Race and Class

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March 14, 2011 | 3:01 PM | By

Guardian Angel, Woman Assaulted in Racially-Motivated Metro Fight

Twitpic: @dcguardianangel

Guardian Angels handcuffing five assailants who attacked one of their members on an Anacostia-bound train, Saturday night.

Earlier today, I storified tweets about the Guardian Angels voluntarily patrolling D.C.’s Metro system. This weekend, one Angel on an Anacostia-bound train tried to break up a fight between a black youth and a white woman; that man was violently assaulted by five people (including the youth from the original altercation) for trying to intervene. Other nearby Angels rushed to the train and detained all five assailants until police could arrive and arrest them. That’s the bare outline of what went down. But there’s more:

Alex Kaufer, an Angel in training, stepped in when a black male youth allegedly assaulted a white woman on a train as it pulled into the Anacostia Station on the Green Line about 11 p.m. Saturday. The youth and his friends apparently were making racial comments to the woman and her friend.

“The youths were harassing the girls. They were making fun of them because they were white and because of the way they were dressed,” John Ayala, East Coast director of the Guardian Angels, tells WTOP. “The girl got up and told the youths, ‘We are not afraid of you.’”

That’s when the fight started…

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FILED UNDER: Public Transportation, Metro, Race and Class, Racial Divide, WMATA
March 11, 2011 | 3:55 PM | By

David Simon: Drug War is “War on The Underclass”

Flickr: Fernando Galeano

The cover of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson's Memoir

Life imitated art yesterday as the actress who played “Snoop” on HBO’s critically-acclaimed, Baltimore-based drama “The Wire” was arrested. Her charge? Conspiracy to distribute heroin and other drugs.

The creator of “The Wire”, David Simon, released a statement through HBO decrying the war on drugs as a war on the poor. Simon emphasized how different his life and opportunities were and are from Pearson’s; the actress was born addicted to crack, she was a product of the foster-care system and she killed another girl while still a teen. Pearson served time for that murder before being discovered at a club by Michael K. Williams, who also starred on “The Wire” as “Omar”. Here is part of Simon’s statement:

In an essay published in Time two years ago, the writers of ‘The Wire’ made the argument that we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral. And we said then that if asked to serve on any jury considering a non-violent drug offense, we would move to nullify that jury’s verdict and vote to acquit. Regardless of the defendant, I still believe such a course of action would be just in any case in which drug offenses — absent proof of violent acts — are alleged.

Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers. But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson. The opportunities and experiences of her life do not correspond in any way with my own, and her America is different from my own. I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter.

FILED UNDER: Media, Drugs, Race and Class
March 11, 2011 | 1:41 PM | By

Cut Metro Hours? Lose $50 Million from D.C.

DCentric

Save $3 to 5 million by cutting service? Lose $7 million in revenue. Or $50 million in matching funds from D.C.

Metro’s proposal to cut late-night service on Fridays and Saturdays in order to save money and create more opportunities for maintenance may hit a financial roadblock (via WTOP):

A Metro source tells WTOP city officials are less inclined to kick in their share of dedicated funding if they know they are going to lose millions in revenue from the rollback of late night weekend hours.

If D.C. were to hold back its share of dedicated funding, it could set off a troubling chain reaction. The move would essentially break an agreement with the federal government, which sends $150 million in funds per year to Metro. That money is to be matched year after year by D.C., Maryland and Virginia — all putting in $50 million each.

We’ve already covered how this issue doesn’t just inconvenience privileged drunk people who’ve been out partying– it also means pain for members of the working class who depend on Metro to get home from their jobs at odd hours. Another issue? How much money will be saved by the service cuts vs. how much could be lost:
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FILED UNDER: Public Transportation, Metro, Race and Class, WMATA
March 9, 2011 | 11:01 AM | By

Kate Masur’s “An Example for All the Land”

Kate Masur's "An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C."

The author of the first major study of Washington, D.C. during reconstruction in over fifty years spoke to DCentric recently.

Kate Masur, a history professor at Northwestern and author of “An Example for All the Land,” opined on racism, the Republican party and how D.C. developed a thriving African American middle class through good schools.

Why did you write this book?

I’ve been interested in D.C.’s history in part because it represented the juncture between the North and the South. I wanted to look at the period of emancipation and quintessential Northern/Southern issues, including the end of slavery, the meaning of emancipation and urban politics. In D.C., I could look at local and federal government in an interesting place that mixed both regions. That and there hadn’t been a good study of these issues in a really long time.

What were D.C. audiences most interested in?

D.C. was hungry for this sort of work. People have an episodic idea of history, so filling in the blanks and offering a narrative for this period is useful. Lots of people asked about African American politics and participation in a progressive coalition. This was a period of upheaval. You could really see what a difference it made that Congress had exclusive jurisdiction in Washington…the city was batted back and forth. It didn’t have control over its own destiny, this period really highlights that.

That sounds familiar. At the Portrait Gallery, when you read from the Reconstruction-era diary of a racist Washingtonian, I couldn’t get over how similar it sounded to certain anonymous comments I read on recent news articles.

Now, no one wants to own racism. You sort of wonder where all those comments come from if everyone is not racist…not to mention structural racism. In my book, white power brokers deliberately and repeatedly said that it wasn’t about race or problems with African Americans, it was just about good government. In fact, the policies they were seeking dramatically reduced the power of a newly biracial electorate. They made life more difficult for poor African Americans who had just become voters and found a certain amount of political power in D.C., so despite saying those policies weren’t racist, they had everything to do with reducing the power of black people.

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FILED UNDER: History, Books, Race and Class, Racial Divide
March 4, 2011 | 5:59 PM | By

Spent: Choose Your Own Misadventure

"Spent" is a decision-based game that simulates what it's like to live with very little.

I just spent a few minutes “playing” Spent, a website which simulates what it’s like to be low-income and face difficult choices regarding housing, family, transportation and work:

Work hard. Do the right thing. Homelessness is something that will never happen to me. Sometimes, all it takes is one life-changing experience to land you on the streets: a job loss, death of a loved one, divorce, natural disaster, or serious illness.

That message is everywhere, but it’s easy to ignore– and that’s the point of this simulation. The site is programmed to serve up realistic challenges that force players to make extremely difficult decisions– like paying for cafeteria food you can’t afford because your hypothetical child complains about the stigma of free lunches or putting a pet to sleep because you can’t afford the treatment that would save its life.

In the case of the former, after a choice is made between coming up with $3 per day for lunch money, or taking the risk of your child starving to avoid the shame of accepting free food, a screen like this pops up:
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FILED UNDER: Media, Poverty, Race and Class
March 4, 2011 | 4:36 PM | By

Wal-Mart and Communities of Color

Flickr: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

While the Washington Times probes whether it’s a conflict of interest for Council member Yvette Alexander’s advisers to work as paid consultants for Wal-Mart, over at Colorlines, Juell Stewart examines Michelle Obama’s endorsement of the company.

In January, the first lady joined Wal-Mart executives in southeast D.C.—a traditionally black neighborhood in which the controversial chain recently announced plans to open stores—to announce the company’s effort to make its pre-packaged foods healthier and more affordable than less healthy options by 2015. Obama called it a “huge victory” that left her feeling “more hopeful than ever before.”…

Other critics say that by teaming up with corporate giants like Wal-Mart, the first lady risks undermining activism on other issues, like fair labor practices in communities of color that are increasingly dependent upon service sector jobs.

Cheap food isn’t always nutritious. Could Walmart make healthy food more affordable?

The “huge victory” Obama championed in the Wal-Mart announcement is creating viable choices for informed consumers. She and others have argued that communities can only win if there is cost parity between healthy food and the high-calorie snacks that contribute to obesity. “If you have a dollar menu item and a healthier salad that costs three times as much, it’s not a choice for people living on a limited income,” says Antronette K. Yancey, co-director of the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity.

FILED UNDER: Around the City, Food, Race and Class, Walmart
March 3, 2011 | 5:51 PM | By

Acquittal of the ‘Negress’ Minnie Gaines

New York Times, July 21, 1869

A desperate black victim of domestic violence named Minnie Gaines confesses to bludgeoning the father of her unborn child– who was white. Progressives fret about whether an all-male jury will treat her fairly. The public is riveted to the scandalous news story.

If all of that sounds unfamiliar, there’s no need to ratchet up the radio or turn on the TV. Gaines went to trial in 1869. She is a part of D.C. history, yet a cursory search of the internet yields nothing about her besides the blurb to the right, from the New York Times.

Gaines’ story takes up just two pages in a new book by Kate Masur, a History professor at Northwestern University, but those two pages contain a powerful example of what Masur offers in her study of racial equality during reconstruction– “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.”

When asked about the Gaines case, Masur added:

It was the first murder trial in D.C. to be heard by a racially mixed-race jury: six black men, six white. Reporters followed the jury and wrote about how they took an omnibus out to the suburbs and had a picnic on a Sunday. It was scandalous that they ate and worshiped together; the jury was breaking taboos, so the trial was a huge media event.

Women active in D.C.’s suffrage movement also attended the trial, they saw it as a feminist issue. One female activist wrote a letter to the Revolution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s paper, saying “Minnie Gaines is not going to get justice because she doesn’t have a jury of her peers, since there are no women on the jury.”

In the end, Gaines was found not guilty by reason of insanity. That was the mildest possible sentence and she was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the insane for nine months, where she had her baby. Eventually, a hospital supervisor contacted Gaines’ father in Fredericksburg, Virginia and invited him to take her home.

And that is the story of Minnie Gaines.

Next week on DCentric: More on “An Example for All the Land” via an interview with Kate Masur.
FILED UNDER: History, Books, Race and Class
March 1, 2011 | 1:58 PM | By

Race, Class and Gay Marriage

Flickr: laverrue

Wedding Cake figurines.

Over at TAPPED, Jamelle Bouie explains it all, if by all we mean “Black People and Gay Marriage”:

The broader question is this: Why aren’t black people energized about gay marriage, despite having high rates of religious attendance? Easy answer: It’s class, stupid. To channel Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels for a moment, the culture wars are mostly fought between Republican and Democratic elites; after all, it’s easy to obsess over gay people when you’re not worried about paying your bills.

For African Americans, who are disproportionately lower-income, gay marriage is far less important than jobs, health care, and economic growth (this is also true of working-class whites, though to a lesser extent). When you couple this with extremely high support for President Obama — and also, the fact that black people hold different opinions on different things — it’s no real surprise that African Americans, as a class, are less than interested in whether gay people can marry or serve openly in the military.

FILED UNDER: Media, LGBT, Politics, Race and Class
February 23, 2011 | 10:01 AM | By

Our Place D.C.: Treating Ex-Cons With Compassion

DCentric

A sign at Our Place D.C.

Women behind bars have rights, too.

That’s the premise behind Our Place D.C., a non-profit that helps and advocates for  currently and formerly incarcerated women.

“While I know the goal is to protect society from offenders, I’d like you to ask yourselves how long should this punishment endure after the offender has served her sentence and at what cost?” reads one of the large signs posted at its office on K Street Northwest.

Ashley McSwain, executive director of Our Place, said the group helps reduce how many former prisoners commit new crimes and go back to jail – something that benefits everyone.

DCentric

HIV 101

She’s especially proud that Our Place hires back 60 percent of its former clients: “The women we serve are running our company. I love that; it’s the neatest part of this team.” Often, women who are released from prison take a bus straight to K street, arriving with nothing more than the clothes on their back. McSwan described what happens after that bus ride:
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FILED UNDER: Around the City, Non-profits, Poverty, Race and Class