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 I’ll always remember
the day I tried to engage in that silly exercise called “speaking
truth to power.” It was early December of 2001. My topic was
American policymakers’ decision to place nearly a million black
people behind bars and to mark more than one in three black
males with a felony record. As a member of a Chicago-based
council of advisers working to help ex-offenders “reintegrate” into
the “free world,” I was invited to a pleasant conference room
to give my thoughts on these matters to Matt Bettenhausen,
Illinois’ "Deputy Governor for Criminal Justice and Public
Safety." Along with eight other council members, I
presented facts and reflections on the vicious circle of
racially disparate
mass incarceration. Among other things, I noted that there
were nearly 20,000 more black males in the Illinois
state prison system than the number of black males enrolled
in the state’s public universities. There were more
black males in the state’s correctional facilities just on drug
charges, I added, than the total number of black
males enrolled as undergraduates in Illinois state universities.
Bettenhausen,
who hails from a local family of accomplished racecar drivers,
arrived in time only for the last talk. He apologized for his
lateness, explaining that he had been meeting with the state’s
Attorney General to discuss the “War On Terrorism.” His eyes
beamed with pride as he told us how much busier he had become
since his appointment as the state’s "first-ever Homeland
Security Coordinator.” With an American flag pin prominently
displayed on his lapel, he regaled us with the latest reports
on the United States military campaign in Afghanistan. He was
clearly relishing his new supposed importance in the battle
between planetary good and evil. "Wow," a fellow
presenter muttered, "he watches CNN."
After thus communicating
the relative insignificance of our issue at this moment
of sweeping global consequence, Bettenshausen told us that
then Illinois governor George Ryan would not be reversing his
recent decision to eliminate higher education and vocational
training for prisoners from the state’s budget. These cuts,
he claimed, were compelled by the "post-September economic
downturn" – a dubious dating of an overdue correction
in the capitalist business cycle.
Tires
squealing, he apologized for racing off to another meeting
related to “the
war on terror.” I was instantly reminded of James Madison’s
comment that "the fetters imposed on liberty at home have
ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against
real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad." Another
phrase also came to mind: plus ca change, plus c’est la
meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay
the same).
“Everything
Changed”
According
to a great national myth propagated by the in-power
right wing War Party
and its allies and enablers in the dominant state-corporate
media, “everything changed” on September 11, 2001. Before 9/11,
this authoritarian narrative runs, Americans lived in peaceful
division, pleasantly but naively stuck in their own little
prosperous domestic spheres. We were cheerfully but innocently
blind to the dangers of a still-precarious world and to the
related greatness and vulnerability of our nation. We
were too preoccupied with our busy little lives to grasp
our creeping
moral decline, epitomized by the sexual transgressions
and lies of Bill Clinton.
Thanks
to 9/11, we have lost our innocence and awakened to
our national magnificence
and the related threats we face from bad people who hate
and envy our freedom and prosperity. United We Stand: we have
transcended old divisions in shared allegiance to the “war
on terrorism” – a new crusade against a new semi-permanent
Evil Other that is the true replacement for Cold War predecessors
in Moscow and Beijing. We have been morally, politically, and
spiritually toughened, unified, and regenerated by violence:
our own and that of our “freedom”-hating enemies.
Racially Disparate
Residential Neo-liberalism
How
curious, then, to pick up the “Metro” section of
a recent (August 6th)
issue of my leading local newspaper – The Chicago
Tribune. The front page contains a photograph
of 15 well-dressed white people relaxing in a plush
and very predominantly Caucasian
North Side neighborhood (Lincoln Park). They are positioned
to permit a photographer to re-create George Seurat’s
late 19th century painting, titled “Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
It’s
a perfect image of bourgeois calm and oblivious, self-satisfied,
imperial repose.
The photograph, the Tribune reports, will be used
for a “recruitment poster” by the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, which does not seem terribly interested in attracting
student’s from the city and metropolitan area’s large African-American
population.
Things
are a bit more stressful in another, blacker part of
town. Further down on
the same page of the same section, we can read the results
of a recent research report on 1,587 African-Americans
living in the decrepit Ida B. Wells housing project
on the city’s
South Side. More than half of the households there have incomes
less than $5,000. Less than a fourth of the heads of those
households are employed. According to the Urban Institute,
1,000 people living at Wells may end up homeless as a result
of the city’s imminent demolition of the project. There’s an
endemic shortage, the Institute notes, of affordable housing
for the project’s residents and indeed for poor people throughout
the city. Only a small number of the displaced will qualify
to live in the “mixed income” dwellings the city will build
where the facility used to sit.
This
is terrible, but it’s an old story. Since the early- and mid-90s, public
authorities have been demolishing public housing projects with
only minimal attention to the needs and limited resources of
predominantly black public housing residents. The Chicago version
is called the “Chicago Housing Authority Transformation Plan,” a
local monument to the market worshipping, privilege-friendly
philosophy of global corporate neo-liberalism. Pushing disadvantaged
inner-city residents and the idea of social justice to the
remote margins of public concern, that philosophy holds that
markets make the best decisions, that social action to improve
your situation is self-defeating and silly, and that the best
and only way to succeed in life is as a sovereign individual
consumer and investor in a “free market society.” Its triumph
was proclaimed “inevitable” (“there is no alternative”)
by leading architects of American policy and opinion long
before
lunatics from a distant US-protected oil sheikdom turned
flying gasoline-filled symbols (and agents) of petroleum-addicted
corporate globalization into weapons of mass destruction.
As
researchers and activists pointed out long before the
jetliner attacks “changed
everything,” the available stock of such housing in Chicago
is insufficient to absorb the displaced public housing population. That
population is “free” to be homeless, thanks to the working
of economic forces that carry social costs of secondary concern
to local policymakers. Those policymakers, including the
Mayor, are beholden to commercial and real estate property
developers
seeking to remove poor black inner city residents from
choice urban investment locations. Those locations are
slated for
predominantly white professionals, who want to live and
shop in proximity to their offices in downtown Chicago,
a leading
headquarters for heavily state-subsidized and global corporations
like the Boeing Corporation, which equips such marvelous
adventures in democratic free-market progress as the terrorist
occupation
of Palestine (1948 to the present) and the bombings of
Baghdad (both pre- and post-9/11) and (pre-9/11) Belgrade.
Correctional
Continuities
Another
story on the exact same Tribune page also indicates
that some situations remain “normal” in the post-September
11 era. It notes that
seven inmates, mostly black, were recently beaten with
pool cues by guards at the city’s giant Cook County Jail. How
pre-9/11: this is the third such high-profile incident
reported in the last four years at Cook County. The
latest revelations come just days after Cook County
States’ Attorney
Richard Devine – notorious in the black community for
his habit of putting innocent African-Americans on
death row – announced
that he would not file charges in connection with the
beating of five shackled Cook County inmates in July
2000. Meanwhile,
federal investigators are conducting a civil-rights
violation investigation into an alleged mass beating
involving 40 guards
at the same jail in 1999.
Last
July, the Chicago public was momentarily
shocked – these
things pass, as the media moves on – to learn of
a terrible accident on Interstate 57, south of
Chicago. Several blacks and Hispanics were
critically injured and two died when a van rolled over
while carrying
18 Chicagoans to visit loved ones warehoused in racially
disparate mass penitentiaries located in the southern
part of Illinois.
Terrible, but not new: on January 26th of
2001, almost 9 months before “everything changed,” a
Salvation Army van carrying eleven people on Interstate
55 south of Chicago
collided with a tractor-trailer, killing all ten of
the van’s
passengers and its driver. Ten of the dead were Black
and one was Hispanic. The van was part of a regular
service that took people from Chicago’s
predominantly black West Side to visit
relatives and mates
doing time in state prison.
After
both crashes, nobody in the local media or politics
had much to say about
the relationship between the victims’ race and the nature of
the van’s destination. There were no connections made between
the tragedy and the state’s policy decision to dramatically
increase the number of prisoners in Illinois – mostly black
and from the Chicago area – from 27,000 in 1990 to nearly
47,000 in 2000 (even as crime fell) and its related building
of 11
new mass correctional facilities in Illinois during the
same period; massive job-programs for de-industrialized
downstate
whites that are placed at increasingly vast distances
from the “offenders’” home communities (See Paul Street, The
Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago,
Illinois, and the Nation, Chicago:
Chicago Urban League, October 2002).
Last
Hired, First Fired
Speaking of jobs,
an excellent recent front-page article in the Tribune notes
that mass lay-offs enacted during the curiously “jobless” Bush “recovery” have
hit Chicago’s black population especially hard. Blacks “feel
frozen out of the work world,” as local activist Eddie
Read told the Tribune. The feeling among
black workers and job applicants, the paper explains,
is very different
from
the late 1990s, when increased labor demand significantly
cut black unemployment, even among lesser-skilled
inner city workers. It
is worth noting, however, that the black unemployment rate
(18.2 percent) was more than four times higher than the white
unemployment rate (less than 5 percent) even at the peak of
the “Clinton boom” – which “lifted more yachts than rowboats” as
the Tribune noted last year. Also meriting mention is
the fact that Chicago area job growth in the booming 90s was
dramatically higher in white communities than in black communities
(see The
Color of Job Growth, a 2002 report of the Chicago
Urban League). Here we are dealing with continuities that
go back much further than 9/11. They reach back further than
the Great Depression, when blacks were the “last hired and
first hired” for neither the first nor the last time in American
history.
Ghetto Lives
To
more directly sense the rich continuities of racial
homeland inequality in Chicago
before and after  “everything changed,” you don’t need to read
newspapers or studies. You can drive west out of the city’s
downtown on Madison Avenue, past the stadium that
Michael Jordan built (the United Center) and into
the heart of desperately
impoverished West Side neighborhoods like North
Lawndale and West and East Garfield. A large number
of teen and younger
adult males gather on street corners. Most of them
are part of the city’s large and very disproportionately black concentration – estimated
at 97,000 strong in 2001 by the Center for Labor Market Studies
(Northeastern University) – of “disconnected youth,” 16- to
24-years olds who are both out of school and out of work. Many
of them are clearly enrolled in gang organizations and engaged
in the narcotics trade. Many of them have already served or
will soon serve as raw material for the aforementioned “downstate” prison
industry. Older unemployed males, many unrecorded in the nation’s
official unemployment statistics (their “discouraged” status
means they are no longer actively participating in the
labor force), congregate around liquor stores and missions.
The endemic
stress, disappointment, and danger of inner-city life is
etched on their faces.
Equally
evident is the relative absence of retail facilities,
services, and institutions
that are standard in richer, whiter neighborhoods: full-service
modern grocery stores, drugstores, bookstores, restaurants,
doctors, dentists, lawyers, dry-cleaners, banks, personal
investment and family insurance stores, boutiques,
coffee shops, and much
more. Businesses and homes are visibly dilapidated, with
many of the former relying on hand-painted signs to
advertise their
wares. Local business owners, many of whom are Arab, protect
their enterprises from burglary with bars and gated shutters.
Pawnshops and barebones storefront churches are widely
visible, as are liquor stores and currency exchanges
advertising super-exploitive
Payday loans. Taxicabs are scarce and those that do serve
the neighborhoods are generally low-budget, fly-by-night “jitney” firms.
The
small number of whites seen in these neighborhoods
and their South Side counterparts
are males working in traditional working-class “jobs that pay” – street
and sewer repair, construction trades, firemen, and the like – that
appear to be unavailable to black males.
Police cars cruise
warily, their occupants donning bullet-proof vests deemed necessary
in waging the war on drugs in neighborhoods where people with
felony records outnumber legitimate jobs.
This
is pretty much how these neighborhoods looked and felt
before 9/11. Truth
be told, they look a lot like they did in the 1960s, even
before the riots that are supposed to have taken away their
vitality,
actually stolen by a process of disinvestment that was
already well underway.
Accelerated
Continuity
How
have things changed since 9/11 in these neighborhoods? Simply put, the core continuities
of human suffering and hopelessness have been accelerated. Things
have gotten worse at a quickened pace, thanks in large part
to the racially disparate joblessness of the current recovery.
Also part of the unpleasant equation is 9/11 itself, or more
accurately the official, right-led public and media response
to the terror attacks. September 11th gave the radical-right
Bush junta – falsely labeled conservative – a precious opportunity
to divert public attention away from the causes and consequences
of urban inequality, to starve, cripple, and pre-empt programs
that might alleviate the suffering caused by racism and related
socioeconomic inequality, and to conflate dissent with treason.
These masters of war at home and abroad have seized on the
opportunity with all deliberate speed, consistent with the
timeworn conduct of concentrated power, before and since “everything
changed.” Empire abroad has always been and remains both
reflection and agent of inequality and repression at home.
Paul
Street (e-Mail: [email protected]) is
an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois. His
book Empire Abroad, Inequality at Home: Essays on America
and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers) will
be available next year.
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is published every Thursday. 