Tag Archives: race

Replacing Coal with Green Jobs in Navajo Nation

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via Yes! Magazine

As a small girl, Enei Begaye knew to be quiet when visiting friends’ houses. Nearly everyone in the 4,900-person town of Kayenta, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation, worked in the area’s coal mines, Black Mesa and Kayenta, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Begaye and her friends would play quietly so they wouldn’t disturb sleeping elders back from the night shift.

Most of the Kayenta’s population lived in trailers set up by Peabody Energy, the company that owned the mines. Coal companies are major employers throughout the Navajo Nation. In fact, more than half the Nation’s General Fund comes from revenue from coal mining. Nor is resource extraction limited to coal—oil and gas are also collected, together comprising over a quarter of the General Fund budget.

As an adult, Begaye questioned the coal mining that sustained her family and hometown. Apart from providing low wages and hazardous working conditions, coal mining has polluted the township and surrounding environment. The impact of strip mining has been documented since the late 1970s as eliminating existing vegetation, displacing or destroying wildlife and habitats, degrading air quality, altering current land use, and permanently changing the general landscape of the area mined.
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Ethnic Studies Beyond the Academy

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First published on apaforprogress.org.

Third World Student StrikeForty years ago, the students of SF State joined in solidarity with the Third World in demanding inclusion in institutions of knowledge.  For too long, the histories of people of color have been deliberately omitted from official narratives.  Stories transmitted through oral tradition within families but never recorded in the texts that lined the libraries of learning.  Languages were a private code, spoken, within the walls of your home, but forgotten when interacting outside in the world.  People of color were the invisible labor, unseen and unheard, which fueled the engines of global capitalism to expand.

The struggle at SF State successfully opened up spaces for the Third World, domestically and globally, in the academy, to represent and record our histories and stories.  This opened the way for applied research and policy organizations to elevate the importance of race and its centrality in socioeconomic issues when advocating for equitable policies and practices.  Groups like the Applied Research Center, inspired by the success of SF State, sought to “race” policies and programs, so that the impact of communities of color were laid explicit.  Narrative frames that concealed race behind a color-blind curtain were thrown open to reveal how they served to reproduce the subordinate status of communities of color.

Ethnic Studies 40 Years LaterThe Applied Research Center will survey the successes of ethnic studies, both in theory and practice, in a panel Ethnic Studies Beyond the Academy: Theory and Action at the Grassroots this Friday, October 9, 2009 from 11:00am to 1:00pm, in Rosa Parks C, at “Ethnic Studies 40 Years Later: Race, Resistance, and Relevance”, a conference to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Third World students’ strike and the both the birth of ethnic studies as a field and a college at SF State.   This will be an interactive panel, not just two hours of talking heads, where presenters will explore their effect of ethnic studies on their ideas and strategies, as well as the impact applied research has had on the academy.
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Communities of Possibilities

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This was first published on RaceWire.

Organizing Upgrade

The concept of community is an ever-shifting one.

It first becomes applied to movements for social change after World War II, when a dissatisfied social worker Saul Alinksy shifted his efforts into organizing urban communities, based on geographic proximity. He was the first recognizable community organizer that developed a model beyond just delivering goods or providing services, like the settlement houses that serviced the poor in the late 19th century. Community to Alinsky was based on physical proximity to your neighbors and the goal of community organizing was to build neighborhood, place-based, mega-organization that united various service providers, such as labor unions and churches.

But, the focus was short-sighted, trained on winning a metaphorical stop sign on your block, with campaigns guided by non-ideological and pragmatic goals, divorced of any critique of racism or sexism. This shaped the role of the organizer as an apolitical technocrat, an outside specialist, distinct from the community. Often, the leadership and staff of these bureaucratic organizations were white men, who were capable of working endless hours to get that stop sign installed.

Enter the 1960s and the global struggles of the Third World to shrug off its colonial masters. Radical movements within the U.S., who sought to eradicate poverty and institutional racism domestically, identified common interests with liberation movements abroad. This was the third world within. The same axes of oppression—racism, sexism, and capitalism—operated within communities of color at home. This new sense of community, what the Applied Research Center’s founder Gary Delgado terms as “communities of interest”, led to multiracial formations that tackled a wide variety of issues, beyond a single campaign, and prioritized indigenous leadership by community members so there isn’t a bureaucratic apparatus that mediates political activity between decision-makers and the community. Community leaders are not just members, but also teachers, analysts, as well as actors.

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