The Face of Homelessness

I have been thinking a lot about the homeless for quite awhile now. It is a problem difficult to ignore given the proliferation of people 'living rough,' attested to by the increasingly common tent encampments that are frequently rather gleefully taken down with alacrity by city officials. Are there alternatives? In Toronto, a motion that would have kept warming centres open from November to April was defeated, despite shelter space being at a premium. 

Unquestionably, it is to our collective shame that people are living without a semblance of dignity, dignity they could achieve if we made it a real political issue. 

The poor have no political voice, largely because they don't vote and have no power. Leverage only occurs further up the social scale. But it it would seem far past time that people realize, if not for altruistic reasons, then at least for selfish ones, that the problem of homelessness is everyone's problem. 

Consider the recent, seemingly unprovoked, attacks on people in the street, on the streetcar and in the subway, often in broad daylight. Obviously, those perpetrating the attacks are largely mentally ill, a condition frequently exacerbated, if not caused, by homelessness. 

You can do it for yourself, or you can do it for the collective good. And yes, that would require a reallocation of government resources and/or tax increases for the the well-to-do, something that has become the third rail in politics.

The homeless have a face. Thanks to ESN Parkdale for the following:

Richard was evicted from Lakeshore and Jameson yesterday. His tent and belongings were trashed in front of him, by a large mechanical claw and a group of

@cityoftoronto

workers. They didn’t offer any shelter, because there’s none available (per the City’s own stats).

Food For Thought

I found this on Twitter. Thanks to Michael Warburton for this clip on Mohammed Ali musing about language.

Wasted Opportunities

 

While I have posted now a few times on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's campaign to keep people in abysmal ignorance. there always seems to be something more to say on the topic. My friend Gary alerted me to a new article in The Guardian about the fervent Floridian's campaign to lay waste to young minds, keep them in profound ignorance about American history, and feed red meat to his acolytes.

Last year he signed the Don’t Say Gay bill, a nasty little law that bans classroom discussion of sexuality or gender identity issues – effectively forcing children and teachers alike to stay silent about their families and lives, under the threat of lawsuits. 

Since then, the Florida governor has repeated the playbook in increasingly ambitious fashion. Last April, DeSantis signed the exhaustingly titled “Stop Woke Act,” which restricts lessons on racial inequality in public schools. The bill prohibits the teaching of material that could cause a student to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress,” due to US racial history ...

Indeed, DeSantis seems intent on obstructing anything that might foster greater awareness and critical thinking.

In mid-January, DeSantis’ Department of Education issued new guidance to educators, saying that all books that have not been approved by a state compliance censor – euphemistically termed a “school media specialist” – should be concealed or removed from classrooms. Because the law deems some books “pornographic” or “obscene,” it also creates the possibility that teachers who provide books that feature LGBT content to students could be given third-degree felony charges. 

And, as mentioned in my previous post, he hasn't stopped there. 

Last month, DeSantis announced that he would ban the AP African American studies course, saying that the course, which had initially included readings on Black feminism, the Black queer experience, and the Black Lives Matter movement, violated his Stop Woke Act, and was “pushing an agenda on our kids.” 

Sadly, the College Board cowardly acquiesced in this effort to quell inquiry, and now DeSantis has set his sights even higher.

Last week, the governor announced a sweeping agenda to overhaul the state’s public universities, aiming to make their curricula more conservative by eliminating tenure protections for progressive faculty and requiring courses on “Western Civilization.” He’s started with the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts honors college with an artsy reputation. There, DeSantis installed a new board made up of Christian college administrators, Republican think-tank denizens, and the right-wing online influencer Christopher Rufo. The board promptly fired the college president, and has set about reshaping the mission and instruction of the college in DeSantis’ image.

De Santis's motives in all of this crass obstructionism is transparent.

Schools are spaces where lots of voters – and crucially, lots of the white, conservative voters that DeSantis needs to mobilize – feel they have a stake. It’s easy to get people riled up and panicked about kids, easy to pray on people’s protectiveness towards their children as a way to exploit their anxieties about the future, about a changing culture, about lost innocence. And frankly, it’s easy to get people to be mad at teachers...

And if that weren't bad enough, there is a more sinister interpretation to what he is doing.

... there is a more foundational reason why DeSantis and the far right are attacking education: it is the means by which our young people are made into citizens. Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the experiences and worldviews of others, and learn what will be required of them to live responsible, tolerant lives in a pluralist society.

It is in school where they learn that social hierarchies do not necessarily correspond to personal merit; it is in school where they discover the mistakes of the past, and where they gain the tools not to repeat them. No wonder the DeSantis right, with it’s fear of critique and devotion to regressive modes of domination, seems to hostile to letting kids learn: education is how kids grow up to be the kinds of adults they can’t control.

Education has traditionally been viewed as a tool of liberation from ignorance, of social progress and increased opportunity for all. DeSantis has badly perverted it, lustily cheered on by those who would like to believe that the status quo of the 1950's (or perhaps even further back) worked just fine for everyone who mattered.

 

 

 

The Veil Of Ignorance

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul....

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,

Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,

Infects unseen.

- Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4

The above attests to the destructive, corrosive effects of not confronting one's wrongdoing. The wrongdoing does not go away, but continues to fester beneath the surface, often with severe consequences.

It seems the perfect metaphor to apply to  America's reluctance, and in many cases, refusal, to confront its racism.

As I recently wrote, Florida, under its governor, Ron DeSantis, seems particularly loathe to address that past, judging by the restrictions on what books and what curriculum can be taught. The main criterion for acceptability seems to be material that will keep young people in ignorance about what many of their fellow Americans have dealt with in the past and continue to confront today.

As a result of all of this, the College Board, the organization responsible for AP courses, has changed content and made optional some parts of its African American Studies. It denies that it was influenced by DeSantis's recent proclamations.

The NYT begs to differ. When the revised course was revealed at a glitzy Washington party, it was clear the board had succumbed to political pressure.

The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.

And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.

NYT Editorial Board member, Mara Gay, elaborated  on the College Board's timidity:

They downgraded the study of Black Lives Matter, of reparations, of queer life and of incarceration. They removed prominent writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and bell hooks, who have helped so many people understand the relationship between race, class and feminism.

It is no coincidence that the Black writers under assault, like Mr. Coates and Ms. hooks, have been militant in refusing to allow America to forget. “The time to remember is now,” Ms. hooks wrote. “The time to speak a counter hegemonic race talk that is filled with the passion of remembrance and resistance is now. All our words are needed.”

Awareness of Black history is a threat to the groups promoting racism, because 

[i]t humanizes the enslaved and their descendants. It lays bare the terrible cost of white supremacy, not only to Black Americans, but to the nation. It opens the door for exactly the reckoning that makes interracial coalitions possible, giving life to democracy and pluralism and stripping would-be tyrants of their power.

The problem is that looking directly at this history is a prospect that terrifies many white Americans. 

Canada, hardly a country awaiting canonization, at least has had the rectitude to move toward truth and reconciliation as it attempts to confront and atone for its racism toward the Indigenous.

Not so in the United States, which brings to mind an old proverb, reputedly of Russian origin, that says, Better a bitter truth than a sweet lie.

Clearly, it is a notion with which many, many Americans vehemently disagree.

 

 

 

. 

"The System Itself Is Broken"

So says Politics Girl about American law enforcement, an assertion underscored by the recent murder of Tyre Nichols, one of an untold number of victims of out-of-control police. 

American slavery may be a thing of the past, but state oppression of 
Black people continues, with no end in sight. 

I Got Nothing Today

 

...except my contempt for willful stupidity.

H/t Wu-Tang is for the Children

Reacting Instead Of Responding

 

I'm sure I am not alone in choosing not to watch the extensive video detailing the murder of Tyre Nichols. Granted, I have seen snippets on the news, but the thought of an extended viewing of a man being beaten to death holds no appeal for me.

Yet his execution on the streets of Memphis has raised a number of questions, the race of his killers not the least of them. How could five black officers have used such a level of violence against a black man? And there is no simple answer, despite those who insist there is nothing wrong with the system, just 'bad apples' who have infiltrated it as a means of exercising their abhorrent tendencies.

Others have suggested that, being black, the officers' heinous behaviour sprang from a need to show that, despite their race, they were a "part of the team," that team being the blue brotherhood - you know, the team that regularly abuses its authority, especially when dealing with people of colour, and covers up their actions accordingly.

Relatedly, others have suggested the murder just underscores a violent systemic police culture crying out for radical reform. And it is this cause that is the thorniest to deal with. Many would prefer to react to the immediate problem instead of responding with long-term solutions.

In her column today, Shree Paradkar reflects on how little progress has been made since the graphic murder at the hands of police of George Floyd, largely due kto an institutional reluctance to address root causes of the violence.

Bernice King, the lawyer and activist daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., said, “It should not require another video of a Black human being dehumanized for anyone to understand that police brutality is an urgent, devastating issue.”

The other talking point, as if to lay doubt on the fact of anti-Blackness in policing is this: “But five of the officers who brutalized Nichols are Black!”

Surely, after all the conversations about systemic racism with the “racial reckoning” of 2020, this question is but a reflection of denialism? Why else the stubborn insistence that racism is solely about what lies in the hearts of individuals?

Historically, she says, many police forces were created to monitor slaves trying to escape and move Indigenous people off their land. That legacy must be considered in contemporary police abuses.

If the race of the officers involved is relevant, it is not to give an out to white cops. It is to show how systemic racism does not require the person enforcing it to be white.

“The slogan to come out of the previous uprising wasn’t ‘Defund white police;’ it was ‘Defund the police,’ observed writer and podcaster Victor Bradley on Twitter. “Because the people focused on this issue know it isn’t justice to diversify an institution designed to enforce social injustice.”

He also pointed to the long-existing media narrative of “white cop on Black man,” leading the public to believe that personal bias of white cops was the problem. “The system is extremely anti-Black and violent even when it’s functioning normally,” he said.

Since the murder of Floyd, there has only been some tinkering around the edges of policing. 

 Anti-racism committees were instituted. Workplace workshops were briefly the rage. Lots of trauma porn — hey Black people can you horrify us with your tales of terror? Can I get you a coffee? There were some new hires and promotions: white women and non-Black people of colour benefited, continuing a history of gaining from activism for Black people. And sure, some Black people benefited, too, with institutions of power holding them up as symbols of progress, the most valued being those most willing to go along. 

But nothing systemic has really changed, and Canadians have little reason to feel superior in this regard.

Far from having their wings clipped, police power has become more entrenched than before. No city in Canada cut its budget. On the contrary, they all increased it annually (at lower rates than before, if you’re looking for reasons to hope). Given how tight city finances are, to increase the police budget is to literally deprive another more needed service in the city.

The police are convenient symbols of power when we need them. For example, given the recent spate of violence on the TTC, frequently perpetrated by mentally ill street people, it is easy for  Mayor John Tory and the TTC to say they will ramp up police presence on the subways and streetcars, while the problems underlying that violence continue to fester beneath the surface. 

Reacting is much easier than truly responding. Real change takes time. And that will never happen until there is a real appetite for it amongst the powers that be.