If real reform is going to happen, it has to put in place a viable, critical, formative culture that supports notions of social and engaged citizenship, civic courage, public values, dissent, democratic modes of governing and a genuine belief in freedom, equality, and justice.

— Henry Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. xi.

While I believe that public education should equip students with skills to enter the workplace, it should also educate them to contest workplace inequalities, imagine democratically organized forms of work, and identify and challenge those injustices that contradict and undercut the most fundamental principles of freedom, equality, and respect for all people who constitute the global public sphere.

— Ibid., p. 9.

Public education in this society has hardly ever attracted the enthusiasm of the powerful—any medium through which the disempowered can gain ground on the privileged has always had the tag of “Communism” or “Anti-Americanism” hung around its neck. And for this reason, the public school system has been the piñata of Right-wing politicians and their bosses, whacked to death and drained of all resources that give it life and sustenance. So starved of precious funding are many schools that music, health, and even history classes have been shaved off, narrowing the scope to Math, English, and Science courses, to better prepare a generation for leadership in a hostile and competitive world—or so the apologists bay.

Public education has always had the eyes of society’s owners trained on it, and in our age those of the ruling class see it as but a bygone nuisance, one mere hour away from total oblivion. Education, for this slim minority, should always keep one element esteemed above all else: value. The narrative goes: students cannot simply be educated to be educated; they have to be to take over companies, build pyramid schemes, crunch numbers, sell mortgages, grab land, win lawsuits, and run government. Public education, then, always represented a great threat to the fantasies of those who want back the culture Roosevelt chased off.

To see this dream come true, the anti-public culture warriors went to work, stripping off what they could by the piece, guffing lies into the living rooms of millions, setting presidential agenda when they could; and before long, it became common sense to see underpaid, overworked, unsupported teachers who endure 9-10 hour shifts as the great wall standing between an abandoned generation and a renewed gilded age.

Looking back, the plan seems executed without flaw: to render the very concept of a society obsolete, to demolish critical sites that create and sustain the values of such society; to reframe the function of schools, to collapse media ownership into the hands of a few, to run a profit-making pipeline from low-income public schools into juvenile halls and thereafter prisons—assigning a function and role to students who might better spend their time trying to make society a model of justice and parity. In the grand finale, public school teachers were dragged out into the town square for public stoning. Having deskilled these teachers for decades, switching their roles to technicians and test machines, the demonization began, which helped later on in absolving them off all power to challenge oppressive workplace practices like militarization and privatization.

The Texas Board of Education’s decision last year to delete all history of working-class organizing and resistance would prove merely the latest round in a long battle to do away with any education that doesn’t assign students consumer identities—giving to teachers that of salesclerks.

Acclaimed education theorist Henry Giroux traces this history in his latest text, Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students, and Public Education, a slim, fiery volume drenched as much in hope as in despair for what has become of a culture which tells kids CEOs know more about education than do certified educators. “Despite the trust we impart to them in educating our children,” he writes, “we ignore and devalue the firewall they provide between a culture saturated in violence and idiocy and the radical imaginative possibilities of an educated mind and critical agent capable of transforming the economic, political, and racial injustices that surround us and bear down so heavily on public schools.”

Teachers, devalued and demonized, are increasingly being written out completely. Giroux notes: “As many as one million students are now finding themselves in classrooms where the only adult is a computer technician.” And the loudest champions of this new wave wouldn’t be our insane friends on the Right but the philanthropic minds of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Sam Walton, and many other wealthy executives—captains of the education ship in the Obama era. They have the ears of the illiterate education secretary, Arne Duncan, whose mind is forever sold on a corporate education system, controlled by Wall Street financiers and Education Management Organizations (EMOs), run by market rules, and inevitably pumped up with so much greed and avarice into a bubble so vast it bursts—and millions of struggling citizens lose everything while the rich beam off scot-free:

Underneath this discourse lie the same old and discredited neoliberal policies that cheerfully serve corporate interests: privatization; union busting; competition as the only mode of motivation; an obsession with measurement; a relentless attack on teacher autonomy; the weakening of tenure; educational goals stripped of public values; teacher quality defined in purely instrumental terms; an emphasis on authoritarian modes of management; and a mindless obsession with notions of pedagogy that celebrate memorization and teaching to the test.

The private has been at war with the public for as long as slaves were resisting the demands of the market, but never before has public society fallen under such compelling attacks as to inspire the sense of desperation sweeping through public schools: entire staffs cleaned out by the hundreds, districts hijacked by corporations and the military, schools shut down by omnipotent emergency financial managers, students taught curriculum written by McDonald’s, British Petroleum, and Walt Disney. This sequence has a simple motivation, Giroux insists: “Public schools are under attack not because they are failing or are inefficient, but because they are public.”

The new culture cannot be complete without striking to death this one last giant, which still hangs upon a tight rope the hopes of millions of parents, unable to afford private education or home schooling. This, then, puts upon education a great responsibility, to prove to the naysayers that it can “function” with “efficiency” in our complex world, that it can crank out students with good GPAs who’ll sit in cubicles for the next 50 years after graduating college. But this notion fails the test, as Giroux notes: “The repeated emphasis on education manufacturing a product, as if it were designed simply to produce durable goods, does nothing more than justify its treatment as a machine to be repaired rather than a complex social institution made up of living, breathing human beings.”

It is the shameless construction of uneducated clods who couldn’t tell John Dewey apart from the decimal system: the fantastical aspiration of Wall Street racket runners and half-wit entertainers who swear charter schools are merely public entities shielded from the bureaucratic red tapes clogging up all access to meaningful reforms. And any hour these days they are found plastered on cable news screens, reciting jingle-like platitudes only gratifying to like-minded simpletons, frothing at low standardized test scores, high teacher salaries, tenure, unions, and the short hours kids spend in school these days. What they want, of course, is a generation trained to the “Gordon Gekko ethos of ruthless competition.”

They want kids to see education as a business, as primarily the means to a financial end, which would explain why “when young people were surveyed in 2009, 73 percent responded that their top goal was being financially wealthy as opposed to only 37 percent who supported that position in 1971.” They want kids thinking—but uncritically. They want kids seeing the world through the ideas and values that crashed the global economy two years back. They want kids enmeshed in a casino capitalism doctrine that creates the sort of culture where Ponzi schemes and redlining and subprime bundles keep the engine running.

In New York, as in many cities countrywide, the billionaire mayor can put his trust only in CEOs to run the education system. Success in the hard-nose private sector is now paralleled with experience required to deal with matters of segregation, curriculum, pedagogy, dropouts, special needs, and school meals. This signals a turn in the screw, calling to question a crisis of values, a reshaping of principles, beliefs, and traditions. “In this instance,” Giroux writes, “Bloomberg and the market-driven billionaires who support his view of education are now asking the American people to be proud of what we in fact should be ashamed of—the rise of a market-driven business culture that hates democracy and the forms of education that make it possible.”

Reading Education and the Crisis of Public Values, Giroux often comes across inhabiting multiple bodies: in one sense, a latter-day prophet announcing doom to a half-empty lecture room; in another, a veteran intellectual supplying ammo to a younger generation woefully unprepared for the most important public education fight in the nation’s history; a matador striding alone, trying to hold onto what remains of a flailing, collapsing tradition; a public advocate resting one final count of persuasion upon a society slipping into the abyss of neoliberalism, from which no return might be possible. “Surely, under such circumstances, we have joined Alice in falling into the rabbit hole.”

But this teacher of hope wouldn’t want to depart without a sense of what true education brings: not a model or method or structure frozen and microwaved for use like packaged patties, but a “political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills, and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves the possibility of what it means to be engaged citizens while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy.”

Students, if they at all care for their futures, would have to forge alone at times, returning to history for inspiration, refusing to be swept away by this whirlwind of neoliberalism racing through everything yet to be privatized. Students would have to be vigilant against facile alternatives to the paradigms and traditions handed down through generations, fought brutally, and often bloodily, for by men and women who simply dreamed of a world free from the fangs of corporate dominance. Students would need to be at the forefront of this movement, like the children of Chile, refusing to sell out their futures and those of generations to come. “They must also learn to confront directly the threat from fundamentalisms of all varieties that seek to turn democracy into a mall, a sectarian church, or an adjunct of the emerging punishing state.”

With this document, we can truly hope for the best.

This is a game / I’m your specimen

— Sly Stone

Lately, it seems, Hollywood has been drilling deep for the bottom of the barrel of mediocrity. The official consensus goes: at the turn of the millennium, a new medium seized the hearts of today’s youth, operating at a level and speed unlike anything ever before, and this medium effectively wiped clean the slate of existing templates, rendering everything before obsolete, setting new paradigms for all other media forms, whether the news, sitcoms, dramas, even movies. To keep up, then, rival packaging understandably becomes glossier, less engaging, more entertaining, and certainly absolved of all content which might make unfair demands on the fragmentary, flickering intellect of the average 21st century consumer.

So of no surprise should it be that this past weekend’s big release, Bad Teacher (Sony), affords nothing of value to any film goer with interests above the carnal and caustic lusts of the stereotypical teenager. [Plot is revealed below -- Eds]

Elizabeth Halsey (played by Cameron Diaz) is a sharp-mouthed seventh-grade English teacher at a Cook County public middle school, plagued by a mission to achieve the barest minimum in the classroom. She’s comfortable coming to school routinely stoned or wet, leaving the kids nourished on a daily movie run. The world is plotted against her, it also seems, as her latest drive to get breast implants was derailed for financial reasons. Her students are at best disposable twerps underserving of love or respect: when one brings in home-baked cookies on the first day of class, she spits them out. At a PTA conference, she solicits bribes from parents, even guaranteeing one of her daughter: “She will get an A—or your money back.” At a student’s home, she steals a glass dolphin.

And yet through all she finds time to square against a nemesis, built from the start as a good-natured, exemplary, however hyper-energized teacher across the hall who remains ever suspicious of Elizabeth’s antics, much of her information coming from kids bullied into confessing all they know, one even threatened with points deduction for not answering sufficiently—perhaps a long march from Abu Ghraib? Before long, in stumbles an accidental character, substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (played by Justin Timberlake), tasked to spice up a script not terribly surplus in content and character.

Nevertheless it’s classic Hollywood:

Cat fight—Check

Love Triangle—Check

Casual Racism—Check

Faux Narrative Arc—Check

Aspirationalist Tendencies—Check

Cheesy Romantic Ending Utterly Unrelated To Plot—Check

But there’s a lesson of pressing urgency, for Elizabeth acknowledges her decision to teach was made for “all the right reasons”; namely, “shorter hours, summers off, no accountability.” During conversation with a gym teacher, as both contemplate their middling realities, he asks her: “What went wrong in your life that you ended up educating children?” And she answers: “Maybe I was a bad person in another life.” This is the set narrative until one night she learns of the annual bonus granted the teacher with highest performing students on the state standardized test, a whopping $5700. And this switches her drive, turning overnight from slothful, irresponsible, indifferent bum into fascist/dictator/super-mean teacher, amping up the cruelty for the glory of the bonus, to make the down payment on the boob job.

“Things are about to change around here,” Elizabeth announces to her students the morning after. “Recess is over!” And to ring this message home, she slams dodgeballs into the faces and bodies of students who miss questions on a pop quiz. When test time approaches and her students don’t seem enough prepared, she uses sex and drugs to deceive a test official, steals a copy of the test, and shows no remorse when later exposed—getting the official to fall on his sword through sexual blackmail.

Recently, Ms. Diaz spoke of the motivation for playing this character. “By the time I got to the end of the script I realized I didn’t have to redeem her, and that was so refreshing.” Timberlake seemed inspired along the same lines: “It’s not often a comedy like this comes along where every single character can kind of get away without being redeeming at all.”

Of course their artistic choices must be respected, but in a politically volatile period, when public school teachers are struggling to survive amidst the indefatigable attacks of liberal and hard-Right charter zealots, the decision to play teachers with no redeeming value could be strikingly insensitive, if not downright idiotic. And never mind this movie is rated R, meaning many likely to see it are parents with kids in schools. Yet both seem too smart to give critics the upper hand, Ms. Diaz declaring recently, “I am as public as education gets,” and Timberlake opining, “We have to figure out a way to pay teachers more. … The teachers we actually learned more from taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. They have such a huge responsibility and are under-appreciated and underpaid.”

It’s a delicate tension between good and bad, fiction and reality, two trifling hours in a dark theatre and a looping soundtrack of denigration from the powerful and prestigious, blaming you for all the ills of society. Watch closely, and Diaz’s character seems eerily cribbed from a classic Michelle Rhee diatribe—yes, the failed former chancellor of DC Public Schools who reckoned herself Superwoman and loved to brag of the thousands of teachers fired during her three-year reign.

Last September 2010 when the propaganda documentary Waiting for “Superman” premiered, Rhee was welcomed onto Oprah’s couch as a “warrior woman for our side!” and she took up the audience in sweeping ecstasy, telling the tale of a teacher “in our district who over a decade’s span would be AWOL, she wouldn’t come in for days at a time, and the kids would be left without a teacher, and then finally she started falling asleep in class.” Rhee decided to terminate her, but the teacher grieved it and was only suspended, “and then when she came back she was in a parent’s meeting and swore at them, called them bad names.” And only after 10 years was the sleepy, foul-tongued, union-backed teacher finally terminated. Only a few months prior, Rhee was desperately defending the mass firing of teachers, a defining feature of her tenure: “I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school.”

This would be Elizabeth Halsey, who’s passed out for most of class period, who smokes weed in front of her seventh-grade students, assuring them “it’s medicinal,” who seems built without any moral or ethical strand, a cartoon, caricature character, absolutely fiction, flat in true cinematic terms, hopelessly irredeemable, yet in control of over 20 students on any given day.

This wouldn’t fall under what Norman Mailer called the “sinister edge of serious film on a large screen in a dark theater.” So it’s much too easy to conclude the movie is banal, trite, silly, and useless, to dump its memories and images into a dustbin, irredeemably trash and filth; but to interpret Bad Teacher so simplistically would mark a general ignorance of the role Hollywood films play in our society, as teaching machines—educating all, young and old, with rapturing graphics, bawdy humor, gory scenes, shoddy plots, and captivating suspense thrillers which almost always spill outside of the theaters onto the main streets of everyday life and even into the living rooms and bedrooms of society.

Films, therefore, however different from legislations, ordinances, or publications, take form equally as message apparatuses, merely entering the same room through different doors. And within this context, certain meanings resonate higher in the public sphere than others. Certain registers count, leaving others devalued. In this instance, the notion that most public school teachers are reckless bums living lavishly off the hard work of parents, enjoying “shorter hours, summers off, no accountability,” comes just as genuinely rendered as the latest chest-pounding drivel drips of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates or non-educator entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada.

Elizabeth lies, cheats, steals to get the bonus, and no critique of the corporate sensibility creeping into public education, which drives senseless competition among public servants identified as educators—nothing but the craven desire for cheap chuckles registers. Public schools, in this film, are shunned as unregulated, abuse-ridden, chaotic environments, and the writers and director wouldn’t bat an eye defending their work as an apolitical representation of the absurd.

The formula, they know, needs no reinventing—smash language, sex, drugs and conflict together, and an eager public seats at the ready, waiting to lap it all up. After three days, a strong $31,000,000 debut—second place, behind the animated Cars 2.

James Baldwin worried in 1959 what was becoming of his native land. “We cannot possibly expect, and should not desire, that the great bulk of the populace embark on a mental and spiritual voyage for which very few people are equipped and which even fewer have survived,” he wrote. “What we are distressed about, and should be, when we speak of the state of mass culture … is the overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people.”

But our world, Baldwin knew, runs on supply and demand, and absence of demand doesn’t nullify supply. At a time when corporate CEOs have stooped in the public consciousness lower than drug dealers and politicians, no recent film, save for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2, takes a parodic lens to their chicanery. Whether or not the overwhelming polity thinks public school teachers have lost their touch and have at long last become unnecessary burdens on society fails to count in this chain, and Baldwin knew why: “The people who run the mass media and those who consume it are really in the same boat. They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.”

Maybe Sony Pictures Studios wouldn’t mind refunding my $7.50—no popcorns.

Zombie values find expression in an aesthetic that is aired daily in the mainstream media, a visual landscape filled with the spectacle of destruction and decay wrought by human parasites in the form of abandoned houses, cars, gutted cities and trashed businesses.

— Henry Giroux¹

Zombie culture hates big government, a euphemism for the social state, but loves big corporations and is infatuated with the ideology that, in zombieland, unregulated banks, insurance companies, and other megacorporations should make major decisions not only about governing society but also about who is privileged and who is disposable, who should live and who should die.

— Giroux²

The storms have been gathering for a few years now, and in one tidal wave centuries-old institutions, traditions, and values are being leveled out of existence, washed over by the roaring seas of neoliberalism. Yet no one attendant to the decades-long warning signs can claim shock; but that this wave should sweep through so thoroughly, and in the first term of the first Black president, who many deludedly believed either a “liberal” or “Marxist”– this, it seems, came unawares for most.

Across the country, millions are gripped with panic, watching their once-secure lives turned over so suddenly and sold to an insidious system which could be best described as inverted authoritarianism — a creeping culture in which individuals, institutions, and identities are subject to one infallible authority: corporations. And across the country, dozens of governors now find themselves at the right place at the right time to “change the course of history,” to plunge the final stake into democracy’s heart, effectively doing away with all petty talk of government for the people by the people. But this scheme would never sell well unless Emergency Time was declared, and the masses stripped of all ability (and right) to think clearly, which helps make the idiotic ramblings of the governors look logical.

And one consensus has towered above all: public workers are to blame; from podiums where the high and mighty bay in strong but familiar tongues, they are counseled toward austerity measures because, apparently, their society is in the red, and only by taking pay cuts, pink slips, and less hours can they do their share to sustain it. In times of surplus and stability, however, no mention of the common good or public benefit passed the lips of these elected oligarchs, all conceived from the union of Reagan and Thatcher, the latter who brayed in ’87: “[T]here is no such thing as ‘society.’ There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.” Two decades later, a simpleton from Kentucky elected to the Senate confided into a news camera that “we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor. We all are interconnected in the economy.”

Florida’s CEO governor seems keen on the idea, seeking to, as The New York Times reported recently, create a “business-friendly environment” in which financial and environmental regulations are dealt fatal blows, and corporations walk off brimming with nearly $2 billion in tax cuts, and the fangs of privatization dig deeper into Medicaid and the prison industrial complex; in addition, the elimination of 8,500 state jobs, a $1.75 billion cut in the public school budget, and new mandates requiring 600,000 government workers to pinch 5% toward their retirement.

The school board of Providence, Rhodes Island, had a better idea—ship pink slips to all of its nearly 2,000 teachers, forewarning possible termination at school year’s end. This would help in the arena of budget cuts, officials said, especially since next year’s $308 million school budget is expected to fall short $40 million.

Over in Indiana, Republican state representatives were shoving through a bill to bar unions and companies from negotiating better agreements, to strip out collective bargaining rights. They had been inspired by the inept county executive elected governor in Wisconsin who dreamt one night that he was Reagan’s illegitimate heir, and history was standing still on his behalf. So to plug his state’s $137 million budget deficit, Scott Walker decided to hit hard against public-sector unions and public schools and public universities, all the while swearing no nefarious motives.

Perhaps he felt a certain security having seen the alleged socialist president strut his stuff earlier in February, slicing in half a home-heating aid program for poor people, potentially impacting 3 million families nationwide. And as if to snicker in the faces of the Professional Left, the proposal called for an end to the Bush-era tax cuts, two months after his administration had bullied Democrat legislators into extending it.

Ohio Republicans knew, too, their time had come, and in due time a bill was rammed through the state House and Senate to stop binding arbitration and strip the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers. But by now this simple scheme had grown stale, so to send bells tolling, the bill also included a ban on strikes — punishable by hanging? “Unionized workers could negotiate wages, hours and certain work conditions but not health care, sick time or pension benefits,” reported The Associated Press. “The measure would do away with automatic pay raises and base future wage increases on merit.”

Michigan’s Tea Party governor dared to dream bigger. His bill would grant him power to declare towns in financial emergency, at which point an Emergency Financial Manager would be endowed with infallible authority to  “reject, modify, or terminate” contracts, suspend or dismiss elected officials, delete union rights, and hand power over to corporations. The sky is falling, he’s been bleating lately, though ever alert against mentioning the $1.7 billion in tax breaks extorted from the poor and elderly and swiftly transferred to big corporations as $1.8 billion in tax cuts.

Like his comrade in Pennsylvania, who hopes to anoint an anti-regulation energy company executive with “supreme” authority over environmental regulations, and his other comrade in Wisconsin, who plots to hand over state public utilities to titans like Koch Industries, Rick Snyder of Michigan is forging toward a more perfect tomorrow — where budgets are balanced, public workers know their place, poor school kids drop out of existence, the elderly rejoin a shrinking workforce, and corporations own cities, even states, leading to the privatization of entire societies, entire cultures. And with Romney or Santorum shepherded into office come November 2012, perhaps this would become the world’s first truly, and proud, privatized nation.

When fascism would sail to these shores, many have warned for decades, there would be no marching bands or mass rallies, no mustache trimming, no mass murders — preferably a more sophisticated form, more subtle, more agreeable to the average, burdened worker forced to juggle three jobs and four kids while watching Mexicans trampling across town in their capacity-defying mobiles. Fascism would come with mindless commercials pushing a thousand products per break; it would come with a twitchy maniac on a popular entertainment news network who sees blood written on every wall; it would come with a systematic dumbing down of the multitude, with a perennial circus that invites the public to choose between political Siamese twins who play the part of opponents for nine months. It would come with a slow death that renders millions upon millions dead among the living — eternal zombies roaming the streets, unable to connect their private pains with public policies. Fascism would not feature a megalomaniac villain the world would love to hate; it would feature cheerful corporations openly buying off politicians and setting social agenda, unconcerned with the hurt feelings of the masses whose voices would never reach high enough on cable news media to pierce public consciousness and rally strong against the marauders walking off with their children’s futures.

Henry Giroux’s latest text, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, accounts for a society whose members seem gleefully invested in their own undoing without knowing it. “Rather than being forced to adhere to a particular state ideology,” he writes, “the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses.”

Nowadays reading is a bore, so for cheap information, fast food style, most rely on television; incidentally all the major news networks are owned by corporations involved in everything from weapon manufacturing to sweat shops and slave labor, so the news commonly drives dangerously close to a 24-hour commercial marathon, a propaganda model built on product-pushing for whichever agenda rules the day. Viewers are asked to judge between the opinions of two dimwits pitted against each other like pugilists, to choose whose opinion flatters more. And once the segment ends, the baton is passed to the latest pill or pad without which life is not worth living — all in one chorus insisting, as Giroux notes, that the only way “to define ourselves is to shop and consume in an orgy of private pursuits.”

Against the backdrop of escalating homelessness, rampant joblessness, mass poverty, hunger, and hopelessness, the call to consume has only ratcheted, increasingly through the lips of kids too young to understand the values being promulgated. In a recent “Best Buy Buy Back Program” commercial, which touts the glories of ever-new products rendering one-month-old ancestors obsolete, a young girl no more than five runs around a front yard before reproaching her dad, who is dragging in a 3-D plasma TV right when a truck appears outside announcing 4D HDTV coming soon, “You got the wrong TV, silly head!” Toyota had a better idea, employing an 8-year-old Donald Trump to champion its new line, the Highlander, which everyone wants to ride in, the kid says, because “it’s got mad style”; and in a series of commercials featuring “embarrassing” parents wheeling their children around in “the old family hauler,” the kid prescribes to his peers the Highlander, which “comes with a sweet, rear-seat entertainment system.” His final counsel seems reasonable enough: “Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame.” E*Trade figured out a more haunting strategy: move the lips of diapered toddlers in cribs and call it marketing genius. The series of commercials run from the senseless to the raunchy; toddlers announcing stock tips, extolling E*Trade’s superiorities, and even employing sexual innuendo in their bits. Adults, in these worlds, remain either out of touch, embarrassingly arcane, or entirely irrelevant. Perhaps this explains why a popular weekly show on FOX Television tries to restore some stolen dignity as grown men and women get to pound their chests hard and screech for joy if at the end they best their opponents—5th graders.

Lives are being swallowed alive by greedy pythons who front big insurance firms and corporate banks, but breaking news on CNN must pause the world over to announce Lindsay Lohan has just arrived in court for her latest hearing, or a dad says his boy is floating toward the heavens in a gas balloon. Henry Giroux’s Zombie Politics sees this sort of routine idiocy as a trick to keep a terribly under-educated electorate further narcotized into sizzling stupor while the real rulers hold power forever:

Not only is the issue of the good life and the conditions that make it possible often lost in the babble of the infotainment state, but the market values that produced the economic crisis have so devalued the concept and practice of democracy that Americans find it hard to even define its meaning outside of the sham of money-driven elections and the freedom to shop.

Power is insecure, he also notes. Power must be cuddled by media through which mass audiences can be counseled against their interests, which explains Walker’s thrill over the New York Times’ February 21 article capturing snippets of everyday, blue-collar private employees who scorned their public-sector counterparts for demanding too much. “Power does not work simply through the control and influence of wealth, income, and resources,” Giroux writes. “It also has to legitimate itself, and for that it needs to create a pedagogical culture through which it can promote its ideologies and values.”

Of course, Orwell knew language travels ahead to prepare proper ground for action. Or as Toni Morrison reflected in 1993, “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” Language is commodified and sanitized, drained of its deadly implications, refined and dressed up nice; then becomes acceptable to those who should be warring against it. Words like “Austerity” and “Deficit” and “Shortfall” and “Burden” and “Freeloader” and “Ingrate” and “Entitlement” stalk the day, seizing the souls of those who’ve never fallen short of the good life — the pay-your-taxes, go-to-church, vote-Eisenhower life — yet now find themselves the victims of measures by governors who hear Reagan in their heads screaming, The time is now! This is language of a different sort, as Giroux notes: “Zombie language, with its appeal to the living dead, erases the social as it privatizes it and can only imagine freedom through the narrow lens of self-interest, exchange values, and profit margins.”

This is language which often destroys the truth, turning facts into casualties all in the name of making a point. It is now chic for politicians to simply lie about everything — from whom they sleep with, to where their funding comes from, to what perks the funding brings, to who writes their bills, who pays their lunch, who sways their vote. And for the entertainers masquerading as talk show hosts or commentators, lying becomes a necessity, second nature — a quality without which frenzy cannot be whipped up among the die-hard fan base taught to believe everything it’s told.

The smart even know lying draws flies—lying creates controversy, which creates coverage; and for as long as the liar can claim strong commitment to proving the lie true, TV cameras would forever be at the ready, on the edge to nab the first scoop. The idiot ex-governor of Alaska can, for instance, wake up one morning depressed the world has passed her over and climb back to national notoriety with a lie so seismic (thanks to the bots who run cable news) that it does well in sinking mainstream support for the health care reform bill in its original form. Another idiot who CNN has fallen in love with can manufacture lies out of a tape recording and set off a national storm against the honor of a woman accused of saying the exact opposite of her recorded remarks.

Meanwhile, large swaths of the public are being abandoned to stable a ship whose captains refuse to throw the real Jonahs off into the deep end—yelping about budget deficits while desperately ignoring the corporations blessed with billions in tax cuts, the multi-millionaire and billionaire CEOs whose average workers can barely scrape together a family meal while working two jobs. “At least 46 states plus the District of Columbia have enacted budget cuts that will affect services for children, the elderly, the disabled, and families, as well as the quality of education and access to higher education,” reported the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities early February this year.

The young of color, especially, don’t count. Through “policies of punishment” and a commercial culture that ranks its members based on those who buy more, many are either drugged up or locked up, “excommunicated from the sphere of human concern,” as Giroux writes. In Detroit public schools, their fate seems sealed. State officials have ordered the emergency financial manager to close half its schools, a plan to feature, come next year, up to 60 students per class. The kids would have to shut up and shoulder the burden of a $327 million district deficit they somehow must have contributed to.

The young, the poor, and the old are excess in this strange world where “we’re all interconnected.” In Arizona, 98 low-income patients approved for organ transplants can be abruptly flung off the list due to state budget cuts. In rural Tennessee, firefighters can stop by a house while it burns to the ground, snickering now and then, refusing to lift a finger on their hoses because the family had failed to pay the annual homeowner protection fee: $75. Three dogs, a cat, and many memories died that day. One day later, a primate trained to talk on the radio told his millions of listeners the deaths were justified: “If you don’t pay your $75, then that hurts the fire department. They can’t use those resources and you would be sponging off of your neighbor.” No wonder the Right-wing shook violently when former Rep. Alan Grayson exposed its wishes that the burdens of society simply “die quickly.”

The excess are to be overlooked and forgotten, shut out of mainstream awareness, left to rot and decompose in “tent cities found under bridges and located in other invisible landscapes—used in the past to get rid of waste products, but now used to dump poor working-class and middle-class families.”

Yet these conditions, however grim, stand amenable, even if the Wisconsin and Ohio uprisings boast no strong validations. Across the landscape, splotches of resistance seem to be spreading, especially among corners long-docile in the face of injustice—as a great wave gathered with enough fervor to turn over traditions seemingly etched into eternity. But if children would inhabit a world where corporations and elected representatives hold separate functions, due action must be taken before entire towns bear the logos of merchants who survey the world through a prism in which only profit matters. Giroux insists it’s time to “fight for the formative culture and modes of thought and agency that are the very foundations of democracy”; time to “mobilize a militant, far-reaching social movement to challenge the false claims that equate democracy and capitalism.” Those willing would have to beat back against the creeping forces of authoritarianism whose values “embrace death rather than life, fear rather than hope, insularity rather than solidarity.”

Turn on FOX News, tune into any of the several dozen radio frequencies broadcasting from Right of the field, and wonder at millions around the country beholden to a bobblehead from Alaska who finds troubling the concept of Africa as a continent, millions more at the feet of a bloated buffoon paid in the hundreds of millions to invalidate the mental superiority of humankind. “It’s time to bury the dead,” Giroux instructs, “and let the living once again inhabit the regions of government, the media, the economy, and other crucial spheres of power.” Amen.

1. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 32.
2. Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, p. 33.

Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it
Might not be such a bad idea
If I never, never went home again

—Gil Scott-Heron

They returned home to a Jim Crow South that expected them to go back to the servile position they left. Most resented it and wanted to be honored for risking their lives for their country rather than attacked for being uppity. Some survived the war only to lose their lives to Jim Crow.

—Isabel Wilkerson¹

Men lynched, castrated, and burned alive for using their tongues as weapons—against a terror state that told them each day they counted less than human. Women hanging from trees, their fingers severed and stored in jars as souvenir, throngs of ecstatic worshippers cheering, commemorating a weekly ritual—the women probably talked back in a way that suggested they forgot their place in the society they were born into. Angry mobs banging down doors in the dark night, searching out a young man accused of stealing turkeys—if found, a tree needs watering.

Hang onto your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die

6 million Black Americans in the South had seen enough to know Death had their names written in blood; so starting World War I a great migration began—many, like Nicodemus, creeping through the night to elude the paranoid suspicions of their vengeful captors. They slipped onto freight trains, crammed into cars, and dragged their feet for long walks from a place more hell than home, unsure of the future but desperate in conviction. And with heads pressed forward, never looking back—at a ghastly past that had made migration compulsory—they fled the South for the North, commencing a sprawling relocation which slashed in half the South’s Black population within six decades.

Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Boston University professor, documents this heretofore unengaged history in her grand new text, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a dexterous and detailed look into what became of a movement—told through the trails of three central characters—without which Motown might have never found meaning and Jazz might have never found new notes, relegating John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Louis Armstrong to obscure footnotes in the book of time.

Recently I had the chance to speak with Wilkerson on the scope of her research, ongoing migration in the 21st century, and the unique literary approach used to tell this great story until now never told.

Tolu Olorunda: Thanks for taking the time out of your chaotic schedule to speak with me. I guess the personal is political because your mother migrated from Georgia to Washington, D.C., and your father from Southern Virginia to Washington, as well.

Isabel Wilkerson: Yes. I literally would not exist if they had not made that decision because they never would have met. They were from different parts of the South, and the culture, believe it or not, is different from state to state. My experience growing up first generation in the New World made me very aware of how that experience is very close to the immigrant experience—and I identified in school with people whose parents had migrated from around the world—because you’re having to forge your way in a place your parents can only help you so far in trying to adjust to.

TO: 6 million Black Folks?

IW: Correct: beginning in World War I, with the opening and great demand—really desperate need—for labor in the steel mills and on the railroads in the North. And that was the beginning of the defecting from the caste system in the South, continuing until after the 1960s, when the system, as it had been known in the South, was dismantled. So that went on for almost three generations—people leaving.

TO: And I guess the concept of Citizenship is prominent in your book because this act you describe as migration—which we normally think of as an inter-national affair: relocation from one country to the next. But for these brave men and women who embarked on this journey, and in such massive proportions, it almost suggests they couldn’t have been recognized as citizens of and by their very country.

IW: Oh, absolutely. They were not recognized as citizens; they didn’t even have basic human rights. Their citizenship was not recognized in the land of their birth. And so they got about trying to find a place where it would be recognized and where they could live freely as citizens. And they shouldn’t have had to do that—but it was necessary: they could either stay in a caste system that restricted every inch of their movement, or they could leave. This was the choice every African-American family in the South had to face.

TO: So they make the migration from the South to the North, thinking this might be night-and-day, hell-and-heaven; but they get to the North and find out that trying to flee one terror doesn’t exclude the existence of another terror awaiting you.

IW: Many of the assumptions about them followed wherever they went, partly because the South was not another country, even if it acted like it in many respects. They found great resistance and hostility because they were coming from places where they were underpaid or earning no wages at all, so there was some fear that wages might go down and also fear from Blacks already there that this could endanger their already tenuous positions. So it’s one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, and it’s going on now with groups coming from faraway lands, just trying to make it in this forbidden and hostile environment, which end up pitted against each other, not realizing how much they share in common.

TO: These misconceptions, your book documents, were expressed by the layman, the working-class woman who had to compete with someone willing to work for lower wages; but they were also expressed by sociologists and economists. You quote economist Sadie Mossell who, speaking of the mass migration to Philadelphia, wrote, “With few exceptions, the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture”; and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier: “The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city … [and] the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease” (260-261).

IW: And that’s an assumption made about people arriving from a faraway place who are misunderstood, underappreciated—their motivations and full humanities are not recognized even by the people with whom they should have the most in common. It was not just Whites in the North, but Blacks as well, making assumptions and judgments about them, which made the transitions difficult. They had all the challenges you could imagine, which in some ways are proxy for what any new immigrant group has to go through when they come to a new place. And I would hope the book helps people feel more empathy for what it takes to make that great leap: to recognize what they had to go through to get there—that’s astonishing!—and what they left behind.

TO: If more Blacks had migrated from the South to the North, do you think the South would have remained the South as we know it? And what possible consequences for the North—since people and things were left behind, as you point out. If more had left, fed up with the brutality of Jim Crow, would the north have had its own southification?

IW: I think the North did have a southification. Think about it. Look at what happened to the family which tried to move into the apartment in Cicero. First they had a difficult time getting in the building: they were turned away before they could actually move in; and when they did they couldn’t stay because the people took all their belongings and hurled them out the second floor window and burned it all. They even went as far as ripping out the radiators and faucets. It was a mob scene—not in the South but in the North. These were working-class, recent eastern and southern European immigrants who were themselves feeling insecure and economically threatened in this foreign place.

But I think that had more people left, the Civil Rights Movement would have taken off earlier because there needed to be a critical mass of people leaving in such numbers with a velocity that would make an impact on the South and would ultimately embolden the states to say, Enough has happened—now is the time to make our move. And the North only began paying much attention to the atrocities in the South when it was attracting so many Black people—when the cities began changing dramatically, demographically. All these factors were interconnected.

TO: And what separated those who stayed from those who left?

IW: That’s a really good question. You might be able to answer that question, too, when you think about the people in the community where you came from—who stayed. I don’t make a judgment whether it’s a good or bad thing to leave, as an individual. I look at it as necessary to make the change we now all benefit from—as such a necessary historical moment that it’s hard to imagine what life would be like had they not left. The people who stayed tend to be more the keepers of the culture, the ones tied to the sentiments and history of a place. Those who left are more restless, impatient; they have an agitation for something better and different. I heard people say over and over again, “If I stayed, I would have died. I would have said something that would have gotten me in trouble.”

TO: I sense that this great migration is very much applicable to what we’re going through today. There was story a couple months back of Hispanics fleeing a small town in Connecticut following persistent police brutality: hardworking business owners just leaving in droves; they couldn’t take it anymore. So I guess it’s still going on today.

IW: Oh, it’s still going on because human behavior is fairly predictable—people react a certain way when exposed to certain stimuli. And the continuity factor in all these cases is economic insecurity. So I would hope by reading this book people would recognize and see the humanity in anyone seeking to leave a place for someplace better, and recognize this as the background of all Americans—there would not be a country without migration: relocation, dislocation, adjustment.

And people don’t realize that if you’ve come a long, long way to get to a place, you cannot fail. Failure is not an option. You’re too far from home. You can’t even afford to stumble. You have to succeed. So that means the people who come here are often determined and courageous people who are misunderstood as wanting to take advantage, when often they are coming with the same hopes and ambitions as anyone who’s ever crossed the Atlantic, or the Rio Grande, or the Pacific to get here.

TO: We hear that a whole lot with the Mexican, Middle-Eastern, African influx these days. I mean, people do think it’s about spitting in the faces of blue-collar workers, when it’s anything but. And I hope your book helps people, the literate public at least, understand something it needs knocked into its head: that immigrants are simply trying to establish a better life for themselves.

IW: Exactly. I also would add, though, that the caste system, being what it is, means a lot of assumptions are made about African-Americans who have been here for a while, who have been forced to live like immigrants in their own country. So I also hope the book helps newer immigrants empathize with, and see the humanity, the commonality with people they may not know have lived the immigrant experience, as well. I hope it fosters greater understanding on both sides. We haven’t yet had a dialogue to see how much we have in common, and in the absence of it: suspicion, resentment, hostility—all these replace what could have been an opportunity for understanding.

TO: Now, you could have written the book in some dreadful, legalese, textbook format. But you chose something, I think, more poetic, something magisterial—narrative journalism, which in long-form demands a lot of time, hard work, extensive research. And it was fascinating to see that in 2010 someone was still keeping alive that legacy.

IW: Thank you. I chose it because I wanted to pull the reader into that world beyond imagining-right-now: when you think of the daily terrors, arcane laws, and then the hard decisions the people made to move, and even what they encountered when they made it to this New World. I wanted the readers to picture themselves in those same situations: see what they saw, feel what they felt, and to ask, What would I have done in the same situation?

So I wanted it to come alive for the reader, which means an extra layer of work because you do all the research necessary to write the more scholarly book, which is important for the furtherance of intellectual understanding, then you take another step, though, to get deep into the lives of the characters to tell their story: you spend a lot of time with them. I wanted to reach as many readers with a story that has been, in my view, the greatest underreported story of the 20th century. And I thought people needed to know about it.

One of my inspirations was The Grapes of Wrath, which is a seminal novel about the Dust Bowl migration, and yet there was no Grapes of Wrath for the Great Migration, which is by many times a larger relocation of people within the borders of this country.

TO: How did this decade-long hustle match with your former gig as Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times?

IW: Oh, totally different. In other words, because it was so much bigger than any single topic I had ever tackled, it just took so much more time. But, really, it was the scale. I mean, the attention to detail, sitting down and talking to people, doing additional research: all that I would have done for any piece I would write for The Times. This was just so much bigger in scale. You’re talking 6 million people leaving over the course of three generations, the need to really talk about it from a century-long experience, the precipitating events, and the need to follow people afterwards. So you’re exploring 100 years of history, and that’s a lot. That’s a lot of material.

TO: Yeah, I don’t think you’ll find out what Ms. Ida Mae was wearing at ten-years-old, or what she was thinking at thirteen, after 10 minutes of interview.

IW: Yeah, one phrase might have taken an afternoon.

TO: And if it’s not too personal a question, I’m just wondering where the funding came from, to be able to travel back to all these places and…

IW: That’s a good question. I mean, it’s all part of the work of making it happen. For one thing, it’s nonfiction, so publishers provide an advance, very much like the music industry. And on that basis you make it work. But for 100 years of history, over 1,200 interviews in four different states in the North and three in the South, I had to get additional support. So I was awarded a Guggenheim: they recognized faith in the work and my commitment to complete it. And I also took teaching positions. I taught at Princeton and Emory. I had a lectureship at Northwestern. I continued to write—took short breaks. I did all that to supplement it.

TO: But you had to create multiple selves to be able to teach and simultaneously embark on this great journey.

IW: It also meant watching the budget. I remember catching a plane ride to California which had three or so stops. Soon as you went in the air it came back down. I stayed at the cheapest hotels at airports. You know, you do what you must to make it work.

TO: How do you whittle down 1,200 subjects to 3?

IW: Everybody had a certain strength and a window into the migration that they were sharing with me. But it really came down to about 30 people on my list, all very strong personalities—something that made them of interest. The book would still have maintained the same overarching goal, but the specifics would have been different, which would have affected the experience of the reader. I always wanted people the reader could identify with and see themselves in. So the deciding factor ended up being one person for each migration stream, and then I needed each to be different from one another. They had to all be leaving for different reasons, with different motivations. And they all needed to emerge from different classes. Finally, just great storytellers and characters in their own rights, who you would want to sit down and listen to.

TO: Every now and then, you come in as a character—introduce the first-person pronoun. It’s usually short-lived, but I’m curious about the literary decisions you made to bring yourself in, tell the story of your mother and father, and then take yourself out.

IW: That is really a great question because I struggled with that: I am a journalist who was trained to not use the first-person. So to use it felt like a wild leap into unknown territory. But I think it was probably more comfortable because I was talking not about me but my parents, who were part of that migration and generation. I felt it was necessary to help the reader understand the inspiration for the book, where the passion came from, to give a window into my awareness of the similar experiences of my family: it’s not as if I’m on the outside looking in. I am an observer, but one who has seen it up-close in my own life.

I did it with great thought each time. And other times I used the first-person had only to do—generally speaking outside of the Methodology section—with driving down the Mississippi with Ida Mae, and she wants to stop on the side of the road to pick cotton. And because I’m there, I can’t say, “She was with someone who was driving, and suddenly they stopped.” I was hoping for an authenticity, integrity, and intimacy in the work itself.

TO: You Flipped O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for “The Things They Left Behind,” a small section in the book.

IW: Yes! Of course. Thank you! I love that book!

TO: So what got you thinking you could tell stories with the abandoned possessions of these people?

IW: Well, you know, I just love that book. Telling stories through things is a kind of art unto itself. And it has great meaning. I mean, what people choose to carry and what they leave behind—by definition, things were left behind because many people left on-the-run. And those things become emblems, symbols of loss, homesickness and heartache. And every person who leaves a place has something tangible they had to leave behind, and I think that makes it real for the reader, too.

The idea of just saying, They left, sounds so simple; but saying, “They would never be able again to sit down with their mother for a cup of coffee or grits and bacon”—that has a different connotation and meaning. It’s a way of cataloguing the loss and sacrifice.

TO: Speaking as the first Black woman (Feature Writing, 1994) awarded a Pulitzer for individual reporting in journalism, would you like to see more Black writers involved in this sort of long-form, time-sapping, hopefully timeless, work your book is such a shining example and legatee of—as opposed to much of what we have today, which really could be described as fast-food novels? Shouldn’t there be a more vigorous push from the different levers we have for more Black involvement in narrative nonfiction and literary journalism?

IW: I absolutely believe that and hope the book opens the door for more of this kind of work. I hope it has proven there’s an audience for it and there’s a desire for it. The issue, of course, is that it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of determination and perseverance; and it just takes so long. A person has to really feel within themselves that it’s worth all that. No one can make that decision for you.

I hope there will be more such work because this is one opportunity to humanize a people that have often been left to the assumptions of conventional wisdom, rather than the reality of their lives and heart desires. And it can only come through when you take the time to make people feel really comfortable enough to tell their stories. It’s a delicate thing that takes a lot of time. There’s a need for stories to be told from the perspectives of ordinary people, not just the celebrities and household names. With ordinary people, truth and wisdom is found.

TO: Certainly. And I think just as Mr. Talese did with Unto the Sons for his people, you’ve done for Black people with The Warmth of Other Suns—bringing to life stories of everyday people who would normally go uncounted in history; but now generations to come would pick up this book to discover what life was like and the legacy that birthed them. So you’ve told this epic story; took you 15 years, 1,200 interviews, and god knows how many miles and how many airplane rides—

IW: You’re right about that.

TO: How quickly do you take up another project after exhausting so much energy and time on this?

IW: I’m still in the process of trying to make sure this gets into the hands of as many people. My goal was just for people to read it. You know, there was a library with 147 holds on the book. Some people may not get the book till 2013! And so I am thrilled the word has gotten out and people want to read; it shows we have more in common than we’ve been led to believe, it helps humanize people who—as you’ve indicated and I agree—would otherwise go uncounted, unheard from; and, of course, these people are getting up in years, so there was a great effort on my path to try to get the stories told before it was too late. So right now, I’m thinking about that, but I can say about the next project that it would not take 15 years because I would never have taken on something if I knew it would take that long. But it’s a good thing I didn’t know.

1. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), p. 145.

Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

—  Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), p. 4.

It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system, to think of the criminal justice system — the entire collection of institutions and practices that comprise it — not as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization.

— Ibid., p. 12.

As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

— Ibid., p. 171.

If news reports from the last three decades should check clean, Black and Brown males only fill the Criminal Justice System today because they choose, of their own free will, to turn the ways of crime and disorder; perhaps also because they seem to come from stock inherently deformed and defiled — unable to adapt to a civilized world where barbarism is unacceptable.  

And if the renowned rants of Black butlers on the Right should be treasured, Black males only find their human rights violated constantly, only find their dignities criminalized, only fall in the crosshairs of this very real War on Drugs, because they’ve discarded phonetics, filled their iPods with N.W.A. records, altogether accepted academic success as a White Thing, and preferred to sag their khaki pants three inches below waist level.   

Of course, delusion is powerful, and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, in her scathing text The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, levels these reports and rants with rare clarity, depth, and candor.“Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, helps to define the meaning and significance of race in America,” she writes. “Indeed, the stigma of criminality functions in much the same way that the stigma of race once did. It justifies a legal, social, and economic boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

The “them” have long found out their society lost faith in Redemption about the same time it sent into office a B-movie Hollywood actor/corporate salesman, who took on the causes of the rich and ruthless; pronouncing drug users Public Enemy No. 1, shelling out cold cash to any districts desperate enough to hook their tongues around the fishing rod. Since, sentencing rates have “quintupled,” for-profit prison stocks have boomed, rehabilitation resources have dwindled, and a “collapse of resistance” has seized activists and concerned citizens once outraged enough to topple the system of incarceration entirely.

It’s become increasingly easy to neglect those caged in and denied meaningful citizenship for the rest of their lives because for most, even before buying or selling those couple pounds of weed, even before lifting that crack pipe to their lips and inhaling with blissful pain, even before signing those flat checks amounting a few hundred dollars, society didn’t consider them clean enough to warrant concern. So now that the stain has grown greatly, and spread through far and wide, it’s more acceptable — even reasonable—to turn backs, eyes, and ears to millions crying out for help.

Now the wind has changed direction and I’ll have to leave

Won’t you please excuse my frankness but it’s not my cup of tea

Communities of color can suffer immeasurably from unwarranted (often deadly) police presence, and no significant, mainstream outrage is raised. Families of color are dropped to their knees, with fathers and mothers saddled with lengthy sentences for harmless infractions, and news channels implore their cameramen and correspondents to keep seeking more sensational stuff. Increasingly, working-class Whites are bullied into prisons for sinking one or two pills into their throats, for digging into their arm veins with H-filled needles; but, even then, they’re “not the real target” — they’re mere collateral damage, alibi even: to assure the world no Race-specific agenda is at work. Michelle Alexander begs to differ.   

A couple of days back, I spoke with her on the myth of colorblindness, on how media images frame public perceptions of prisoners and subsequent punitive policies, what mass incarceration means for ailing communities of color, and the struggle ahead for all sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Tulu Olorunda:  Thanks for your time, Ms. Alexander. You begin the book with juxtaposed images of a Black man handcuffed and overshadowed by officers in some street gutter, and a Black man overshadowing a past of Jim Crow and segregation to make history happen. In the first, passersby ignore the Black man; in the second, hundreds of thousands are paying solemn attention to his every word. Can you take it from there?

Michelle Alexander:  Yes. With the election of Barack Obama, so many people have persuaded themselves that we’ve finally triumphed over Race, that we’ve moved beyond Race. Meanwhile, of course, there are millions of poor people of color who have been branded felons, relegated to a permanent second-class status, legally discriminated against. So that young Black man kneeling in the gutter, at the same time the world is celebrating the election of Barack Obama, is, I think, a profound illustration of how our attention has been diverted, in recent years, away from those who’ve suffered from the emergence of this caste system, and how we’ve been enchanted by the election of a few African-Americans into positions of power.

TO: You insist that forms of racism don’t die out but adapt to the times — preservation-through-transformation, as you describe. “The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy,” you write, “evolve and change as they are challenged.” Why have most civil rights groups failed to see this and take up critical action against it — preferring to lunge from courtroom to courtroom rather than attack the streets, where the real war is taking place? And you have some stern words for these groups — “adapt or die.”

MA: Yes. I wrote this book because I was so deeply alarmed by the relative quiet of the civil rights community and African-American leaders in the face of mass incarceration. And I admit, at the outset, that I, myself, failed to fully grasp the extent of the devastation caused to communities of color as a result of the Drug War. There was a time when I didn’t fully get it.

I had a series of experiences representing victims of racial profiling, police brutality, and people who are struggling to “re-enter” a society — that never much wanted them in the first place — after being branded a felon. I had a series of experiences that affected me in profound ways; and now that I can see, with blinders off, the way it operates, the history, and how it functions to recreate a permanent second-class status for poor people of color (especially Black people in America), it is downright painful to watch so many of our African-American leaders, people who call themselves Progressives, including some in the civil rights community, standing by quietly as this Drug War rages on in our communities and mass incarceration continues at pace.  

But my book isn’t just about wagging fingers, because I was complicit in this system for quite a while. It’s really an effort to inspire others, to wake people up.

TO: What was the writing process like? I mean, what were you looking for, what did you find, and what weren’t you prepared for — what blew your head off?

MA: ln the course of my research, there were a number of studies that did blow my mind. One is that today there are more African-Americans under correction or control, in prison or in jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850. That’s a decade before the Civil War began. The scale of this system is astonishing! And we’re blind to it in part because prisons are out of sight and out of mind. During the Jim Crow era, there were “White Only” signs everywhere, Black people were supposed to sit on the back of the bus — there was no denying the caste system. But, today, if you’re not in it, it’s easy to deny. Prisons are typically located in White rural communities, far away from highways; and once former prisoners get out, they’re typically dumped back into the same racially segregated communities from which they came.

Another fact was that as of 2004 there were more Blacks disenfranchised than in 1870 —the year the 15th amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws discriminating against the right to vote based on Race. And the Felony Disenfranchisement laws today have decimated the potential Black electorate.

And I read one study by the Urban League in Chicago — that was another study that completely blew my mind — showing that in Chicago nearly 80% of working-age African-American men have criminal records that legalize discrimination for the rest of their lives. Nearly 80%! Just the scope and scale of this system…

TO: The book mostly details this new Jim Crow that marginalizes poor males of color. But is it not true that women, especially Black women, are fast becoming a prime target as well, even swelling up ranks just as swiftly as Black men did 20 years ago?

MA: Oh, yes. It is true. And while my book focuses specifically on Black men, that is in no way to diminish the significance of women in the Criminal Justice System. In fact, one could argue that the harm caused by high rates of incarceration of Black women is greater than that of the incarceration of Black men, because our communities are so fragile. To remove mothers, who are just barely holding these families together, and put them in cages, relegates children to foster care — for relatively minor drug offences. And this threatens to unravel what’s left of the Black family.

TO: Can you talk a bit about Ronald Reagan, the pater familias of this enterprise? Right as he announced the War on Drugs three decades back, only 2% of Americans considered drugs the most pressing national crisis. Soon enough, as you write, through legalized and sanitized bribery of local officials, this War became established as a serious threat worth endless resources.

MA: Yes. Most people think the War on Drugs was launched absolutely in response to a rise in drug crimes. But that’s a big myth. Drug crime was actually on the decline when the War was declared. The War was part of a grand Republican strategy to issue racially coded political appeals — on crime and welfare: get-tough language — to poor White voters, especially in the South were many were disaffected from civil rights gains.   Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term — War on Drugs. But Ronald Reagan was able to turn that rhetorical war into a literal one. This was before crack actually hit the streets. And the Reagan administration seized the [subsequent] rise of crack, and actually hired staff to publicize inner-city crack-babies, crack-whores, crack-abuse, and crack-violence, in hopes of persuading Congress to devote millions more dollars to the Drug War. And the plan worked like a charm.

The Reagan administration was giving out cash to districts and agencies that were willing to boost the volume — the number of drug arrests — which gave them an incentive to just go out and round up, shake down, frisk, toss as many people as possible in order to boost their arrest numbers. And these stop-and-frisk practices are most prevalent in communities of color, because of a Drug War that has almost nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with racial politics.

TO: You detail a number of studies, amongst which was one published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, revealing some startling stats: White students used cocaine seven times the rate of Black students, used crack eight times the rate of Black students, used heroin seven times the rate of Black students. Another 2000 study, this time by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, discovered White youth aged 12-17 fell over a third more likely to have peddled drugs than Black youth. But in a 1995 survey published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, wherein respondents were asked to shut their eyes and picture drug users, 95% envisioned Blacks, only 5% envisioned other racial groups — notwithstanding contrasting reports suggesting Blacks constituted only 15% of drug users at that period.  So why the disparity of reality?  

MA: A big part of the reason is media imagery. What you often see are Black men arrested and handcuffed for drug crimes; in movies, on television news, you see Black men depicted as drug criminals. And, again, this is no accident. At the time the War was launched, very few people cared about drug crime. And then, in the public consciousness, most people located drug use as White hippies smoking pot. That image changed profoundly after the Reagan administration launched a media campaign to publicize drug abuse and drug violence. The media became saturated with Black users as drug offenders. And by the time the War was unleashed, you couldn’t turn on the evening news without seeing images of Black and Brown men rounded in handcuffs as a result of drug sweeps. Now, routine coverage of drug sweeps aren’t as prevalent as they were in the ‘80s, but they still persist unabated, and the targets remain.

Now, that being said, there has always been a connection between African-American crime and the public consciousness — even dating back to Slavery up through Jim Crow. Every caste system has always been rationalized to some extent based on Black proclivity to crime.

TO: On this issue, of media machinations, you raise a very serious concern, one of Public Pedagogy, where, as you lament, shows like Law & Order offer strikingly mythical misrepresentations of the justice system and the impacts on poor people of color caught up. Some arrested fellow screams, “I want my lawyer!” and, in the next scene, he’s sitting across a very competent, Yale-trained defendant willing to go to bat for him.

MA: It’s such a myth. In reality, most people, if they’re lucky enough to meet with an attorney before they appear in court, meet for a matter of minutes before being forced to make decisions that would profoundly affect the rest of their lives. And the system is so set up to ensure innocent people pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit, from the threat of harsh mandatory minimum sentences or from probation promises — without being told that as a felon you’ll be discriminated against for the rest of your life: the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. All of these come true because people are processed through the Criminal Justice System — like widgets moving through an assembly factory line.

TO: I’m not sure you know of The Good Wife, but I’ve found it willing to let out some uncomfortable truths about inmates on Death Row, for-profit prisons, and the games politicians play with innocent lives hanging in the balance. Are there any shows getting it right on this issue, or is television just cursed from the start and inately untrustworthy

MA: Well, for the last several years I haven’t watched much television. I have three young kids, and I’ve been trying to write a book. I’ve been told that The Wire is very good. And I’ve heard good things about The Good Wife, too

TO: In Ohio, as you note, 90% of children charged have no lawyers. And across the country, young people, children even — some too young to brandish their skins with tattoos, or purchase Rated-R movie tickets, or legally drive cars — are sent to adult prisons, struck with lengthy sentences. (In fact, a brilliant book was released last year on this very frightening predicament, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?) I’m wondering how has media portrayal — demonization — of youth helped lead to a time and place where these ridiculously punitive policies are accepted as sane measures to address social problems plaguing young people?

MA: Yes. There has definitely been a wave of punitiveness that has washed over. But I don’t think the effects are evenly felt. I mean, it’s extremely rare to have drug sweeps at fraternity houses or college campuses, to have upper-middle class kids courted to prisons and branded felons for the rest of their lives. So I don’t think society has written off all youth.  I think it’s written off some youth; and this has been defined widely by Race. Today, mass incarceration is really about marginalization — the disposal — of a group of people who are no longer essential to the functioning of our economy and our society.

We could, as a society, have offered bail-out plans, we could have flooded these communities with a wave of compassion. Instead, we declared a War on Drugs, we ended welfare as we knew it, we went in there and we rounded up young Black men en masse, and we disposed of them in prisons. So I think those who are viewed as useful to our society are still treated relatively well in the media and in political discourse.

TO: I loved so much your analysis of the street culture many young Black males adopt to, in many ways, search for solidarity and support — for familial meaning. You say when their schools are transformed into prison sites, when they are rendered parentless, they inevitably come to embrace this stigmatized identity. And you ask: “Should we be shocked when they turn to gangs or fellow inmates for support when no viable family support structure exists? After all, in many respects, they are simply doing what black people did during the Jim Crow era—they are turning to each other for support and solace in a society that despises them

MA: Yes. I think there is so much finger-wagging going on, even by Barack Obama, who on Father’s Day [two years back] said Black fathers are AWOL: they’ve abandoned their families, they’re acting like —

TO: Boys.

MA: — instead of men. But so many of these men haven’t abandoned their families voluntarily. They’ve been rounded up. And in an environment like this — where a war has literally been declared upon you and your family — what do we expect these young folks to do? When you’re stopped and frisked on your way to school, stopped and frisked at school, told you’re never going to be anything but a criminal, harassed by officers, it is just utterly unreasonable for us to expect that youth subjected to this kind of treatment wouldn’t try to find some way to carve out a positive identity in the midst of all this — and try to have a posture of resistance.

TO:You take it a step further in arguing that branding people of color as felons might be more insidious than many today admit. that the very act of incarceration might, in fact, be about Identity and Role in a racialized society. So you say, “The process of marking black youth as black criminals is essential to the functioning of mass incarceration as a racial caste system. For the system to succeed … black people must be labeled criminals before they are formally subject to control. … This process of being made a criminal is, to a large extent, the process of ‘becoming’ black.” It’s curious that in 1961, that great prophet you ended the book with, James Baldwin, touched on this topic — “What they do see when they look at you is what they’ve invested you with. And what they’ve invested you with is all the agony and the pain and the danger and the passion and the torment: you know, sin, death, and hell…” It’s stunning that 50 years after The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name, Notes of a Native Son, Blues for Mister Charlie — if you fast-forward, all the same pathologies still exist. 

MA: Yes! Absolutely! It’s astounding, actually. When you go back and just read those books, ou see how much relevance they have today. It’s eerie, even. When you read Dr. King’s speeches. You read much of what Malcolm X had to say. When you go back and read this stuff, and when you think about it in the context of mass incarceration, you barely need to even change a word for it to have as much meaning and resonance for today.

TO: Can the same also be said of the current immigration debate, over color as cause-for-suspicion, color as probability of outcast-alien status? You cite, in the book, the case of United States v. Brigoni-Ponce (1975), which essentially granted allowance of Race in suspecting Brown people of illegal immigration activity. How relevant is that with today’s Arizona unrest?   

MA: Yes. Well, I think most of what can be done in movement-building today is to identify the links, to be able to map the links between forms of oppression African-Americans are experiencing and forms of oppression Latinos are experiencing. There’s certainly a kind of divide-and-conquer attempt at work.  

So I think it’s critically important for us to see that what’s happening in Arizona has some common origins with the rise of mass incarceration in this country, which had to do with White anxiety over having to compete with a group of people they looked at as inferior. And here, in Arizona, you have the same dynamic — of White fear, anxiety, and panic over a group of people deemed to be inferior and undeserving.  

TO: I want to end on an issue you raise early in the book. Mere decades ago, you write, activists were bubbling across the country with fervor to overthrow the prison system entirely — not just in egregious instances, but altogether: to erase it as alleged blind arbiter of justice. Then one thing led to the other — Nixon came along, Reagan swooped down, Clinton swept in — and society has not been the same since. And this sense of powerlessness, in midst of privatized prisons and other grotesque metamorphosis the machine underwent, has created a “collapse of resistance.” But the clock is ticking, and the time is now for any redress of these very serious problems. So how do you suggest this moment is seized by all those just as fed up as you are?

MA: Yes. You’re absolutely right: people want to talk about a world without prisons and they’re dismissed as crazy or quacky, but it wasn’t that long ago when mainstream criminologists and policy advocates were talking about dismantling prisons because they caused more problems than they solved.

And, ultimately, I’m interested in building a movement not just to end mass incarceration but to end the cycle of racial caste. And centering on these isolated policy reforms is doomed to fail because the system can so easily adapt and bounce back. And a fierce backlash to any major form of downsizing to the system is inevitable because there are so many people — corporate interests — that have a stake in the maintenance and expansion of the system. And the backlash would come in forms of racially coded political appeals about the need to get tough on crime and not give people free passes. And most people’s biases would be tapped into again, to shore up this system and ensure it continues to function for a very long time.

And this is why I believe we need to build a movement to end mass incarceration head-on, rather than pretending this system is primarily about crime control and can be fixed through criminal justice reform. This system is primarily about racial control.

As commercial culture replaces public culture and the language of the market becomes a substitute for the language of democracy, consumerism appears to be the only kind of citizenship on offer to children and adults alike.
– Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse that Roared (Updated and Expanded Edition): Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010), p. 24.

What are the implications for a democratic society increasingly under the sway of corporations that subordinate politics, history, public discourse, and non-commodified forms of culture to consumerism, escapist entertainment, and corporate profits?
– Ibid., p. 90.

Growing up corporate has become a way of life for American youth, and companies like Disney constitute a new global force in shaping youth around the world as consuming subjects.
– Ibid., p. 211.

In March 2007, Disney announced early preparation for a new animated production, The Frog Princess. Maddy (as in: Mammy), in true “American fairy tale” tradition, would be a Black chambermaid slaving away in the New Orleans pit of a spoilt, White débutante, only to be rescued ultimately by a voodoo priestess fairy godmother who helps her clutch the heart of a White prince who rescued her from a Black Magic villain. Civilization!

But soon as the 40 million Black people in America got word of Disney’s latest exploits in the realm of racial imagination, holy hell let loose, and the plot and title were at once scrapped: revised as The Princess and the Frog: the tale of Tiana, a fatherless 19-year-old Black waitress (and aspiring restaurant owner), set in Jazz Age New Orleans, who tries to snap a wicked spell placed on a not-quite-White prince, and thereby restore his humanity — only to be transformed herself into a frog, then having to hop through life’s animated twists and turns until arriving at the inevitable ending where both regain their character, fall into sensual bliss, and live happily ever till the credits roll.

The embarrassing effrontery of Disney’s first proposal is in many ways emblematic of the media/merchandise giant’s decades-long anachronistic approach to reality, and stubborn disregard of cultural sensitivity: a characteristic synonymous with corporate hubris. But it also extended a ritual Disney has, since inception, strived to keep secret — injecting highly educational-political-pedagogical shots into the social realm, all the while claiming Innocence as prime and final motif.

How fortuitous for Disney that as it sought to assure the world Black girls belonged better in kitchens and laundry rooms (rather than restaurants and board rooms), a Black family was ascending the podium of international acclaim, and Michelle Obama, wife of the current President, was arousing curiosity from all ends for refusing to recline in the back-seat while her husband ran laps across the country, hoping to convince citizens he could do the job just as good as any of his White opponents/predecessors.

Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock survey this theme with abundant brilliance in a newly released, updated and expanded version of The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, first published in 1999. Disney has long been educational and political, they write, and parents who prefer Disney — because, so the chants go, it offers up innocent and harmless alternatives to the sinful, violent, sexist, caustic courses that make up most TV shows and movies these days — need to widen their eyes more to a reality not so hard to pick up: far from innocent and harmless, Disney’s stuff not only render social and political and historical commentary often skewed toward bias, but at times aim for that exact edge.

When, in 1992, Disney unfurled Aladdin, and blurred the line between ignorance and xenophobia, with the main theme, “Arabian Nights,” confessing,

Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place
Where the caravan camels roam
Where they cut off your ear
If they don’t like your face
It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

The Gulf War had just ended. And, here, Arabs were distorted as grotesque-faced barbarians waiting/needing to be civilized. Walt Disney would have been much pleased. After all his vision, as World War II raged, was to employ film in “molding opinion.” Thus all coincidences were off when in freezing point of the Cold War, twelve years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned to clouds, Disney released Our Friend the Atom, a 53 minute film extolling the virtues of atomic power.

Yet, Disney affects kids and adults with equal authority — with a strident, mythical representation of Innocence that concerns childhood just as much as it does nationhood: kids revel exhilaratingly in the spectacle of fairy tales and everlasting happiness (which only lasts the longer they can buy the hundreds of merchandise lined up to relive various epic moments in various pictures), and adults are steered to examine their country as pure and faultless, and a righteous crusader against evil in this world.

Disney, here, blurs the line between childhood and adulthood, catering to both children and adults’ sense of perfection, and purging the imaginary world it creates of “evil” — one historical record at a time. At Disneyland, “There are no historical records of labor strikes … There is no history of labor unrest. No history of attacks on immigrants. No history of slavery or segregation. No Red Scare, no McCarthyism, no atom bomb.”

Disney so values Innocence and Perfection that employees must adhere to extremely conservative dress codes and conducts — no facial hair, limited hair-length, no earrings or bracelets on men, limited accessories on women; smiley-faces and cheerful dispositions always, complete obedience to script, etc. And when accidents occur, such as passengers being thrust off malfunctioning rides hundreds of feet in the air, employees must keep these “incidents” under wrap. Should ambulances be necessary, hurt passengers would be hurtled into “low-profile vehicles” to keep the thousands of oblivious, potentially soon-to-be-victims everlastingly happy in the “happiest place on earth.”

Disney’s deal with parents is terribly complex. Parents must be willing to submit their kids up for inspection, upon which Disney decides which roles they fit, and which identity-narrative they adopt. But parents must also realize the prize of the birthright: admission of inherent deficiency, both in themselves and in their kids. After all, successful parents don’t need imaginary characters raising their kids: and smart kids don’t need imaginary characters for stimulation: and, more pernicious, a manageable society does not need moral lessons from the world’s largest media and entertainment empire. But such is the deal brokered, which explains why Disney has raked in millions of dollars from the absurd Baby Einstein products which swear to enable toddlers whose parents “want their kids to keep up in a highly competitive world”—a Darwinian society. It also explains why DisneyFamily.com was launched to, amongst other excuses, provide “resources on parenting and raising healthy children.”

For this reason, in Disney’s film history adults have always represented quirky, uncouth, uncool, burdensome characters. Kids are central target — adults: merely proxy. But once the heart of the child has been claimed, the adult is of no use anymore, and kids must come to understand that. Ironically many adults were raised by/on Disney, and stand forever armed to bring down the hammer on anyone who claims Disney does more than entertain —that it educates (explicitly or otherwise). And it’s not so hard to understand why: for who, in right mind and sense, can accuse a bunny-eared, glove-wrapped, oval-eyed mouse of orchestrating an insidious plan to indoctrinate children worldwide?

This has made Disney Teflon for years — even as it carries out some of the most retrograde work practices in the modern world, and bombards children with consumerism, and attempts to subvert parental authority, individual agency, social community, public spaces, and private lives. Disney also wins in a world where the worth of children factor less each day, where hundreds of billions of dollars are cashed in annually from direct marketing to kids of any age, with horrendously minimal concern from legislators and elected officials who with a conscientious vote can end the abuse immediately.

Giroux and Pollock make mention of an addiction more injurious to kids than all the street paraphernalia laws have been installed to haul them off to jail for buying or selling — a zombie-like addiction to various electronic media forms, documented January this year by a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation study suggesting typical American tweens and teens actively engage electronic media for up to 8 hours daily — up 1 hour, 17 minutes in just 5 years. With a 2000 Nielsen Media Research study able to account for only 38.5 minutes spent weekly by most parents and kids in meaningful conversation, it’s clear who the real Daddy and Mommy are —Mickey and his emissaries.

“Too many parents have become mere shadows in the lives of their children, who spend endless hours absorbed by the visual imagery on a screen,” write Giroux and Pollock in The Mouse that Roared. “By exposing them to a marketing pedagogical machinery eager and ready to transform them into full-fledged members of consumer society, the commercial world defined by Disney and a few other corporations conscripts children’s time.” And in an age where kids register over 40,000 TV ads annually, where by 4th grade most have memorized 300-400 brands, the identity of the American child can only fall somewhere between consumer and commodity.

For Disney, Identity reigns supreme. The White female raised on Disney mostly learns that her lot in life is to seek endlessly until finding that knight-in-shining-armor — without whom her life would lack meaning. For the White male, over the White female has he been given dominion: for her existence is incomplete without him; and should he feel just in kidnapping and abusing and maltreating her, she can’t but settle patiently till the inner prince lurking is comfortable enough to set forth, as Belle in Beauty and the Beast recounted: “There’s something sweet/ And almost kind/ But he was mean/ And he was coarse/ And unrefined/ And now he’s dear/ And so unsure/ I wonder why/ I didn’t see it there before/.” For the Black or Brown male or female, if a chambermaid or villain or terrorist or thug or brute isn’t too full a pill to swallow, arrangements can be made for a future blockbuster motion picture that stresses to do better.

Other colored kids don’t belong on LCD screens but in toxic, run-down, roach-infested, union-busting, underpaying factories — to sew and stuff the clothes and dolls Disney sells to Western children at hundreds of times the hourly wages earned by kids slave-laboring in China or Haiti. (For more, see the candid 1996 documentary, Mickey Mouse goes to Haiti: Walt Disney and the Science of Exploitation.) As one child in Orange County, Florida, is swiping a junior debit card to pay for a $23 T-shirt, emblazoned with the face of her favorite Disney pop star, another in Sonapi Industrial Park, Port-au-Prince, is swatting the sweat off her brows and hurrying, before dusk falls, to line up the edges of the same shirt which in a few months would be hung on a rack in some Florida Disney store.

But Disney, the mammoth media conglomerate it is, can flaunt weight and worth around without any worries. It can invade classrooms — as happened with five hundred 3rd grade students from eight Maryland schools in 2006, which helped pilot a “Comics in the Classroom” program employing Disney characters as literacy resources (“kids end up learning without even thinking about it,” the Vice President of Disney World Publishing bragged) — and little pushback is felt. It can sell to kids disposable icons like Miley Cyrus, star of the popular sitcom Hannah Montana, thereby reducing self-expression “to what a young person can afford to buy,” and only faint, distant objections are raised. It can offer crypto-fascism a facelift, with pictures like The Incredibles and The Path to 911, knowing well whatever criticisms fall its way wouldn’t stain a spot on its financial reputation. It can champion conservative causes openly, and sleep tight knowing the cloak of Innocence still spreads unruffled.

“The issue here,” Giroux and Pollock argue, “is not whether people read Disney differently, or even enjoy the glut of entertainment and commodities that the company dumps into the culture, but whether a democratic society can allow an ever-expanding corporate culture to blur the distinction between public and private, entertainment and history, and critical citizenship and consumer identity.” And Disney is today more important than ever, as it encroaches international and indigenous communities where, given its unremarkable human rights record and neoliberal devotions, “everything potentially becomes a commodity, including, and perhaps most especially, identity.”

With the elegant, former CEO Michael Eisner booted out in 2005, and the mild-mannered Roger Iger assuming position shortly after, many saw a moral sea-change and better days for/from Disney hovering over. Close reading, however, suggests differently: for while Eisner governed through imposition (“It doesn’t matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computer, or satellite. Everyone’s going to have to deal with Disney.”), Iger’s lash is no less swift. He prefers the new-neoliberal doctrine of illusion-of-choice, of selling customers fictional identities, of “empowering” citizens to carry out their civic duty — consume.

In 2005, Iger insisted to the Associated Press, “Consumers have a lot more authority these days and they know that by using technology they can gain access to content and they want to use the power they have. … We can’t stand in the way and we can’t allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go or wants to go.”

What Disney has for nearly a century packaged as family, wholesome fun and entertainment—totally innocent and innocuous — has meant the imposition of narrow and often prejudicial values, ingrained by kids, adults, and the larger society—in the U.S. and beyond. And though Disney may be a global, corporate force wielding enormous resources, those who find fault with its principles have no other choice but to fight on its own turf and terms — with kids, with adults, with society.

“Central to such a challenge,” advise Giroux and Pollock, “is the necessity of addressing how neoliberalism as a pedagogical practice and a public pedagogy operating in diverse sites has succeeded in reproducing in the social order a kind of thoughtlessness—a social amnesia of sorts — that makes it possible for people to look away as an increasing number of people are made disposable.”

Fighting Disney on its own turf and terms also means critically engaging multiple media forms, creating progressive versions, and refusing to be swept up by animation (as though computer-generated characters couldn’t command harmful suggestions). “Film watching involves more than entertainment,” admonish the authors: “it is an experience that reproduces the basic conditions of learning.”

Only then, by avid learning, can this very real war be won.

The days grow hot, O Babylon!
‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!

— Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh

If the Arizona immigration unrest of the last week counts of any value, it must be that in the coming days and months, Brown citizens must brace up for a ratcheting of policies and rhetoric unwavering in fervor to make of them criminals with no right to live in this “shining city upon a hill.” Even with unprecedented outrage, calls for serious boycotts, daily protests, university withdrawals, SNL skewering, and White House disappointment, the fire, it should be clear, has only begun blazing. Soon it would spread far and wide, consuming any Brown body in path.

As Greg Palast noted, the bill passed was more reaction than action—more preventive than proactive. “What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote – and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one,” wrote Palast for Truthout. “Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast.”¹

A budding Brown major-minority could wreak terrible havoc in a state like Arizona, thus the need for some arbitrary laws, whose proponents argue have nothing to do with disenfranchisement, that shoot for the knees of specific voters of color—a la Birmingham, with its very own Bull Connor. And through the last week, abounding evidence to back up this claim has unfolded indiscriminately.

No more are words minced or euphemisms exploited to conceal convictions. Now that the house is burning, anti-Brown champions—many of them politicians and powerful—can screech out their racist and beastly demands uninhibited.

In Iowa, six GOP congressional candidates all have ideas on what to do with their “illegals.” Pat Bertroche, an Urbandale physician, stepped up first: “I think we should catch ’em, we should document ’em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support micro-chipping them. I can micro-chip my dog so I can find it. Why can’t I micro-chip an illegal?” It’s not popular, Bertroche conceded, but it’s cheaper than erecting a fence. Another contestant, Dave Funk, worried using the term Undocumented Worker “is like calling the drug dealer an unlicensed pharmacist.” As Scott Batcher sees it, “If we’re allowing illegals to come in, we’re probably letting terrorists walk across the border, too.” Brad Zaun, a state senator, complained “Illegals are killing us financially” and should all be “put … on a bus and sen[t] [back] wherever they came from.” For Jim Gibbons, border-crossing is no different from human trafficking; it is “illegal and immoral” and a “pretty important thing.” These kinds of talk, these war-like noises, Mark Rees bemoaned, should find greater mainstream appeal, but the public, to its detriment, let “politician[s] bury those things that are uncomfortable to talk about.”²

San Diego-area Republican congressman Duncan Hunter, a constitution adherent, wants to deport naturally-born children of undocumented immigrants. “We’re not being mean,” Duncan protested at a party rally last week. “We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.” Duncan might well have the chance to will his wishes into existence if Republicans take over the House later this year and push through a bill banning automatic birthright citizenship for such children.

“Why do our politicians make us give driver’s license exams in 12 languages?” asks Republican Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James in a recent campaign ad spot. “This is Alabama: We speak English,” James belts out. “If you want to live here—learn it.” He swears to make this law upon chance as governor. I’m a business man, he comforts constituents. It’ll save money. “And it makes sense.” It makes sense. Then a stare-at-the-ground 4-minute pause. “Does it to you?”

Back in Arizona, the state legislature passed last week a bill equating cultural studies with “ethnic chauvinism,” claiming most curricula encourages insurrection and self-segregation, and—here we go again—intimidates conservative teachers in public school classrooms. About the same time, a Wall Street Journal report uncovered efforts by the Arizona Department of Education to police and punish teachers with accents—predominantly Brown. Aiming for those who, to students, might sound “heavily accented” or “ungrammatical,” the department “dispatched evaluators to audit teachers across the state on things such as comprehensible pronunciation, correct grammar and good writing.” Is it possibly that of all the plagues the education system today falls victim to, this department saw none dealing greater volleys than teachers who jumble certain consonants? Or is this about cultural capitals—and cultural intercourse? “It doesn’t matter to me what the accent is,” a smart parent countered: “what matters is if my children are learning.”³

The fire will spread far and wide.

Bill Quigley, advancing the discourse, wrote recently of an immigration issue larger than Arizona, national in scale, of an out-of-control immigration-enforcement agency that “is not actually targeting convicted criminal aliens, dangerous aliens or even violent aliens” but “everyone” who looks the type. You look the type if you’re Florinda Lorenzo-Desimilian, a Maryland 26-year-old married mother of three (all U.S. citizens) who was arrested in her home by local police, Quigley noted, “on a misdemeanor charge of selling $2 phone cards out of her apartment window without a license.” She was booked, fingerprinted, and her prints shipped to the FBI which called up ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and found her to have overstayed a work visa. Desimilian was imprisoned for two days and is currently on the verge of deportation.⁴

When Barack Hussein Obama II clinched the presidency in November 2008, and masses of White people at once began stocking their basements with military firearm, and began showing up at his events armed and loaded, ready to “take” their “country back,” many saw it as downright-redneck Republican racism, others thought of it half-racist and half-disgruntlement-with-feelings-of-powerlessness from decades of casino capitalism that only did good a few rich; yet others believed the ragers, who eventually formed flesh as select factions of the “Tea Party,” had justifiable reason to rise up against what they saw as shifting ground—rewriting of reality: beginning of a people-of-color-takeover that would ultimately topple the White majority in but a few decades. Obama, thus, whether wittingly or not, marked the first splash of this wave blowing northward. After all, as the son of a Kenyan father, a son whose American citizenship was still in grave question, nothing shorter than full-scale attack on Whiteness and all that it embodies (read: people) was at work.

In hats, flags, masks, mustaches, and all the other costumes Dollar Store coupons can cover, the Parties marched through the streets of Washington, of Chicago, of Indiana, of Atlanta, of New York, of Alabama, of Arizona, coughing up patriotic cries—we will not be intimidated! we will not be depopulated! To whom the message was directed was hardly coherent. For some, Obama was the recipient. Others bayed at the moon and slept well at night, assured Lincoln and Washington were smiling down on them, for standing up for their country’s White-Judeo-Christian indelible identity.

The Texas Board of Education added its stamp mid-March, appropriating language of the Civil Rights Movement to deliberately misconstrue racial history and reality, deleting major historical figures like El Salvador archbishop Óscar Romero, and consistently blocking inclusion of Hispanic role models for the many Hispanic children serving in the state’s public school system. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” Board member Mary Helen Berlanga chanted as she stormed out.

This feeling of helplessness, of castrating rage, that pushed Berlanga out is becoming fast a reality for many Brown people. It is fast approaching—that sense that you are not wanted, and that any attempt to insert yourself into a reality to which you are a rightful inhabitant would face a firewall; that the best you can do, to preserve the remnants of sanity chipping away each second, is remove from a land or place or space that has rejected you: that no more has use for you.

This is a “very serious problem,” as Malcolm X understood over four decades ago. “The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here,” he lectured with usual, razor-swift clarity. How do you reconcile with that rush of betrayal that clouds your mind, that pushes you to the edge of the bridge, that pushes you beyond that edge. African-American peoples can speak a word or two about that—about coming to sobering grips with that unmanageable reality. I’ve paid all my dues! they moaned. I’ve led a righteous life! I’ve been a responsible citizen! I’ve filed all my taxes timely! I’ve worked three jobs for decades, shifting between hospital bathrooms and fast-food canteen cash registers and voter-registration drives. And for all this—I deserve nothing but spite and shame and humiliation?

The society you’ve contributed invaluably to over a span of centuries now abruptly sees you as a threat to be exterminated, as harbinger of crime and disease, as the very cause of current unrest—as a thief, snatching the slice of pie reserved for citizens.

It’s the rumble of identity and myths, as James Baldwin deftly knew—and tried to get the rocks to acknowledge: Of what use are you to a society that depended on you once but now can see no title for your fit—however below human dignity? Of what use are you to a society that sold you myths of grandeur but failed to register the promises once reality (and its consequences) factored in? And when looking back on the years of lost allegiance and lost pride, what do the children of Israel say to Pharaoh—who needs them more than they need him? And what do they demand of him? Dignity is good. Reparations are just. But not even the full restoration of dignity or mammoth monetary compensation can lick the wounds and sober the agony of decades and centuries built on the shabby foundations of betrayal.

The millions of Brown undocumented immigrants in this country have for the last few years felt pinned to the mat by this reality. Without their hard, and often undignifying, work, the national economy would wobble, certain states would go under, thousands of families would lose balance, hundreds of businesses would shut down, bridges wouldn’t get built, houses wouldn’t get cleaned, gardens wouldn’t get cut, flowers wouldn’t get trimmed, fruits wouldn’t get picked, and chaos may very well let loose. Yet, with silent strokes of pen, like that in Governor Jan Brewer’s hands on April 23, their humanity is at once abandoned at the feet of the first officer willing to stop some boy or girl or man or woman or wife or daughter or grandmother who looks the type—in practices reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Law—and demand they present proper documentation or submit their hands to handcuffs that could lead them away from this shining city forever.

So, clean, cook, wash, dig, build, sow, lift, scrub—but don’t even dare to vote, José; don’t entertain any such self-damning thoughts, Maria!

And what if, approaching tipping point, millions of “wetbacks,” as for years many have snickered silently, decided to march from Egypt back to their promised lands, decided to pick up their cross and return to places where financial stability might not be guaranteed but dignity is assured. What would be the responses of many on the Left who regard themselves true allies of Brown people? Would they lift their hats, bow gently, and apologize on behalf of the thugs on the Right who “just don’t get it”? Or would they take real solidarity with Brown people, and tell their people—if they leave, we leave, too? And would Pharaoh and his minions, faced with a reality not as pleasant as they imagined, crouch into a corner and cry, “My slaves have deserted me,” or rush through some petty immigration “reform” bill that offers little comfort to the many abused and dehumanized and assaulted and insulted by years of indifference—on state and federal levels.

However the pendulum swings, the choice falls in the laps of Brown people—both registered and unregistered. As the fire escapes the water hoses of the many who, well meaning, have begun sprinkling ephemeral solutions upon this very serious problem—of identity and myths—only Brown people know what’s in their best interest, and what safeguards their dignity—and that of future generations—most adequately.

But to James Baldwin they can turn confidently, who pleaded in 1963, when this same fire pursued his people: “to do something which I know to be very difficult: to be proud of the auction block, and all that rope, and all that fire, and all that pain.”

All that fire! and all that pain!

1. Greg Palast, “Behind the Arizona Immigration Law: GOP Game to Swipe the November Election,” Truthout, April 26, 2010.
2. James Q. Lynch, “3rd District GOP hopefuls take tough stances on immigration,” GazetteOnline, April 27, 2010.
3. Miriam Jordan, “Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2010.
4. Bill Quigley, “Not Just Arizona: Immigration Enforcement Out of Control on Federal Level,” Dissident Voice, April 30, 2010.

Zero tolerance is not simply the effect of possibly ignorant adults who misunderstand data on youth violence; it is not simply the resulting social policy of ill-spirited adults who carelessly toe the line of pejorative media representations of youth; it is not simply another devastating practice of traditional top-down, corporate models of school governance. … [It is] all of these things, together.

– Christopher G. Robbins, Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schooling, p. 41.

Either teachers and administrators work with students and their communities as citizens involved in the construction of the public good, or they reproduce and exacerbate the erasure of the social contract and replace it with the carceral pact.

– Robbins, p. 85.

[I]f public schooling fails to assume the role of guarantor to democratic public life, can it be presumed that under the demands of an ever complex global society and without other institutions capable of assuming such a position, democratic public life stands a faint chance of being reproduced and, when necessary, reconstituted?

– Robbins, p. 151.

Every age has its “scare.” Scare gives meaning to a society trained toward cowardice. There’s been the Red Scare, the Black Scare, the Brown Scare, the Woman Scare, back to the Brown Scare, and now the Youth Scare. The culture of fear is critical, Christopher Robbins writes, in aiding “powerful social actors and institutions … squelch opposition to their interests … while diverting attention from and reinforcing the asymmetrical conditions of power that underpin and provoke social tensions.”

On January 14 earlier this year, a 15-year-old Irish immigrant, Phoebe Prince, was discovered, by her 12-year-old sister, dangling from a noose in a home closet. For months, following her arrival at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts, Prince took in invectives from all directions. Students—male and female—made known she was a “slut” and an “Irish whore.” In-person, and on Facebook, her tormentors swung hard. The day of death, just minutes away, a student had pelted a soda can her direction, from a passing car.

As news broke of this tragedy, outrage poured in—editorials, columns, radio shows, TV shows. Parents wanted to know why school officials failed to act decisively when lives were at stake, why abuse on this level was tolerated so long, why Prince had to end her life before those who most mattered began listening.

Then the rage ratcheted, and fell upon the students whom stand accused of tormenting a fellow student into suicide. The esteemed moralists, on the Right and Left, drove out at once to condemn this rising, immoral generation of “predators,” who share none of the wholesome, family “values” their parents internalized since birth, who must have picked up their principles from MTV and VH1 and Rap music since, you know, bullying can only be traced back through the last 10 years or so. On cable news shows, the moralists called for stiffening of “anti-bullying” and “zero tolerance” laws—to put end to this practice without tarry.

(Sensationalism sells.)

No doubt Prince’s life wouldn’t have cut short so tragically if greater administrative responsibility attended her cause; but if anyone truly thinks the further criminalization and militarization of schools would surrender into its coffin the long-running tradition of bullying, and that only police officers and metal detectors and CCTV cameras and K-9s would “make this stop,” Prince might have died in vain.

Christopher Robbins’ Expelling Hope drives this point home deftly. For years, most public schools have employed zero tolerance policies to keep students in check; and, for years, little progress has been accounted for, even with ever increasing security apparatuses—physical and technological. With some schools now featuring “sting operations” and “undercover agents,” students have only learned “quickly that both their teachers and the police … are not primarily involved in school life to guide and protect them, but to set up conditions that make it easier for professionals and other authority figures to find, frame, and forbid certain students from school life.”

Zero tolerance for guns! drugs! and crime! Hear the proponents’ cry. But behind this façade, Robbins writes, is zero tolerance for children—and the mistakes they make. School officials storm into students’ lockers any time of day—Fourth Amendment be goddamned—reinforcing how “little autonomy” students have “to resist and question” authorized abuse. And students wallow at the crack of school hierarchy, limiting attention to their concerns. For poor Black or Brown kids, the die is already cast: they walk into school Day 1, hate what they see, respond intelligently, and leave school grounds in handcuffs. And when any uppity activist or parent dares question why more money goes the way of suburban schools, officials gamely open up their special notebooks, and point out the number of tardy, absent, suspended, expelled, and arrested students as perfect justification.

Of course, as Robbins notes, racism wins again, for the “crimes allegedly committed by Black youth are presented as the consequences of biological pathologies or cultural deficits, whereas those allegedly perpetrated by White youth are typically framed as responses to middle-class alienation or the consequences of proverbial teen angst gone mad.” We hold this truth to be self-evident: that a “densely corporatized media environment has no interest in presenting youth as needy, well-intentioned, curious, meaning-seeking beings.”

When thinkers take this issue seriously—the unveiled link between media misrepresentation and pugnacious polices—perhaps some serious questions would find answers: like, How did society “come to a point” where zero tolerance is “even thinkable”? How did anti-Youth legislations pass as “law of land” without much murmur from a society ostensibly concerned of the plights of its children? How did Youth in but a few decades turn from hope for “the future” to hoodlums undeserving of a future?

Amazing, ain’t it? Society has fucked with kids so badly over the past few years that it’s now scared shitless. Any moment kids might pop. A hit dog will holler! the axiom warns. So now society erects maximum security prisons, juvenile halls, and detention centers to stave off, as long as possible, a generation so abused, maligned, and disdained that revenge seems the only righteous response.

Any peep or squeak these days can be cause for suspension or expulsion. Confrontation with an abusive police officer can lead to immediate arrest and time behind bars. Some students face abuse so dehumanizing they self-expel; others can count on principals to plant drugs in their lockers to expedite expulsion; others would be branded “baby Rikers” or told, “That girl has no ass,” or even sexually assaulted, by officers employed to serve and protect them.

Today, most public schools enlist several surveillance services to monitor students’ every move. Some schools even require students pass through metal detectors and security checkpoints, and empty their book bags and take off their shoes and surrender their belts, before advancing to learn the wonders of Pythagoras’ theorem and the importance of the Gettysburg address. And when they arrive in class, teachers hold one hand up to the blackboard, and the other fixed upon the panic button or walkie-talkie. One unsolicited sound, and the student is hauled out of class to the local precinct.

In Expelling Hope, Robbins mentions Troops to Teachers, a federal program established by the Department of Defense in 1994 and reinvigorated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which recruits retiring military officials to fill up low-income schools. God’s mercy fall on that poor kid who decides to speak out of turn on the day this soldier’s pent-up rage or hallucinations or shell shocks flare up untamed. All fits, however, with a war-culture in which “social identities” find utmost definition: “War [on] Terror, War on Homelessness, War on Drugs, War on the Poor, and the alleged cultural wars.”

As the War on Terror offers language (and manual) to maintain school security, no wonder uncooperative students can (and must) be disappeared with haste—the better to keep other students abreast of zero tolerance for subversion or insurrection. Students must understand, as a famous President bellowed not too long ago, “You’re either with us, or against us.” Those “with” enjoy the privileges of citizenship—they get to shop and visit the theater undisturbed. Those “against” must be weeded out with swiftness, and excluded entirely—from a “political culture that progressively values neither workers nor citizens, but consumers and criminals.”

Robbins asks: “How will excluding a student now help a teacher reach the most pressing and immediate test standard? How will excluding a student absolve teachers and society of the responsibility for past social, political, and economic relationships that produced the disruptive unwanted behavior?”

Answers don’t rush out as readily as calls for greater “regulation” of schooling: longer days, shorter nights, and even conservative dress codes—as though tucked-in uniform “can fill the social and educational gaps promoted by racism, malnutrition, poverty, community violence, and structural violence.”

In the past, much of this foolishness faced vehement pushback, but fewer complaints find volume these days because in a Race-to-the-Top era, schools must compete for cash. And public schooling, no longer a “given and precondition for democratic social order,” falls vulnerable to the machinations of “an iniquitous market order.”

When the new administration cut the ribbon late 2008, and promptly selected former Chicago Public Schools “CEO” Arne Duncan as its broker, many liberals flailed away, disgusted that a president-elect, ostensibly “liberal” (and, to hear many on the Right tell it, “Marxist” and “Socialist” and “Communist”), would put in a corporate serf to rectify the greatest educational disaster of a generation. They might have lost track of reality, however—as vicious education legislations have always solicited the help of both Wall Street parties. Robbins reminds:

Zero tolerance was a bipartisan strategy, constructed at the contradictory but powerful interstices of neoliberalism and social conservatism. It deals with the social symptoms of a new economic order, erasing the social contract, and perpetuating racism in a color-blind consumer society. … It has, in a very deep sense, reinforced the structures of fear and violence [people] inhabit in a privatized and individualized social order.

Youth deserve more out of life than the reality frisking them and the future awaiting them. Society has, fantastically, found way to convince itself children shouldn’t factor in—in any conversations of struggle, of survival, of success. But we certainly can hope for better. In fact, we must. And hope in this sense, not some cheap political slogan seducing millions disaffected with life, but personal impulse engineered by collective action: “the composite of private dreams translated into public visions and commitments, one that expands human possibility.”

“What would hope be if it did not refer implicitly to youth?” Robbins asks.

So, shall we expel or enhance it?

Education is never innocent, because it always presupposes a particular view of citizenship, culture and society.

—Henry Giroux¹

Education occurs in a context and has a very definite purpose. The content is mainly unspoken, and the purpose very often unspeakable. But education can never be aimless, and it cannot occur in a vacuum.

—James Baldwin, “Dark Days”²

The renowned comedienne Wanda Sykes unleashed the following in I’ma Be Me, her latest HBO special: “We really do need to revamp our education system. It doesn’t work. It does not work. … We don’t learn anything. It’s not comprehension—it’s just retention, it’s just rote. That’s it. We just keep it long enough to spit it back out—pass the test, and we get rid of that shit. … It’s like our brain’s a big Etch-A-Sketch.”

At this Wanda began rattling her head vigorously, in like manner of a kid erasing scrawls from an Etch-A-Sketch pad, leaving audience members bent over from cracked ribs. But in jest, as is often said, much truth is told.

The retain-then-regurgitate model most kids today are taught with does in fact provoke very sobering consequences for not only their intellectual development, but the social stability of our society. Any society filled with individuals too timid to think for themselves, or too civicly illiterate to decide what’s in their best interest, is a step away from self-damnation. There are a number of implications for a society that teaches its kids instant gratification and ephemeral pleasure is key in life, among which is the loss of long-term commitment to even the most basic elements of human existence—family, community, friendship, etc. This might explain the inexplicably high divorce rates these days. It might also explain why some seem to find greater joy in blowing life-savings at casino crap tables (a la Las Vegas) than investing in the future of kids or other similar worthy causes. Why spend the time, energy, or money requisite in cultivating life-time friendships and social bonds when a weekend in Atlantic City promises to deliver equal amount of thrill?

This is the Etch-A-Sketch model: The sovereignty of Now. I want it—and I want it now! Sadly, these are the rancid values kids growing up today are brought up with. They are told all that matters are good grades on tests. It doesn’t matter what effect the tests’ contents have on the future awaiting them. All that matters is “doing well”—now! Whether or not the student shoulders certain cultural baggages which school, by nature, should address is of no consequence. The demand is plain: give us what we want—or get held back. And because many kids, through admirable perception, find this speed-driven, individualist model deadly to their survival, legion of them are being held back and demoted.

But the Etch-A-Sketch model does more than rob kids of opportunities to learn the social values without which a livable society ceases to exist: it also ingrains in them a resistance to critical thinking—an abandonment of independent reasoning. The same philosophy that tells kids learning should only function within specific time spans is at work in adults who seem to have a hard time choosing political candidates with substantive promises to make society more fair and just. Most end up settling for immaterial qualifications like fashion choice, personality, and charisma. Thus, a child fed on instant gratification is an adult socially malnourished. The pernicious effects of such pedagogy is perhaps most evident in its limiting and limited outcomes.

It is limiting because kids are given no freedom to explore a subject widely and engage deeply in what, for instance, makes Los Angeles the largest city in California. All kids are taught is that it is so. They have no clue why, they have no clue what its current demographic makeup is and how certain social factors came to account for it; worse yet, they are clueless of the history—a rich and hybrid one—that produced Los Angeles. At most, if lucky, they might be told that one of the world’s most sought-after attractions, Hollywood, rests at home there. But if such child expects further elaboration for why Hollywood is at all a fascination, she might be sorely disappointed. It is simply assumed Disney has already taken care of that.

And the Etch-A-Sketch model is limited because it compresses—often for political purposes—history, culture, and language into sound bites of reference. It disciplines the past into a subjective capital—susceptible to selection and pickiness. Kids learning about the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s, for example, are told only that Rosa parks sat, Martin Luther King marched and, voilà, doors which were previously shut opened, and color barriers were lifted, and economic prosperity became a reality, or possibility, for whichever Black families preferred a “deluxe apartment in the sky” to run-down slums on the cold concrete. It wipes out entirely the diverse and complex characters whose irreducible contributions were central to reclaiming the dignity people of color—not just Blacks—were robbed off with the double whammy of Jim Crow laws and domestic terrorism.

No talk of Malcom X—except in disparaging terms. No talk of Dorothy Cotton. No talk of Fannie Lou Hamer. No talk of Rev. Joseph Lowery. No talk of Medgar Evers. No talk of Grace Lee Boggs. No talk of No talk of Mahalia Jackson. No talk of Odetta. No talk of Nina Simone. No talk of Kwame Ture. No talk of Freedom Riders. No talk of John Coltrane. No talk of Louis Armstrong. No talk of Bull Connor. No talk of Orval Faubus. No talk of Hoover. No talk of Little Rock. No talk of Bloody Sunday. No talk of Sept. 15, 1963. All kids are taught is that a Black woman spontaneously refused to give up her sit to White passengers, a Black man slept soulless nights in jail cells, but came back swinging with dreams of integrated playgrounds, and today the Blacks lucky enough to live in the suburbs owe all gratitude to that movement for their success. Of course the economic quagmires within which people of color—and Blacks especially—have long-wallowed is never addressed. The Prison Industrial Complex is deemed too controversial for kids to learn about. And, most devastating, the history leading up to Rosa Park’s 1955 defiance remains unengaged. That she was a seasoned student taught the art of protest at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee is a mystery to most kids.

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned over a century ago against patronizing kids or determining what serves their interest—and what doesn’t:

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child.³

This, however, hasn’t done much to impress a society obsessed with I.Q.’s and other such narrow theories of intelligence. Society isn’t yet settled on whether kids, young enough to be sentenced to expire in jail for life, can be trusted with determining what pedagogical models should be best applied in teaching, and reaching, them. The “tampering and thwarting,” we are begged to believe, merely shows a society concerned about the content kids are exposed to—not a surveillance state bent on monitoring every aspect of their lives. If kids can’t adequately choose for themselves what’s best, what use does it make to “respect” their wishes when they decide schools are doing more harm than the streets. The folk singer Ani Difranco wrote a stellar poem in 1993, “My I.Q.,” excoriating the sham that is I.Q. testing, and the segregative classification of kids based upon perceived performance differences:

When I was four years old, they tried to test my I.Q. They showed me this picture of 3 oranges and a pear. They asked me, “Which one is different? It does not belong.” They taught me different is wrong. …

But a good brain ain’t diddley if you don’t have the facts. We live in a breakable, takeable world; an ever available, possible world.⁴

Society loves “exceptional” kids. They are the ones whose parents proudly post “My Child is an Honor Student” bumper stickers on cars, refrigerator doors, and even office computers—for all to marvel at. These are kids told early on that they are “special.” They have something their peers lack—“intelligence.” They would most likely be “successful” in this world: graduate high school valedictorian, earn enough college scholarships to cover tuition costs, and matriculate thereafter with enough honors to stumble into high-paying jobs. Rarely are these the kinds of kids who go on to earn Master or, heaven forbid, PhD degrees. They don’t have to. What it might take another student to earn a PhD (in financial terms), they were able to settle for right out of college. They are “exceptional.” Better than most others. Their self-esteem was being nurtured, even pre-birth, to ensure they grew up with brows high enough to look down upon the many “non-exceptionals” with.

On the other side of town are children born not in hospitals but in crack houses, in trailer parks, in mobile homes. They have no one to fill in their heads lofty ideals of “exceptionalism.” They learn early on that to demand so much as food when hungry can earn thunders of insults. Not because the adults around hate them or fail to see their unique qualities, but because sobriety hasn’t made an appearance ‘round those parts in quite a while. When sober, the adults show as much affection as possible—until the pipe begins calling their name anew. These children are placed in dilapidated nursery centers and end up in middle schools and high schools that speak more of death than life. Those that make it as far as high school graduation barely earn requisite grades. Those who don’t—and they are in the majority—resort to street crimes and petty hustling.

Both sets of kids are White, by the way.

Who made the first set “exceptional”? Does the fact that as young as 3 months old they were provided countless educational toys to prepare them for “excellence” count? And does the fact that the other set had brains which as young as 3 months old were being chewed out by the various chemicals scouring the environment and choking the air they breathed in count?

When society turns from a “Child-As-Problem” to a “Condition-As-Problem” philosophy, not only will the playing field both kids compete on be leveled, but the second set won’t have their futures written out and defined—indeed defiled—pre-birth. Then, only, will the “better, richer, and happier life” promise yield more than laughter and mockery from all those who know better.

A Child-As-Problem way of life contends children have in their hands various opportunities from which to choose and plot out successful futures—regardless of social strata. It blames children for any shortcomings—minor and major. It visits on the heads of failing students ridicule and humiliation, and tells them Social Darwinism is a moral concept to separate the wheat from the chaff; in which case, chaffs like themselves are no good for a world facing “complex problems.” It readies—and narrows—the options those kinds of kids have at their disposal: Jail; Army. That districts in California reportedly build prisons based on the 3rd grade reading levels of children is a telling example. Kids, in this sense, are not only set up to fail—they are destined to fail.⁵

Condition-As-Problem, however, takes seriously meanings of redemption and liberation—especially in an educational context where kids are assaulted regularly with pedagogical weapons. It does away with farcical, lunacy-led fantasies of “personal responsibility,” and holds up the state as responsible for the lives of its disenfranchised, tax-paying citizens. The aim, here, is to find constructive ways to make neighborhoods more palatable for the intellectual growth of children whose conceptions of life are bound to reflect poverty and nihilism. If the condition is the problem, then greater emphasis is placed on concrete commitments to construct avenues through which kids can dream bigger, brighter, and bolder than the social constraints enforced upon their imaginations by surrounding blights.

This philosophy tears down that inhumane wall which seeks to divide kids into categories and define their destiny based on scores on superficial tests. It reorders the thinking and priority of society into believing every child has the necessary skills, values, and ideals to help transform the world into a domain free from oppressive forms of prestige and privilege. It always keeps in mind that “the motivation to succeed is present among children of all cultures, no matter the way in which it is directed.”⁶

1. Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 31.
2. Reprinted in James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 788.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (New York: AMS Press, 1883, 2008 ed.), p. 143.
4. Ani Difranco, “My I.Q.,” Puddle Drive (1993).
5. “How Schools Can Work Better for the Kids Who Need the Most,” Challenge Journal (Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 1998).
6. Janice Hale, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1988), p. 51.

Communication is what one does with words and what they do to us.

— J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness¹

Our language points up contrasts and dichotomies while reality often falls through the cracks between the categories.

— S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser, Dimensions of Meaning²

Aristotle was right in acknowledging that “the power of speech is intended to express what is advantageous and what harmful, what is just and what unjust.” Our ability, as human beings, to communicate with each other, to inspire and motivate, to exchange ideas about the world, has not only made life easier, but separated us from other breeds of species surrounding. And, it appears to me, the value of language (or communication) can be used to measure the quality of life within any society and community.

The words used; the verbs expressed; the labels invented—all measurements of a people’s understanding of, and connection to, reality. If this is true, what can be said of the “illegal immigration” debate that has taken greater command of the imaginations of our society in recent times? And what can be delineated from the key words bandied around ruthlessly?

Right off the bat, we are informed—by Right-wing ideologues—that Mexican citizens who cross the border overnight to establish humble livings for themselves in the U.S. are not “undocumented workers” but “illegal aliens.” In this context, there is little room left for the histories and backgrounds of the “criminals” to breathe. The policies that provoke families, for instance, to take such drastic measures is utterly erased—and condemned as inconsequential. They are “aliens”—foreign species unworthy of recognition and hostile to the well-being of human beings—citizens. That the combination of “illegal” and “alien” is nonsensical at best and intellectually valueless at worst never crosses the minds of the pundits and shock jocks whose hard work has brought it into mainstream and celebrated discourse. It would seem, to those below the legal alcohol limit, that no rational basis exists upon which to condemn an “alien” as “illegal.”

The very nature of an “alien” prescribes wholly different sets of principles—unlike the pre-established tenets used to punish or promote citizens—for engagement and interrogation. An “alien,” by nature, belongs to a different world and different geographical territory. And, if Star Wars is to be taken seriously, aliens demand unique devices just to understand them—let alone control and repress them. But the adjective “illegal”—as opposed to, say, “undocumented” or “unregistered”—came to life once brain-zapped nitwits, bent on dehumanizing otherized citizens (“aliens”), ran out of creative options to make ends meet. They convinced themselves: by adding “illegal” as a prefix, no one would be left unsure if our targets are innocent or guilty. Whether or not the term “illegal alien” is just as silly—if not more—as “illegal criminal” isn’t of mental merit. This, unfortunately, is the limit to which many are willing to go beyond in criminalizing and demonizing those seen as different—thus deficient.

It’s critical intellectuals and educators take seriously the effect words can have on citizens who otherwise consider themselves enlightened enough to stay clear of semantic manipulation. History shows even the most advanced of men and women can be seduced into unconscionable deeds by trained orators. As was the case in Germany during the Hitlerian regime, many never thought themselves that gullible, that impressionable; but even words that appealed to most as abstract and indirect evoked strong and costly reactions in the hearts and minds of everyday citizens.

Language scholars S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser explained more definitely four decades ago how vulnerable human beings really are to “magic words”:

The Nazis purposely used terminology which appeared concrete but was in reality ambiguous and meaningless. The “enemies” of Germany that had to be destroyed, said Hitler, were the “November criminals,” the “red dragon,” the “Jewish plague,” the “parliamentarians,” the “democratic-Marxist-Jew,” the “Jewish bacillus.” All these referentially meaningless abstractions were in turn grouped together into the equally abstract “System.”³

English psychiatrist Anthony Storr added deeper layers in suggesting that Hitler’s words, specifically at Nuremberg rallies, “was not intended to convey information but took on the quality of an incantation or chant.”⁴ Storr noted that the marching bands and musical instruments preceding and proceeding Hitler’s remarks provided much cover for his oratorical deficits and “reinforce[d] the effect which the music, the banners, the search-lights, and the processions had already induced.”⁵ Thus, even the most inhumane and repugnant charges, in this sense, took on melodic tones—better digested and internalized.

Many on the extreme Right today, though not as powerful or skilled or smart as Hitler was, have been eliciting just as dangerous an effect in listeners’ minds. A man who shot his way into a Tennessee Unitarian church in June 2008 confessed he “hated the liberal movement” in America and didn’t care too much for “liberals in general as well as gays.” He was particularly disturbed by some of the liberal stances taken by the Unitarian church in past times.⁶ In a letter written right before his murderous rampage, the gunman expressed desire to “kill … every Democrat in the Senate & House [and] the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book.” Here, he was making reference to a book written by the conservative commentator, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), in which liberals and democrats are recreated as America-hating traitors with deep-seated desires to see their country destroyed. Police officers also discovered other liberal-bashing books at the gunman’s house which, by their title, reveal how effective hate speech can be in pushing human beings over the edge of sanity: Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.

Shock-jocks understand that in times of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, human beings are vulnerable and impressionable, and can be manipulated with ease. A local Tennessee police chief explained how the church shooter, a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, came to blame liberals for his financial woes: “It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.”

Like in Hitler’s Germany when it was fashionable to blame the Jews, and in George Wallace’s Alabama where it was rational to blame the Niggers, so it is in the hard-Right’s America easy to blame the liberals, or democrats, or progressives—or anyone bold enough to think for themselves.

With tens of millions of Americans tuned into the various streams of talk radio, those who cherish the very foundations upon which a livable society stands must become more concerned about the level of acidity spewed daily in the name of Free Speech. Examples of the corrosiveness that today passes for rhetoric from those corners are endless, but a few are worth citing.

Consider the words of talk show host Michael Savage on Autism, which he considers “a fraud, a racket”:

I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, “Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.”⁷

Similar comments were made by fellow crackpot Neal Boortz who, in early 2008, ridiculed then-candidate John Edwards’ work on behalf of New Orleans residents, insisting that “so-called refugees” from the region who sought relief around the country following the 2005 category-5 hurricane “was just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage.” He went further:

That wasn’t the cries of the downtrodden. That’s the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them.⁸

FOX News star Bill O’Reilly had laid the foundation three years earlier:

Now, our government has a duty to provide a safety net so these people aren’t living under bridges. But some of them are anyway, because all the entitlement money they get they spend on heroin or crack or alcohol. … Many, many, many of the poor in New Orleans … weren’t going to leave no matter what you did. They were drug-addicted. They weren’t going to get turned off from their source. They were thugs.⁹

These aren’t just the expressions of relatively heartless values and presuppositions; they are marching orders to listeners who, as is the case with one celebrated commentator, happily refer to themselves as “dittoheads.” And you don’t have to take my words for it. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh, currently the most listened-to personality in the genre, explained over a decade ago that the primary purpose of the shock jock is “to make you mad. And the formula for making you—the viewer or the listener—mad hasn’t changed a bit; yet people keep falling for it.” And whether the “dittoheads” who’ve made an idol of him are aware at all, his fulfillment is not in educating or enlightening, but in “stirring them up.” For Limbaugh, “callers are like music on a record station—you play the top ten. You don’t take bad calls.” These “callers” cannot be granted license to “control the show.” After all, “people turn on the radio to be entertained, to be entertained, to be entertained.”¹⁰

Unsurprisingly, Limbaugh’s language pales in comparison to those shared by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who, in a talk to Black radio announcers in 1967, cautioned broadcasters to be cognizant of “the role which the radio announcer plays in the life of our people—for better or for worse.” King praised the efforts of Tall Paul White, Pervis Spann, and Georgia Woods for using their airwaves to furnish social justice—educating, fundraising, etc.—during the Civil Rights battles of the ‘60s. “We would certainly not have come so far without your support,” King told them. “In a real sense, you have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful, cultural bridge between Black and White.” Dr. King believed the radio was the only avenue upon which the masses depended for information; and with that much given, much was required from radio announcers. King, nonetheless, acknowledged much still had to be done to expand the possibilities, on a national scale, of radio as an educational tool: “But, my brothers and my sisters, we are only beginning. We still have a long, long way to go.”

How disappointed might Dr. King be today, in what has come to define radio as we know it? How embarrassed might he be to witness the rise of the shock jock and the decline of the radio educator? And how morally indignant might he feel toward the various ways talk show personalities dangerously inflame passions and incite emotions in viewers—often culminating in lamentable episodes, such as Bill O’Reilly’s accused contribution to the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller (whom he numerously attacked as “Tiller the Baby Killer”). Media critic Rory O’ Conner explained in a Bill Moyers feature just how listeners are, as Limbaugh might put it, stirred up—over and over again:

Here’s the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it’s not shocking any longer. It’s already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? … [Y]ou have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there’s gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who’s gonna say, “You know what? That’s a good idea. Let me act on that.”¹¹

When words are used weapon-like, to attack and destroy, to conquer and dominate, those who suffer the most are those on the sidelines—those considered spectators, entertained by the spectacle of cruelty. What is rarely addressed is how much of a psychological impact takes toll on the minds of listeners and viewers who, day-in-day-out, are terrorized by on-air personalities whose careers rest solely on calling enemies incendiary names and putting political fatwahs on the heads of opponents. If the incidents of the Unitarian church and the abortion doctor are of any significance, its clear more emphasis must be placed on the non-neutral observers who are “shocked” into ever higher levels of inhumanity by men who consider themselves little other than entertainers.

As Henry Giroux put it recently,

the language of oppression and cruelty becomes normalized, removed from the sphere of criticism and the culture of questioning. Such a language does more than normalize ignorance, illiteracy and irrationality; it also produces a kind of psychic hardening and deep-rooted pathology in a society increasingly willing to eliminate the policies that enable social bonds and protections necessary for a substantive democracy.¹²

In times such as this, marked by mass civic illiteracy, coupled with economic uncertainty, tripled with political instability, quadrupled with the arrogance of private and political elites, citizens are most vulnerable to the primitive suggestions of the low-grade thinkers employed by Right-wing organizations to bluster on for four hours daily.¹³ But it is also in times like this that those same vulnerable populations can be best uplifted and educated by concerned thinkers and intellectuals dedicated to making the best with what’s left of our wobbling world.

1. J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness: A Textbook on General Semantics and Epistemics (Dubuque, Iowa: W. C. Brown Co., 1973), p. 130.
2. S.I. Hayakawa and William Dresser, Dimensions of Meaning (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970), p. 5.
3. Ibid., p. 50.
4. Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 46.
5. Ibid., p. 47.
6. Associated Press, “Police: Killer targeted church for liberal views,” MSNBC (July 28, 2008).
7. Transcript and Audio
8. Transcript and Audio
9. Transcript and Audio
10. Video
11. Bill Moyers Journal, “Rage on the Radio,” PBS (September 12, 2008).
12. Henry A. Giroux, “Language and the Politics of the Living Dead,” TruthOut (January 19, 2010).
13. Chris Hedges, “America the Illiterate,” Truthdig (November 10, 2008).

In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk.

– Henry Giroux, p. x.

If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized… p. 29.

As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society. p. 82.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?
By Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-61329-4
ISBN10: 0-230-61329-2

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Giroux has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Giroux has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux’s “critical sympathy” to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from — for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants — young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the “assault against youth” being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of reproof youth, and especially those of color, are being confined to by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who “died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction.”

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a “willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens.” But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn’t responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn’t be established as law without a media complex that has “habitually” reinforced representations, however false, of young people as “variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative.” It’s important to note that these suggestions “do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability”; they also “legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government.”

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society — a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which “children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell.”

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities – to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, “constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics.” And today’s children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in “the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility.” (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to “a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)”; a society unable to “define youth outside of market principles determined largely by … market growth and the accumulation of capital.”

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an “expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism.”

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux’s meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, Slumber Party in a Box, which enlists “agents” to “invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ‘feedback through quizzes’ to GIA headquarters.” Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources – peer pressure power — to use in expanding their brand — even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their bank account figures than “using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism.”

But there’s another angle to this, which hasn’t gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn’t necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by “4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built.” This war is against the growing population of “pint-size nihilists” amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally “marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives.”

And while we’re at it, let’s make sure they’re excluded from “various forms of student aid,” post-conviction, including but not limited to “welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and… public housing.”

Isn’t it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on “intellectuals” of great courage to “take a stand” against these “collective problems” putting at risk “not only young people and adults… but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself.” But how many of these intellectuals wouldn’t have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they’re being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them “Marxist” and “Socialist” values – values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of popular culture, who’ve “hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness.”

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to “critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge,” are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied “opportunities to engage knowledge critically… [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something.”

Giroux’s hopes are for a “larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future,” in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, “We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance.” Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: “… [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance.”

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux’s call to young people is direct: “[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it.”

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society — faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

In a recent interview, President Chirac recounted an experience that left him deeply troubled. Through a secret phone call, placed in early 2003, George Bush tried to explain how his plans for war were in direct correlation with biblical prophecy: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

All this, coming on the heels of new allegations that former Blackwater CEO, Erik Prince, purposefully operated his disgraced private mercenary machine as a modern-day crusade battalion against the evil forces of Islam—found dominant in the middle-eastern region. And just a few months after the release of tapes showing soldiers in Afghanistan being told to “hunt people for Jesus” and to “get them into the kingdom.”

Of course, this is hardly surprising for those who watched closely the unfolding and aftermath of the Iraq war. A great number of reasons to justify its moral imperative were put forth, but none took repugnance to a new low more than those provided by the former President, such as claims, on countless occasions, and to countless foreign leaders, that “God” was the driver of his war ship, that “God” had instructed him to “go and end the tyranny in Iraq,” that his 2003 war was, essentially, “the lord’s will.”

Many reports have also detailed private conversations Bush had with foreign Head of States about the “love” of God. And with GQ magazine’s exposé, published March this year, of the biblical quotes former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regularly laced his top-secret memos with (“Open the Gates that the Righteous Nation May Enter,” “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him to deliver their soul from death”), the implications couldn’t be more startling.

Is it any wonder that those most eager to talk about their love for “God” are often the ones most likely to do the devil’s bidding?

Raised in a firm, Judeo-Christian home, I appreciate the roles spirituality and morality play in providing a young child with much needed structure against the many impurities this world contains; but “religion mis-overstood,” as the rap artist Nas once put it, is “poison.” And religious extremists, who’ve convinced themselves that the only true path to the afterlife is that which they’ve chosen to follow, are no less dangerous than the man who led the whole world into war based on conversations he imagined to be having with his “God.”

Conservative Christianity is chief culprit for a lot of the twisted pathologies our society partakes in today, but bigotry isn’t exclusive to the right only. Books by Sarah Posner (God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters), Bill Press (How the Republicans Stole Christmas: Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Faith & Politics and What We Can Do to Make it Right), and Frank Schaeffer (Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back) have outlined poignantly the right-wing’s co-optation of Christianity for commercial political causes, but not enough has been written on the fundamentalism of religion, and how easy it is for even the most well-meaning of liberals, leftists, or progressives to contribute to the chaotic conditions humanity remains subject to.

In 2009, no one is still left unsure whether religion, and its struggle for supremacy, has been the greatest dividing factor this world has entertained. The results—millions of lives lost (and counting)—is plenty proof. Innocent blood has been shed, and will continue to be shed, for as long as religion remains a deciding factor in the public spaces that govern our everyday concerns and careers.

My faith (small f) is private and I hope it remains that way. And though I believe I’m doing right by my maker, I’m not so arrogant as to proselytize it to everyone who comes my way. I don’t hold anyone to a lesser standard for refusing to commit to the same religion-based belief system I’ve adopted. I chose the prophetic route of theology, which puts at center the burdens of the disenfranchised above all other entities, but I’m not so quick to denounce atheists or agnostics as heathens whose special place in hell awaits them—if they don’t repent and turn from their wicked ways some time soon.

With the increase in church shootings, mosque bombings, and synagogue attacks, the need for inter-faith dialogue is more critical than it’s ever been. Pastors, Imams, Monks, Rabbis, Priests, Atheism Scholars, and all other religious/non-religious leaders must make a commitment, within the next decade, to broaden the discourse of faith, that it may include all those who find inequality distasteful enough to engage it in a way that frees the yoke of the oppressed and brings to justice the oppressors.

At the core of each credible faith is the belief that reciprocity should guide the believer’s actions, reminding him/her that no God is worthy of worship who lets injustice go unpunished or a good deed go unrewarded. For those who truly cherish life over death, peace over war, liberation over imperialism, that should be common ground we can all gather around.

There’s a woman in Chicago… She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.

– President Ronald Wilson Reagan (1976)

… This legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.

– President William Jefferson Clinton (August, 22, 1996)

All I’m trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard – they’re not on welfare, they’re going to their jobs every day, they’re doing the right things by their kids –they should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while.

– President Barack Hussein Obama II (March 18, 2009)

It’s unclear what possessed President Obama’s intimation at welfare recipients as lazy, selfish, uncaring bums, but the suggestion that they are not “working hard,” or “doing the right things by their kids,” is a cruel and mean one. The characterization of poor single-mothers, who coincidentally live a life dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies, as irresponsible narcissists is surely no new phenomenon. One need only look to Ronald Reagan, two decades ago, and find ample relief in his infamous description of financially-disempowered Black and Brown females as, Welfare Queens. Obama’s high-fiving of the ‘Great Communicator’ is, sadly, unsurprising, for one who has praised Reagan at every step possible.

In the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, last year, Obama couldn’t contain his admiration for the man whose economic policies successfully demolished the dignity and dreams of a whole generation of people: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Obama went further in his praise of Reagan, for eliminating “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.” A couple of days back, on St. Patrick’s Day, Obama again drew inspiration from the man many—and they are certainly in no short supply—have compared to the devil, on numerous occasions.

Whether Obama understands this or not, the demonization of welfare recipients has to STOP! As long as the narrative of laziness remains affixed to the character of this group, the right-wing’s war on poverty (the war to perpetuate it) would have foot soldier in the White House—an ally in the most powerful man in the world. Another notion, as it relates to Welfare, that deserves death by a thousand execution squads, is the premise that Black and Brown single mothers are the major recipients, and thus, welfare is but another Affirmative Action-esque ‘handout,’ which must be eliminated, to enforce personal responsibility on these communities. Every legitimate study shows that White women are, in fact, the overwhelming beneficiaries of welfare programs. This detail is not meant to bash economically handicapped White women, but rather, to put to bed, once and for all, the lies concocted by the right-wing, in attempts to abolish the safety net which has held many families intact, for the last few decades.

In 2000, when Obama enacted a run for Congressman Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat, the then-relatively unknown State Senator sought to convince inner-city Chicago constituents, which Rush represented, that he was not the Ivy League, Harvard educated, Hyde Park snub Rush’s campaign had depicted him as. Unfortunately, the charge stuck to him, like a lapel pin, and many Black and Brown residents had a hard time seeing the faces of their struggle in Obama’s eyes and promises. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, won handsomely, and without breaking a drop of sweat.

Obama might not have to worry about those claims lingering any longer, but, as every politically-astute observer knows, old ghosts come haunting back—chickens come home to roost. If Obama keeps up his antics of lambasting poor Black mothers for feeding their kids Popeyes Chicken remnants for breakfast, and asserting that a “good economic development plan for [the Black community] would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars,” it wouldn’t be such a tough sell, next election cycle, for his opponents to argue that, perhaps, the populist President isn’t so populist after all! It might not be so hard to propose that Obama, himself the child of a food-stamps recipient, has forgotten were he came from.

Obama’s remarks, though intensely troubling, might be just the wake-up call progressives could have only dreamed of. In the mid-‘90s, when Bill Clinton fulfilled his solemn vow to “end welfare as we know it,” many Clinton supporters were unable to reconcile the actions of the then-popular president, to the promises—of equality for all—he had made on the campaign trail. In his reflective book, Death Blossoms, political prisoner and prophetic leader, Mumia Abu Jamal described Clinton’s “legislative obscenity” as a “chilling” plot, drafted to dash “the hopes of millions of the poor, all in order to protect his political ass.” Brother Jamal, as always, was right on target, and the question now looming larger than ever, is if Obama might be considering a relative “legislative obscenity,” which might come in handy, in the event of a need to “protect his political ass.” The prospect might look improbable, but history informs us of the moral obligation to remain combat-ready at all times.

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.
– Malcolm X, The Power of Media (1964)

… The cops be trying to pop and lock me/
They cocky, plus they mentality is Nazi/
The way they treat blacks, I wanna snap like paparazzi/
– Hip-Hop artist Common, Real People, Be (2005)

… The media be crucifying brothers severely/
– Tupac, “Blasphemy,” The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996)

Only in a failed media state is an innocent peace-maker, with a knee to his head and palms pressed upon his back, deemed the perpetrator of his own death in an execution. This is the story of Oscar Grant III – the murdered 21-yr-old Oakland father. In a rush to reverse the graphic images, caught on tape, the mainstream media, and its companions, have sought to diminish the credibility of Mr. Grant, and exonerate, before legal trial, Officer Johannes Mehserle of all wrongdoing in the death of Oscar Grant.

Borrowing predictable moves from the old playbook, CNN, MSNBC and FOX News (and their many affiliated siblings) have all reported that Oscar Grant supposedly had a (police) record, and thus, somehow – logic be damned! – culpable in his own death. Those who payed keen attention during the Sean Bell fiasco are well aware of this trend. As Sean Bell’s precious body was riddled by the 50 bullets of four New York police officers on duty that November night (the eve of his wedding), and the inexcusable homicide of Bell was sentenced justly in the court of public opinion, mainstream media channels, with unseemly haste, were swift in reminding viewers that Sean Bell, and his counterparts, possessed a criminal record. It’s a rehashed move to lessen the humanity of the unjustifiably murdered, and diminish the extent of criminality – how logical.

Soon after commercial news channels found the shooting of Oscar Grant too popular to disregard (with over a million hits on YouTube, of mind-gripping cell-phone documentaries of the incident), it was no shocker to see them (our dependable news-source) report of the death-threats Officer Mehserle has received, ever since (Death threats, who could imagine?). Noting how Mehserle has been forced to take a paid-leave (poor him), move twice to different residential locations, and receive police protection, it became a sort of chorus, sang by pundits who find no cause of concern in the unprovoked shooting of an unarmed Black man, and received ample airplay on cable, national and local news outlets. Defending the officer’s actions, they have helped circulate the laughable (though, not that funny) report – 6 days after Grant’s death – that he (a two-year veteran of the transit agency), in fact, confused his taser for a gun.

The mainstream channels have deemed Oscar Grant’s behavior “threatening” to the officers who exercised full control over his handcuffed, subdued body. They have justified his death with unsubstantiated (and erroneous) reports of his participation in the scuffle, which ultimately ended his life. Oakland District 6 Council member, Desley Brooks, took note of this trend in a press-conference on Wednesday, January 7th 2009: “We [the community) want to be very clear to you, the media. We would not tolerate you criminalizing the victim, and making the suspect somehow victimized. The news that is being portrayed today is that this poor officer, who executed a father who begged for his life, that he is in protective custody. My question is, ‘Who was there to protect Oscar Grant, when he was shot?’”

Indeed, the “protect and serve” force was less interested in being forthright about the shooting, and waited several days, similar to the MSNBC-Imus incident, to see if it would ever yield any traction. As told by citizen-journalists across the country, the officers involved in the execution of Oscar Grant confiscated all cell-phones and video cameras thought to contain documentary of the shooting – purportedly for “evidence”-gathering purposes. The mainstream media has failed to report that.

What is certainly clear from this ordeal, is that mainstream media – which insists we live in a “post-racial” era – is not only a disseminator of untruths and prevarication, but also operates antithetically to the interests of everyday people. The mainstream press corps has failed to – just as in the cases of Abner Louima, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Baron “Scooter” Pikes, Ronnie White, Kathryn Johnston, Michael Stewart, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton Jr., etc. – keep track of the lovely widow, and four-year-old daughter of Oscar Grant. Dead Prez was right: “You can’t fool all the people all of the time/ But if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind/ … For your TV screen, is telling lies to your vision.”

I think that I have the capacity to get people to recognize themselves in each other. I think that I have the ability to make people get beyond some of the divisions that plague our society… [D]uring my younger days when I was tempted by, you know, sort of more radical or left wing politics, there was a part of me that always was a little bit conservative in that sense; that believes… [in] recognizing everybody’s concerns, seeing other people’s points of views and then making decisions.

– Barack Obama on ABC’s This Week

In the wake of President-Elect Obama’s recent cabinet-appointments, many white liberals have taken it upon themselves to release pent-up aggression at a man they thought was the “progressive” candidate he had earlier claimed to be.. As they saw it, Obama had “betrayed” the loyalty that earned him victory. As a sort of catharsis, railing Obama’s reputation over the coals of indignation could make them feel better about their decision to elect a man who promised virtually nothing (of substance) in his bid for the presidency. White liberals, especially, have had to learn so much, in the last 1 month, about the man whose political dirty-laundry was never hidden from the public to begin with.

In a highly predictable move, they have sought to bash everything Obama, or Obama-like, and couch their frustration in the ‘eloquence,’ and ‘con-artistry’ of Obama. Spare me the misplaced aggravation. One of such liberals is writer and activist, James Petras who went as far as suggesting that no progressive organization or publication held Obama’s feet to the fire during the presidential campaign. Petras believes that, to guarantee John McCain a loss, every progressive and leftist news site accommodated and encouraged Obama’s sophistry, as he clinched victory into becoming the “greatest con-man in recent history.” As Petras tells it, “The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics.” This is stunning because “self-opiated ‘progressives,’ who” once operated as the conscience of the Democratic Party, saw no wrongdoing in concocting “arguments in his [Obama] favor,” – long as it ultimately garnered Obama victory.

It is unclear whether Mr. Petras is engaging in grand-delusion. In the course of the ’08 presidential race, countless “progressive” publications never let a second slip-by without heaping fact-based criticism on the Obama campaign staff, and the candidate it worked for. Perusing the pages of Black Agenda Report and Black Commentator solves the puzzle. Black Agenda Report, notoriously known for its constructive criticism – characterized by some as, “attacks” – of Obama, must have mysteriously slipped Petras’ memory, as he proclaimed the progressive community to have cheerled Obama into victory. Another Black progressive publication, which I write for, BlackCommentator.com was unrelenting in its undressing of President-Elect Obama, as the tiresome 22-month long campaign drained the blood of reasoning from, otherwise, radically-inclined liberals, leftists, and progressives – most especially Black ones. At Black Commentator, readers were left to juggle between the biting commentaries of Cynthia McKinney-supporters, such as Larry Pinkney, Dr. Lenore Daniels, Tolu Olorunda (myself), etc., and the discontent Obama-supporters, such as Bill Fletcher Jr., Reverend Irene Monroe, David A. Love, etc., expressed on a weekly basis. How Black progressive voices became muted in Petras’ reproof of the progressive bloc is not a surprise to this writer..

Black progressives have always maintained an impeccable legacy of critical opposition to empire – in whatever form it comes in. Whether it was Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, Black progressives have remained unbridled in their remonstrations against White power in Black face. Yet, the liberal wing of the American political system has never appreciated, nor accepted, their moral leadership. This reality is validated in the leadership of most unions, non-profits, and left-inclined political organizations. The membership might be disproportionately Black and Brown, but the management, mostly, retains a White identity.

Whilst Black progressives sought to rip the mask off of Barack Obama, in an attempt to unveil his true identity, we were deemed ‘Obama-haters,’ whose egos sought to stifle the chances of a Black man making history. The same white liberals, who now find no progressive solace in Obama’s unfolding cabinet, told Black progressives to be quiet, and “wait till he gets in first.” This logic of reprimanding Black souls to be silent, and reserved, dates back to the era of slavery, with pretentious white liberals, presented as abolitionists, urging Black slaves to fight for more substantial accumulations, other than freedom. “Higher wages,” “better treatment,” and other silly calculations were exalted above the pedestal of liberation. As it was then, so it is now. At a time when the inconvenient truth stares White liberals in the face, they seek to put the blame, instead, on a Black man who bathed them in his eloquent and rhetorical oceans. With this outburst of disillusionment, what most disturbs Black progressives, such as myself, is the reality that every disappointing appointment, by the President-Elect, was foreseeable a million miles away.

From the selection of pro-war Zionist, Rahm Emmanuel; to the hawkish center-right triangulator, Hillary Rodham Clinton; to the grossly incompetent hoop-star, Arne Duncan; to Monsanto-shill Tom Vilsack; to religious-right ideologue Rick Warren, the inevitability stands out.

Since clinching the Democratic Party nomination – but really dating back to his Senate career – President-Elect Obama had dropped countless hints about the administration he planned to oversee. As a strong believer in bipartisanship, Obama had pledged to welcome voices, opinions and characters he ‘disagreed with.’ Most white liberals, instead of questioning this logic, played along with his divine call for “unity.” As one who could “bring together” all factions of society, and heal the “racial wounds” that “divide” us, it was only a matter of time before Obama was perceived as the second coming of Jesus Christ. Though voting repeatedly for an extension of the Iraq war, whilst a Senator, white liberals convinced themselves that he was more than willing to end the war in 2 years, as he had promised – or not.

While most White liberals were foaming at the mouth, many Black and Brown progressives sought to expose Obama as the unraveling of a hip, cool, and sexy imperialist-to-be. An example is L.A.-based writer and editor Juan Santos, whose phenomenal piece, titled “Barack Obama and the ‘End’ of Racism” (Feb. ’08), put to bed all claims to a war-ending-peacenik-post-racial-uniter – in the personage of Barack Obama. Santos captures the Obama personality with exceptionality: “Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy… Obama, with his extraordinary intelligence and presence (by any standard), is, in the eyes of white Amerikkka, (and, according to the standards of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which still rule the thinking of Euro-Americans) the half-white, and thus, half-redeemed “Black savage” – “redeemed” by his “white blood”, “civilized” by it – redeemed by his relative whiteness- ultimately redeemed and refined by the white nation itself… Obama knows the rules of the game, after all – he is the rules of the new race game- his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism.”

The problem with white-liberalism, and its inability to render deserved criticism, while it mattered, lies in the inherent non-identity of its political philosophy. White-liberalism is structured around celebrity, popularity and majority – Democracy? It blows with the cultural and political tide. Whilst it was convenient, and even expedient, to embrace Obama’s candidacy as the “dawn” of a new political paradigm, white liberals flocked with endorsement of this “charismatic,” and “new” Black politician, who doesn’t see Race or color. He was, in their imagination, the manifestation of Dr. King’s dream. Not the Dr. King who grew into consciousness from 1965-1968, but the “I Have a Dream” Dr. King, but the Dr. King who wouldn’t dare say that, many in “the white community” feel the Civil Rights movement “should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem;” not the Dr. King who incinerated the petty belief that “integration” is “merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure.” This belief that Obama is the birth child of ‘the other’ Dr. King’s dream, led White liberals into missing the point on Obama. Having been taking for a ride by the Obama campaign, they now feel the need to justify their gullibility with the infantile defense that Obama had misled them into thinking differently about his potential as a progressive president.

While some see latent value in the recent outrage surrounding Obama’s cabinet-picks, I’m not as convinced that disorganized screams are the keys to steering the wheels of the Obama administration in a progressive direction. With self-proclaimed “progressives,” such as cable-news host Keith Olbermann, ascribing unconditional praise to the grave of Mark Felt, otherwise known as “Deep throat,” without mentioning his supreme role in the formulation of COINTELPRO, it’s clear that White liberals still have a lot to learn.