I’ve often seen gentrification as a difficult problem to tackle. For many of my friends—young, working people trying to live in diverse areas and support themselves on small, non-profit or public service salaries—it is a struggle to find housing without becoming an agent of gentrification. But a
New York Times piece today about Mount Morris Park, a traditionally-black Harlem neighborhood, explores one of the uglier examples of that phenomenon.
Timothy Williams chronicles the recent dispute over the neighborhood’s Marcus Garvey Park where, since 1969, drummers from Africa and the Caribbean have played an important role in shaping the social fabric and dynamic of the place. “The musicians,” he explains, “who play until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday, are widely credited with helping to make the park safer over the years.”
Across the street from the park however, at 2002 Fifth Avenue, is “a new seven-story cream and red brick luxury co-op with a doorman, $1 million apartments and a lobby with a fireplace.” Predictably, there have been some disputes about the character of the neighborhood.
As I mentioned in
a prior post about the Garrahy Judicial Complex, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in that facility’s Courtroom 4C, where arraignments for RI’s 6th District take place. The judges at arraignment give a shpiel about the meaning and consequences of a plea whenever someone pleads out at that stage of the game, and I often take much of that shpiel for granted.
An important part of what they must instruct the defendants is that any criminal conviction or guilty plea will affect any immigration status or proceedings. For many, this means that deportation is inevitable. One thing missing from the shpiel, however, is consideration of how a guilty plea and prison sentence will affect the defendant’s status in Family Court. All too often, defendants are counseled to accept a shorter sentence with time served only to be served with Family Court subpoenas on charges of neglect—neglect that occurs while these parents are behind bars—or deportation papers.
Colorlines magazine has a great piece this month on the intersection of systems—namely immigration, incarceration, and foster care. In “
When an Immigrant Mom Gets Arrested,” Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler write:
Immigrant mothers are not the first to deal with the ways that different government agencies intersect, usually to their detriment. The experiences Black families have had with child welfare and criminal justice policy make clear what can happen to communities when family policy intersects with a set of other punitive policies.
While I applaud Loury’s defense of hip-hop and appreciate McWhorter’s defense of Obama, I take issue with the false dichotomy these scholars have erected between the two. Loury says hip-hop is politically-charged and Barack Obama’s message is destructive; McWhorter says hip-hop is destructive in a way that counters the positive message of Barack Obama. But hip-hop, at its roots, is political, and many of its leaders have long championed Obama’s message and agenda through their words and rhymes. Obama, in kind, has become one of few mainstream voices for the ideology that underlies hip-hop.
Does it count as shameless self-promotion to promote my promotion of a friend’s event? Hopefully not. Scope my piece in this week’s Phoenix on the upcoming criminal justice reform festival, Justice or Just Us?, taking place at AS220 real soon.
Many of you know that, for the past two years, I have been facilitating arts and writing workshops at the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI) through Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (
SPACE).
This Sunday, May 4, SPACE will be opening its annual exhibit of art and writing from the ACI. The exhibit will take place in the Youth Gallery at
AS220, 115 Empire Street from 4 PM to 7 PM.
In addition to displaying art and writing, we will be reading selections of poetry written by the men and women who participate in our workshops. We will also be distributing our annual Zine, a collection of their work. Refreshments will be served. If you can’t make it on Sunday, the exhibit will be up in the AS220 Youth Gallery through July; please stop in and check it out!
If you’re running in it, you probably already knew that the inaugural Providence Marathon (officially the
Cox Providence Rhode Races) is Sunday, May 4. But for everyone else, get out there and support Rhode Island runners!
The
course begins at the Johnson and Wales Harborside Campus in Cranston (rain or shine), and winds its way through the East Side, Pawtucket, and East Providence before finishing 26.218 miles later in Downtown.
And to those who will be running: just be careful when you cross that line:
This time with a commentary on race and the death penalty.
I’m starting to love this guy. In
today’s Times, Liptak examines a forthcoming study by the Houston Law Review on racial disparities in the application of the death penalty in Harris County, Texas. He writes:
The unexceptional finding is that defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. More than 20 studies around the nation have come to similar conclusions.
But the new study also detected a more straightforward disparity. It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.
Check it, and look for more of Liptak’s pieces in which he brings to light the harsh truths of our criminal justice system.
For some reason, it takes
fancily-worded articles in the New York Times for my family and friends to realize what I’ve been hollering about for years… America’s addiction to incarceration. Anyway, props to Adam Liptak for consistently bringing these issues to public eye. Today, Liptak sheds light on an important and staggering statistic: that the US, with 5% of the world’s population, incarcerates nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. He writes:
Indeed, the United States
leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Oh, and speaking of crimes that would not produce prison sentences in other countries,
scope my bit on how lil’ Rhody incarcerates its debtors in this week’s Phoenix.
TONIGHT – William C. Rhoden, of the New York Times and that ESPN snoozefest Sports Reporters fame, is appearing tonight at Brown for a discussion regarding race and sport in America. He will appear alongside former Bears and current Oregon State University (way to mess that one up, PC) men’s basketball coach and certifiable “next-big-thing” Craig Robinson, as well as Brown junior student-athlete Nicole Burns.
The panel discussion will be moderated by Brown prof Jim Campbell and begins at 7 p.m. in the Andrews Dining Hall. The talk is free and open to the Brown community, as well as communities of other colors (that is, the general public).
If you have at least a passing interest in both sports and race relations, you should probably go… who knows, there may even be snacks.
I just came from
the Black Rep, where I was privileged to see the premiere of their new play The Etymology of Bird. Written by Zakiyyah Alexander and directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian, the play delves into the fabric of
Bed-Stuy (the same Brooklyn neighborhood that inspired Spike Lee’s
Do the Right Thing) and provokes a series of important questions on race relations, criminal justice, family life, love, fear, stereotypes, and hard choices. The Rep describes The Etymology of Bird:
Brooklyn, New York, 2008. Another long, hot NYC summer where B-boys, fly girls, and MCs mix with merengue, salsa, dancehall, and the new cop on the block. Birdy and Jermaine have known each other forever, but this summer, they see each other for the first time. The Etymology of Bird is a love story about our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and the choices we make that can change everything.
But this description only scratches the surface of the play and the complicated issues it tackles on a minimalist stage with a relatively amateur cast. The two main characters, Jermaine and Birdy, are played by two incredibly talented Brown students–Jonathan Dent and Fedna Jacquet. They, along with the rest of the cast, drew me so far into the thick of the plot that I found myself sitting jaw-clenched, teary-eyed, tight-fisted, and short of breath on a sunny Sunday Providence afternoon. If that description makes The Etymology of Bird sound painful, let there be no mistake: it is. But it is also funny, heartwarming, thought-provoking, and powerful.
Anyone catch this? Recently,
Condoleeza Rice briefly stopped being a tool to describe the difficulties with discussing race in America, calling Obama’s speech “important” and slavery America’s “birth defect.”
“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”
“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said
This was all too much for Lou Dobbs to handle, and in the heat of his slobbery tirade about how “he doesn’t have a problem,” the King of Xenophobia gave us all a nice lesson in self-hoisted petards when he pretty much said that these “cotton picking black politicians are being ridiculous,” presumably in calling for a probing dialogue about race in America.
We all know mud when we see it, and with the garbage-slinging over Bill Clinton and General Merrill McPeak’s comments intensifying, let’s recognize what was said. First, Bill Clinton said that “It would be great if we could have two [candidates] who loved this country,” because then we could focus on issues, “instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”
In an impromptu reflection on the former President’s comments, Obama advisor General Merrill McPeak, noted that, having lived through McCarthyism, he had “had enough of it.” McPeak also questioned how Clinton could impugn a Democratic candidate’s patriotism after he faced the same smears in 1992 over his alleged hippie draft-dodging (my words, not at all his). Military man McPeak is playing hyperbole-hardball with Bill on this one, and may have crossed the line.
But what of Bill? With all due respect, his initial comments were political trash of the stinkiest order.
(more…)
Don’t forget about two awesome events happening tonight:
The Black Air Foundation Fundraiser to Benefit the Lambert Lima Flying Squadron Cadet Program from 7:00-9:00PM at the Cape Verdean Progressive Center, 329 Grosvenor Avenue, East Providence.
Obama’s
speech yesterday addressing race and the manufactured Jeremiah Wright controversy was brilliant and moving. Whether you agree with that assessment or see him as a crafty politician giving another pretty speech, it is notable for the fact that he actually dared to speak to the voters about a difficult issue as if they were mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.
It is unfortunate that we have to praise him for what should be the standard in American political discourse, but the fact remains that such forthright maturity is decidedly not the standard. All that remains to be seen is whether the voters (and pundits, and media, and his political opponents) actually are mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.
Thanks to tipster Bill M. for alerting us to this story:
Chinese Laundry, which opened March 11th at
121 North Main Street (right in my neighborhood!), is not receiving the warm welcome for which its owner,
Chow Fun Food Group owner
John Elkhay, had hoped. The restaurant, which
claims to offer, “a modern pan Asian dining experience with an intoxicating vibe, incredible worldly flavors, and a sensual, sophisticated atmosphere,” opened amidst a firestorm of controversy.
John Elkhay, who has brought fun, trendy restaurants to the Providence dining scene, arrived at his VIP party on Friday night after a stressful and unexpected debate that emerged in the blogosphere earlier in the day. An ad for his newest restaurant, Chinese Laundry, in Providence Monthly featured the naked torso of a woman and the words “See what you are missing.” It caught the eye of a student at Brown University who referred it to a blog written by a self-proclaimed “angry Asian-American woman.”
Entries
I’ve often seen gentrification as a difficult problem to tackle. For many of my friends—young, working people trying to live in diverse areas and support themselves on small, non-profit or public service salaries—it is a struggle to find housing without becoming an agent of gentrification. But a
New York Times piece today about Mount Morris Park, a traditionally-black Harlem neighborhood, explores one of the uglier examples of that phenomenon.
