propositions press

is "tech" "racist"? what kind of a question is that?

One Jen Rhee stumbled upon my blog several months ago and, given my interests in art and social conditions, invited me to embed the following infographic that she and a small group of collaborators assembled. Here it is. My comments follow below.

Created by: OnlineITDegree.net

Given the brand-recognition angle of the above infographic, I can only assume that by adding it to my blog I am helping out Jen. But on this blog the price for publicity is critique. My evaluation, then.

I like the design sensibility and talent for organizing information. I also enjoy the choice of a Murray Hill-like display font for an infographic about racism. It makes ironic reference to the Mad Men-era of ugly prejudice mixed with stylishness.

What I find weaker is the analytical framework, particularly the use of the words “tech/technology” and “racist.” Are notebooks and handheld electronic devices synonymous with tech or technology? If this is about patterns of racial exclusion and dominance within an industry, then perhaps the point would be better made if some comparison were made against a different industry. For example, are the numbers of tech start-up entrepreneurs any different when compared to the executives of automobile companies? If the profiles are comparable, then can one be described as racist when the other is not? Or are both then to be considered racist, and where would that leave us? And where would that leave the meaning of "racism"? 

Furthermore, is racism a phenomenon limited to the exclusions of and biases against Black and Hispanic people? What about the over-representation of white managers and senior executives in relation to the abundance of East and South Asian junior engineers? How might that also fit into the patterns of exclusion you are attempting to address? Silicon Valley is the physical manifestation of a global industry, and beyond that, of a global economy. Who are the South Asians that find their way to a glass-ceiling career in a Silicon Valley company? Might there be some patterns there that reflect the social hierarchies of an entirely different context?  

It is not necessarily that I disagree with the observations highlighted in the infographic, more that I sense incompleteness in its analysis, a need for a more fine-grained argument, and contextual information that probably overrides the infographic medium. 

the getaway that left questions

Walking home from the hardware store, I was lost in my own thoughts when a rising gutteral roar turned my head. My eyes settled on a remarkable scene unfolding in comical slow motion across the street from me. The first thing I saw was a young pale-faced man in a name-patch uniform lumbering across the lot of a BP gas station, apparently at a full sprint, but weighed down and misbalanced by a beer gut so big that he might have rolled faster than he could run. Then I saw what he was running after. Super loud but super slow, a rust-eaten nineties mufflerless Caprice with a young black man about two-thirds reclined behind the wheel lurched out of the lot, accelerating at a rate just barely faster than the man on foot. For another two seconds it was a contest, but the car gained in momentum what the belly lost. The chase went into the street but after another moment it was all over except for the cursing.

I deduced what had happened easily enough, but the meaning of the event is not so simple to determine. To my mind the story of this one event can be interpreted in at least three ways.

1)    It was a routine drive-off from the pump, the kind of loss-leading nuisance that vexes small retailers daily, the costs of which are built into the price of purchase.

2)    It was a counterproductive assertion of entitlement, feeding the perception in the secure spaces of white America of a growing and increasingly dangerous black and brown criminal underclass.

3)    It was an act of everyday resistance, a concrete, elemental, but banalized fuck you of the kind for which even the anti-capitalist activists of Occupy Wall Street essentially lack the guts.

These interpretations do not hold mutually exclusive purchase. In fact, all of them make sense simultaneously because of the subject positions in play, not only across the spectrum of positions but within them. Consider the players. First there is the station attendant. Then the driver/perpetrator. There was a white man watching from one of the other pumps. And there was me, witnessing from across the street. The multiple interpretations move across the complexities of and between these subject positions.

My first assumption was that the paying customer at the pump would tend toward interpretation number (2), but who knows; there are ostensibly anti-racist white leftists around here among whose questionable ideological merits include the capacity to rationalize even the most anti-social of behaviors on the part of African American persons. There was part of me that hoped the driver himself harbored a feeling going in the direction of number (3), but it was probably more like a perpetrator’s perspective on number (1); he was likely already thinking about how to get his next tank of gas as he pulled into traffic. He already had to seek out a non-pre-pay station for a fast one, and how far could he get on a single tank of gas, in a guzzler? For the station attendant thinking about his job—how to explain the incident to his boss, maybe having to fill out a theft report—number (1) might be the go-to interpretation. But the driver was an African American man, with all the stereotypical indicators of an inner city migrant, quite out of place in Middleton, Wisconsin, a town less than 2% African American. With an outsized pride of place, some residents of Middleton (adjacent to where I live in Madison) actually believe that Middleton is one of the country’s “best places to live,” as trumpeted in mainstream media reports. Would these factors of race and social exclusivity figure into the station attendant assigning number (2) as a meaning? 

Finally, the station was a BP. After feeling the frustration of both last year’s impotent post-Deepwater Horizon boycott campaign against BP stations, demonstrating that consumers really do not have the power to meaningfully punish transnational corporations, and of the current inability of the Occupy movement to exercise a power beyond changing the national conversation (which I acknowledge is huge, gratefully), I tended to see the episode as an example of number (3). I was actually glad to witness an action that could be described an unapologetic fuck you—after all the devastation (which is still inconclusively known, but constantly upped in estimation) in the Gulf of Mexico and BP’s proven impunity—finally! Inarticulate or not, politically meaningful or not, counterproductive as it was, for one short moment, in my mind I quietly saluted the driver.

But then I felt terrible afterward, for the knowledge that the tendency toward racial profiling in an area where even I, a Chinese American, routinely get stared at had just been fed the equivalent of an energy drink by this young man's action. Also for what such an act of disobedience says about the conundrum facing the Occupy movement. That is to say, significant parts of the Occupy movement must show that they can make progress in creatively addressing the system it critiques, opposes, and abandons, as one that is fundamentally racist. But the all-important African American street element, having suffered thirty years of massive incarceration and everyday police repression, is basically neither politically present nor self-consciously politicized, made up of individuals existing in survival mode, same as the driver of the Caprice.

Finally and not least, I felt the negativity of the continued erosion of trust that goes along with another business perhaps deciding to safeguard against theft through pre-pay means. On the other hand, why should the self-satisfied town of Middleton expect a different standard of public trust than what millions of people live with in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and other places across the region? Another salute....

I witnessed a crime. Or was it an act of resistence?

These questions follow:

Is an interpretation informed by racism in any way a reasonable response?

If not, then how does one begin to address racism when those who racially profile their fellow citizens believe it reasonable?

What hope have we that the everyday daring of the most economically desperate become self-consciously politicized? 

How do those of us who are less daring than we need to be model ourselves on the driver and inflict a pain, no matter how small, measureable in units other than webpage hits?

 

vq memories: tony, i hardly knew ye

After I graduated from college and before I went into my current work, I spent a little less than two years working for a troubled youth treatment program in Pennsylvania called VisionQuest. It seems like a dream now, and not just because it was twenty years ago. VisionQuest, in both the camp and wagon train components that I worked, was simply its own culture and universe, far removed from the mainstream of conventional life. As a work experience, it was exhausting and exhilarating in the way that only those unsustainable experiences of time-bound collective mission-defined jobs are. I guess this period was my version of going “into the wild”—a common experience for my generation of privileged, idealistic, and discontented college-educated young people. (I like to tell people that had our guy Christopher McCandless made it back across that river, he probably would have been back in grad school in the next year or two.)

Anyway, at that time the VisionQuest treatment milieu was a combination of boot camp, summer camp, circus parade, inner-city youth mentoring, and staff party scene. The youth were mostly from Philly and Pittsburgh, with a few individuals from Erie, random suburbs of the big cities, or Trenton, New Jersey. They were sent by courts, not parents. They weren’t “at-risk”; they were already in trouble, some of them pretty seriously. The company’s treatment program was known for its tough love and spiritual philosophy—emphasis on both the “tough” and the “love.” 

The youth were both: tough and loving. I grew to respect these kids, for their survival skills, their loyalties, and most of all, for their amazing intensity. From a distance—when I didn’t have to deal with their shit, right in my face—I even regarded them with a kind of awe, and still do. Some of these kids, who’d grown up under unbelievably challenging, violent, and amoral circumstances on the streets of North Philly or The Hill in Pittsburgh, would die for you, I am not kidding. But that is, only if you had gained their trust and proven yourself. Which is of course the hurdle most adults never got over in relation to these kids. Especially the white liberal educated people who came to work as staff—not all, but almost, at least in my time there. The black and/or working class, less educated, ex-military, ex-law enforcement, ex-semipro sports staff tended to relate better, and could occasionally match the intensity of these youth. Those of us who succeeded at VQ—and, believe me, anyone who worked there for a year or longer qualified as having succeeded—mostly were of the latter demographic and social origins.

I, with my high falutin’ college degree and traveling box of books, was unusual among the “senior professional staff,” an internal earned designation for the reliable employees who had demonstrated an effective rapport with the youth, meaning, the staff who were committed, who weren’t going to be quitting by dashing out in the middle of the night and leaving the kids with just another experience of broken trust. Many of the elite-educated hires ended up leaving in disgust or horror after witnessing one too many incidents of physical restraint. In truth these incidents could be rather violent in a rough, boys-on-boys kind of way. After all, we’re talking about some big, thuggy sixteen, seventeen, and sometimes eighteen year-olds. Kids with scars, muscles built from playground basketball and detention push-ups, and sometimes a gunshot wound. Who each, nearly to a person in my experience, anyway, had hearts of gold, not to mention unbelievable potential.
Restraints typically ended in hugs, and occasionally in tears and therapeutic breakthroughs. That was only the most dramatic form of visible love. Affection and care permeated the program and camp environment in lots of other ways.

The successful staff tended toward the profile of the youth in other ways, perhaps unsurprisingly. For one thing, a lot of the staff were somewhat unstable in their own personal lives. Cheating lovers, recreational drug use, too much drinking, borrowing money with no intention of paying it back—these are run of the mill behaviors in many corners of the adult world. But among the Senior Professional Staff (SPS) of a youth treatment/placement agency? Not ideal, at least in the conventional thinking. But VisionQuest was anything but a conventional culture, and that was the strength of the company and its treatment model. The dysfunction sometimes extended to the staff, but the fundamental integrity—the kind you can’t fake, especially under the scrutiny of some of the street-smartest kids in the world—was there, too.

To this day I continue to believe in the VisionQuest way; in my short time there I saw too many transformations to not be convinced that we were doing something very right. I still treasure my earned status as SPS, symbolized by "the button on the leg," inspired with permission by the Bishkawaliki tradition of the Crow Indians, an unforgettable detail to anyone who passed through the VQ world. Though I really do not know what the camps and the work is like now, the company’s website reflects much of what I recall of the VQ culture. 

I have only ever spoken in public about my time at VisionQuest once, at Mess Hall about six years ago. The reason I am thinking about all this now is because I just did what people can do now with the web, which is search for names from our pasts. In a moment of nostalgia for the past, I searched for a few of the distinctive names that populated my world back in 1991. One of these names was Tony Zasa, a VQ veteran who even then qualified as one of the old guard. He led my staff training group and inspired me to tough out the first few weeks of what I now realize was the most challenging job I’ll ever have. He was no-nonsense, a straight shooter who had helped quite a few youths over the years in the VQ tough love way. I credit my positive experience at the company in part to having been trained by him.

So you might imagine my shock when a search on his name returned this old news item. 466 pounds of cocaine and 75 pounds of meth? That is not somebody having a weekend party. My god, Zasa, what happened to you? Take off that button.

 

 

 

the mysterious fdl initiative movement, on black friday

The fdl initiative movement has come to life. The photo evidence comes in from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.  

A mess of students from UW-Fond du Lac with shared concerns and curiosities about their city and fellow citizens got organized, got smart, and got motivated. There were about thirty in all, led by the art students. Specifically, they wanted to creatively address the anxieties felt by some elements of the citizenry regarding the spectre of rising demographic heterogeneity. How to raise the issue while wearing an ideological poker face was part of their challenge.

While I have already related some of the recent happenings in town, a number of Wisconsin's other campuses have lately been hit with incidents of racist and/or homophobic vandalism. Beyond that, it is also important to remember that this part of Wisconsin has long been deservedly known as a conservative part of the state. Joseph McCarthy, from outside Appleton, is the area's most notorious conservative son, but in the general achievement category we would do well to remember that Ripon, just a few miles from Fond du Lac, lays a credible claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party. So when it comes to addressing these issues, the fdl initiative movement is on the front lines in ways the critical artists of Chicago are not.

It being November, they decided to bring three questions to the public assembled in advance of Black Friday shopping. 

On t-shirts.

  



 They found large numbers of these People (Who Shop) exactly as they had known they would, outside big box stores in the early morning hours of Friday, November 26. fdl initiative movement workers invited persons who had nothing to do but wait, to consider the questions. Those who were willing wrote answers on the shirts.

I have not seen the t-shirt responses. As they'd expected "some are great, some funny, and some stupid," said John Scotello. Where the fdl initiative movement goes now is unclear, but at some point we need to see the t-shirts with responses. Though maybe it is premature to decide how, where, and when to show them, it is fun to think about. But the group has not put much attention to those questions just yet, having prepared for another venture out, as of tonight. Not Black Friday this time, but a regular Friday night. That means they likely will encounter the more familiar assemblage of the weekly Friday night watering hole rather than the once-a-year gathering of the People Who Shop. 

Earlier today I met with my language tutor. He is an anthropologist. During our practice session, in which I tried to explain the fdl initiative movement, it occurred to him that the exercise sounded like a kind of activist poetic anthropological research. If there is a creatively rigorous process of analysis after the "data" has been gathered, that may be an appropriate description. How and when the "researchers" make their agenda more apparent is what we now await.

All photos courtesy of fdl initiative movement.

  

fond du lac report

A week ago I visited Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, for the first time. Faculty member John Scotello of the UW-FDL Art Department invited me to lead a workshop for the students. He briefed me on his students’ interest in topical or public engagement art projects, as well as some of the outstanding local issues.

He forwarded to me the observations and thoughts of another faculty member whom he had polled about local concerns. That person mentioned a recent episode of racist flyering, in which mock missing person flyers with the words “Have You Seen Me?” over the picture of a white Euro-American child were placed on car windshields in a parking lot. The flyers included language describing the white race as endangered.

I have not found an image of that flyer but a quick Google search turns up a few news stories about racist flyers being distributed in Fond du Lac, including this one. Fond du Lac is apparently a hub for white power activity in Wisconsin.

The UW-FDL art students are very concerned not only about the extremist activity in the area but about what they perceive as the general level of intolerance of cultural, ethnic, racial, and sexual diversity, on the one hand, and the valorization of homogeneity, on the other. With them taking the lead, we spent the afternoon workshop thinking through doable projects intended to raise the level of self-awareness and introspection among people encountering the work, specifically in relation to cultural, ethnic, and racial identity and identification. The project we sketched out ended up being pretty elaborate, considering these students are only in their first and second years. (UW-FDL is a two-year campus; students must transfer to a four-year campus to finish their degree programs.)

I won’t give away the details, but the public action/performance part of the project is scheduled to be executed before the end of November. I can also share the name of the project: The FDL Initiative Movement. I will update readers when there's more to report. (And now there is.)

*

I found a couple of free hours to wander Fond du Lac’s downtown. In the antique mall on South Main Street I spotted an odd board game. Odd, because I’d never seen a vintage board game that made direct thematic or design reference to an African culture. I bought it for $15.

After digging around online for a little bit, it seems that this game, Bantu, is something of a legend among board game aficionados. According to boardgamegeek.com, the game was never produced in a second edition. Stuart Dagger says Bantu was named by Phil Orbanes as one of the “Great Games That Never Made It.”

What is funny to me is that the game itself is very abstract. The competition consists of racing your tokens around a board track, using strategic decisions to block and pass the tokens of the other players. One of the distinguishing features of the game is that there is no random number generation. The rate of travel is half pre-determined and half realized in play, depending on what zones one’s token lands on. As in Parcheesi, there is no symbolic or cultural representation intrinsic to the game at all. So why the name Bantu and the “African”-themed graphics?

Parker Brothers introduced the game in 1955. Billed in the rules pamphlet as “one of the most exciting games to come out in years,” Bantu was obviously conceived as a rather sophisticated experience as far as board games go. But what would that name and cheap African-ness mean to a suburban American family looking for fun new pastimes? Did the foreign-ness or implied primitivity in the name and visuals lack for appeal to the boardgame buying public? Or did the game just not catch on—maybe because it was simply too abstract and strategic in nature? After all, the game was reintroduced later on as Sack in kit form and still seems to have not hit the big time.

And who in Fond du Lac, of all the conservative places, was curious enough to purchase a boardgame called Bantu in or around 1955?

 

 

 

detroit scouting trip: labadie and the people's movement assembly

Not much time to rest after KC. The next week we were off to Detroit. For me, it was the third time in nine months. The “we” were Brian Holmes, Sarah Lewison, Claire Pentecost, Rozalinda Borcila, Amy Partridge, and myself. The trip proper started from Chicago. Sarah came up all the way from Carbondale and I from Madison, of course.

We traveled in two cars. Claire, Brian, Sarah, and Rozlinda in one. Amy and I in my car. We departed on Friday morning at around 9:30 AM, after a quick check to make sure everybody had their passports with them. We didn’t use them, but you never know when you might want to scoot across the border to Windsor. For dim sum, if nothing else.

Coming from the west, stopping by the Labadie Collection was the obvious first thing to do. I have said this before: for any leftist or radical researcher or history buff (and what radical isn’t a student of history), this place really is a must-visit. The thing is, you must go with some idea of what to request, otherwise there is just too much, especially on a first go ‘round. Well, I certainly had some ideas. I wanted to see Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (D.R.U.M.)-related publications and ephemera and a late Sixties/early Seventies radical black paper from Detroit called Inner City Voice. Inner City Voice and D.R.U.M. were contemporaneous expressions, and I was curious about how D.R.U.M. and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were covered in the local radical press of the time.

Julie Herrada, the gracious and super knowledgeable curator of the collection, took the time to introduce all the others (this was their first visit) to the Labadie and how it works. Claire and Sarah ended up studying original copies of Mother Earth, while Amy delved into a portfolio of daily newsletters called The Punch Press, produced by and for the striking laborers of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike. Those were amazing. Apparently produced everyday or nearly so, they are a moving document of organized and creative working class culture. Not only are there strike news items told in the language of outrage skewering the Fisher Body management, but also notices for union dinners complete with menus, reminders for social events like dances, and funny little hand drawn graphics. Judging by The Punch Press, the striking workers had some joyful experiences in their togetherness, even as they engaged in militant struggle and took life-changing risks.

You may enjoy excellent scans of what appears to be the full run of The Punch Press right here.

 

punch press, flint sit-down strike bulletin

 

strike bulleting, menu, 1937

 

strike bulletin graphics, 1937

Julie hooked me up with all the materials I could possibly digest. Particularly interesting was a D.R.U.M. publication titled “The Midwest and the League.” The opening article was about the black revolutionary workers movement and the regional particularities of the industrial midwest, from an early Seventies perspective. There was also an interview with one Mike Hamlin, evidently one of the founders of the League and a main activist in D.R.U.M., and, furthermore, one of the editors or main writers for Inner City Voice. The design is subtle but clear, with a minimum of graphic elements, very readable layouts, and a choice of display text that maintained a uniformly militant tone. Designers of radical publications today could certainly take a lesson from this pamphlet.

the midwest and the league

 

early seventies interview with Mike Hamlin

 

fredy perlman's not the only detroit-paris connection!

Then, the serendipitous began.

vintage issues of inner city voice

Julie, who kept checking in with us because of her curiosity about our impressions (and seeming to like having the opportunity to reacquaint herself with some of the holdings through our fresh eyes), mentioned that there happened to be a conference going on that day and the next, and that Mike Hamlin was scheduled to speak. Wow. We printed out the conference schedule and decided it was too good to pass up, especially since it was free and held right there on the Michigan campus. We resolved to attend the Friday evening panels, of which there were two.

 

julie @ the labadie

So after a cheap dinner in the student ghetto, we made it to the Labor and Economics Panel and, after that, the Movement Panel: What Is “IT”?, the “it” being the “it” in the conference title: Take It Back, Bring It….

Mike Hamlin was on the first panel and he was intense and excellent. I could sum up his fifteen minutes by simply quoting him: “I was a revolutionary then, and I am a revolutionary now.” Yup. Dean Baker was pretty good, too. Arturo Rodriguez spoke about farmworker organzing back in the day, but was mostly quiet during the discussion segment. The drag of the panel was, unfortunately, the youngest participant, a Michigan student named Yousef Rahbi. He was introduced as an experienced student activist, but most of his exhortations fell into a category of sentimental idealism that bordered on the embarassing. For example, he urged those in the audience to dispense with ideological thinking and keep utopic visions in mind when acting in the day to day by remembering “the beautiful scenes…of dogs and frisbees, people really living.” I kid you not. Where are the young radical lions I have known, the Emily Formans and Daniel Tuckers of today, when you really need them? Because Mr. Rahbi wasn’t it.

mike hamlin @ take it back, bring it forward conference

The second panel was much better. Al Haber, from the original first generation SDS cohort, presided. Rich Feldman from the Boggs Center sat on the panel and was awesome. His longtime friend and our Chicago pal Bill Ayers was on it, too. Ron Scott, former Panther and now doing Peace Zones for Life activism in Detroit, kicked butt. He put on a clinic for how to stay rad while embracing new complications that blur the old lines of antagonism, say for example, between cops and inner-city residents. Bob Zellner, who was active in SNCC, gave an inspired presentation. I really hate to say it, but again, the weakest presence was the youngest person, a woman who had done much for Michigan Peaceworks, Laura Russello. She chose to speak about therapy and wellness for activists. Yes, important, but not all that relevant on a panel about movement lineage, inheritences, and innovation. It could have been analytical, with something to say about how movement work can be disfiguring, but her treatment was rather superficial, I thought. As well–maybe we got a skewed sampling since we only attended the one evening session, but the panel composition was awfully male. Out of ten contributors there were only two women. What is up with that?

But it was worth attending. It was fun to see Bill Ayers in a non-neighborhood context, and Julie ended up going, too. And Sarah Lewison recognized Peter Linebaugh sitting in the row behind us. He is a radical historian who teaches in Toledo but lives in Ann Arbor. Our colleague Brett Bloom met him at some event in Europe and turned on the rest of us to his lectures online. So we got to make his acquaintence, though I’m not sure he knew what to make of four of us mobbing him all at once. All I can say is, it could have been six.

 

Interview - Peter Linebaugh - The Magna Carta Manifesto

Anyway, we were off to Detroit after that, for a late night arrival.

The main feature of the next day was the Detroit People’s Movement Assembly, held at the Central United Methodist Church. There were probably about forty-five or more people there. Maureen Taylor kicked things off with a rousing welcome, an impassioned and downright furious condemnation of the latest DTE disaster, in which a family whose heat had been cut off by the utility suffered a deadly fire when they were forced to turn to space heaters for warmth.

There was some general USSF stuff discussed, but mostly it was very Detroit-centric. What I mean is, most of the time was spent on short presentations by four activist initiatives already underway with actions timed to coincide with the influx of USSF activists in June. After the presentations, we broke into small work groups around each of the four campaigns. There were worksheets provided that had outlines and blank lines for strategy, target, message, action, etc. This part of the PMA was clearly an organizing session, but which was open to anybody who came to the PMA, not only including but especially welcome to the out-of-towners. Here is some footage from the PMA, this bit featuring Steph Guilloud of Project South.

Stephanie Guilloud at PMA, 3/13/2010, Detroit from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.