propositions press... 2.0

summertime, the political reflections are easy

Since reporting on the Wisconsin Uprising as it happened in 2011, I often get asked by friends from other states about the situation here. Now filed away as one of the countless social movements that erupted and then dissipated, it is right that people wonder. Moreover, in viewing the national scene it is impossible to ignore the role of RNC chair Reince Priebus and the outsized prominence of House Speaker Paul Ryan. Whatever is the matter with Wisconsin, it has become the entire country’s problem.

The Wisconsin Question is founded. A lot is going in here, most of it either pretty bad or straight up horrendous. To put it most simply, the all-out assault on the public sphere signaled by the passage of Act 10 five years ago has gone to new levels of implementation and therefore new levels of destruction. Moreover, at this point we can with certainty expect the Republicans to introduce new and even harsher initiatives affecting education, business, infrastructure, and conservation.

The particular targets of GOP attack are many, including the University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin’s K-12 public schools, and the Government Accountability Board, the state’s long established neutral office of elections oversight. The state’s environmental protections have been rewritten or put under review, including those affecting water quality standards and regulation of CAFOs. Then there is the dismantling of Wisconsin’s state civil service examination and staffing process, along with the implementation of drug-testing of public assistance recipients, and various attacks on matters of reproductive freedom and gender equity.

The litany reviewed above is not an exhaustive account; what I write about here are only the most visible areas of the latest Republican offensive. Each of these assaults has sparked criticism and in some cases a backlash. Each deserves its own analysis and breaking down each front of struggle would require a whole book. Now I focus only on that nearest to me, the attack on the University of Wisconsin, as seen from campus and the city of Madison. Being a complicated collection of interests situated against a city in transition that happens also to be the state capital, the University situation makes for an excellent case study in layered politics and accompanying strategic misconnection.

The assault itself included at least four notable components. They can be grouped as pairs, two general assaults and two targeted attacks. The most concretely impactful of the general assaults is the massive budget cut advanced for the 2015-17 biennium, a draconian denial of public resources justified by a manufactured crisis. Originally proposed as a $300 million cut, Walker played himself off as a compromiser by dropping the figure to “only” $250 million, an 11 percent across the board reduction in state support. Felt by many if not all parts of the university (UW sports and the medical center might be separately managed, for example), the cuts bring austerity to a tangible level affecting thousands.

Also qualifying as an attack on the university as a whole, Walker attempted to rewrite the university’s mission statement. Barely caught by watchdog journalists, the revision would have dropped all reference to the Wisconsin Idea, a credo that constitutes the very heart of the UW’s guiding principle, and replaced it with boilerplate language about career preparedness. When called out on this stealth move—even the Republicans know such a revision would be highly unpopular among ordinary Wisconsinites—Walker backtracked and shrugged it off as a “drafting error,” an explanation recently confirmed as an outright lie by a court-ordered release of the governor’s emails.

Both of these attacks created political liabilities for the Republicans. They dropped the rewrite of the mission statement altogether. The budget passed, but the cut created plenty of bad feeling between the Republican-appointed members of the UW Board of Regents and the campus administrators who are trying to run their schools. Even a few Republican legislators expressed concerns for the effects on campuses in their districts. The lesson here is that broad attacks of the kind that affect a geographically distributed and cross-sectoral swath of the population entail high political risk. Even at the level of higher education—a magnet for Republican accusations of elitism—the University still benefits from the attachment and sense of ownership felt by average residents of the state. In both these cases, the Republicans pursued their agenda in ways that created weaknesses for themselves.

The targeted assaults, on the other hand, mostly strengthened their hand. One of these—a UW System wide tuition freeze slipped into the budget for the same biennium—was less of a frontal attack and more like a gambit, giving something in order to buy time, block an opponent’s move, or divide the opposition. Advertised as the governor’s college affordability plan, this was a straight pander to families of currently enrolled UW students. But imposed at the same time as the drastically reduced state funding, the tuition freeze handcuffs UW administrators from closing the budget chasm produced by the Republicans. The only conclusion is that the Republicans are deliberately choking the University of Wisconsin. And yet because of the short term benefit, the move effectively neutralizes the potential resistance of the students. Plus, nobody can directly advocate for tuition increases without being seen as insensitive to the already difficult debt burden faced by college students today. That some current student leaders have criticized the freeze is a testament to their awareness and foresight. But these have been individual voices expressing disapproval without the wave of a mobilized student constituency.

Finally and most controversially, Walker and the Republicans passed legislation weakening faculty tenure and increasing the power of campus administrators. A new System-wide tenure policy was adopted against prevailing faculty opinion, leaving individual campuses to bring their own rules into alignment with the new policy. Robin Vos and other GOP university-haters slammed faculty tenure as a jobs-for-life deal that the state simpy cannot afford. Walker made hay of unreasonably light faculty workloads and other bogus charges designed to paint faculty as elitist do-nothings. Administrators were again put in the middle. Some of them desire the flexibility to phase out specialized programs and academic departments that attract comparatively small numbers of students or that appear to be trending toward scholarly extinction. That means denying tenure lines and possibly terminating tenured positions. But the administrators are also responsible for maintaining an institution that attracts top research and teaching talent and the institution’s overall stature as encyclopaedic, and that means finding ways to support niche programs. In my opinion, it does mean working with a meaningful but modernized tenure system. Also, it must be said that the administrators, from the chancellors on down, have no job protections at all. This figures into their capacity to maneuver amidst the minefield of faculty discontent and state-imposed austerity.

The attack on tenure was their most masterful play. While provoking resistance expressed in the form of a System-wide wave of faculty senate no-confidence resolutions, the attack fanned the smoldering distrust between faculty and administration. Even more importantly, the move divided students from faculty in terms of respective prime concerns. The Republicans fractured what should be a campus unified as a single constituency. Now the students, faculty, and administration find themselves unable to act in concert. Compare this to the common outrage expressed regarding the attempted erasure of the Wisconsin Idea.

The lesson here is that not all political aggression is of equal value and effect. For the Republicans, launching attacks on targets concerning specific constituencies is better strategically than aiming for targets that provoke broad concern. These kinds of attacks effectively define any resistance as “special interest,” undeserving of broad support. The second pair of Republican attacks successfully foregrounded people’s political identities and priorities as students, as faculty, and as administration—unlike with the first pair, wherein the attacks offended the sense of universal Badgerdom shared by all three constituencies and millions of regular Wisconsinites besides, to the point of forcing the Republicans to back down on the rewriting of the UW mission.

The challenge for the opposition is to enhance identification with and as a broadly collective public while still defending against attacks that most directly affect only certain segments of that public. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is a slogan never more needed, and yet, compared to the heyday of the IWW, American society is vastly more complex in terms of the identity matrices in play. Our groupings, whether externally imposed or self-defined, seem to be unendingly divisible. Diversity has become the basic condition while unity is the elusive construction.

One matter of strategy seems to be clear: an enhanced collective identity will not happen without a rejuvenated vision of it. That is what the Wisconsin Idea was to begin with—a visionary articulation of social unity and mutual responsibility meant to guide the University and the state as they grew into a common future. While Walker’s attempted erasure of the Wisconsin Idea was a foolish miscalculation, the opposition has yet to exact maximum political cost. Perhaps for that to happen a new and expanded Wisconsin Idea needs to be advanced, and it has to come from those caught now in the special interest bind: UW faculty, students, and administrators: End the austerity and renew investment of public funds in public education; tenure for all, including adjunct faculty; free tuition for all Wisconsin students. Make Wisconsin smarter than business, smarter than markets, smarter than the University as it is.

an oasis unable to grow outside of itself

Historically, the labor and intellectual leadership in and around Madison has made an outsized impact on statewide progressive policy. The density of citizen engagement and public conversation has always been exceptional here. That has not changed. If anything, since the upsurge of 2011 the political climate in this city has settled into a permanent low boil. And yet the Walker regime has continued its systematic dismantling of Wisconsin’s once-vaunted public institutions, largely unimpeded despite the superficial vitality of Wisconsin’s progressive political culture. One could say then, that the rise of the right wing in Wisconsin is at the same time the story of the left’s failure, and particularly the failure of the left as can be observed in Madison. 

Two recent public exchanges had me grousing about left political culture, both having aired on Madison’s leftist media lifeline, WORT. The first happened on Allen Ruff’s radio show of May 21 (archived until July 20, 2015), between a caller and his guest for that day, Mary Bottari, of the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD provides detailed information about the conflicts of interest and corrupt ways that have become standard procedure under Republican governors across the country and glaringly under the Scott Walker regime, for example, as chronicled in the CMD investigative project ALECexposed. Ms Bottari is without a doubt one of the best informed watchdog journalists now working. True to her expertise, she rolled out one outrage after another, describing in detail the erosion of good government happening in nearly every direction.

But she herself—and by extension the entire leftist mentality of which she is a vehicle—was exposed by the program’s first caller (@22:30). To paraphrase, the caller professed frustration with all available activist responses thus far, ie marching in protest, helping with the recall election, supporting progressive candidates, educating oneself, etc. Then he added, to the right wing members of his family nothing that Bottari said makes a difference. For them Scott Walker can do no wrong—the charges of corruption, nepotism, plunder, and outright lying, whether true or false, are irrelevant. What matters to them is that Scott Walker stands in contrast and opposition to the “the people like us” they despise, which I took to mean, for one thing, the people who do care about GOP misdeeds. For the provincial, activist right, leftist loathing of Walker is in fact a mark of legitimacy. The caller then addressed a challenge to Bottari: “It’s time for the people who are providing the information to also provide some answers. What does your guest suggest that we should be doing?”

Bottari failed to answer the challenge; she did not even seem to take the caller’s perspective as a serious analysis. Her response was pure liberal boilerplate: let’s keep on witnessing, reporting, and educating—basically saying that is all we can do, that is the best we can do, that is the only thing we can do—as if she had not heard anything the caller had just said. Bottari probably declined to take up the question of cultural divides in her capacity as a CMD staffer for reasons of professionalism. But she at least should have validated the question. Instead of amplifying the caller’s challenge, Mr Ruff more or less let her off the hook, thereby contributing to the evasion. The caller was desperate for something besides more gory detail about how bad things are. The response was at best a missed opportunity and at worst an example of the complacency that runs on the smugness of the well-informed who value political knowledge over political achievement, or else confuse the former for the latter. If the left cannot let go of the presumption that self-evidence of information necessarily produces political achievement, the right will continue to steamroll all who stand in their way. To be perfectly fair, I for one did not expect Bottari to have “the answers.” She is no doubt flummoxed just like the rest of us. Nonetheless, instead of spending precious community airtime detailing the wreckage, the voices of the Wisconsin left need to be in constant strategy session mode, precisely because everything else, including the valorization of information and accuracy as stand-alone strategies, have thus far failed. It is important that figures like Bottari lead that conversation—to begin with, simply by acknowledging that political creativity and experimentation are what we need. 

The second complaint-worthy media moment took place on Carousel Bayrd’s May 26 edition of A Public Affair (archived until July 25, 2015). The guest was Harriet Brown, a writer who tackles the subject of female body image and the obsession with weight loss. She is a critic of “fat-shaming,” particularly as delivered by health care professionals, and she questions the received wisdom regarding the “obesity epidemic.” She claims to debunk causal associations between weight gain and a host of maladies, and aims to recontextualize the contemporary weight standard as a problem of obesity rhetoric and distorted science. As Ms Brown went on about how there is no evidence of BMI being linked to various illnesses, I had a couple of negative reactions. The first is that Ms Brown never acknowledged the cultural specificity of the thin body ideal, namely, that it is a racialized ideal. The vast majority of the collective “we” and “us” she repeatedly used in her declarations are, in fact, young white women of higher education and it is to that demographic that her critique pertains. I almost feel that this should not have to be said, because it has been noted in so many places, but Native, African American, and Latina women in general have very different beauty ideal hang ups—skin color, hair, voice, eyes, etc. Weight plays out very differently. While eating disorders affect people of all races and gender, analyzing weight loss in isolation from other body issues tends to erase women of color, for whom weight is but one body issue and often not the most important, and instead speaks primarily to the particular body image battles of young white women.

Further, because she universalizes freely, Ms Brown also glosses over what is an epidemic outside of the US. In fast developing societies such as China and Brazil, and where genetic predispositions are more common than in European bloodlines, the incidence of Type II diabetes is clearly on the upswing at alarming rates. One of her points is that there is no causal relationship between weight gain and diabetes. This may be true; whatever the weight, sugar is the known culprit. But nonetheless, in, say, persons of East Asian genetic make-up (like me!), the risk for adult onset diabetes rises sharply for people of Asian descent at a lower BMI than that corresponding to risk in caucasians. Whether weight gain by itself causes diabetes is not as important as it being clearly an indicator of risk; not unexpectedly, reducing weight reduces risk. Moreover, higher caloric intake is also known to be a contributing factor, irrespective of exact sugar consumption. These patterns are provable to the extent that at the level of populations, the trends can be predicted—societies that move to American standards of caloric intake can expect to see a rise in adult onset diabetes. Because that is what happens. To invalidate these realities is plain irresponsible. And I called into the show and said so (@46:30). My points weren’t taken well by either the guest or the host.

The bigger mistake, of which Brown’s arguments are only one example among many, is the tendency of ostensibly progressive social critics to accept the framing of myriad problems as individualized experiences. In this case, she identifies fat-shaming as a problem, ie the messaging that emanates from physicians and other health professionals, as well as social peers, directed at people considered overweight, often patients or people in otherwise vulnerable positions. The shaming implicitly or explicitly attaches a moral failure to a person’s inability to control weight. By this dynamic, fat people are assumed to be weak, unreliable, lazy, etc. Of course the moral angle is a fallacy. But Brown makes the wrong counterattack by accepting that weight control is a matter of individual management, and that the solution is to advocate for a no-standards ethic. Rather than dispensing with the shaming, she merely turns the tables; health care workers are the guilty ones—guilty of attaching health concerns to body weight, which in her world have no association. She fights finger-wagging with finger-wagging.

Besides some passing mention of media and advertising, Brown failed to address anything structural or economic, not even obvious widespread problems like junk food being sold in schools to offset decreased funding. Or the basic industrial reality of processed foods being manufactured for such a low shelf price as to render healthy fresh foods unaffordable by comparison. Or the general observation that there are whole economic sectors invested, directly or indirectly, in making and keeping people overweight. Instead, Brown’s blindspot opens her for uncritically legitimating the neoliberal solution to all social inequities: diversity and inclusion. By privileging the pain, triumph, and acceptance of the individual as the site of struggle, above collective, cultural, or structural fronts, Brown re-inscribes a genuinely resistant impulse with the instrumentalized flexibility demanded by global capital, ie a bundle of interests all-too pleased to redefine “fat” ever upwards.

 *

Even the dissection of leftist failure in Madison is a failure. It is like shooting hot air balloons but then not knowing where they land. There can be no follow-up and no debate because A) the unvarnished information, or B) the pain of the individual, is so compelling as to preclude any self-location of argument. The valorizations of these two factors are deep-rooted, tendencies that can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings, now two or three hundred years old, of rationalism and individual rights as the pathways to social order. A generation’s worth of collective effort built the alt-infrastructure from which Madison residents now benefit, including WORT itself. Such projects took a leap of imagination, of dreaming the possible, beginning with adopting priorities outside of those prescribed in the given pathways. At larger scale, the progressive social and environmental policies that originated in Madison and became models for the state and the country were founded on some germ of imagination. If only today's left could amplify that creativity, rather than retread the inherited frames.

ferguson to malcolm to madison

We took the intersection for twenty minutes, causing a stir. There, standing in the middle of the intersection of Doty Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, several hundred yards from where the regressive Scott Walker only minutes earlier took the oath for his second term as governor of Wisconsin, members of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition made their public vows as the leaders of a new movement.

The movement may be new, but some of the words used in this movement are old. Some feel like tributes. YGBC principal Brandi Grayson, a frequent chant and march leader, often finishes off a rousing passage with the full throat call ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!! At the few YGBC rallies I have attended the response often feels fresh and committed. But a couple of times it sounded less than total, including out of my own mouth. I suppose it is in the nature of the call and response to wear down as much as to build to crescendos. In the search for renewed political militancy, this is the paradox we inhabit—caught between hot, fresh emotion and exhausted gestures.

I can hear warm, not hot, enthusiasm in my fellow demonstrators’ voices. This makes sense, seeing as how we are charged with supplying the response in a performance of words that originated in a time meaningful but mythical to many of us—the 1960s—a time that continues to loom large in our common understanding of political possibility. This is not a terrible thing—YGBC rallies have produced many surprises, including on the day of the vows what seemed like a closely held plan to block the intersection. Given the unpredictability put into play, clear historical references may be useful as familiar anchors. As long as the #FergusontoMadison movement produces truly novel situations, immediate and repeated references to historical models might be helpful signposts as the movement carves out unknown political territory. Or they could serve to confuse us, mistaking the models from the past as perfect templates for the present. The choice of battle cry is a small but concrete example of the difficult challenge faced by YGBC and all the #BlackLivesMatter activists, ie how to claim a radical tradition, but also find ways to critically advance that tradition without repeating the mistakes of movements past. 

Seven YBGC principals took their oaths while holding books of power. One of the seven, M. Adams, carried a short stack featuring a copy of Manning Marable’s book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Coincidentally I had finished reading the book only about two weeks before. Before, I only knew of Malcolm's story through the Autobiography and a collection of his speeches. Marable's book makes for a timely revisitation, as Marable’s scholarship serves those who oscillate between fidelity to a bygone form of militancy and organizational strength, on the one hand, and on the other, new democratic tendencies that make space for contemporary voices that the older social movements never did. The YGBC core, strong in queer and female leadership, represents the shift in boldness of visibility, and therefore the paradox of today’s condition—we honor the radical past as a political statement but live in and help shape worlds unimaginable to the ancestors.

And yet some brutal realities have not changed.

As Marable tells the story, the event that first brought Malcolm to public attention (including, significantly, to the attention of the NYPD’s secret operations unit) happened in 1957. Malcolm put his stature on display when a crowd spontaneously assembled in response to a police beating of three Harlemites who had verbally intervened when they witnessed a young man being roughed up by NYPD officers. Two of the three men were members of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 (later renamed Mosque No. 7), where Malcolm had been minister for going on four years. One of them, Johnson Hinton, was beaten badly aross the face and shins and then dealt the further indignation of being jailed for resisting arrest. Malcolm calmed the vengeful mass, which had grown to an estimated two thousand and gathered in seething anger outside the police station. To the frightened amazement of police, Malcolm did what they could not—he sent the Fruit of Islam home with a wave of his hand and authoritatively dispersed the crowd. Later, when, in a #Ferguson moment, a grand jury failed to indict the officers responsible, Malcolm blasted the decision and his life as a public political voice began. 

*

Malcolm’s emerging politics generated friction in all directions—between him and the white establishment, between him and the largely southern Civil Rights leaders, and, fatefully, between him and Nation of Islam leadership. Elijah Muhammad lead the NOI on an apolitical path, basing its low level of engagement with current events on an ideology of separatism and self-reliance. But political differences are not what drove Muhammad to dismiss and eventually attempt to silence his top minister. Same with personal jealousies—they played a part but did not define the split. The split hinged on Malcolm’s knowledge of and negative response to Muhammad’s exploitative sexual adventures, which played out in the insular circle of his young female personal secretaries. In other words, for these men, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm, who perceived themselves as dealing with fates of entire peoples, destinies and histories writ large, the absolute and irreconcilable source of conflict seemed to come from the realm of intimate relationships and personal sexual behavior. Here again, contemporary relevance is not hard to spot.

It is tempting to take the story as simple confirmation of that adage by now worn thin, that the personal is political. Of course it is. But that is a starting point in an analysis, not a final conclusion. Also, there can be no way to adequately frame the misdeeds of the Messenger according to today’s points of reference, supplied as they are by a toothless left reduced to spending enormous energy parsing microaggressions and individual cases of sexual misconduct on elite college campuses while the business of brutal capital accumulation proceeds without obstacle on all fronts, churning up lives by the millions. Here is the value in Marable’s telling of the story, the lesson for today. He throws into high relief Elijah Muhammad’s sexism as more than a matter of interpersonal politics. Rather, it was a general political disaster. 

Muhammad and the NOI foregrounded black existence as the everyday contradiction, and claimed that it could be resolved only through adopting the Messenger’s teachings. That meant accepting a disciplined, absolutist structure and a readymade racial theology. Because of this very rigidity, the NOI found great success (as exemplified by Malcolm himself) in cultivating membership from among the current or ex-incarcerated, thereby introducing into the NOI a pronounced class element. The numbers of rank and file who came out of the urban street culture differentiated the NOI from the Christian middle class blacks who were the face of the Civil Rights movement. Malcolm’s work with the educated activists he attracted to his Organization of Afro American Unity and his late drift towards the MLK wing of black activism produced class tensions incommensurable with the dominant NOI culture. The same could be said of his revised racial analysis, based on the multi-racial realities he witnessed on his international travels. Thus, Malcolm’s evolution as a political thinker and organizer resulted in tension traveling in multiple directions. A scandal falling within the zone of any of them might have grown into a general crisis, unraveling relationships along all lines of fissure.

That event happened to explode within a set of relationships in which power was distributed according to gender, as it happens in an autocratic context by which the women of the NOI were made clearly subservient to the men. Beyond the extremism of Muhammad’s own behavior towards women, this framework for managing gender roles and divisions of labor brought the unpleasantries of contradiction to the intimate sphere, including in Malcolm’s fraught and unsatisfying connection with his wife, Betty (one of many controversial aspects brought to light in the book—watch this video for short but intense debate that touches on Marable’s treatment of their private life). But it is important for us to recall that the women who bore the Messenger’s children, and who had their lives strictly and cruelly constrained afterward, but who chose to never describe their experiences to people outside the NOI, did not use the terms made familiar by second wave feminism, “the personal is political.” In relation to the discourse of second wave feminism, the women of the NOI lived apart in time, place, and sociopolitical context.

Marable certainly makes it clear that Malcolm’s great blind spot was his inability to form a political analysis through the lens of gender. Nevertheless, Marable’s complete tale makes me believe that the oppressive gender dynamics at the top of the organization caused a split because Muhammad’s serial transgressions could not be kept separate from the other tensions then also eroding unity and trust. Rather than reducing Muhammad’s infidelities to a matter of interpersonal politics, I believe it is more useful to think of Malcolm as having to navigate a layered matrix of contradictions in which alternately a race, a class, or a gender fissure might take center stage as the focal point of a crisis—all while the other fissures remain in play and can never be excluded. Seen in this way, the legacy of Malcolm even fifty years after his assassination provides us with a new starting point. Far from being an end, diversity is the problem with which movement partisans always begin—and not a diversity simply of static social identities but rather of constantly shifting and differently weighted antagonisms.

*

An oath taken today on Marable’s book says this: We who were once invisible even to our own esteemed leaders, who have suffered exploitations seen and unseen through generations, are, as the ultimate survivors, central to the struggles ahead. No more blind spots, no more excuses. 

Having to negotiate between a powerful historical example and their own lived experiences—absorbing The Then but finding ways to act effectively in The Now—is undoubtedly a tall order. When social movements really succeed and change a society, one consequence is that later generations have to contend with the received history. Fixing histories in Hollywood movies, stone monuments, and passive holiday observances does the opposite, it severs the past from the present. Casting contemporary problems as unfinished movement business is a way to connect the achievements of the ancestors to the challenges of our time. The YGBC-led activism in Madison is more than an inspiring local manifestation of the post-Ferguson movement for racial justice. With demonstrated commitment, a strategy of issuing radical (and radically realistic) demands, and an evident openness to tactical creativity, this movement has the potential to play out as the best case scenario, whereby a fresh culture of political engagement reinvests the retro-saturated cry ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! with a multi-dimensional analysis and intersectional agenda.

Finally, in addition to quoting from the past, and perhaps as an antidote to the pitfalls of scripted nostalgia, the other stand-by call and response chant at YGBC events leads from the present moment in the other direction, towards the future, in words and feeling. It is a chant that lays claim to future victory—something that will happen—in a contemporary cadence equally suited to the sporting spectacles out of which it was born and those celebratory moments in this new struggle, when we look around the occupied intersection, at each other, amazed to see that we really are the leaders we have been waiting for.

 IIIII…

            (crowd: IIIII…)

Be-lieeeeve…

            (Be-lieeeeve…)

That weeeee…

            (That weeeee…)

Will win!

            (Will win!!!)

 

(together, fast!)

I believe

that we will win!

 

            I believe

            that we will win!

 

                        I believe

                        that we will win!!!

oily fargo report: where are you now?

I arrived at night and this was the first thing I saw.

The trains come rolling through Fargo headed east or west, blocking cross traffic at least once or twice every hour, around the clock. These are diesel locomotives pulling and pushing forty, fifty, seventy, ninety or more units, many of them US DOT-111 tank cars. Sometimes all of them, a mile long. With the imposing spatial occupation and muscular screech of up close movement by rail, the frequent trains bring into unusually clear view mechanical power activated by frenzied capital, announced in advance by the warning bells of crossing gates being lowered yet again. Being around this for a few days gave me a feeling similar to when I saw firsthand the forest of horizontal cranes lifting up the skyline of Shanghai around 2001, a sight that delivered a comparable mixture of awe and triteness. It is the kind of feeling that exists when a boom is routinized almost overnight.

The eastbound tank cars are presumably full. How frequently they will run in the winter is a question and given the unprecendented circumstances of this expansion I am not sure anyone knows how a Dakota winter may limit the continued growth of this traffic. Maybe there is a lot of Canadian experience in this department, but there is an energy boom up in Alberta, as well. It is likely that limits are being pushed everywhere. Now having seen the city of Fargo what are more worrisome are the inevitable floods. Since the 1997 flood—the first of what are now counted as two “hundred-year floods” from the last seventeen years—the north flowing Red River has flooded Fargo at least five times. Standing on the western banks of the river, seeing the Minnesota side nearly within a stone’s throw (close enough to feel some Minnesota envy—more on that later), it is not difficult to picture the narrow course being overrun by heavy rains and snowmelt. Judging from recent climate history, we are about to find out what happens when markets dictate that the trains run through conditions made dangerous by natural disaster. 

Providing an excuse to enlarge our own carbon footprints, the Central Time Centric symposium at the Plains Art Museum assembled visitors from around the Midwest to enjoy several days in Fargo, I among them. I am not sure how many of us there were exactly. The room averged probably forty bodies but many people attended unevenly over the four days. The roster included nearly thirty participants, mostly from out of town. The symposium subtitle was Art + Social Practice in the Midwest, but it could have been called This Is What a Boom Looks Like. Or, more accurately in regards to the Bakken “play,” as the oil men call it, this is what the effects of a boom look like in a town 425 miles away from its epicenter. 

Our slice of Fargo was a blissfully upbeat section of downtown, running west from the Radisson (where the museum put us up in business chain comfort) about five blocks to the Plains Art Museum and, a block or two beyond that, the Sons of Norway lodge, where we partied in the Troll Lounge until they kicked us out (in the friendliest way possible). In between is the Broadway dining, drinking, and entertainment district, complete with classic movie house marquee, quality coffeehouses, artisanal snack and sandwich shops, and Empire Tavern, a dive that a group of us closed on our last night in town. Just to keep things from getting too crazy, a federal courthouse sits just across from the museum.     

This lively part of town which attracts people morning, noon, and night is bounded on the north and on the south by railroad tracks only six blocks apart. To move out of this compact and walkable part of town—for example to drive from the museum to I-94 or merely to stroll from the hotel to the river front park—one must cross the rail paths with the traffic described above. With a large student population from the three campuses of the Fargo-Moorhead area, downtown draws a party—that is what we witnessed (and contributed to) at 2 AM on Sunday morning. Crowds of drunk people stumbling into the late summer night, taking in food from the closing time vendors, being loud, and, well, drunk. You can see where I am going with this. Accidental rail deaths will happen. Or if they already are happening, then they are bound to become more frequent, what with the growth in both the train traffic and the human traffic—much of North Dakota is gaining in population, especially Fargo, where the mean age of residents is only 31, according to Mike Allmendinger (of the Kilbourne Group, who gave symposium goers an informative booster’s presentation of Fargo urban development).

Catastrophic scenarios are as easily envisioned, helped along by a growing visual record of recent oil train disasters. Put simply, massive explosions and/or spills are inevitable because enormous quantities of a highly volatile (nearly twice as combustible as the oil that comes out of Iraq), highly toxic substance are being transported overland thousands of miles basically around the clock. So-called energy independence is really a form of enslavement to a risk society, and until we move away from a hydrocarbon economy definitively, that risk inches toward a certainty. Beautiful, vibrant Fargo sits literally in disaster’s path.

* 

At times CTC reached the open horizons of socializing and informal debate befitting the freewheeling affair that the symposium was in antiquity. But mostly I and the other participants spent our day time hours in a space ordered by rows of chairs facing a stage with four or three panelists each taking to the lectern, in scheduled “roundtables” that were in fact panels. The flaw was the lack of direction given to the presenters in advance. Instead of channeling the presenters toward developing arguments or offering ideas that are new to themselves, the organizers and roundtable moderators mostly left presenters to their own default modes. For most artists this means doing the easiest thing. So instead of a roundtable in which four different people would offer, say, four different arguments about “enduring engagement” or “the rural-urban continuum” (those being some of the roundtable topics) followed by rapid fire McLaughlin-style discussion, what we got was the procession of artists presenting samples of their work via a slide show. Five minutes was the amount of time we were asked to use. Without disciplined time keeping nearly everyone went substantially over, leaving too little room for the discussion and audience questions that followed.

Here it makes sense to compare the CTC form to what happens at the Creative Time Summit, an event that was raised repeatedly as a point of reference. Probably half the Summit presenters make use of their eight minutes as openings for an original statement, a short essay, or a concise argument; Laurie Jo Reynolds set the standard. Others rely on the tried and done, walking an audience through a portfolio. Even there they can get away with it because Creative Time does not put them into the uber-deadening format of a panel. The difference between the two approaches is obvious, and I can say from my experience as a Summit presenter that CT organizers do work with the speakers to get their thoughts rolling in the direction of delivering a TED experience rather than a portfolio slide lecture. Having individual conferences with each presenter in advance is a ton of work, but I think only the curator can play that role. Else really have the roundtable discussions be that—discussions with strong moderators, quick responses, and putting people on the spot such that differences get aired.

I would love to see CTC become an annual or bi-annual event. Regular regional gatherings could be used not only for the basics of learning what regional neighbors are doing, but to practically cultivate regional coordination on the issues that concern political artists. Facilitating the flow and temporary concentration of political cultural workers would mirror the interstate flows of capital and thus enable artists to inhabit the spatial overlap of their concerns. But regular gatherings would need to be occasions for work to get done rather than for showing one’s work. Let’s get rid of the showcase mentality and instead think or dream about some outcomes. Some handful of the same visitors could be invited from one year to the next, or every few years, so as to continue conversations over time with a changing cast of voices that also has some continuity. Colleen Sheehy and the Plains Art Museum staff demonstrated that they have the wherewithal to make a sizable gathering run without any organizational hiccups; early September is a great time of year to be in that part of the country—in the age of permanently exuberant capital, such affective concerns are not to be minimized. CTC organizers and we who feel some investment in the event as a potentially ongoing concern, should think about how to take it to the next level of seriousness. That begins with breaking down what happened.

*

As far as the somewhat dramatic closing discussion, Shanai Matteson and Julia Cole have already posted thoughts in which they allude to that and other episodes. I am not in whole agreement with their perspectives, but neither do I feel a need to rehash details. To me the key is how that episode will be interpreted. If people take it all at face value, and reduce the ideas and feelings that were expressed as belonging only to the names in the room, then the larger picture will have been missed. I will say here what I said then: what matters is not who got angry, who got hurt, or who made a mistake. What matters is that the conditions under which we had been brought together made such an episode not only possible, but likely. And in that respect, it had little to do with the personalities involved. CTC, as it was, could have featured an entirely different cast of participants but end up stumbling to the same tensions. Because the structure of the event would have remained the same, and the structural conditions under which we all work would have been the same, the tensions would have been the same. Addressing the structure means having to formulate a political analysis because structures are determined by what is politically possible. Changing a structure means having to act politically.  

Effective political action is always a collective endeavor, beginning with the constitution of the collectivity. Therefore one political analysis of CTC starts with unpacking the royal we, a collective pronoun applied too easily when people gather under the presumption of a vaguely defined shared something (in this case, that something being, according to the event title, “social practice”) rather than for a specified issue, topic, or cause. In such circumstances the pronoun we means something a little different for probably everyone. Who belongs to what groups? And how might a new group identification be constructed, and for what purpose? 

Apart from the categories of race, gender, class, and age which everybody brings to every situation as a baseline set of identifications, the CTC assemblage as a whole was most readily, but not necessarily simply, broken down by place of residence. True to the event’s subtitle “Social Practice in the Midwest,” I believe that all save for keynote speaker Rick Lowe could be meaningfully described as hailing from around the Midwest (and maybe him, too—he didn’t stay long enough for me to find out). The largest group must have been the Fargo-Moorhead crowd, though I did not bother counting. A close second would be the current and former Twin Cities residents. Of those I counted thirteen current and at least four former. After that there was the Chicago-centric cluster of six or seven, and then three or four from Saint Louis. There was at least one each from Kansas City, Iowa City, Omaha, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee. Nearly all were currently based in cities. Though some participants might have been born or raised in rural areas, Jay Salinas from Reedsburg, Wisconsin, might have been the only current rural resident in attendance (and he admitted to having a Chicago past).

Then there was the overlap and exchange between circles, making clear that where one is “from” is a changing and cumulative set of identifications. For example, Scott Stulen, who traveled from Indianapolis to Fargo, had just relocated to Indy from Minneapolis in the last year or so. Colleen Sheehy herself splits time between Fargo and Minneapolis. I can only describe the Chicago-centric grouping as such because these are people who learned of each other through networks centered in Chicago; at least that is how I got to know them all. But most at CTC whom I put into the Chicago-centric category now live in other cities (Nicolas Lampert in Milwaukee, Daniel Tucker in Philadelphia, Sam Gould in Minneapolis, myself in Madison).

The geographical groupings allowed for a productive way to think through the conference dynamics. The contentious moments mostly centered around criticisms of irresponsible or exploitative practices by white artists in relation to communities of color and/or low income people, a criticism wearily launched by some of the people of color in attendance. The problem of privileged artists rewarded for working in or with a community branded as disadvantaged happens in a lot of different places and entails a set of ethical questions that all artists working in conjuction with public participation must consider. But patterns manifest differently depending on local conditions, especially as pertains to funding structures and the economics of public art, which changes the problems facing both artists and the communities they work in.

Location-specific contexts became evident in these conversations, but only indirectly. Reading between the lines of the live-action cataloguing of projects (which is essentially what the panels were), over the course of three days I perceived a divide between those working in the Minneapolis context and everyone else. A contrasting context was provided by the Chicago-centric cluster, mainly because that was the only geographical grouping also large enough to color the conversations from a common experience of place. Notice that I am not speaking of site specificity. What I sensed was something more like localism or membership in “scenes,”—contexts defined by urban centers, and therefore shared by all the people in that place, even for individuals occupying differing positions of status or social location.

One example of this happened during the Rural-Urban Continuum roundtable. The discussants had just finished their introductions. Much of the work had in common the pattern of artists working on “service” or participation projects in neighborhoods or communities in which they themselves do not reside and therefore do not belong. In response Chaun Webster of North Minneapolis argued that communities—particularly black communities—perceived as marginal from the vantage point of those inhabiting the position of a privileged cosmopolitan white artist are in fact often significantly self-sufficient, and in possession of substantive forms of creativity long predating the arrival of those artists. His further criticism was that many of these artists—perhaps including by implication the artists sitting on the all-white, all-male panel—get rewarded for their interaction with these communities while the community members themselves are recognized as nothing but passive dependents, thereby cloaking a contemporary white man’s burden mentality in a new social practice guise.  

Then, on a panel the next day Webster himself complained about “million dollar” grants being awarded to arts non-profits that have only recently discovered the North Minneapolis communities that have existed for decades beyond the sightlines of arts funding. I cannot confirm the veracity behind the discontent (and I might be remembering the remark wrong), but the mere mention of a million-dollar grant made it obvious that the Minneapolis/Minnesota context is not the Milwaukee/Wisconsin context, not the Madison context, and certainly not the Chicago context. The meaningful difference has to do with not only the relative wealth of arts funding in Minneapolis but also the values advanced by that funding. Taking Webster’s criticism as a guidepost, some of the arts funding bodies of Minneapolis reward artists who do exactly what he complained about, and, according to some of the Minneapolitans I spoke to, have begun to fund such work through formalized categories using descriptors such as “community engagement,” “public participation,” “place-making,” and “social practice.”   

I do not have firsthand knowledge of these trends in Minneapolis and anybody who does is welcome to fill in the details. What I do know is that back when I lived in Minneapolis (it was nearly twenty-five years ago; I counted as one of the former Minneapolitans in attendance) the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship award was $30k. When I moved to Chicago the better part of a decade later the Driehaus Foundation artist award, the preeminent unrestricted individual artist award in a much larger city, amounted to only $10k. And then the program was ended altogether, by which time the Bush fellowship was up to $60k (and now stands at $100k). Though open to artists from the Dakotas, the vast majority of Bush fellows are Minnesotans. I mentioned Minnesota envy. That is what we experience in Wisconsin, where there is no equivalent foundation support and governor Scott Walker downgraded public support for arts and culture by putting the Wisconsin Arts Board, formerly a stand alone agency, under the administrative control of the Wisconsin Department of Tourism. In that reorganization the individual artist fellowship program was suspended indefinitely.

It may be perverse to admit this, but my envy was relieved somewhat by the exchanges I witnessed in Fargo. With some carrots an order of magnitude larger than what are available elsewhere around the Midwest, the allocation of such wealth produces prejudices that necessarily frame the work. Criticisms such as Webster’s may have purchase in Chicago, Milwaukee, or even Madison, which most certainly suffers from a similar tendency toward liberal paternalism in relation to communities of color. But let’s face it, the buying power hardly compares and therefore the calculus of privilege is somewhat different.

 As for the contextual foil, Rural-Urban Continuum panelist Nicolas Lampert exemplified the mentality often found in Chicago-centric art workers, including those present. Unlike some of the participants made defensive by Webster’s fault-finding, Lampert answered the criticism by matter-of-factly stating that in Milwaukee all public art strategies, all political activism, and practically all social interactions are defined by factors of race, that the color line is a colonial reality in Milwaukee that nobody can deny. This was a response as a post-facto pre-emption, admitting to the charges with a sort of “Yes. And….?” In this way it was typical of a critical art ethos cultivated under the ruthless conditions of neoliberal Chicago, one that takes imperialism as an extant project and common enemy. Closer to the ground, Jim Duignan, principal organizer of the Stockyard Institute, stood as proof that the white male position in the Chicago context is embedded in a layered history of relative privilege that in his case can only be unpacked and reconfigured by doing the exact opposite of what Webster’s criticism might suggest—ie by intimately attaching Duignan’s own practice and personal relationships to the lives of the youth color who are being raised on the same Chicago streets he ran a generation earlier, rather than distancing his work from those communities. On the whole, it seems to me that compared to the Minneapolis context, socially and politically engaged artists face a kind of desperation and lack of support in Chicago that by necessity force an erosion of expected social barriers, at least in the best examples of creative response. (Elsewhere I’ve noted that conditions for political artists in Chicago are also at a crossroads, largely due to the capitalization of social practice happening there, too, mostly under the auspices of academe.)

I am not arguing for a reduction of public and massive foundation support at all; the civilized treatment of arts and culture in Minnesota is in so many ways laudable and right-minded. But the way the support is doled out and framed tends to circumscribe the focus and nature of discontent—precisely as it is designed to do, if you ask radical artists who work in European social democracies. This makes it all the more important for conferences to shift focus to problems of structure rather than content or individually authored projects. As far as who gets to do the speaking, who gets the featured slots at events like Central Time Centric, who gets the external recognition—this is a larger problem against which gatherings such CTC also ought to be working. Lesser known folks must be included, and that means cultivating them when they cannot be found. It is more labor, surely, and a longer term commitment for the organizers, but in the end for the remaking of structures that support careers more than social movements, this must be the direction. Otherwise, CTC will only be noted as lines on resumes—expressions of individual ambition—as opposed to the collective ambition of making a new social history.

*

To sum it up: let’s do this again, but next time let’s focus on where people live and work, so as to hammer out theories of shared experience and common conditions—so needed by people working around the Midwest as the conference organizers undoubtedly know. The social then becomes the ground on which the individually authored projects stand. Let’s counter the tendency to foreground the artist’s work, which leads instead to the false idea of an authored sociality rather than the fact of shared conditions.

Two short notes to end this long (but still incomplete) report. First is, no matter all of the above, some projects still stand out. For me on this trip, it was the Plants for Patients project coordinated by artist and fabulous reproductive freedom activist Meg Roberts. Working within the context of abortion provision in ultra-conservative North Dakota, Roberts has designed a simple and sensitive work-around to the problem of dehumanization in the polarized contest around abortion access. Check it out.

And, finally, on our way out of town, anxious to get back to our families after four days away, Sam Gould and I got caught by—what else?—a train of loaded tank cars. Or rather, two of them. Perfect.

 

 

Bakken Oil Transport, Fargo from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.

 

 

rest in power and for the rest of us

General Baker, Ernesto Laclau, Maya Angelou. Sam Greenlee. Lately Yuri Kochiyama and most recently Ruby Dee. The ranks of the movement ancestors grow by the week. As I write, I wonder who of the radical generation’s s/heroes will make for an earthly exit next?

As we accelerate into a remaining decade’s worth of fiftieth anniversary observances, those faces of the Sixties who have managed to survive into elderhood will pass with regularity from here on out. That is what it felt like when the world rolled through all the WWII 50th anniversaries. The commemorations were also an extended elegy to the passing of a generation.

As for the rest of us, we really are the ones we have been waiting for, simply because we are the ones who remain. So it  is, the surprising turn of time, for generations ascending a new position vacated from above and pushed into from below. 

In my boxes of old letters I found a nearly twenty year-old note from by Yuri Kochiyama concerning the wrongfully convicted worker David Wong. The letter gives a feel for what an experienced and enthusiastic organizer Yuri was, reaching out to people one by one. Shortly after receiving this I learned of Yuri's long history and of her association with Malcolm X. The postscript is pretty funny. The scribbles at the bottom are from when I grabbed a pen and tested its flow on the nearest paper, probably to take a message while on the phone. It is a habit.

She included with the letter blank petition sheets and leaflets for events. One event was titled The David Wong Case: a forum on the history and political issues held at Art In General. Another leaflet carries an excellent summation of the case on one side and on the other a notice for a "luncheon" event at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

*

Being what is conveniently called a Gen X-er, my political education leaned heavily on the half generation ahead of me, those of Baby Boomer age. As they finished with their formal, political, and cultural educations and the Seventies wore on, young people joined the general workforce, many of them as educators. Education underwent a mutually tempering dynamic. The idealism of new teachers whose values were forged in the struggles and social shifts of their youth met with the rigidity and structural dysfunction of the institution. If cynicism crept ever more surely into the attitudes of the teachers who had entered the job with invincible belief, the distortion went both ways. The institution was softened, classroom by classroom. People of my age benefitted. In our childhoods we had adult role models who were halfway closer to me in age than were my parents. Going into my teens I related to them like older cousins or young aunts and uncles. They spoke a culturally familiar language but came of age before my consciousness arose. They owned a counterculture by producing it, whereas I came to claim it by studying it. 

What Boomers and Gen X-ers have in common is the homogeneity of generational experience. Millenials, by contrast, can be broken down into a plethora of sub-groupings, subcultures, extremes of privileged or disadvantaged experience, and even different generational lineage—in the Millenial generation there are quite commonly persons of the same age for whom one set of parents are Boomers, another Gen X-ers, and another early Millenials, kids having kids. All social spectra are wider, the menu of consumable culture is as vast and as flat as the culture-scape of YouTube, the matrices of identity are endlessly fluid, and the scale of the world’s problems are unprecedented. As the last of the Civil Rights s/heroes fade—perhaps the final generational upholders of an old-skool reverential dignity, so foreign to most who were raised in the age of irony—I wonder about taking a seat as an elder in the future in relation to the youth of today, for whom a generational identity may no longer make sense.

I see comrades a generational rung above me move into their top steps and I feel my childhood finally slipping away. This is the pre-death, the warm-up for the final act in the mortality plays we are all fated to perform. 

*

Of the recently departed radicals, the closest to me was my artist hang-out pal David McLimans. He was an illustrator living in Madison with a talent for making political commentary come to graphic life. He lived the narrative of his time—he went from an outstate Wisconsin youth to a go in the military in the Vietnam era. Incapable of getting with the imperial mission, Dave went disciplinarily limp, passively forcing the Navy to discharge him. From there it was back to the land, settling a corner of the Driftless Area with a group of lifelong partners in idealism who have hearts for the non-human world. By the time I met him, Dave had been making it as an independent artist for many years. Though less well-known than the folks listed above, nonetheless Dave probably reached considerably more people through his prolific graphic contributions to national op-ed pages and magazines, and through his acclaimed environmentally-themed children’s books. 

I came to know Dave in the last four years, spending frequent Thursday nights in the company of an artist brotherhood simply referred to as The Lodge, of which Dave was a beloved member. Lodge discussions usually hover around current events, political rants, and field reports so I only saw Dave’s work on the occasional non-Lodge visit. Usually I would interrupt him working at his desk in the front room of his International Style house. He would talk me through the various in-progress designs of cut paper and maybe complain about feeling rusty in the hand after weeks of screen time. Having to shake off the stiffness is something I can relate to, but even at my most dexterous I have never had the evident hand skills that he did. He was truly gifted.

Part of living means moving ever closer to death. For artists, builders, and other people who make things, one’s creations usually outlive the maker. Inanimate objects and material artifacts last many times the length of a human life. Artists live in a kind of dual space-time, being trapped in our perishable bodies but putting our life energies into the careful creation of things that will be around long after. Dave seemed to stretch in both directions of this paradox, thinking through in his creativity the ephemeral and the permanent. He produced hundreds of images for the fleeting attentions of the daily newspaper reader. But he also assembled dozens of sculptures out of found materials resistant to disintegration—bits of detritus with no meaning other than as eternal trash, to which he granted renewed life as art, decoration, and ritual object. Dave, gone before he could fully inhabit his elderhood, created art for a globe that unceasingly spins a new day somewhere at every instant, as well as for the world to be, when humans stop counting days.

* 

These scans are of Dave’s spreads included in the book Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers. 

 

 

 

a late arriving intolerance for 'zero tolerance'

So there is new outrage circulating about the Madison Metropolitan School District’s (MMSD) so-called zero tolerance policy. The story is getting coverage in both the Isthmus and Cap Times.

The basic narrative goes like this. A 14 year-old girl, a ninth grader, was caught bringing whiskey disguised in water bottles on a school trip, one bottle for her and one for another student. The violation of policy was defined as a “Level IV” infraction, whatever that is supposed to mean. The corresponding consequence is an expulsion for the rest of this year and, if conditions are not met, all of the student’s sophomore year, as well. I emphasize the conditions because the news stories are headlining the penalty as a three-semester expulsion and downplaying the conditional re-entry, which would happen over the summer, resulting in an expulsion lasting the rest of this school year only. 

Let me be clear about a few things. One, I believe true zero tolerance policies in schools are a terrible thing, which ought to be reevaluated and probably junked, along with the punitive culture we have allowed to become the framework for all discipline and corrections (ie laws requiring mandatory minimum prison sentences and such). There is no place in MMSD for an approach modeled on any such philosophy, nor in any corrections or justice system. 

Two, I am friendly with the attorney for the family of the girl, Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, and can testify to his good character. If I needed legal representation or counsel, especially in relation to the City, MMSD, or on a civil rights issue, he would be on my short list of options. So my reading of this whole situation ought not be taken as any kind of personal attack on either Jeff or the family he is serving.

But I wish to enlarge the scale of the conversation, to situate this one story in the context of what has been a city-wide conversation about racial disparities in Madison, particularly as it plays out in MMSD. The public conversation about race (a cyclical phenomenon, some jaded longtime Madisonians tell me) was jump started back in the fall with the release of the Race to Equity report, a document that basically confirms in an avalanche of compiled data all the worst observations one could make about the radically divergent experiences in Dane County of African American people compared to white people.

The academic achievement gap, predictably, shows up as extremely unfavorable to African American students in MMSD. Linked to the academic underperformance is the distressingly high rate of African American students on the receiving end of the MMSD disciplinary process, including in suspensions and expulsions—a trend that has been informally noted for a very long time.

So my problem with this episode receiving all this attention (and even as I write this a social media advocacy movement demanding lenient treatment of the girl) is this: why is all this outrage and motivation to speak out against the policy happening only now? One simple reason, glibly stated and needing to be unpacked for sure, is that the girl and the family caught up in the harshness of the policy are white. So, to unpack: it is not merely or solely a function of skin color, of course. In Madison (more so than in many places, per the Race to Equity report) white is short for a social status benefiting from multiple factors of privilege: possessing the status of the well-educated, having financial resources, residing in comparatively safe neighborhoods, having access to all kinds of informal but very real support (for example, belonging to social media circles inclusive of various influential voices), having an assumed benefit of the doubt granted on the part of authorities, and so forth. In this case, none of those privileges were given much weight when the punishment was determined. To me and my possibly over-sensitive critical instincts, the current and proper outrage directed at the policy is mixed in with an indignation of the truly entitled: No, this policy cannot apply to MY daughter! She is an honor student! (As every report seems to point out.)

In short, few of these outraged parents gave the policy a thought until a white middle class student suffered its consequences. This in itself is a problem. 

What bothers me most is this: that the policy was allowed to be adopted and implemented, systematically used by MMSD to discipline students, probably on a daily basis somewhere across the district, but only generated outrage among white parents now—because, in fact, until a first-time rule-breaking ninth-grade white girl got the hammer, that very policy had been serving those same parents by ostensibly protecting the children of those parents from the aggressions, disruptions, and dysfunctions of the black children! Now, here it is, the perfect example to me of that term du jour, white privilege (or should I say, “of the week,” since Madison just happens to be the host site for this year’s White Privilege Conference, being held this very weekend). Meaning, if one is white, the policy serves as I described above, but without requiring any active involvement. Nobody has to raise a hand and say, Yes, protect my kid! Parents of white students could be entirely passive or even skeptical of the policy in the abstract, and still have the effect of the policy be as I described—a mechanism to rid the schools of trouble-making, threatening, out of control students, who, oh, by the way, just happen to be mostly black.

Please consider how the racial politics might be playing out. Knowing that Superintendent Cheatham is very sensitive to achievement gap issues, and in fact has made that problem one of her priority areas, including in the area of disciplinary policy, I think it is entirely possible that she or other MMSD leaders are feeling the pressure to apply disciplinary policies in conspicuously non-discriminatory ways. To avoid the appearance of favoring a class-privileged white student, they may be choosing to go by the policy’s letter instead of the spirit. Which, of course, is no way to correct a disparity. But it would be evidence of the larger context of which I speak.

Also, please consider the benefit of the doubt angle. A black kid caught with enough whiskey for a shared seat party in the back of the bus on a school trip in the ninth grade would likely not only have received the same or worse punishment, but her parents would have been instantly discredited as decent, competent parents. As opposed to this case, in which the parents have all the resources (and again, entitlement) to go on the offensive, effectively shutting down any discussion of why and how a ninth grader would have free and unsupervised access to hard liquor in their home (and the typical follow-ups: does this happen all the time in their home? are they drinking in front of her? do they have drug and alcohol problems?) The stupidity of youth or the oversights of parenting may very well be judged by double standards corresponding to two different social realities—I honestly don’t have a problem with that—but let us at least be honest about it by saying openly that the parents of this girl are reaping the advantages of their social position compared to many others who have none of those things.

So to all the white parents on Facebook getting pissed off about this injustice for the first time (including a number of my personal friends and neighbors), I encourage you to take this event as an occasion to demand an overhaul of the policy, yes, but with an attention to the social costs long borne by those living in our city who have far fewer resources to negotiate draconian penalties that in some and maybe even many cases were levied in equally unreasonable fashion. And please be prepared to accept a profound responsibility for creative disciplinary solutions that will truly benefit all students, instead of continuing the complacency that effectively results in the reinforcement of the worst racial disparities in the nation—a complacency that only ends when it is one of yours that gets the rap.

companies and towns

“The company town, that is the next logical step.”

Said an old friend of mine in between chomps of his mixed seafood salad—bosses’ fare for a man expressing discontent from the point of view of labor. Such is life in the Political Age of the 99%. Even the well-fed are fed up. We were sitting at the counter of the Tadich Grill early on a Friday night in early June, in San Francisco’s financial district. This was a treat for me—the food, the city, and now getting to hear a first hand report from a pal who works deep within a major tech player. For him the treat was for the first time in months leaving work for a dinner engagement before eight o’clock. He had bolted the office at five o’clock not just to work around my evening departure flight, but because he had already resigned himself to going in the next day, Saturday, and most likely some on Sunday for good measure.

When I asked if he was always that swamped with work, he basically offered that he was swamped with evaluations. No annual performance evaluations in fast-moving Silicon Valley—no, those old-fashioned ways are for east coast brokerage firms and midwestern insurance companies. In an application of many a start-up guru’s wisdom, this internet behemoth (long beyond its legendary start-up days) subjected its many hundreds of heavy-lifting engineers to the pressure of the quarterly evaluation. At his salary level and with his skills, my friend learned to be paranoid constantly, to assume that any negatives on an evaluation would open the door for a younger, cheaper, and more recently graduated worker to be brought in. He’d been there for three years and it is time to move up or move on, else face stagnation, which in his field means a sour fate indeed: contract work for life.

What about the work itself? To see your brainpower and problem-solving going into web architecture relied on by hundreds of thousands people all around the world, that must be satisfying, no? No. First of all, his team’s assignments come down from above, which means that his input on the strategic level is very limited. When the assignments come, they come with pressure—everything needs to be done yesterday. But the assignments are cancelled and completely reformulated with equally short notice. Imagine sprinting for a finish line as hard as you can in one direction, all the while knowing that the race may be halted at any time, and that the whole team will be redirected toward a completely different finish line and expected to sprint toward it with no break. Second, this breakneck pace and unceasing work, backed by the pressure of quarterly reviews in which upper management grades on a curve, ie no matter one’s empirical performance, half the team is reviewed negatively—what is it all for? For this particular web-empire’s sports news portal. Can you say, Who the fuck cares?

Before he goes into his serious venting, my pal hands me a selection of varietal chocolates courtesy of the company. This is his summary of the conditions there—a beautiful campus, free high-quality, mostly organic breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free big-name weekly entertainment (bands, authors, up-close celebrity appearances), yoga and premium workout facilities, and little treats thrown at them all the time, like these chocolates, which ironically advertise themselves as being free of slave labor. Why even go home when the goodies are at work? Oh, to sleep, change clothes, and check the junk mail. Sleeping pods are the next amenity, if the Valley ever runs out of single twenty-somethings with CS degrees who don’t mind pulling all-nighters. My friend is wrong. It’s not the company town, it’s the company life.

*

“You see, Madison is a company town.”

Those are the words of our local radical historian Allen Ruff, spoken at the Fighting Forward session on the Aftermath of the Wisconsin Uprising. He was speaking of the University as “the company” and he is correct. Like the company towns that dotted the Rust Belt in its industrial heydey, Madison is also home to many spin-offs, suppliers, and copycats of the main company. The business of the University is research and education. The spin-offs are the start-ups and tech companies, the creative industries, the hospitals and clinics, and the whole range of knowledge-work institutions that call Dane County their home. The support industries include the coffeeshops, the 24-hour gyms, and the locavore restaurants. The sizable body of non-UW state employees who reside in Madison also fall into the category of workers in related industries.

Like the company towns of a generation ago, this town’s company is under growing pressure from new forces of competition, internal decay, and the rigidity of its fixed investments. The superficial trend is toward a company that does more with less, an abstraction of efficiency that tells nothing of the real costs of the University’s responses to the pressure it receives. Those responses include the generation-long trend of steep tuition increases—a development that shuts out academically qualified would-be students and practically indentures others—and the making of a precarious body of workers, first among them the graduate students who teach many of the courses and almost all of the discussion sections. Moreover, a small but increasing number of slots once offered to Wisconsinites and other Americans are now being taken by the cash-paying wealthy from around the world, especially China.

The unfolding crisis is most apparent in the secondary institutions, the ones that suffer some variety of the same ills but surf on far less accumulated fat and prestige than does the University. And as in Janesville, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, or any other twentieth-century company town, here the gap between decay and reterritorialization is wide enough to accommodate the establishment of a substantial class of human beings, what Ruff calls (quoting Chomsky) the superfluous population, that is, people who are neither consumers nor producers. For them, another industry serves, employing guards, police, surveillance hardware, probation officers, and social workers.

Near the end of the session a fellow in the audience, one of only two (from what I could see) persons of color in the room, asked a question about the achievement gap in Madison. He posed it as a query concerning the connection between race-correlated high school achievement in Madison and, as he said, the University’s annual “importation” into the city of thousands of white students. In attempting to make sense of his own words, the man mentioned the factoid of Madison’s achievement gap being most wide at the upper income levels, thereby implying that controlled for income, racism stands as the most plausible explanation of the operating gap between black and white students. Then he called attention to our segregated geographies, citing Owl Creek as an example of the spatial margins of race in Madison. Calling attention to racism in the context of a political discussion of the Uprising through highlighting the specific marginalizations suffered by black and brown people in our city was a welcome intervention, though his synthesis remained incomplete.

In response and as a closing remark Allen spoke of the color line, of its primacy as a line of separation keeping the full power of the left from being realized. The simplicity of the statement only hints at the complexities for of course there has always been more than a single, static color line, and color lines stretch unevenly across geographical space. Allen himself applied a spatialized racial analysis in the post-recall analysis he wrote for The Progressive. He convincingly argued then that Scott Walker and the WI GOP leadership forged a winning statewide coalition by successfully bridging the divide between rich and poor, suburban and rural, through appeals to a white electorate.

How to apply this analysis to progressive, enlightened Madison is the question. Thinking of the University as a company that, like all dominant employers, manages its labor in accordance with the interests of the institution (whether for-profit or not) may be helpful. Though not capitalist by nature, for the last decade at least the University has been turned strongly toward a corporate and privatized agenda, and now largely defines and negotiates its interests in reaction to an aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-educational conservative regime. Given that, and the consequent rollback of the University’s once active redistributive agenda, what is the connection between the University and the worsening racial/spatial politics of Madison?  

*

It is a little over a month later and I am back in the Bay Area. My, how four weeks can change everything.

My plane touched down only a couple hundred yards from the burned out hulk of Asiana Airlines flight 214. I could see the investigators on the ground studying the wreckage.

A broad contingent of inmates in California prisons are on hunger strike.

 

BART workers are observing a shakey truce with management but may strike again at any time.    

And my friend? He indeed has moved on. Interview and negotiation turned into an offer; he is about take to the treadmill at yet another Silicon Valley pioneer-turned-corporate-giant, by my count his sixth company in a career fourteen years old. I'm crashing at his Palo Alto pad while he's out east visiting family. His vacations only come between jobs–the companies take the rest.

 

the persistence of (bookstores as more than) memory

The book publishing industry is going in a lot of different directions right now. Given the uneveness and increasing instability of the societies served by the long-form text, not only in terms of business climate but in areas of technology, consumer economics, and subcultural trends, it makes sense that the industry will stay in fractured flux for quite some time.

Against these conditions there appears this article about independent bookstores in Madison and Dane County from the Cap Times. It cheers greatly to read local media giving some love to our area’s small bookstores. But the author only scratched the surface. With each having a different story behind it, the article could have profiled other stores for a much longer article, easily. I do appreciate that the writer featured Arcadia Books (not to be confused with Arcadian Press). I had not known about this place and it looks terrific—judging from the website it strikes me as one of those semi-idyllic crapshoot businesses that are simply done well enough to make it. I am going to find an excuse to go to Spring Green.

Disappointingly, the author did not include any mention of Rainbow. Neither did he make note of the second-hand shops and discounters. Frugal Muse, Half-Price Books, and Stony Hill Antiques are all worth a browse. Board members suggested that we draft a letter in response, to have our say and, more importantly, help the article gain in scope. Pasted below is what we came up with.

Few are the cities of Madison’s size that can support so many bookstores. As the field of bookselling and distribution continues to shift, and as books themselves continue to diversify in form, I wonder which of our town's stores will ride the oncoming waves into a new golden age of books and if any will drown in the choices before them. 

 

Dear Cap Times:

We read Rob Thomas’s article about Madison’s independent bookstores with delight and optimism. Ten years ago, by which time the big box stores had crushed independents in nearly every retailing category, who would have predicted the demise of the chains? And again, only five years ago the e-book revolution promised another sharp turn towards a paperless world. But in towns with serious readers books and independent bookstores persist.

Books, it is true, we can buy straight from our screens to our mailboxes. But books are always better with their associated people. The friendships, debates, and hanging-out that come with finding the people that correspond to one’s books are what we at another of Madison’s independents, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, aim to provide—books that come attached to an open community of engaged citizens, adventurous thinkers, and committed activists. Our store hosts events and study groups once or twice a week, at least, thereby helping to cultivate the progressive and intellectual life of Madison.

When it comes to the bookselling business, the writing on the wall is never quite what it seems, except maybe in the reliably quirky space of your favorite independent bookstore. So please come out, not just to Rainbow, but to Frugal Muse, Room of One’s Own, Paul’s. Go to Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua and People’s in Milwaukee. And Woodland Pattern, and all the other independent booksellers we are lucky to have across southern Wisconsin. Browse the shelves and maybe buy a book, but either way, leave with something priceless: a community and a culture that belongs to where you live. 

Sincerely,

 

Dan S. Wang

Susannah Tahk

board members, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Madison

tales of pain from a winter's amble

Nighttime is the right time, says the neighborhood Great Horned Owl with the hoo hoo hoo call. On still, cold nights its call travels quickly through the air, with a clarity only possible when the air is dense, the trees bare, and human traffic at its nightly ebb. The owl seems at once near and far. Distances collapse. Winter ether renders live sound an expansion of itself, an aesthetic of season, weather, and time of day. 

For me the most spook-inducing sounds are to be found on frozen Lake Mendota. On nights with no breeze to whistle, the energy of ice more than a foot thick bowing according to the push and pull of late winter temperatures fills the aural void. Echo-ey pops and deep groans traveling along fissures supply moonlit ice strolls an abstract soundscape, without meaning, except that you are walking on this ice that is momentarily contained in an unbelievable tension.

Tonight I’m not worried about that, ice creaks and all. This time my stroll is interrupted by an intruder from within. Specifically, a toenail grown just long enough to irritate. The sharp corner of the nail (always trim toenails straight across, I was told growing up) digs painfully into the soft side of its neighboring digit with each push off the right foot. Each step is a wince. We have high quality of life expectations here in Madison, so this is a real downer.

Then I thought about Andy Murray. I watched him a couple weeks earlier in the Australian Open final. The cameras caught him changing socks between sets. His toes were taped, having blistered in a five-set match against Roger Federer only about forty-eight hours earlier. Ouch. I thought about my daughter, whose first injury as a dancer was a hurt toe at camp last summer. I thought about my own foot rot episode from when I was younger, on a long canoe trip. Once it set in it consistently worsened, going in a few days from nusiance to a jaw-clenching torture.

But the end of that trip was in sight. What is more, I was at an age when the pain provided a focus, lifted clouds of teenage confusion, and actually felt good because that. Enjoying acute pain is a young person’s sport.

Then I thought about my grandmother. And then my other grandmother. And my great aunts. They knew about pain around the toes, and for them there was no end in sight. They had small feet, the kind that come from binding. They were members of the last generation of women, already elderly in my childhood, to experience the binding; their daughters were not put through it. When I read mention of the foot binding process, it is usually described as a breaking of the arch. But the toenails also were sometimes left to grow, curled into their own flesh, after horrible pain to be finally crushed as well, or for the lucky, to be simply pulled out. Imagining the actual experience generations of Chinese women went through, “bound feet” seems too cozy an expression. It is one of those terms that sounds better than what the practice is in fact. Kind of like “extraordinary rendition.”

I wonder, did my grandmothers, as the lively girls they must have been, at times relish the pain? Men serving hard prison time speak of going into endurance mode, taking episodes of dissociation for the sake of mental survival. Sentenced to an indefinite duration of pain and permanent hobbling, a prison of their bodies, their families and social values, girls with small feet must have mastered the whole spectrum of coping psychology, including the mentality of the young athlete or disciple who learns to put pain into a box. But then to live with the new reality of small feet, small steps, and an eternally unsteady walk—what extremes of feeling or better yet unfeeling are necessary to manage the daily realities of such a fate? I will never know.

What I am complaining about, again? That toenail, the clipping of which I can already envision, only minutes away.

The irritation now respectfully ranks strictly at the low end on the pain spectrum signs you see at the clinic. Corrected in my thinking, the sensation feels more like a prompt than a sting, a reminder to me of the willingly and unwillingly experienced pains of the past and present world, even from within my own family history. It is a reminder that those considerable smarts and unfathomable sorrows have essentially no association with what small troubles I contend with. A toenail tonight only highlights the fact that in this mild life I am living I am mostly brutalized with music and other external forms of beauty—as long as oneself keeps from getting too cocky over thin ice. 

Finally, I realize that this is no pain-free zone in the world of our local owl, either. On the contrary, if the owl gets its way tonight some creature will feel all the wrenching unpleasantness of a full assault, to its limit, beyond which lies only numbness and shock–the anaesthetic, those short moments of a living death. In Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote about the dread of the rabbit, surrounded by the voice of its hunter. My beauty is some other creature's pain, just as my grandmothers' pain was somebody else's beauty.

 

it's messed up, and i'm feeling at home

After six years of living in Madison, more or less, I have taken a liking to this town. I found an excellent community of activist intellectuals, a cell of radical designers and picture-makers, a reliable and enjoyable network of neighbors. I live about 150 yards from Lake Mendota, where our street ends with a primitive landing at water’s edge. The lake is recreational hell in the summer, but on a chilly still fall night one can meditate on the rocks and catch a whiff of the North Woods. There are always bands on the calendar worth seeing. The produce, cheeses, and meats available around here are among the best the nation has to offer. The many bike paths ensure safe coasting.

Great quality of life stuff is what bothered me about living here. Thankfully, the easy living is dying, and not just because the restaurant scene is overhyped to the point of embarrassment. The days—and decades—of being clueless and content in Madison are over.

The beginning of the end was signaled by the attacks on the public sector in February of 2011, to which the massive Wisconsin Uprising was a response. Wisconsin labor had been a victim of a previous generation’s success. Current workers enjoy standards of living hard-won by earlier struggles, lifestyles that had allowed workers to nearly forget that they are labor. But since the Uprising things are different, and working families in Madison know that from now until the end of their working lives and probably beyond, it will be a fight against Wisconsin’s right wing wrecking crew, currently led by the inimitably rodent-like Scott Walker. Walker and his lieutenants won their battles in the legislative halls but in the process woke the population. Austerity will do that.

The final shattering of Madison’s paradisiacal illusions comes from a different direction. Rather than from the stroke of an elected leader’s pen but in some respects seemingly as rapid, this blow takes the form of a demographic tidal wave, brown and black, surging via the late Millenials generation. One does not see it at the farmers’ markets, nor in the Overture Center lobby, nor in the crowds at the Badger football games. The Establishment class and culture in this town remain largely white.

But this complex future already resides in the public schools of Madison. The four general high schools range from 1500 to 2100 students. Various alternative programs serve another 400 high school-age students. The city as a whole is 7% African American and 7% Latino while the high schools are in aggregate 19% African American and 15% Latino. Along with the 9% Asian Americans, 8% self-described as mixed race, and the 0.5% Native Americans, the high schools serve a population only about 48% white. It’s California in the tenth grade.

Socioeconomic diversity is beautiful in the abstract, a make-believe harmony invoked by those flakey coexist bumper stickers one sees around the white neighborhoods of Madison. But in the flesh, the mixing of races and ethnicities brings with it a complicated set of problems, particularly when racial and ethnic groupings correspond to lines of class stratification and spatial segregation, as they do here. Because the dysfunctions of poverty are racialized and there is a generation gap on top of that, Madison’s aging white liberal establishment class is about to face its biggest test. Coexist, or turn reactionary.

Where are all these children of color coming from? The Latino kids are mostly of Mexican origin, but beyond that, I do not know of any pattern—whether they predominently are from another US city and/or whether most of them can trace lineage back to a particular set of places in Mexico. There probably is a pattern, but I do not know if any data has been collected. The Asian American kids seem to fall into three groups: children of East Asian/Asian-American professionals, children of South Asian/Asian-American professionals, and children of Southeast Asian-Americans, generally a working-class segment. It would make geographical sense for the Native kids to be mostly of Wisconsin tribal origins, for example Menominee, Ho-Chunk, or Oneida, but I do not know of any statistics regarding tribal membership.

The African-American kids are the most contradictory in terms of collective identity. Apart from a handful with African immigrant parentage, most of them moved to Madison from Chicago. A smaller number relocated from Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Beloit.

Chicago, as a place of origin, is the contradiction because it is shared, but not. What I mean is, of the Chicago migrants, an individual student might have moved to Madison from the West Side, the South Side, Uptown, or one the inner ring suburbs such as Evanston, Maywood, Ford Heights, or Blue Island. Or from the pockets of poor and working-class African American residence that dot the suburbs, even the largely white western suburbs like Willowbrook or Lombard. Whatever “Chicago” means to an African American student relocated to Madison cannot be assumed as shared with another “Chicago” kid in its details because Chicago and its sprawling environs are themselves widely variable in terms of local character, even when narrowed to one socioeconomic class.

And yet, in relation to the other students, “Chicago” becomes a convenient group identity, threaded together through superficial commonalities. The condition of many African American youth, therefore, is one of being caught between the assigned identity of “Chicago” and a substantive meaninglessness of the same. What shared experience there is comes only after their relocation to Madison, primarily through the spatial segregation that results when the black folk without much money —and in Madison that is the vast majority—end up living in the parts of town offering the most affordable rents. Apart from the exceptional affordable rental building here or there, most African American residents of Madison end up in the concentrations of cheap rentals in segregated neighborhoods, parts of town where the streets don’t end at the lake. For example, the Owl Creek neighborhood of the far southeast, in the clusters of apartment complexes along Schroeder Road in the southwest, or the rentals around Allied Drive south of the Beltline. In a city built around four large and irregular lakes, being away from all of them may be the truest measure of isolation.

I do not know what Madison becomes as the town’s Sixties-descended liberal establishment runs its course as the dominant culture, but I am quite sure the city will look different than Madison of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. What kind of a progressive formation steps up to defend what the earlier generation built—civil, middle-class, rational—as the right wing assaults on the public sphere sharpen, and the dysfunctional social dynamics perfected in our neighboring big cities threaten to reproduce themselves here? More to the point, how do we of the older generations and the youth who embody this emerging society together build the necessary progressive formations? There are few models and no certain paths forward, but failing to try is not an option.

What I see is a town long accustomed to a comparatively equitable distribution of modest affluence becoming a city not unlike others around the Great Lakes, separated into first, second, and third classes of citizens, colliding segments that enjoy the healthiest, best educated, and most tasteful lifeways against those made up of families trying to get by in the least hopeful of times.

But I must say I prefer living in a place that bundles external but proximate anxieties instead of allowing the space for endless indulgences in self-absorbed neuroses, high-brow escapist distractions, or views to faraway countries for reasons to decry imperialist policies. Post-Uprising life in Madison serves up global problems on a local platter, and that is a specialty we would do well to appreciate.