Fight for $15 and the heroes in company uniforms
“What’s disgusting? Unionbusting! What’s outrageous? Poverty wages!”—a chant often heard at Fight for $15 actions
Sometimes heroes come dressed in company uniforms: perhaps MacDonald’s, or maybe Subway, Wendy’s, Mrs. Fields or those Whole Foods distinctive black aprons. That kind of hero was out in the streets of Chicago on July 31 and August 1. They had walked off their jobs to support the Fight For $15 campaign led by the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC).
WOCC is a new union in town. Currently with several hundred members and growing, it wants a $15 an hour wage for food and retail workers in Chicago. There are similar groups in other large American cities.
I had the privilege of picketing with WOCC at a Northside Chicago Whole Foods on July 31. I was with also WOCC on August 1 from early morning to early evening as WOCC strikers marched through the Chicago downtown, picketing a number of low wage workplaces and sharing their stories.
Filed under: Society and Economy, Unions
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Chicagoans go to court to stop racist school closings
“Since 2001, defendants have carried out school closings so as to contribute to a form of racial and economic segregation, as destructive as older forms of intentional racial segregation.”— McDaniel v. Board of Education of Chicago; the lawsuit goes to trial this week. Tuesday at 10:00am until Friday at 1:00pm at the Dirkson Federal Building.
After the Civil War freed slaves demanded that schools be established as a tool of liberation. With the help of the Freedman’s Bureau and hundreds of determined teachers, both black and white, they succeeded in creating the first large scale public education system in the American South.
Both black and white students benefited as the nation struggled to reunite after the costliest war in US history. One might think these African Americans would have received the thanks of a grateful nation and continued to be recognized for that accomplishment.
That’s not what happened. Instead they and their African American descendants were subjected to decades of cruel school segregation and racial discrimination. Discrimination in education also affected other people of color, as well as students with special needs. These discriminatory practices continue today in many school districts. One of these districts is the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
That’s why Sherise McDaniel, a CPS parent, joined with other CPS parents to sue the Chicago Board of Education to stop the school closings. The closing of 49 Chicago public schools, most of them in African American working class neighborhoods is the latest example of CPS racial and special needs discrimination. McDaniel and the other parents were fed up with these harmful policies and the resulting inequities in educational achievement.
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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Uptown Uprising and the Right to the City
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” — David Harvey , The Right to the City
The 1968 French student-worker uprising popularized the phrase “The Right to the City” from philosopher Henri Lefebvre‘s book Le Droit a la ville. According to Lefebvre the right to transform the urban environment cannot be restricted to people who own substantial property, hold citizenship papers or are otherwise deemed to have a higher social status. It means all of us, regardless of race, gender, age, economic status or any narrowly defined category. The city is a place of possibilities and we have a basic human right to make those possibilities realities.
May 1968: Beginning of a long struggle
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Why is Corporate America fanning the flames of violence in Chicago?
“At times like this when CPS is making an attempt to close the most schools at one time in the nation, I don’t think you need another Columbine or Connecticut or another suicide because of bullying.” ― Sherise McDaniel, Chicago Public School parent
Corporate America has declared war on public education by closing schools, privatizing schools, gaining control over curriculum, imposing a barrage of hi-stakes testing, limiting citizen involvement and attacking teachers unions. The worst attacks are against working class education.
Corporate America sees no reason to educate working class students beyond the most basic level. They are seen as nothing more than future low paid drones in a brutal dog-eat-dog-cat-eat-mouse economy. The war against public education is a class war being waged by the wealthy against a growing working class resistance.
It is a New Civil War.
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, Society and Economy
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Keep Pope alive: One of 54 Chicago schools on the death list
A cacophony of young voices competed with the low whistle of a cold wind on a gray Chicago spring day as children skipped down the sidewalk in front of Pope Elementary. The school is located across from Douglas Park on Chicago’s West Side in the North Lawndale community. It is also one of the 54 Chicago schools slated for closing. Pope, like most of the schools on the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) death list, is located in a predominantly African American working class neighborhood.
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, Society and Economy
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The Lost Woods of Rachel Carson
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ― Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson had a life-long love affair with nature that was accompanied by a deep and terrible sense of loss because of the human destruction wreaked upon the biosphere. Although Carson’s literary fame is based on only 5 books, she also wrote numerous short pieces during her employment at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as newspaper stories, magazine articles, speeches and personal letters. She was among the finest writers of the 20th century USA.
Her biographer Linda Lear has done a great service by sharing a sample of these virtually unknown Carson writings in the anthology Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. These give us a glimpse of the living breathing woman behind the environmental icon.
Filed under: Environment, Global issues
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The Chicago school closings: Finding truth amidst the lies
“Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.”— Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union
It was a grim Thursday afternoon on March 21st as the news trickled out that 61 Chicago school buildings would be closed and that 54 school programs will be axed. The closings are heavily clustered in the poorest mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods, where decades of disinvestment and economic apartheid have taken a heavy toll on the residents.
Many people have moved away from these communities, driven out by the lack of jobs, the meager resources given to the schools, the inadequate city services and the resulting crime and violence. Many believe that the forced exodus is part of a land grab for real estate interests who will move in to gentrify these areas.
On the South and West Sides of the city, where the closings are hitting hardest, poverty is a policy, not an accident. The Chicago financial elite, which could provide jobs and rational investment, has chosen displacement over renewal, ethnic cleansing over neighborhood stabilization. As the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel is the public face of this prairie plutocracy.
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, Society and Economy
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Chicago’s deadly border crossings: lives in the balance
There are no barbed wire adorned border walls. You won’t see unsmiling heavily armed solders toting automatic weapons as you wait nervously in a long line for clearance to cross over. You won’t have to show a passport or have your car torn apart during a search for weapons or drugs. In fact unless you are an expert at modern urban wall art, you may not even realize you have crossed one of these Chicago borders.
They are the ever shifting boundaries in Chicago’s gang and turf wars. What the Associated Press has called, “a Sandy Hook Elementary School attack unfolding in slow motion”, caught the attention of the national media with the killing of 15 year old South Sider Hadiya Pendleton.
Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy called it a gang shooting, and that Pendleton, who had no gang affiliation, was a victim of “Mistaken identity — wrong place at the wrong time.” Leaving aside the issue of where is the right “place” and when is right “time” to get shot, this statement tells us nothing.
But I heard another explanation at a South Side meeting about the education crisis.
Filed under: Education, Race and gender, Society and Economy
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My old neighborhood is now multiracial–why is that a problem for some people?
The old neighborhood is the one people moved away from long ago, some with a firm grasp on its bygone realities, but for others their warmed over memories are coated with a gooey nostalgia. Not that there is any thing wrong with an occasional indulgence in mental cotton candy, which is why I joined an online group devoted to Wheaton, Maryland nostalgia.
From kindergarten through junior high I lived in the Glenmont section of Wheaton, Maryland just outside of DC in Montgomery County. Glenmont was similar to other post WWII working class suburbs that were hastily built or expanded to accommodate what came to be called the baby boomers. Glenmont was also very white and segregated. Maryland is a border state where slavery was once legal and segregation was not hard to find when I was growing up.
My parents moved there from DC’s inner city Shaw neighborhood in 1951. Most of the surrounding Glenmont houses were new, built for young families who qualified for low interest GI home loans from the government. With the new families moving in and new homes going up, there were no real neighborhood traditions around many of us. We had to create our own from scratch.
Filed under: Race and gender, Society and Economy
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The West Side of Chicago says NO! to school closings
“Listening to person after person eloquently, yet desperately, plead for their schools not to be closed during the Austin-North Lawndale Network school utilization hearing on Jan. 31 brought forth, to my mind, heart-wrenching images of our enslaved African-American ancestors pleading for their loved ones not to be beaten, sold at auction, or killed.”—Bonita Robinson, retired Chicago teacher, Duke Ellington School, Austin-North Lawndale Network
The Chicago Public Schools(CPS) has asked residents to attend any of 28 meetings around the city to give their input about neighborhood schools being closed because of “underutilization” and “budget constraints”. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has forcefully refuted these CPS rationalizations in their publication The Black and White of Education in Chicago.
In response to threatened school closings by the CPS leadership, neighborhoods across the city are saying NO— loud and clear. One such meeting was held on a cold Chicago evening in late January in the Friendship MB Church on Chicago’s West Side near where I live. Schools from the Austin and North Lawndale neighborhoods were represented.These communities are largely black and working class.
In the face of the cold-blooded racist threats to close their neighborhood schools, people responded with a night of love, pride and solidarity. Hundreds of parents, students and teachers packed the Friendship MB Church as people spoke of the deep love they had for their neighborhood schools where teachers and staff go that extra mile even when they must fight for the most basic modern educational resources.
“We have the most devoted teachers in our school. I’ve been an A student since the 8th grade. I love Henson and love is very strong word. And man do I love Henson. I’m graduating, so why should I care if it closes. They help the entire community, not just the people who go there.”— an 8th grade student at Mathew Henson School, Austin-North Lawndale Network
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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