Archive for social change
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We seem to forget the many civil rights organizations and efforts that still operate daily in this country, trying to bring change. One in New England is Basic Black, which was set up
in 1968 during the turmoil of the civil rights movement as a response to the demand for public television programs reflecting the concerns of African Americans. Now, forty years later, in the midst of another historical political shift, the mission of Basic Black remains strong.
On their useful website, Basic Black folks have many important discussions of racial issues today. One editorial recently is by Rev. Irene Monroe on debates, especially among conservatives and younger Americans of all politics stripes, about “Do We Still Need to Celebrate Black History Month? Her answer is a strong yes, and in the process she makes some important points:
February 1 began Black History Month, a national annual observance since 1926, honoring and celebrating the achievements of African-Americans. This February 1, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM) opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, honoring the courageous action of four African-American students. …. Fifty years ago on February 1, 1960, the now ICRCM was a Woolworth’s store and the site of the original sit-in . . . . And as a result of their civil disobedience, sit-ins sprung up not only in Greensboro but throughout the South.
She then quotes and dissects the problem of collective forgetting and societal erasure (Jane Hill’s term) that is so common in the U.S. today:
However, for a younger generation of African- Americans as well as whites, whose ballots helped elect this country’s first African-American president, celebrating Black History Month seems outdated.
Thanks of course to the aggressive socialization of almost everyone in elements of the old white racial frame, which naively or inaccurately insists white racism is now dead.
She also makes a key but rare point about how LGBTQ folks get left out of too much Black history, including in this month:
Within the African- American LGBTQ community, Black History Month has always come under criticism. … The absence of LGBTQ people of African descent in the month-long celebration is evidence of how race, gender and sexual politics of the dominant culture are reinscribed in black culture as well…. . And because of this heterosexist bias, the sheroes and heroes of LGBTQ people of African decent – like Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Bayard Rustin – are mostly known and lauded within a subculture of black life.
We need a new era of collective remembrance on all these issues. How about 12 Black history months every year?
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A very useful website for information on civil rights issues these days is http://www.civilrights.org. Civilrights.org is operated by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. It has many useful lists of anti-racism and other anti-discrimination sources and reports, such as this recent one on hate crimes and what to do about them.
The site just reported on this major progress in government appointments, as Amanda Simpson becomes the first ever transgender presidential appointee. Here is the statement from the website by Tyler Lewis:
President Obama recently appointed Amanda Simpson, a transgender woman, to be the senior technical adviser to the Department of Commerce. Simpson – the first ever transgender presidential appointee – will serve in the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. The federal agency enforces sanctions and embargoes on various goods and regulates the export of sensitive technologies, such as software and machinery. Since 9/11, the bureau has made restricting the export of technologies that could be potentially used to create weapons of mass destruction a top priority. With 30 years of experience working in the aerospace and defense industries, most recently serving as deputy director in advanced technology development at Raytheon Missile Systems, Simpson is exceptionally qualified for the position.
President Obama’s openness to finding talent among all Americans is a welcome change from the previous administration, even if it took a decade into the 21st century. He may not be as progressive on things like the economy as many would like to see, but his orientation to real diversity and operational openness marks a major change for this government and society.
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I just got this notice about a CDC presentation on how inequality/equality shapes major aspects of every society:
The Division of Violence Prevention and the CDC/ATSDR Social Determinants of Health Equity Work Group invite you to attend a presentation: “The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger” by Richard Wilkinson Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham and Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology, University of York (Tuesday, January 5th – 9:30-10:30AM, Chamblee 106, 1A-B).
The summary of their presentation is suggestive of deep structural issues:
Among high income countries, comparisons of life expectancy, mental health, levels of violence, teen birth rates, child wellbeing, obesity rates, the educational performance of school children, or the strength of community life tend to be fairly consistent: countries which tend to do well on one of these measures tend to do well on all of them and countries which do badly on one, tend to do badly on all. What accounts for the difference? The key is the amount of inequality in each society. The picture is consistent whether we compare rich countries or the 50 states of the USA. The more unequal a society, the more ill health and social problems it has. This presentation will provide an overview of the theory and evidence for how income inequality affects well-being and examples of strategies that are being adopted based on these research findings.
Richard Wilkinson has a recent book, written with Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009). He is also a founder of The Equality Trust “to increase public understanding of the damaging effects on societies of large inequalities in income and wealth (www.equalitytrust.org.uk).”
One review of The Spirit Level on Amazon notes that in the book:
Wilkinson and Pickett lay bare the contradiction between material success and social failure in today’s world, but they do not simply provide a diagnosis of our woes. They offer readers a way toward a new political outlook, shifting from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more sustainable society. The Spirit Level is pioneering in its research, powerful in its revelations, and inspiring in its conclusion: Armed with this new understanding of why communities prosper, we have the tools to revitalize our politics and help all our fellow citizens, from the bottom of the ladder to the top.
Moving to class, racial, and gender equality means moving to healthier societies.
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Well, President Obama has been in office just 11 months, and people are now making broad judgments about his efforts so far. He already has done more than Bush did in eight years to move the country in a progressive direction, in spite of all that remains to get this ship of state back to some semblance of democracy and humanity.
One set of issues now cropping up involves “what has he done for black Americans?” Given that no group supported him as overwhelmingly as black Americans, that is an excellent question. And it has been one of the last ones to be raised lately, it appears. At Politico, one article by Carol Lee a few days back raised a set of issues along this line. It begins thus:
President Barack Obama deflected criticism Monday that he has not been attentive enough to the African-American community, telling American Urban Radio Networks that he was unconcerned to see that kind of message coming from former supporters such as actor Danny Glover.
President Obama said that Glover was just one of few discontented folks, that most black actors supported him so far, and also cited his support from black Americans in the polls. He was asked these questions, significantly, by one of the very few reporters (April Ryan) in the White House press corps, with whom he had a rare one-on-one interview. He is certainly accurate about the polls. Interestingly, Politico does not link to the full interview, and thus ignores the full question asked by April Ryan, which was much deeper and probing:
Speaking of the African American community, this seems to be a shift in black leadership, as it relates to supporting you. You have the CBC that’s upset with you about targeting on the jobs front — African Americans, 15.6 percent unemployment rate, expected to go to 20 percent; mainstream America 10 percent. Then you have black actors who supported you — Danny Glover, who’s saying that you’ve not changed, your administration is the same as George W. Bush. What are your thoughts about the fact that black leadership is grumbling, and the fact that people are concerned with you being the first African American President, and they thought that there would be a little bit more compassion for black issues?
He made an interesting comment to Ryan’s question, to quote Politico again:
“Is there grumbling?” he asked rhetorically. “Of course, there’s grumbling, because we just went through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” “We were some of the folks who were most affected by predatory lending. There’s a long history of us being the last hired and the first fired. As I said on health care, we’re the ones who are in the worst position to absorb companies deciding to drop their health care plans,” Obama said. “So, should people be satisfied? Absolutely not. But let’s take a look at what I’ve done.”
Right on point, so far as I can see. Black Americans and other Americans of color have taken harder hits from this Bush Depression than have white Americans as a group. And Obama inherited almost all the Depression problem. You can raise serious questions about the white team he has advising him on the economy, but not about that he inherited this problem. Politico notes too that
Obama repeatedly used the pronoun “we” in discussing America’s black community, but insisted that he shouldn’t be expected to target policies exclusively to African-Americans. “The only thing I cannot do is, by law I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” Obama said. “I’m the president of the entire United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That, in turn, is going to help lift up the African-American community.”
The “we” is indeed revealing. This is the first case since 1789 where black Americans could really be part of a strong “we” statement from the head of state. Interestingly, again, Politico leaves out a lot of substance that Obama gives about his take on the “state of black America” in replying to Ryan:
I think this continues to be the best of times and the worst of times. I mean, I think it’s the best of times in the sense that never has there been more opportunity for African Americans who have received a good education and are in a position then to walk through the doors that are opened. And, obviously, you and me sitting here in the Oval Office is a testament to that. I think it’s the worst of times in the sense that unemployment and the lack of opportunity, particularly in some cities, has never been worse. I mean, you look at a city like Detroit where you used to have an enormous African American middle class built on the auto industry — that city is in hard, hard times right now. Now, just going back to the point you raised earlier about our responsiveness to the African American community, imagine what Detroit would look like if we hadn’t stepped in to make sure that GM stayed open. . . . [However,] if you’ve got double digit unemployment in cities like that, we’re going to have to make some special efforts, and it starts with early childhood education; it starts with education generally. That’s why I’m putting such a big emphasis on that. But it also means that every federal agency has to make sure that the assistance that’s being made available to the general population is targeting those hard to reach places, so that they are also benefiting from our overall efforts to lift up the economy.
Eloquently put, clearly, but it is striking that at no point in this interview does President Obama note the widespread racial discrimination facing black Americans in housing, employment, education, and policing, and he does not even touch on the critical need of these “federal agencies” to enforce aggressively the (now mostly weakly enforced) U.S. civil rights laws. He continues to use language that plays into the soft version of the white racial frame, language about education and socioeconomic conditions that does not frighten off moderate or liberal whites.
In our recent book Adia and I point out that this playing to moderate/liberal white sentiments was true, with only one major exception, during his entire presidential campaign. In a “post-racial American,” a black President still cannot openly and candidly address a/the central problem facing African Americans—and indeed all Americans: Systemic White-Imposed Racism and its many facets and impacts.
Hundreds marched in Glasgow, Scotland yesterday in a rally (opens short video, 1:17) to call for an end racism. According to this report, the march and rally were organized to remind people of the dangers of allowing prejudice and discrimination to go unchallenged, and was organized by the STUC, a labor union. Reading the news about this anti-racism rally in Glasgow got me wondering, why aren’t there more of these in the U.S.? While I recognize that a rally is not the same thing as a social movement, but it is noteworthy that the only time there’s an anti-racism rally here, it’s in response to a KKK (or other white racist group) rally, and there’s not a sustained anti-racist movement in the U.S.
There’s some recent research by sociologists Jill McCorkel and Jason Rodriguez that may shed some light on this question (recently highlighted in Contexts). McCorkel and Rodriguez explored the experience of those who participate in movements dominated by people of other races, specifically, they used multi-year participant observation to study how white people become accepted in civil rights organizations dominated by African Americans (e.g., “pro-black” abolitionism and “conscious” hip hop). They found that white people are rarely recruited into such organizations and, when a white person seeks membership, they’re often relegated to “supporter” roles rather than given full membership. In order to move into the core of the movement, white people had to prove their “realness”— that is, their commitment to political struggle. But regardless of their efforts to “fit-in,” white participants in black social movements never could become full members. (You can read the entire article in the journal Social Problems, March 2009).
While McCorkel and Rodriguez’s research is focused more on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to two racially progressive movements, their research also suggests a few speculative explanations for why there’s not a robust anti-racist movement in the U.S. First, it suggests that whites are rarely seen as natural allies by people leading organizations focused on racial equality. Further, it suggests that anti-racist whites are not organizing among themselves to form a movement against racism, but rather are seeking out organizations dominated by African Americans. Yet, once in those organizations, anti-racist whites must do the work of proving their “realness” to others rather than engaging work that might change structural inequality, dismantle institutional racism, or raise the consciousness of other whites. Perhaps anti-racist whites who want to see real social change should work on doing something to change the school-to-prison pipeline, as just one example, rather than trying to get demonstrate how “real” they are.
Or, maybe like whites in Glasgow, whites here in the U.S. could organize an old-fashioned anti-racism rally.
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Since the 1980s black leaders have held several State of the Black Union overview conferences. In 2006 a document, “The Covenant with Black America,” was presented to eight thousand attendees at the seventh conference in Houston, a book-length statement of strong recommendations to policymakers that would improve the lives of African Americans. In addition to suggesting action options for African Americans with regard to issues such as renewal of voting rights legislation and boycotting discriminatory companies, these conferences have generated renewed interest in an array of political campaigns accenting issues of concern to black communities.
Subsequent black conferences have confirmed these goals, and the book version of the Covenant became a New York Times best-seller. A third book in the Covenant series is now out, and is described on the website thus:
Accountable is the the yardstick that will determine whether we, the people—both political leaders and citizens—have lived up to the aspirations enshrined in The Covenant and operationalized in THE COVENANT In Action. It offers a pragmatic model for holding our new president and political leaders accountable for what they have promised and must deliver. It also holds us accountable both as individuals and as a community for our actions or inactions in keeping our agenda on track. Because the stakes have never been higher, Accountable teaches American citizens how to be driven by “the cause and not the candidate,” and how to sustain the new political dialogue in which “our votes cannot be separated from our voices.”
The Covenant with Black America website has some very useful interactive maps (from http://www.blackstat.com) dealing with important statistical data by state on Health, Education, Justice, Democracy, Environment, Digital Divide, and Rural America.
There is also a good link to race, poverty, and related news events.
This is a good site for students to access.
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photo credit: lessismoreorless
The British Guardian/Observer just did one of the better stories I have seen on US cities suffering greatly in this Bush depression–showing that in Detroit things are worse than in the great Depression of the 1930s. Much of Motor City is now “a ghost town.” The 1930s saw official unemployment reach about 25 percent. Today it is 29 percent in Detroit. This predominantly black city has lost more than half its population in recent years as U.S. capitalists have made many poor decisions, usually in the name of profit, including disinvestment in U.S. industry. Among other things they have sought cheap labor overseas, often at near-slave wages, and weak government regulation. Once the fourth largest city, Detroit has dropped to 11th in the country.
One summary of 2000 and 2005-2007 census data describes racial percentages in the city:
The racial makeup of the city was 81.6% Black, 12.3% White, 1.0% Asian, 0.3% Native American, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 2.5% other races, 2.3% two or more races, and 5.0 percent Hispanic. The city’s foreign-born population is at 4.8%. Estimates from the 2005-2007 American Community Survey showed little variance.
A city once overwhelmingly white, Detroit is now one of the least white cities, the probable reason mainstream national media have paid little attention to the economic depression firmly entrenched here. Journalist Paul Harris at The Observer describes severe conditions in Detroit thus:
Try telling Brother Jerry Smith [at a Capuchin brothers’ soup kitchen] that the recession in America has ended. . . . Outside his office the hungry, the homeless and the poor crowded around tables. Many were by themselves, but some were families with young children. None had jobs.
He adds:
There is little doubt that Detroit is ground zero for the parts of America that are still suffering. The city that was once one of the wealthiest in America is a decrepit, often surreal landscape of urban decline. . . . The birthplace of the American car industry, it boasted factories that at one time produced cars shipped over the globe. Its downtown was studded with architectural gems, and by the 1950s it boasted the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership of any major American city.
Then U.S. capitalists started aggressively disinvesting in U.S. cities’ industries, and whites had already begun to flee cities like Detroit for the suburbs. With the help of white real estate decisionmakers, White flight created the famous “doughnut” pattern of black residents at the center surrounded by mostly white suburbs. Manufacturing decentralized in the metro area, then started fleeing to the South and other countries — for cheaper labor and no regulation. The city dropped half its nearly two million population to about 900,000 now. And today even the suburbs are also in trouble:
Its once proud suburbs now contain row after row of burnt-out houses. . . . Now almost a third of Detroit – covering a swath of land the size of San Francisco – has been abandoned. Tall grasses, shrubs and urban farms have sprung up in what were once stalwart working-class suburbs. . . .
The city has a shocking jobless rate of 29%. . . . Recently a semi-riot broke out when the city government offered help in paying utility bills. Need was so great that thousands of people turned up for a few application forms. In the end police had to control the crowd, which included the sick and the elderly, some in wheelchairs.
To make matters worse the city has a huge government debt and is cutting major services like street lights and public transportation.
(For a boosterish story on Detroit, that barely touches on these issues see Wikipedia here)
We have summarized the significance of much of this capital flight from US cities here:
Capital flight—the movement of companies to locations with lower labor costs and favorable profit-making conditions—is now a threat to many U.S. workers. And it is distinctively racialized, with workers of color in recent decades often suffering disproportionately from it. Especially African American and Latino workers in blue-collar jobs in major US industries like the auto industry.
Many US corporations now routinely operate around the world. The global capitalistic market has made low-wage labor and unregulated working situations available to most big corporations which shift investments out of moderate-profit industries to higher-profit international ventures, abandoning U.S. industries. From the (usually white) corporate executives’ view, plant closings and capital flight “discipline” U.S. workers to accept lower wages—and to be docile in the face of corporate decisions. A variety of U.S. firms are using relatively low-wage, nonunion labor pools in poor countries to cut production costs. Computer and electronics industries, which many have counted on to provide jobs to replace the decent-paying ones lost in declining “smokestack” industries, have joined the corporate flight overseas. Many blue-collar jobs and, increasingly, many white-collar jobs are being exported overseas; they are often the jobs important for many new entrants into the U.S. work force, such as non–college-bound high school graduates. The U.S. government has aggressively facilitated the export of many decent-paying jobs to low-wage areas in other countries. Without some countervailing power, corporations with accountability to no country will go wherever labor is cheapest and most repressed, a process that has steadily eroded the standard of living for many U.S. workers and their families–of various racial backgrounds.
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(Photo credit: Kassandra Agee-Letton)
At a major national community service forum at Texas A&M today, I got to hear the first sitting president I have ever heard in person. President Obama gave a strong and aggressive speech on the importance of community service and volunteerism. This was a forum sponsored by the Thousand Points foundation set up by President Bush-41 some years back. While such volunteerism has serious limits and certainly is no substitute for major structural reforms and significant action to bring an egalitarian society—and many conservatives do see it as that substitute—it does bring out the best in many Americans. In his speech, actually, Obama was careful to point out the limits of volunteer and service efforts to bring substantial change in society’s big problems of social justice, something rarely heard from politicians on this subject.
Some great organizations and efforts were celebrated today, and are facilitated by this foundation—as well as the usual band-aid organizations. Obama noted too that there have been huge increases in applications for the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, suggesting that even better service organizations might also get lots of applicants. (At Texas A&M University record numbers of students get into volunteer work these days, against much of it limited local community service work but efforts that suggest greater challenges might attract some of them.)
The media coverage I saw (or heard about from my students) of the event and the buildup to it was often lousy and slanted toward the “if it bleeds it leads” school of contemporary journalism. They had played up the conservatism of Texas A&M University and/or the likelihood of thousands of right-wing demonstrators. Actually only 100-200 demonstrators showed up, and there were also numerous supporters of Obama who demonstrated for him. They were mostly kept far away from the campus venue too. And the audience of 3000+ in the university auditorium gave President Obama by far the strongest standing ovation of the ovations given to the many dignitaries there (including Bush-41 and Secretary Gates, members of Congress, etc). 
Also distorted by the mass media is Obama’s political agenda and efforts. I learned today from his speech about huge supportive efforts he and his staff have engaged in to facilitate and increase community service by Americans, especially young Americans—including the Ted Kennedy service Act he signed that expands several of the service corps. See here for some information. Substantial governmental money has been put behind these efforts. Why hasn’t the media covered this rather extensive effort to facilitate community service by Americans of all ages and backgrounds?
Still, I worry that such an emphasis on volunteer service, Obama’s qualifications notwithstanding, does and can deflect our national attention to getting on with the major structural changes we need to make in order to make this the substantially egalitarian society it claims to be.
From August 7th to the 9th, the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) held its annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. SSSP is an organization of scholars, activists, advocates and students, who apply the principles of social science along with a humanistic perspective to the study and solution of social problems. I had the privilege to hear Dr. Steven Barkan deliver his presidential address on August 8th, and his message is an important one that deserves to be heard beyond the walls of the conference hotel ballroom. Dr. Barkan graciously shared a copy of his speech with me, so I could write about it here.
In his address, Dr. Barkan called for a “new abolitionism.” The United States, he pointed out, as others have, has come a long way in addressing racism, and he celebrated this fact. “We should rejoice that many people of color have made gains unimaginable a generation or two ago . . .” Nevertheless, in 2009, almost 245 years after the Civil War ended, more than 100 years after W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and four decades after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, “the problem of the color line continues,” said Barkan. People of color still deal with racism on a daily basis, both “symbolic racism” and more overt racism.
To illustrate how racial inequality manifests itself today, Barkan used the examples of racial disparities in wealth and health. He cited statistics showing that the median net worth of families of color is only $25,000 compared with a median $141,000 for non-Hispanic white families. With the exception of Asian Americans, the poverty rate for people of color in the United States is more than double – and for some groups, more than triple – the poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites. To these observations, I would add that while the racial wealth and poverty gaps narrowed somewhat during the 1990s, the current economic crisis has once again restored them to their 1970s equivalents. Moreover, as Barbara Ehrenreich recently pointed out, to be black and poor nowadays makes the probability of “being sucked into . . . the ‘cradle-to-prison pipeline’” increasingly high.
In looking at racial disparities in health, Barkan cited statistics on infant mortality (i.e., the number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births) that show black infant mortality to be more than double non-Hispanic white infant mortality (13.6 and 5.8, respectively). Life expectancy for African Americans is five years less than the life expectancy of non-Hispanic white Americans. As Arline Geronimus shows in her research on racial health disparities, the stresses resulting from daily life in a racist society “weathers” African Americans, causing them to age more rapidly than their white peers and to suffer more chronic illnesses associated with stress and unrelenting disadvantage (e.g., high crime, inadequate access to health care, poor health care, environmental toxins). Although social class mitigates this disparity somewhat, the “hypersegregation” that African Americans continue to experience in the United States means that they remain nearly as socially isolated from whites in their living arrangements and private lives today as they did under Jim Crow (see Patterson’s commentary).
As Barkan pointed out in his address, these are disturbing statistics, but we must remember that “behind them are the lives and stories of real people.” And so he called for a new abolitionism, “a new movement to end racial and ethnic inequality.” Specifically, Barkan argued that this movement should use all the strategies and tactics that progressive social change movements have used historically, including traditional political activity as well as protests and demonstrations, and these should be “responsible and nonviolent but . . . also constant, loud when necessary, and perhaps a tiny bit uncontrollable just to keep things interesting.” Barkan sees this new abolitionist movement as a coalition of diverse racial and ethnic groups, but it should not be a movement whose members are solely people of color because “racial and ethnic inequality is, after all, a white problem. It was a white problem in the past . . . and it is a white problem today.” Barkan is not naïve. He admits that many white people will not easily relinquish white privilege. But he urges whites, nevertheless, to fulfill their moral obligation by taking “a leading role in the new abolitionism.”
I found Barkan’s address challenging, but inspiring. He made a strong case against the notion of the US as a post-racial society. The complete address will be published in the February, 2010 issue of the SSSP journal, Social Problems. I urge all of you to read it and I urge you even more strongly to take up Dr. Barkan’s call for a new abolitionism.
The July 10, 2009 issue of the Austin American-Statesman’s online edition features an article titled “Education ‘Experts’ slam César Chavez.”
It reports that the often controversial Texas State Board of Education appointed a six-member panel of experts to help “guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards.” At a recent panel’s meeting, three of the members called for sanitizing various discussions of racial matters in textbooks and thus for the removal discussion of the iconic César Chavez from the textbook standards. The main “reason” was Chávez’s association with Saul Alinsky, a major political activist trained as a sociologist/criminologist.
In his lifetime Alinsky provoked the anger of many conservatives because of his work in community organizing in many cities against injustice. Now these conservative Texas panel members take their turn. They seem to ignore that Alinsky advocated peaceful resistance and that in 1969 was the recipient of an award given by the Catholic Interracial Council, the same award given to Mother Teresa and Senator Harold Hughes.
photo credit: Scani – Salina Canizales
Nevertheless, César Chavez, a key organizer for U.S. farmworkers for much of his adult life and highly regarded in Mexican American communities and many other communities, is guilty by association and all of the achievements and selfless work of this internationally renowned labor and human rights activist are ignored because of his association with another experienced community activist. It’s a baseless excuse, I guess, as good as any such notions.
By the way, I personally witnessed anti-Latino racism in Texas up close in the early 1970s, first as a soldier and later as a sociology graduate student. Sadly, anti-Latino racism is alive and well in Texas.
Note on Saul Alinsky, from a book by Joe and Hernán Vera (Liberation Sociology):
Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was a practicing sociologist, an intellectual activist who worked for and tried to understand the experiences of the oppressed. He founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940. Alinsky’s IAF has fostered much community organization across the U.S., currently with about 57 affiliates operating on behalf of the poor in more than twenty U.S. states, Canada, the UK, and Germany. With 150 or field organizers, the IAF serves numerous coalition organizations linking hundreds of local citizens’ groups and at least a million families. A recent IAF statement summarizes the organization’s current efforts: “IAF leaders and organizers first create independent organizations, made up of people from all races and all classes, focused on productive improvements in the public arena. IAF members then use those new political realities to invent and establish new social realities.” The statement continues with a clear example of contemporary efforts: “One new reality is the living wage movement in the United States. The first living wage bill was conceived, designed, and implemented by the IAF affiliate in Baltimore in 1994. The second bill was the work of the IAF affiliates in New York City in 1996. Since then, IAF affiliates in Texas, Arizona, and elsewhere have passed living wage legislation.”
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