In March 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tenn. to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers who toiled for poverty wages in horrendous working conditions. Following King’s assassination there on April 4, the workers won legal recognition for their union.

Their victory was a landmark in the struggle of Blacks to reap the economic benefits of the civil rights movement. However, the modest gains that followed in the ensuing decades for some middle and working-class Blacks have been dramatically eroded in the past decade by a wave of home foreclosures and an official unemployment rate of 16.7 percent — a trend made worse by recent attacks on public sector workers and the services they provide.

Such is the case in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council reached a budget deal in June that included layoffs of a thousand city workers. Most belong to District Council 37 whose membership is majority Black and Latino. The layoffs of school aides, parent coordinators and other non-teaching personnel, some of whom earn as little as $11,000 a year, are slated to begin Oct. 7.

The hardest-hit schools will be in poor, predominantly people-of-color neighborhoods like Washington Heights, Harlem, East New York and East Flatbush while middle class neighborhoods in South Brooklyn and Staten Island will be barely affected, according to a report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.

Similar developments have unfolded across the country as politicians and the media blame teachers, nurses, bus drivers, letter carriers, social workers and other public servants earning living wages and pensions for budget shortfalls.

The undertone of this slash-and-burn approach is racialized. As my colleague at Colorlines.com, Kai Wright, wrote earlier this year, the widespread images of public employees as lazy and overpaid have “the faint outline of familiar caricatures — welfare queens, Cadillacs in the projects, Mexican freeloaders.”

Of course, not all 21 million public employees are equal. The United States has a vast repressive apparatus composed of hundreds of thousands of federal, state, county and local police and prison guards, most of whom are white and male. They have endured far fewer layoffs and have not been vilified like public workers who provide social services. This is because the right opposes downward redistribution of wealth and power but sees the repressive work of the police as a vital legitimate public function.

Equal Opportunities

The public sector has historically bolstered families of color, in particular Black workers, both through social services and as a source of employment. UC Berkeley labor policy analyst Steven Pitts found in a recent study that the public sector was “the single most important source of employment” for Blacks, who were 30 percent more likely to be employed as a government worker than any other race. Black workers in the public sector also earn wages comparable to what white workers earn, reducing the racial wage gap that plagues most occupations.

Equal employment opportunity guidelines and affirmative action mandates ensure that government employers seek out qualified people of color for the public sector. This offers a level of accountability not possible in the private sector. When the public sector swelled under programs created during the New Deal and the Great Society, so did employment of workers of color. By the 1960s unions recognized the demographic change in the public sector and embraced Blacks as members, ensuring that they earned living wages and supporting benefits.

With an unionization rate that hovered just above 35 percent, the public sector continued to be a source of good, union jobs in the last few decades even as manufacturing jobs moved abroad and union density in the private sector fell below 10 percent by 1997. Now, that is changing. In 2010, state and local governments slashed over 230,000 jobs. Expect more in 2011 and 2012.

War on the Poor

This is a far cry from Dr. King’s vision of bringing “colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect.” In fact, negotiations over the next decade of budgeting amount to a war on people of color. The congressional debt ceiling “crisis” that was resolved in August was a manufactured affair that allowed both parties to justify almost $1 trillion in spending cuts in the next 10 years. This will devastate millions dependent on a tattered social safety net. The budget deal also created a bipartisan super committee tasked with reaching a so-called “grand bargain” that could exact trillions more dollars in cuts to social spending during the next decade.

The often mystifying numbers tossed around in the deficit reduction debate become clearer when translated in terms of the people who will be impacted. This year, the Coalition on Human Needs estimated the cuts would result in:

• 290,000 low-income families losing rental vouchers
• 300,000 to 450,000 low-income mothers and children losing Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food subsidies
• 3.5 million low-income households
losing assistance for heating their homes
• 1.4 million students won’t receive Pell grants.

Census data shows that the past 10 years have been a “lost decade” in terms of livelihood and gains for working families. More than 46 million families live in poverty in this country now, a disproportionate number of them Black. Black families in poverty increased to almost 30 percent and over one-third of Black and Latino children are impoverished. We are further than ever from the “promised land” King spoke of on the last night of his life. But, we have the means to do something about it.

The percentage of taxes paid by corporations and the super-rich are at their lowest in decades while income inequality has soared to levels not seen since the 1920s. That hoarded wealth should be taxed in order to rebuild the public sector and create a 21st century equivalent of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps to give work to millions who need it. Even the International Monetary Fund now acknowledges that austerity measures exacerbate the recession while government spending provides stimulus.

Redistribution of wealth is the starting point for any real solution to the recession and for bridging the racial economic divide that grows more extreme each day.

Yvonne Yen Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center and a contributing writer at Colorlines.com.

Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie. Sign held by a Hopi youth at a protest against Peabody in Denver, Colorado.

The indigenous environmental justice movement celebrated a victory, early January 2010, when a judge ruled that Peabody Energy cannot expand its coal mining operations on the Black Mesa in northern Arizona.  Former president Bush Jr. approved a permit for Peabody in the twilight of his outgoing administration—not surprising, when you consider that Peabody’s parent holding company was Bechtel, a defense contractor with strong political ties—a permit that failed to fulfill all administrative requirements.  Groups including the Black Mesa Water Coalition filed a petition in early 2009, charging that prerequisites, such as filing an Environmental Impact Statement, were ignored, thereby making the approved permit invalid.

For many Navajo, life in the past thirty years has been inextricably linked to coal mining.  As a small girl, Enei Begaye, knew to be quiet when visiting her friends’ houses.  Everyone in the small town of Kayenta, Arizona worked in the coal mines, which operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Some worked night shifts, so Begaye and her friends would play quietly to not disturb the sleeping elders.  Most of the population of over 4,900 residents in Kayenta were employed by Peabody Energy and lived in the trailers the company setup for its workers.

As an adult, Begaye, now co-director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown, and devastated and torn apart Navajo and Hopi communities.  Energy demands increased in the late 1970s during the oil crisis and large corporations such as Southern California Edison casted about for other sources of fuel.  When the corporations spied the black gold underfoot the Navajo lands, the energy companies colluded with the U.S. federal government to raise questions about Navajo claim over the lands.  The land was transferred to the Hopis and 12,000 Navajo families were displaced from their ancestral homes.  Uprooted from their homes and traditional ways of subsistence, many Navajo fell into poverty and despair, forced to accept any jobs that came their way, including coal mining.

The Black Mesa Water Coalition and partners in the indigenous environmental justice movement organized to shut down Kayenta’s Black Mesa Coal Mine in 2005.  Apart from the low wages and hazardous working conditions of the mines, the operations polluted the township and surrounding environment.  Judith Nies described the disastrous environmental consequences of the technique, strip mining, of removing coal where “the land has turned gray, all vegetation has disappeared, the air is filled with coal dust, the groundwater is contaminated with toxic runoff, and electric green ponds dot the landscape.”  Sheep that drink from these ponds by noon, she added, die by suppertime.

The coal from Kayenta fed two power plants, the Mojave Generating Station and Navajo Generating Station.  The former, the Mojave Generating Station, provided electricity to Southern California and Las Vegas.  The latter helped to power the irrigation of the urban sprawl extending outwards from Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.  Neither provided electricity for the surrounding communities.  In fact, less than half of Navajo families have electricity or running water on the reservation.

The latest curb on coal mining on Navajo lands is a bittersweet victory for many on the reservation who are still dependent on the low wage jobs the mines provide.  Begaye found it hard for many years to return home to Kayenta to face her friends’ parents, who lost their mining jobs.  Now, organizers with the Black Mesa Water Coalition see their strategy for indigenous justice as two-pronged: rid the land of dirty coal mining and advocate for the just transition for Navajo and Hopi peoples to a sustainable and locally-owned economy that provides high quality green jobs and career pathways for indigenous youth and adults.  The Black Mesa Water Coalition and the Navajo Green Jobs campaign won another victory this summer when they successfully lobbied the Navajo Tribal Council to enact green jobs legislation.

The recent judge ruling supports Navajo leadership, not only among tribal nations but also for all of us, in defining the new green way of living.  “We don’t want to create a capitalist system within our tribal society,” explained Begaye.  “We’re in a special position, we’ve got a system that needs to be trashed, an economic system that needs to be gotten rid of.  We need to create a new economy that doesn’t devastate but create and empower our communities to function in a healthy way.”

Photo by the Black Mesa Water Coalition.

via RaceWire

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.*

The Obama administration enacted the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) back in February, the largest boon to public spending and the safety net since the New Deal, and yet economic conditions are the worst it’s ever been for people of color and single moms. Unemployment is skyrocketing close to double digits, at 9.7% for August 2009. New Census data released recently showed an increase in poverty from 12.5% to 13.2% this past year, meaning an additional 2.6 million persons now live in poverty. Certain groups experience deepened poverty rates more than others, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
• Latinos and Asians had marked increases in their poverty rates, by 1.6 and 1.4 points, respectively.
• Over one third of all Black children and almost one third of all Latino children lived in poverty in 2008.
• Nearly a quarter of all families headed by single moms lived in poverty, or 3.6 million families, in 2008.

Tracking funds from the Recovery Act has proven to be difficult because there is no centralized, authoritative source of where the money is going to and what it’s being used for. Currently, information about ARRA funds are dispersed across the federal recovery.gov website, state stimulus czars, and watchdog groups. Recipients of monies are required to report on their activities and how many jobs they’ve created because of it by October 10. But, information will only slowly trickle out to the public. Even then, there is no requirement for recipients to race or gender their data, so we have no way of knowing how much of the recovery benefits those most impacted: people of color and single moms.

We have been following the recovery and its promise to stimulate the economy while protecting the planet and its peoples through the creation of green jobs. Watch this page on October 13 for the release of our Green Equity Toolkit, ideas and resources for community and labor advocates on how to create equity in the emerging green economy. If we are to follow the directive of ARRA and the subsequent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance to help those most impacted by the recession, then we must make race and gender equity key in our planning and practices around green job creation. The toolkit will help us do that.

Our initial research into recovery allocations in Los Angeles County brings to light some concerns. Los Angeles County, like many in this country, is cleft by a racial wealth divide into two types of cities: poor and rich. Poor cities of the county–half of the residents of the City of Los Angeles are people of color and one in five live in poverty–are receiving a quarter of the recovery dollars per poor person, as compared to rich cities. We designate cities such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills as rich cities in the county, where more than 70% of the population are white and the poverty rate is well below the national average.

This is the worst economic downturn our country has experienced since the recession of the early 1980s and flirting dangerously to parallel the Great Depression of the 1930s. What will our generation remember when we look back at this time? Did we seize the opportunity of the Great Recession to bring about a green transformation to sustain all peoples, especially those most distressed? ARC provides the tools. We must act together to demand equity in the recovery, green or otherwise.

Photo taken by Jacob Ruff at the Mobilization for Climate Justice protest against Chevron in Richmond, California.

* A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Billionaires for Wealthcare toasted the rightwing demonstrators that gathered in DC this past weekend to protest healthcare reform, legislation to stave off climate change, and all attempts to provide a safety net for working families and folks of color.

They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system. We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We’re simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of ‘Change.’ We’ll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to healthcare, if we ain’t broke, why fix it?”

See more at their website.

A single Chinese time zone is as much a fiction as a single Chinese ethnicity; recently, this truism was illustrated in the blood of Uighur protesters. Noon for Beijing was still seven in the morning for the western province of Xinjiang, the site of recent racially motivated uprisings that started this past weekend, on July 5, 2009.

Though China is often rendered ethnically homogeneous in the West’s narratives, the truth isn’t so simple. 92% of the population is members of the Han race, the dominant group with a monopoly over political and economic resources. But over 120 million citizens identify as members of some other ethnic group, known in China as “minority nationalities,” each with their own cultural practices, histories, and experiences. Some, like the Uighurs and Tibetans to the northwest, practice religious beliefs distinct from the Han. Others, like the Miao in the south and Koreans in the northeast, speak a distinct language. Still others, like the Hui, are indistinguishable from the Han in appearance and dialect, but practice a variation of Islam and trace their ancestry to the Muslim traders who settled in China along the Silk Road.

When Mao trooped through the countryside with his Red Army during the Long March in 1935, he promised the minorities they encountered along the way that a new communist republic would recognize the right of self-determination of ethnic groups. That was soon forgotten when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. One of the first tasks that the nascent People’s Republic of China undertook upon winning the civil war was to classify those living within their borders and create subjects out of them. The CCP sent out teams of social scientists, anthropologists, and statisticians to the far-flung regions of the country to gather data on peoples’ languages, cultural practices, and religious beliefs.

Party bureaucrats sorted through the mass of information brought back. They determined that 56 ethnic groups deserved the official recognition as minority nationalities. This included the Uighurs, nomadic steppe peoples who are Turkic descendants of Chinese Turkestan. Still, over 700,000 peoples are members of ethnic groups not officially recognized by the state. This includes Chinese Jews and Macanese, people of mixed Chinese-Portuguese ancestry in the island of Macau near Hong Kong.

The Uighurs suffered decades of internal colonization at the hands of the dominant ethnic group, the Han, starting from the 1950s onwards. Han migrated to Uighur regions at a rate that increased from 5% in 1940 to 38% in 1990. In popular and academic discourse, the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are portrayed as culturally inferior to the Han. Minorities are seen as exotic and primitive peoples that needed the civilizing rule of the Han to guide them into the modern age.

Dru Gladney, professor of Asian Studies and Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, wrote, “One cannot be exposed to China without being confronted by its ‘colorful’ minorities. They sing, they dance, they twirl, they whirl. Most of all, they smile, showing their happiness to be part of the motherland” (Journal of Asian Studies, Feb. 1994).

The process of grouping a heterogenous population into a singular identity was paralleled in the U.S. Race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant described countries like U.S. and China as “racial dictatorships” in their seminal book “Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s” (NY: Routledge, 1986/1989). Racial dictatorships consolidated identities into an umbrella category to negate any differences and oppositional identities. As Omi and Winant say, “Just as the conquest created ‘native’ where once there had been Pequot, Iroquois, or Tutelo, so too it created ‘black’ where once there had been Asante or Ovimbundu, Yoruba or Bakongo”.

Ideology has material ramifications. Han peoples get first dibs on choice jobs, capital investment to startup their own businesses, and monies to purchase properties. Uighurs find themselves economically marginalized, edged out of jobs and priced out of living in neighborhoods increasingly gentrified by the Han. It’s a story we see in the West, with different players but the same ending.

Is there any wonder that there is popular resentment by the Uighurs and other minorities at their treatment by the Han? Much of the English-language coverage in North America and Western Europe by mainstream news outlets have expressed surprise by the mass violence the Uighurs express towards the Han. This is a long-standing struggle for national liberation that Uighurs and the better known Tibetans engage in. To support their fight for recognition and freedom is also to endorse opening pathways for multiple constituencies to seize power from the state and the ethnic fictions it creates.

Photo of Uighur women protesting in Urumqi, Xinjiang on July 7, 2009 by World Bulletin.