a well-known Jesuit law school — Gonzaga — in Spokane.

This non-diverse reality is reflected throughout the Spokane professional, political, educational, and arts communities. While more than one in ten residents of Spokane is of a diverse ethnic background, that reality is not seen in the offices of government, medicine, law, business, education, social work, religion, or virtually anything else in this community.

The consequences in the application of justice are seen in on the streets and in the court room as recently seen in a well-publicized Spokane court case revealing blatantly racist statements by Spokane jurors regarding an attorney of Asian heritage.

The consequences in the emergency room and in doctors’ offices are experienced on a daily basis by patients who do not receive language appropriate services required under the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and other provisions of law. In Spokane these failures to comply with the law happen on a daily and flagrant basis. As a result, adverse outcomes and deaths have occurred), conditions have been misdiagnosed, and much humiliation and abuse has been suffered (as in the death of 9-year-old Rocio Rodriguez, for example.)

The consequences in the class room are that non-English speaking students do not receive notice of extracurricular and enrichment activities and access to musical instruments in their parents’ languages and thus talented and worthy children are excluded from participation. Beyond that, the larger community and society is denied the fruits of their talents and abilities.

Given that most, if not all, of these matters of access, equity, and justice must be adjudicated in the final instance through the legal system, the lack of diversity in the Spokane legal profession, from law school, to law practice, to public service law agencies, to court room has long-lasting repercussions on the lives of people in Spokane and raises fundamental questions of access to justice which should be matters of major concern for everyone involved in civil rights in Spokane and the betterment of our minority communities.

The time for change in Spokane is long since past. Why has change not come?

Could the answer be “entrenched racism”?

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Spokane County Bar Association diversity page

“…people are never forthright with their prejudices … rarely, if ever, will people disclose that”. – Spokane County Superior Court Judge Robert D. Austin

Jurors’ name-calling prompts new trial

By Karen Dorn Steele

The Spokesman-Review

A Spokane County Superior Court judge has ordered a new trial in a medical malpractice case where a Spokane attorney of Japanese descent was repeatedly referred to as “Mr. Kamikaze” and other racially charged names during jury deliberations.

Judge Robert D. Austin said he was surprised when he received attorney Mark D. Kamitomo’s motion for a new trial in mid-December, based in part on the racial comments.

“We’d hoped we’d moved beyond this, and we apparently have not.

It’s upsetting,” a visibly emotional Austin said during a court hearing Friday. Austin said he could not be confident the jury verdict that went against Kamitomo’s client and cleared a local doctor of negligence was not a result of juror misconduct.

“We have uncontested affidavits that these remarks were made. It’s an expression of prejudice to Mr. Kamitomo’s ethnicity,” Austin said.

The trial verdict was read on Dec. 7 – the 66th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

According to Jack Marchant and Mark Costigan, two jurors who approached Kamitomo after the verdict, five other jurors – three women and two men – mocked Kamitomo during their closed-door proceedings. They called him names including “Mr. Kamikaze,” “Mr. Miyashi” and “Mr. Miyagi,” a character in the movie “The Karate Kid.”

One juror also said that because the verdict was going to be read on Pearl Harbor day, the remarks made about Kamitomo were “almost appropriate,” according to Costigan’s affidavit.

In a second affidavit filed Jan. 14, Marchant, a Washington State University professor in Spokane, says affidavits weren’t obtained from two jurors, Patricia Menke and Zorana Beerbohm, who used Asian nicknames to refer to Kamitomo.

“To the best of my recollection, these two individuals and Brenda Canfield, who has admitted to referring to Mr. Kamitomo in her Affidavit as ‘Mr. Miyashi,’ were the three female jurors,” Marchant said in his affidavit. Juror Steven Walther referred to Kamitomo as “Mr. Havacoma,” showing a “lack of objectivity,” Marchant said.

Dr. Nathan P. Stime was the Spokane doctor cleared of malpractice charges by the jury’s “no negligence” finding. His attorney, Brian Rekofke, obtained affidavits from seven jurors as part of his motion opposing a new trial.

Those jurors didn’t deny the names were used, but they said they were used not as racial insults but because they had trouble pronouncing the names of both Rekofke and Kamitomo.

That’s implausible, Austin said, noting that no juror affidavits reported any “bastardization” of Rekofke’s “Middle European” name.

“Frankly, I can’t conceive of people seriously undertaking their responsibility and using those kinds of nicknames when it’s one-sided,” Austin said.

Rekofke asked Austin to bring the jurors into court and question them about their comments.

“The jurors are very upset they are being called a racist jury. They’d like to be heard,” Rekofke said.

Austin rejected that request. “What if they say, ‘I’m not a racist’? What does that do for me?” Austin asked.

He noted that in the history of discrimination cases in the United States, “people are never forthright with their prejudices … rarely, if ever, will people disclose that.”

When the new trial of Darlene and Bill Turner v. Stime is scheduled, Austin said, he’ll need to determine a way to directly address the issue of Kamitomo’s ethnicity during voir dire, the process of selecting a jury.

“At a new trial, we’re going to have a difficult time talking to jurors about Mr. Kamitomo’s ethnicity. But it will be discussed,” he said.

After the hearing, Kamitomo said he was happy with Austin’s ruling. “The judge paid attention and did the right thing,” he said.

Kamitomo grew up in southern Alberta and graduated from Gonzaga Law School in 1989. He also practices in Honolulu.

His father, Doug Kamitomo, was 8 when his family was seized in Vancouver, B.C., and relocated to a Canadian internment camp after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor.

Dr. Yakubu Saaka, former Foreign Minister of Ghana presents ‘The Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah and It’s Implications for the Future of Africa’

Date: Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Monroe 205

Dr. Yakubu Saaka is currently a professor of African American studies at Oberlin College. Before joining Oberlin, Dr. Saaka was a Member of Parliament in his native Ghana and served for four years as a deputy foreign minister. Dr. Saaka is an accomplished scholar and has published in many areas such as politics, literature, and culture.

Presentations are free and open to Eastern students, faculty, staff, and the Cheney & Spokane community.

(Originally posted at Eastern Washington University Diversity website)

[Listen to Dr. Nkrumah's 1960 UN Speech]

According to the 2005 Newsroom Diversity report produced by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Spokesman-Review newspaper — the daily newspaper monopoly in Spokane, Washington — is doing better than many of its peers in the industry but still has a minority newsroom staff disproportionately small in relationship to the diversity of its readership.

If the weekly VOX newspaper — a Spokesman-Review production edited and written by Spokane area high school students — is seen as part of the S-R’s efforts to develop the newsroom of the future at the Spokesman-Review, one can see why the Spokesman’s newsroom fails to reflect the diversity of the Spokane region, however small that regional diversity is. And one can see why, unless pro-active measures are taken by Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith and his staff, the Spokesman will continue to lag in the area of diversity and the ability to see the world from what Spokane homeless and GLBT advocate Dr. John “Gus” Olsen calls “the perspective of other”.

A look at the editorial membership of the VOX is very revealing. A quick look down the left side of The Vox Box blog page reveals the 17 faces — 16 students and one faculty — who make up the VOX editorial staff. A discussion on diversity on the The Vox Box last year resulted in a call from one student for me to be banned from not only that blog but from all Spokesman-Review blogs (“How much of an issue is diversity in Spokane” — part 1 and part 2 at The Vox Box.)

To his credit, Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith was able to acknowledge and clearly articulate what the overwhelmingly white staff of the VOX could not understand or acknowledge: that diversity in the newsroom is crucial to democratic society and to the ability of a publication to report on, much less understand, the world in which we live. Some of Mr. Smith’s thinking on the matter, including a vow by Smith that in the future the VOX staff will be more diverse, can be found at this post entitled “Diversity in the News” at the S-R’s News is a Conversation blog.

[For those who are unaware, it bears pointing out that Steve Smith is considered a "trailblazer" and a maverick in the journalism business. He is a figure of considerable importance and notice in the world of newspaper publishing for his innovations and explorations of the "transparent newsroom" and "interactive dialogue", as well as for experimentation in how to integrate the world of the newsprint paper with that of electronic "print" news.]

American Society of Newspaper Editors — Resource on Diversity in Journalism

Freedom Forum — For newspapers to reflect their communities, newsroom staffs and the stories they cover should closely mirror the diversity of the population in the newspapers’ circulation areas. The Freedom Forum is charting an aggressive course to identify, recruit and train people of color for journalism careers.

PBS Online NewsHour — Newspaper editors across the country assert that they’re trying to achieve a better racial balance on their staffs, but many journalists of color say they’re still underrepresented at work.

[The following information comes from the website of the Washington State University Library's Civil Rights Oral History Collection. The website contains links to two hours worth of audio-taped interviews on the racism and race relations in Spokane, Washington.]

The Collection:

In February of 2001, the Spokesman-Review produced a month long series of articles on black history titled “Through Spokane’s Eyes Moments in Black History,” focusing in particular on the civil rights movement of the 1960s. As part of that series, Rebecca Nappi conducted a series of interviews with individuals with ties to both the civil rights movement and to Spokane. The guide to this collection may now be found in the Manuscripts section of MASC under the number Cage 683.

The Oral Histories:

Jerrelene Williamson relates her sense of the civil rights movement in Spokane to events in Alabama. Emelda and Manuel Brown talk about their experiences with racial prejudice while raising a family in Spokane, Washington in the 1960s. Clarence Freeman discusses his reaction to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the reaction of the community of Spokane. He also talks briefly about a childhood experience with prejudice in Spokane. Sam Minnix describes the scene during a civil rights demonstration at the Spokane County Courthouse on Friday March 26, 1965. Verda Lofton relates her impression of the same March 26, 1965 Spokane protest. Flip Schulke describes about his experiences photographing race related stories in the south. He mentions photographing the admission of the first black student, James Meredith, into the University of Mississippi. The influence the assassination on Martin Luther King had on the protests and marches is also described. He finishes by discussing the differences between the youth of the 60s and the youth of today, and the legacy of the protest movements. Alvin Pitmon talks about his experiences with prejudice in Arkansas during the forced integration of schools in the 1960s. He discusses his feelings towards Dr. Martin Luther King and the influence Dr. King had on him. Nancy Nelson sings two civil rights spirituals: My Lord, What a Morning and Let Us Break Bread Together.

[Note: Several years ago, while working as a diversity recruiter for the state of Washington, I had the opportunity to hear Jane Elliott speak in Seattle. Her "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise was stunning when she did it nearly 40 years ago. Her reflections on race -- including her view that white women have ridden their "minority" status to greater stature in U.S. society without looking back to offer a hand up to their minority brothers and sisters -- are powerful, compelling, and important. -- Blog author]

Jane Elliott Developed Famous ‘Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes’ Exercise

Jane Elliott, internationally renowned teacher, diversity trainer and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, will speak in Spokane three times in Spokane on February 14 and February 15, 2008.

* Thursday, Feb. 14, 8:30 -11:30 a.m., at Spokane Community College’s Lair Auditorium

* Friday, Feb. 15, 9 a.m.- noon, at Gonzaga University’s Cataldo Hall, Globe Room

* Friday, Feb. 15, 7 p.m., in the Lair Auditorium of Spokane Community College

Elliott will expose prejudice and bigotry as representative of an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. Those who think this does not apply to them may be in for a rude awakening.

In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. nearly 40 years ago, Elliott devised the controversial and startling, “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise. This powerful exercise, which is now famous, labels participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.

For more information contact Ann Price via e-mail or at (509) 323-3667.

[Contest begins January 28th and ends March 1st, 2008]

Ten winners will be chosen from all essays submitted to the contest. Each winning essayist will receive a $5,000 scholarship to a participating black college or university.

All 10 winners will be honored at an awards Luncheon to be held Monday, March 31st in Little Rock, Arkansas. Words of Wisdom spokesperson and esteemed poet and author, Dr. Maya Angelou, will personally present each winner with their scholarship. Additionally, Ruban Studdard will perform for the winners and their guest at an exclusive concert.

The Words of Wisdom essay contest is open to current and prospective students* of America’s participating black colleges and universities. Click here for a list of participating black colleges and universities.
* Fall 2008 full-time enrollment will be verified by Alltel prior to the awarding of scholarship prizes.

• Essays must be 600-800 words and must be the original work of the submitting author.
• Contest begins January 28th and ends March 1st, 2008.
• Contestants have until midnight on March 1st to submit their essays.

Complete contest rules

Dr. Tom Jeannot — Gonzaga University’s brilliant radical philosopher — spoke on the morning of February 2, 2008 at the monthly Spokane Humanist breakfast in north Spokane. These were his passionate and timely words:

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Permanent war and the illusion of democracy

I’d like to begin by thanking Bart Haggin for inviting me back again to the Humanist Breakfast. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken in public, and since I tend to sound like a broken record, I hope I’ll have something new to say this morning. Since Bart extended the invitation, I hope to address, if not quite directly, a topic about which he’s been thinking, speaking, and writing for some time now, namely, power, which he broadly divides into three great kinds: the military and police power of the state; the economic power of the captains of industry and finance; and, not as an afterthought but the key to it all, is popular power, the power of the organized people themselves. Bart is confident that through organizing, which he holds to be the hardest but the most important work we can do, people’s power can resist and even overcome the pernicious effects of an increasingly militarized national security state, both domestically and abroad; and of the political economy of the few-oligarchs or plutocrats-arrayed against the many, ordinary working people and their diminishing expectations, facing as they are the mounting threats against so much as a modicum of economic and financial security, their wages declining, their hours longer, their benefits precarious, their pensions vanished, their homes threatened with foreclosure, teetering on the edge of personal bankruptcy, living paycheck to paycheck, the costs of healthcare and education soaring in a seemingly endless inflationary spiral, and all of the impacts of petroleum, still traded in dollars, selling at $100 a barrel.

It’s not that I think Bart is wrong about organizing, but the people in their large numbers, the working-class majority, confront a hard-fought uphill battle, and it’s difficult to see, in the short term, how reality could be on their side, against the increasing colonization and domestication of our lives by the forces of state-administration, the political economy of globalized capital, and the adjutants of capital in the culture industry and corporate media who operate a propaganda machine that would have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels. (This is sometimes called “the news.”)

Our soul-wearying, life-sapping Age of Reagan grinds on, as well as the world-historical reality to which this Age arose in reaction of a global race to the bottom in the epoch of state-capitalism. Unless you’re independently wealthy, this is the treadmill you’re on, like it or not. Being on a treadmill might not be so bad by itself, we’re well enough accustomed and nicely habituated to the daily grind of our lives, except that it has a destination or an eschatological horizon that can only evoke our horror or terror the moment we pause in our plodding, heads bowed low, to turn our gaze towards the fate we may not be able to avert, of thermonuclear holocaust and ecological collapse, which are the final destinations of advanced industrial, state-capitalist, bourgeois society.

To which the answer might be a platitude on the lips of a George W. Bush or a Newt Gingrich, the classic triple play. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who not coincidentally was a member of the Nazi Party, famously said in his interview with Der Spiegel, which he gave on the condition that it be published only posthumously (as it was in May of 1976, a decade after he gave it), “Only a god can save us now.” For a Bush or a Gingrich, such a divinity, essentially the opposite of what Heidegger had in mind, is nevertheless held to be sacred: technological innovation, what’s called “the entrepreneurial spirit” or “the American genius of free enterprise,” and the theology of what goes by a euphemism worthy of the Pentagon, virginally springing from the head of our latter-day Zeus — Zeus now disguised and donning the garb of the professional economist — only more like the Gorgon Medusa than the goddess of wisdom herself: namely, the so-called “free market,” which allegedly, like a force of nature, dispenses its blessings and disposes over all things. Technology, entrepreneurship, and the structural adjustment programs of neoliberalism might hold the keys to the kingdom — I think it says somewhere in the New Testament, “Thou art Milton Friedman, upon this rock I build my church” — but a betting person, back to the wall in this winter of 2008, might not be willing to bet the farm. If this answer proves correct, by the way, and I’m entirely wrong in my self-assigned role of Chicken Little, it won’t much matter whether the next Commander-in-Chief is Hillary Obama or Mitt McCain, or whether Silvio Berlusconi is restored to power in Italy or Nicolas Sarkozy succeeds or fails in imposing an “American model” on French national life, or whether Ehud Olmert resigns or holds his fragile coalition together in Israel, or whether Osama bin Laden is captured “dead or alive.” The wisdom of Margaret Thatcher might be the wisdom of this age, who said, “There is no alternative.” Or Francis Fukuyama may be right after all with his euphoric prediction at the end of the Cold War that we have at last arrived to the end of history and all people want in Indonesia is Playstation 3. But I suppose it would be redundant to say that this is not where I’m placing my bet.

In which case, something else truly grim appears, our dire national emergency, about which the American psyche seems so strangely complacent, whether we indulge our taste for the daily newspaper, or Katie Couric, or the slightly more highbrow Snooze Hour or NPR. The campus where I teach is eerily sanitized, like the Skywalk or the Northtown or the Valley Mall. Or I push my cart down the aisles of Fred Meyer or some other mega-store adrift in the daydream of my solipsistic bubble, having pulled into the mega-parking lot provided for my convenience as the sole occupant of my four-door sedan. Safely insulated from Jena, Louisiana, from Baghdad and New Orleans, from Kabul and Kinshasa, Nairobi and Mogadishu, the Gaza Strip and the refugee camps, inner-city Detroit and the suburbs of Paris, the outskirts of Mexico City and shantytown Soweto, the slave-labor cities of China and the sweatshops of Bangladesh and Honduras, the daily grinding poverty of Peshawar and East L.A., I swipe the magnetic strip of my plastic card and load my baubles into the trunk of my car. Like the man who jumped off the Empire State Building, I pass the fiftieth floor and tell myself so far, it’s going pretty well. After all, I have everything that James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, joked that any Black person would want, before he was forced to resign in disgrace, as if the pervasive racism of our society could be quarantined in the person of a single evangelical Christian who watches and waits with his Zionist cohort for the second coming of Christ, blazing in glory no doubt, like Slim Pickens astride a nuclear warhead, aimed not at the Temple Mount but Teheran, where the Evil Empire has since relocated its demonic headquarters.

Now this much is merely confessional and not the social science, the critical theory of society you’ve turned out to hear this morning. Thinking of my point of departure as I was driving home from the airport after a blistering weekend in Chicago, having only hours before cabbed my way across the devastated south side of that great American city, I was forcefully reminded that it was the national holiday in honor of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. when a public affairs program on KYRS re-broadcast the famous speech now known as “Beyond Vietnam,” the breaking of his silence of perhaps the greatest American figure of the latter half of the twentieth century. Thinking of the U.S. war of aggression on the peoples of Southeast Asia, in the totality of its meaning and implications, Dr. King urged that the great need of that hour, which neither Lyndon Johnson nor Hillary Clinton seems to have heeded, was in his words a “radical revolution of values.” It was King the revolutionary now speaking and not the plaster-of-paris saint whose grandiloquence we have come to prefer in the diction, say, of a Barack Obama. It was this King who quoted a Buddhist monk as follows:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism…

It was this King, addressing his auditors there at the Riverside Church in New York, who quoted “the late John F. Kennedy,” the murdered President whose words, King said, have now “come back to haunt us….[:] ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’” This revolutionary King whose path would lead him to Memphis as surely as Christ went down to Jerusalem had come to the meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned on April 4, 1967 in order to warn the peaceniks there that:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…, we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

At the Humanist Breakfast this morning, we will surely grant Dr. King his measure of poetic license in order to say that the “calling” of the “sons [and daughters] of the living God” denotes the humanity inscribed in the essential meaning of humanism, the churchgoers then knowing as surely as we know today that, in King’s words, the “recent statements of [the] executive committee [of Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam] are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: ‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam” (emphasis mine).

A time comes when silence is betrayal, even as we march and rally “without end” in the futility of public protest, corralled as we are in the Bush Adminstration’s “free speech zones,” which are really the cattle pens of our irrelevance. For it is the immeasurably sad truth of the American polity forty years after Riverside that no “significant and profound change” has occurred “in American life and policy,” King’s call for revolution having fallen on deaf ears and the hearts of stone of what our friend Brad Read once a week calls the Zombie Nation. (You can listen to Brad and his guests on the KYRS public affairs program, “Zombie Nation,” airing live at 11 on Saturday mornings and re-broadcast Tuesday afternoons at 3.)

At Riverside, King said,

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered….

Yet our social life forty years later is even more cast in the pattern of what the Hassidic Jew, mystic and philosopher Martin Buber called the “I-It” relation, as distant from the “I-Thou” relation as the Colville Confederated Tribes Reservation and the Spokane Indian Reservation are from the Couer D’Alene Hotel Golf and Spa Resort, whose website informs us that they “have mastered the art of relaxation,” offering “luxurious accommodations, rejuvenating spa treatments, sumptuous cuisine, and breathtaking holiday displays,…the destination of choice for discerning travelers worldwide.” Presumably one can find there too an emperor who fiddles while a ring of fire encircles the globe. Don’t get me wrong, I like luxurious accommodations and sumptuous cuisine as much as the next guy and gal, and they are often on my mind as I push my cart through the solipsistic bubble of my private reveries, every bit as much a zombie as the strangers to my right and left may or may not be, as fascinated by “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” as President Bush told me I should be in his rousing speech to the nation right after the September 11 attacks, asking not what my country can do for me but what I can do for my country; to wit: “Go shopping.”

Thinking that I would make Dr. King’s speech at the Riverside Church my point of departure for this talk this morning, I had in mind the triple evil he called out by name on April 4, 1967. But when I listened to that speech on my way into town from the airport, I thought for sure he had named “racism, economic exploitation, and militarism” as the hydra-headed monstrosity disfiguring the image of America and situating it in the antipodes of “the right side of the world revolution,” its polar opposite, not merely counter-revolutionary but the very bastion and emblem of reaction. Instead, at Riverside, King called out “extreme materialism” as the middle term mediating its monstrous twins, racism and militarism. That it was not “economic exploitation” he said at Riverside troubled me for reasons I don’t have the time to explain this morning, except to say that “extreme materialism” and “economic exploitation” are not in fact synonyms, and one might just as well hear Focus on the Family or the malevolent Pat Robertson decry the evils of “materialism” from their televangelical and mega-church pulpit, a bully pulpit if ever there was one to overawe the originator’s, that other great imperialist and prophet of manifest destiny, the rough-rider Theodore Roosevelt, whose butchery in the Philippines set the archetypal pattern for the American Century to come. I was disturbed enough by the non-coincidence of terms to look into it more deeply, which is how I discovered what you probably already know, that King had given two speeches damning the carnage in Vietnam in that April of 1967, and that the speech that was broadcast on KYRS was not the Riverside speech at all of April 4, but the speech he gave from his hometown pulpit, the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on April 30. On April 4, he did single out “extreme materialism,” the damning expression that might fall from the lips of any preacher or priest, even a fascist’s.

Whole paragraphs of the April 30 speech repeat April 4 verbatim, but it’s in the April 30 speech that he substitutes “economic exploitation.” I’m not a King scholar and so I can’t say why he shifted his terms in speeches otherwise so nearly identical that the KYRS host confused the one for the other, except that it constitutes a striking and important difference in meaning. An orator as brilliant as King does not line up his terms and relations randomly or accidentally. Their precise order matters, and it matters to get it right. In the syllogistic reasoning King would have mastered through the course of his doctoral studies at Harvard and Boston University, the middle term is crucial. At Riverside, King linked racism to militarism through the middle term of “extreme materialism,” but I’ll venture the guess that the ambiguity and vagueness of this expression bothered him and he searched for a language more precise, less equivocal, and closer to home of the message he sought to convey. As it happened, just the right term occurred to him by April 30, and it was “economic exploitation,” the precise expression to characterize a social universe of “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights,” a “thing-oriented” and not a “person-oriented” society, which not by accident was racist and militarist to its core. King’s purpose was to indict the very foundations of the society he loved, in much the same way as the poet he quoted, “that black bard of Harlem,” Langston Hughes, who had written: “O, yes, I say it plain/ America never was America to me/ and yet I swear this oath–/ America will be!” Such an America to be, known deep in the souls of black folk, whose own freedom struggle is the signal beacon of any shining city on a hill, is nothing less than the opposite and the negation of an America that “never was America to me”: or in King’s words, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death….”

That condition of spiritual death has already descended on the Zombie Nation we have finally and actually become: not the people but their masters, and not their masters in the form of proper names, but the mastery of a finely honed killing machine whose death grip has us all by the throat and is choking us to death. There is a terrible logic at work whose origin we could trace all the way back to the primal genocidaire named Christopher Columbus. To come closer to our own time, however, Chalmers Johnson has recently revived the category of “military Keynesianism,” the final solution to the crisis of capital accumulation and the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit that nearly destroyed the capitalist mode of production in the aftermath of the stock market collapse in October of 1929. But capitalism is nothing if not resilient: the shift from nineteenth-century laissez faire to state capitalism took three discrete forms in the 1930s: Stalinism, fascism, and the liberal welfare state of the other Roosevelt’s New Deal, all three of which essentially relied on massive rearmament and the total mobilization of society for permanent war.

If the fascist and Stalinist forms were consigned to the dustbin of history, the modern liberal welfare state appeared to have survived unscathed, regenerating accumulation and giving rise to the greatest economic expansion known to humanity, lasting roughly from 1945 to the deep recession of 1974-75, when the next accumulation crisis nearly shipwrecked the nation-state project a second time in the course of less than half a century, presaged by the oil crisis of 1973. As News & Letters made the crucial point in its August-September 2007 issue, “Since the mid-1970s, it has become clear that welfare state policies conflict with the expansionary requirements of capitalist value production. This has eliminated the economic basis of progressive liberalism. The Social Democratic or liberal Left has proven unable to effectively challenge the Right because the objective basis upon which its policies were predicated has seriously eroded.” In other words, the abiding significance of the Reagan-Thatcher years was the state decision, in Bill Clinton’s words, to bring an end to “welfare as we know it.”

Welfare-state liberalism, based on Keynesian economic theory and policy, is no longer viable today, necessitating the austerity measures that are wrecking the lives of working people everywhere, not only in the U.S. but around the globe. With the triumph of the Chicago School, Keynes is dead in every respect but the only one that truly mattered: military spending and the deepening militarization of the whole of society. This has little or nothing to do with who is the Commander-in-Chief or which political party momentarily has the upper hand. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, however, a thorny ideological problem came to the fore, the solution to which was a matter of no small consequence in order to forestall what the German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas aptly named a “legitimation crisis.” The voluntary compliance of the citizenry has proven to be necessary, which in turn can be secured only if Oceania is permanently at war with Eurasia and Eastasia. To this end, slogans are necessary, and after “Crusade” failed to pass muster with the early focus groups, fortunately, “freedom and democracy” were near at hand.

Living in what Michel Foucault, quoting Jeremy Bentham, called the “panopticon,” an ideal prison in which the prisoner is subject to a surveillance so total that no watchman or guard is necessary, the society we live in today has at last metamorphosed into what the American philosopher Jeffrey Paris calls “the carceral society,” a society for which a massive prison-industrial complex, the Bagram prison in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, and the concentration camp at Guantanamo, an official state policy of torture and so-called “extraordinary renditions,” a doctrine of the “unitary executive,” and the suspension of habeas corpus are prerequisites. Likewise pandemic racism and militarism.

Only a few brief years ago, the nation-state project of the U.S. was “hegemony,” to use the term that Chomsky took from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: unrivalled economic, geopolitical, and military supremacy. As of the winter of 2008, however, as we twist in the gale-force winds of still another accumulation crisis, the U.S. has become the largest debtor nation in the world, and geopolitically, King’s prophecy taken from a Buddhist monk has come to pass as people around the world revile the US and see naked imperialism for what it is. This means that the only card the US has left to play is its unparalleled military might, the only arena in which Keynes still has a purchase, which is steadily bankrupting us at the same time the Commander-in-Chief invokes the specter of World War III. Apparently, the drive to permanent war requires the formation of a national-security state, hostile in every way to whatever vestige of “democracy” there still may be.

It’s hard today to believe that Langston Hughes’s oath would still be worthwhile taking, and yet it’s equally hard and nearly impossible to see any other way out. Martin Luther King was a revolutionary, and the time for revolution is now, just in case it’s not already too late. How far Clinton, Obama, McCain, or Romney are from any of this is also the measure of the illusion democracy has become. It seems to me that when King substituted “economic exploitation,” he knew what he was saying. I’m not suggesting that King was a Marxist, although this has been alleged by the John Birch Society and J. Edgar Hoover. But the exploitation of labor-power is the engine of surplus value, self-expanding value is the goal of the system, people are reduced to equipment of the vast economic machine, and I can’t help feeling that our mechanized, routinized lives grow darker by the day when official state policy is a program of mass murder and the time of Dr. King has passed us by.

Tom Jeannot

February 2, 2008

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Read Jeannot’s thoughts on the July 4, 2007 “near police riot” in Riverfront Park as well as reflections by another author on the topic of “What does self-defense against a police riot look like?“

Daniel Beaty, Emergence-SEE!

This highly-acclaimed off Broadway production comes to Spokane for one performance only!

What do centuries of slavery do to the human psyche? And how free are we really at the dawn of the 21^st century? Beaty’s provocative play explores these questions as he portrays a cast of 40 characters including a homeless man, a scientist, a Republican business executive, an 11-year-old boy from the projects, and a slam poet named Rodney, who all weave a stirring commentary on modern black life.

February 27, 2008 7pm Spokane Falls Community College Music Auditorium

(Tickets $15 at TicketsWest, 200 free student tickets will be available in the SUB).

New York Times Theater Review A Ghost Slave Ship Arrives, So Skip the Poetry Slam?

Emergence — SEE — Daniel Beaty at the Apollo Theater (YouTube)

On Point! — Daniel Beaty interviewed by Tom Ashbrook about Emergence — SEE!

Variety Review

Beyond “Diversity”: Challenging Racism in an Age of Backlash

Spokane Falls Community College, March 5, 2007 11:30 t0 12:45 PM SUB Room AB

Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. He will explore how being white creates privilege and the many daily and systemic advantages that come from being a member of the dominant racial group. He’ll also look at the substantial consequences paid by society for the maintenance of such privileges, both the costs to people of color (who by definition cannot generally partake in white privilege) and the costs to whites. Wise will also address the way in which “divide and conquer” tactics have prevented working class whites from joining with people of color to eliminate the inequities that weaken them both.

Wise has spoken to over 300,000 people in 48 states, and on over 350 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale and Columbia. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and conducted trainings with physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. He has trained corporate, government, and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions, and has served as a consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State.In Summer 2005, Wise served as adjunct faculty member of the School of Social Work at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he taught a Master’s level class on Racism in the U.S. In September 2001, Wise served as adjunct faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he trained journalists to eliminate racial bias in reporting.

From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, and in the early ’90s was Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke.

Wise is the author of two books – White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge). He has contributed essays to a dozen books and anthologies including White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism and Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. Wise is also featured in White Men Challenging Racism: Thirty-Five Personal Stories (Duke University Press).

Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award for best feature essay on race issues, and his writings have are taught at hundreds of colleges and have appeared in dozens of popular, professional and scholarly journals. Wise serves as the Race and Ethnicity Editor for LIP Magazine, and articles about his work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a featured guest on hundreds of radio and television programs, worldwide. He appears regularly on the ESPN program “Quite Frankly, with Stephen A. Smith” to discuss racial issues in the world of sports.

Wise has a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, where his anti-apartheid work received international attention and the thanks of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He received training in methods for dismantling racism from the People’s Institute for Survial and Beyond, in New Orleans. He and his wife Kristy are the proud parents of two daughters.

Links Click here for Tim Wise’s latest essay on the Jena 6 and the cost of white complicity – “Complicity Has Its Cost: An Open Letter to Mayor Murphy McMillin of Jena, Louisiana” (October 8, 2007)