Real Solutions Don’t Demand Marriage, Just lots of Math..

See also Prison Culture, The Atlantic and The Washington Post

U.S. Post Office Releases Stamp on Rosa Park’s 100th Birthday

Rosa Parks, Revisited by Charles M. Blow, New York Times:

On the verge of the 100th anniversary of her birth this Monday comes a fascinating new book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor. It argues that the romanticized, children’s-book story of a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history in a moment of uncalculated resistance is pure mythology.

As Theoharis points out, “Rosa’s family sought to teach her a controlled anger, a survival strategy that balanced compliance with militancy.” …
Parks, like many other Americans who over the years have angrily agitated for change in this country, had been sanitized and sugarcoated for easy consumption.

As Theoharis writes: “Held up as a national heroine but stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice, the Parks who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption.”

Fortunately, this book seeks to restore Parks’s wholeness, even at the risk of stirring unease.

The Rosa Parks in this book is as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr.

Happy Black History Month.

The Youngest, The First Latino, and The First Openly Gay Inaugural Poet

One Today

by Richard Blanco

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,
peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains
mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs,
buses launching down avenues, the symphony
of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways,
the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,
or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open
for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language
spoken into one wind carrying our lives
without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed
their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked
their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands:
weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report
for the boss on time, stitching another wound
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love
that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother
who knew how to give, or forgiving a father
who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.

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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

How to Convey the Horror?
by nancy a heitzeg

Editors Note: It’s 2013 – almost three years since Criminal InJustice started. Another place, another time. Last year, it was clear to me that 2012 was gonna be The Year of the Vote. I hope that CI and CMP helped illuminate the way. You know we tried.

So how to began 2013? Well my choice of the piece reprinted below (originally published in 2011) may not seem like the most uplifting, but it is the brutal truth that must impel our work. When confronting the prison industrial complex, we must remember that yes dismantling the profit-motive matters, but confronting the racist roots may matter most.

I began to consider it again for a couple of reasons.

First of all , as my TwitterLine became flooded with debate about the recent film I will not name, I considered once more the power of naming, the power of claiming language/imagery and the omnipresent white male gaze. Who is given license to tell the stories? Who would dare to treat USA race-based slavery as a backdrop for a torture porn spectacle, to mock it even as a set for a spaghetti western? Certainly not those whose ancestors lived it. Certainly not those who currently labor under some contemporary manifestation of it.

Scholars of the prison industrial complex do not use references to slavery lightly — there is a well-documented link between the institution of chattel slavery and the ensuing plantation prison “farms”, convict lease systems and the prison industrial complex of the late 20th century. No one has claimed they are exactly “equivalent”; they are not. Nothing fully compares. But a trip to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola will make the connections crystal clear.

And Angola. The second reason for my choice of this piece. Reading the disgusting screenplay to the aforementioned film took me right there, to that modern day plantation, a relic of the past with a new name and an old story. A place i have visited with students during a January course i have taught for several years. Right in the heart of the Incarceration Capital of the World.  A place that serves as the original impetus for this piece.

I won’t be going back there this year — instead, the class  will explore the birth of the contemporary PIC in the state that Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the Golden Gulag. New sorrows and stories will be accrued as we visit the largest prison for women in the world – Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) at Chowchilla.  And this will eventually be here reported too.

I will miss my comrades at Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, Friends and Families of Lousiana’s Incarcerated Children, Safe Streets/Safe Communities, and the Death Penalty Discourse Network /The Dead Man Walking School Theater Project; my thoughts are always with you. I will see you again in better days.  So much power in your work.

Frankly, though, I am relieved. There is too much sorrow, too much of the real residue of slavery alive at Angola and so many places like it. Too much horror.

But still, here we are, compelled as always – wherever we are – to confront it.

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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

“A Life Lived Deliberately”
by Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Graduation Speech at Evergreen State College, June 11, 1999

Reprinted in The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, Joy James, editor, and The Radical Philosophy Review

Editors Note: As I reflected back on 2012, The Year of the Vote, a year book-ended by the murder of Trayvon Martin and the massacre at Sandy Hook, I was struck by both the victories and the on-going struggles.

But mostly, I was grateful. For this space, for those who frequent it, for a multitude of organizations who persist in  seeking transformative solutions to the monstrosities of criminal injustice, those who resist the lure of the quick-fix “confidence men” and remain committed, in the face of tremendous odds, to liberation, to Abolition.

Thank you especially to Seeta Persaud, Kay Whitlock, Angola 3 News, Project NIA and Prison Culture, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, Victoria Law, Critical Resistance , The Real Cost of Prisons Project, Solitary Watch and Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. Many more…

You all could be anywhere, doing anything but you have made a Deliberate Choice.

So too, have you readers. The subject matter of this series is difficult, rarely uplifting, but I am so grateful you choose to read, to engage, here and elsewhere, to pass the information and action calls on.

In that spirit, I offer tonight the speech Mumia Abu Jamal delivered to the graduating class of Evergreen College in June of 1999, the first graduation speech delivered by a death row inmate. (Mumia has since had his death sentence lifted and is serving life without parole. He has not been freed or silenced.) Students made the choice to invite him and they fought long and hard to have that finally honored. They lived the speech before he gave it – as it should be.

Whatever you think of Mumia’s case, or MOVE or militancy or the rest, the spirit of these words is right. So many stumble through life, deciding not to decide. Just surviving through either poverty or privilege – on the Mean Streets or Wall Streets, in the suites or in the ivory towers of academia. Some think it is easier to turn away — to avoid the pain or the obligation that always comes with knowledge and especially comes with privilege – but Not You.

You Live Life Deliberately and I Love You for It.

Thank You ~ Honored to be with you in the Struggle.

Here’s to 2013.

(more…)

ThinkProgress Infographic

Norquist Tax Pledge Begins to Crumble

A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy by Warren E. Buffet

The group’s [the Forbe's 400] average income in 2009 was $202 million — which works out to a “wage” of $97,000 per hour, based on a 40-hour workweek. (I’m assuming they’re paid during lunch hours.) Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15 percent of their take in combined federal income and payroll taxes. Half of this crew paid less than 20 percent. And — brace yourself — a few actually paid nothing.

This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers. However, I prefer a cutoff point somewhat above $250,000 — maybe $500,000 or so.