Arieso226

Avengers: Age of Ultron

"Shit." "Language, Tony!

This famed author deserves to have her writings continuously celebrated.

Housing Discrimination

NO. 1

 Racial exclusion, or segregation had real damage to the black communities persistent in their fight for freedom to own and be included in everything whites were already allowed in; the fight for equality, economic security, for education, and for fair housing was just beginning. Racial exclusion was such a severe enough problem, since in every near northern city, black newcomers crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods left behind by upwardly mobile whites. White builders, in charge of housing and agencies related could dictate who could own, and William Levitt, of Leviittown where massive developments were made in the suburb, was no exception. 

       These types of houses were ‘affordable for the common man’, and remade America’s landscape after World War II. The iconic images of little ranches and Cape Cods, set in spacious yards on curvilinear streets, stood for everything that America celebrated in the Cold War era. These subdivisions attracted a heterogenous mix of surburnites, blue-collar workers employed by U.S Steel factories, teachers, clerks, and administrators. Levitt celebrated the ‘American-ness’ of these houses, saying ‘’No man who owns his house and lot can be a communist. He has much to do.’’ Don’t really know how owning a house can get in the way of your political ideologies, but alright. And when Levitt was questioned about the racial homogeneity of his planned community, he responded, ‘’We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’’  But the housing and racial problem was connected, as blacks could not get these houses because they were black. One instance of racial exclusion was in metropolitan Philadelphia, where between 1946, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks. Langston Hughes, popular poet described black neighborhoods as the ‘land of rats and roaches, where a nickel cost a dime.

 NO. 2

   Economist Robert Weaver spoke, ‘’among the basic consumer goods, only housing for Negroes are traditionally excluded freely competing in the market.’’ The struggle to open housing was not just a matter of free access to a market excluded to blacks. Racial segregation had high stakes. In post war America, where you lived shaped your educational options, your access to jobs, and your quality of life. The housing markets also provided most Americans with their only substantial financial asset. Real estate was the most important vehicle for the accumulation of wealth. Breaking open the housing market would provide blacks to access to better-funded, higher-quality schools. It would give them the opportunity to live in growing communities–near the shopping malls, office centers, and industrial parks where almost all new job growth happened. And more importantly, it would narrow the wealth-gap between blacks and whites. The battle against housing discrimination in Levingttown, or anywhere else would be the most important in the entire northern freedom struggle.

      NO. 3

 Housing segregation in the north was built on a sturdy foundation of racial restrictions encoded in private regulations and public policy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Midwest–and especially Indiana and Illinois, were dotted with ‘sundown towns’ places whose residents drove blacks off by force, enacted ordinances to prohibit black occupancy (although such ordinances were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917), and sometimes posted signs, like that in Wendell Willkie’s Elwood, Indiana, warning blacks of the dire consequences of staying around after sunset. Such crude techniques succeeded in driving blacks out of small towns, but they were less effective in the major northern metropolitan areas that attracted the vast majority of African American migrants beginning in World War I.

Three devices were used to help housing discrimination: first, private but legally enforecable restrictive covenants—attached to nearly every housing development built between 1928 and 1948— forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone other than whites. Second, federal housing policies, enacted during the Depression, mandated racial homogeneity in new developments and created a separate, unequal housing market, underwritten with federal dollars, for blacks and whites. And third, real estate agents staunchly defended the ‘freedom of association and the right of home owners and developers to rent or sell to whom they pleased, steering blacks into racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods. Whites in the North had economic reasons to fear the ‘Negro invasion’ as they called it. Their ability to secure mortgages and loans were at risk. But their motivations were not solely economic. Intertwined concerns about property values were fears of black predation. North and South recoiled at the prospect of miscegenation. In the South, they feared the legal restrictions on intermarriage and racial mixing in public spaces; the North feared the regulation of housing markets.           

Teachers lead a music lesson for agricultural workers’ children at a nursery at Okeechobee migratory labor camp in Belle Glade, Florida (1941).

What happened to Haiti?

I wrote an earlier piece on Haiti, mostly on the revolution and its leading founders Toussaint L’Overture. But the missing parts, like what happened after the revolution, who became president after L’Overture’s capture, and why Haiti still looks and is, impoverished must be answered.

So, independence day for Haiti from French rule is January 1st, 1804, when General Jean-Jacques Dessalines led his forces against Napoleon’s colonial army. Upon achieving liberation, Haiti became the first independent black republic and the first leading state to abolish slavery altogether. Except, in 1825, France’s government, alongside the U.S and other Western powers placed an embargo on Haiti unless they paid the French government $36 billion dollars as reparations to end slavery and keep their independence, and ever since, Haiti has been exploited for its natural resources and has fallen victim to international trade crimes by European and American ‘world powers’, putting the country in extreme economic decline.

‘‘Haiti has had a long volatile relationship with the United States and other foreign countries. For the past century or more, reforms have been imposed largely by outsiders, leaving the country with little ownership of the development of economic and political systems. Haitians were left with a ‘prickly nationalism’ distrust of foreigners, and an economy largely dependent on foreign assistance.’’

Haiti, last weekend, has had another major earthquake, this one’s magnitude at least 7.2, which destroyed ‘more than 7,000 homes and damaged 5,000 leaving about 30,000 families homeless, not to mention the death toll was up to 1,200, and over 6000 plus injured. Hospitals, schools, offices, and churches were decimated and badly damaged.’ The tropical storm that came before battered the southwestern side of the country and the earthquake made it worse. The country sits on a fault line between two tectonic plates, the North American and the Caribbean plates, which slide past each other over time. There are two other major faults along the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the southern one is known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system., which the U.S Geological Survey says caused this one and the January 2010 earthquake.’’

Because the country has been in economic decline, and with the recent political unrest (the recent assassination of their former president, Jovenel Moise) its people have been unable to bounce back from the damages of previous earthquakes and are currently living through extreme humanitarian crises. There are thousands of people who are now homeless, in desperate need of aid, food, fresh drinking water, clothes, and socks. It is our responsibility to help, as the privileged who benefit from the exploitation of Haiti, to help and give back what we can.

P.S. Do not donate to the Red Cross. Instead, find and donate to trusted organizations whom you know your money is going directly to the Haitian citizens who will hopefully get basic needs and funding. If you cannot donate, then volunteer at organizations that are sourcing those basic needs. Read and research and spread the word to help.

1) https://batischool.org

2) About Us - Sow A Seed (sowaseedonline.org)

3) Responding to the Major Earthquake in Southern Haiti - Hope for Haiti

#Black History Month

So, the past few weeks I haven’t had the time to write, I was back in school...anyway, I finally had the inspiration to write, and it’s about my classes. I’m majoring in an #anthropology and minoring in English, and as a future anthropologist I have to see events in history, good or bad, through an objective standpoint. I have to mention that I am a water sign, and I have been an emotional child since birth. I am also taking a British Literature class, and the first two weeks of school, we were reading Early Black British Writing, which is basically essays written by past slaves, like #OludahEquiano, or told past experiences, like #MaryPrince. 

   My initial problem, is that only other person in this class is black, other than me, and it was extremely difficult reading such horrible experiences and trying  not to get to angry. Everyone in this class was white, including my professor, and while I am happy that in taking this class, since it allows me to read different genres such as this one, since I had no idea this kind of book existed, I couldn’t help but feel angry, as jokes were passed around the class in order to lighten up the mood. I wanted to leave, storm out of class, and I counted down the minutes till it was over. When I finally left and headed to my anthro classes, I had a talk with my professor there and she basically told me that as an anthropologist, it is you’re job to take such an assessment and not let it affect you. The Middle Passage, stretching from Africa to Europe(mostly London) to the Caribbean and the America’s happened, and lasted over 500 years. It was recorded as the largest migration in this planet’s history. I guess I’m saying that yes, as a people we have the right to be angry. Racism, I think, is a common occurrence, and will be for a very long time. But anger alone isn’t the only emotion we should be feeling. This Black History Month, we should be celebrating for all the things we have accomplished. In politics, medicine, movies, activism, charity, science and math, literature, music, companies and lots more. We have proven ourselves a resilient people, all over the world, and I can say that I would rather be proud than to hold onto my anger. 

Intersectionality in regards to social science

Modern society in America, as a fact, has adapted the constructed norms of the Victorian Era in England, by which I mean how economic class, race, and sexuality is managed, or for lack of a better term, is misconstrued with eurocentric ideals; Since the creation of the United States, the only way you would be able to receive the privileges society holds was if you were white, straight and economically secure.

Throughout the decade, society has changed drastically when it comes to talks on these particular subjects, but we still have a long way to go in advancing a better community for everyone. Intersectionality, created or introduced in the 1980s, ‘‘as a heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of discrimination and social movement politics. It exposed how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice. Over the intervening decades, intersectionality has proved to be a productive concept that has been deployed in disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and anthropology as well as feminist studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and legal studies.’’

So intersectionality is quite popular in learning all these studies. Patricia Hill Collins, a sociologist famous for writing the book ‘Black Feminist thought’ and ‘Race, Class, and Gender, writes about the politics of gender and race, and how they shape and influence knowledge. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and Collins theorized that race and gender are part of our ‘social being’. ‘‘Social science argues that to truly understand society and group life one must be removed from the particulars and concerns of the subjects being studied. In this way, subjects are turned into objects of study. Collins’ (2000) alternative epistemology claims that is it only those men and women who experience the consequences of social being who can select ‘topics for investigation and methodologies used’ (p. 258). Black feminist epistemology, then, begins with “connected knowers,” those who know from personal experience—Rather than believing that researchers can be value-free, Collins argues that all knowledge is intrinsically value-laden and should thus be tested by the presence of empathy and compassion. Collins sees this tenet as healing the binary break between the intellect and emotion that Eurocentric knowledge values.’’

We need everyone's help right now to protect the rainforest and Indigenous People

The Amazon Rainforest is under a massive threat. I know you've heard this a million times, but this is different. There is a piece of legislation that will decimate the rights of Indigenous people of Brazil, who have been protecting the rainforest. It's unfathomably bad. It has majority support. And they're voting tomorrow. As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

The thing you can do—and I know this sounds overly simple—is sign this petition—and tell your friends to do the same: SIGN HERE.

As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

Again, this bill has majority support. You may be wondering, why will a petition signed by people who don't live in Brazil make any difference? Because it will give those opposing it political air cover. It will show the world is with them.

But we need a LOT of signatures.

Please do this simple act and spread the word.

The History of Riots

Riots. Small or massive, can induce major anxiety especially if you’re introverted like me. Riots are usually caused by people getting infuriated, by things like politics, economy, or for the end to tyranny and oppression. You see it when people rise up against their government, like the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the American Revolution. More recently, the race riots of 1965 were a violent and historical recording of how damaging people can act when things start to change, or where there is simply no change. That is the crux of riots.

‘‘What determines a country’s political institutions, and in particular, the extent to which they are democratic? An important set of explanations has focused on the idea that conflict, or the possibility of conflict, induces leaders to promote institutional change? Tilly (1990), Besley and Persson (2008, 2009), and Dincesco and Prado (2012) argue that conflict, and in particular wars between countries, created the setting for Western European nations to build institutions that would enable the enforcement of contracts and collection of taxes. Conflict also plays an important role in Acemoglu and Robinsons’ (2000, 2001, 2006) theory of democratization; they emphasize how the threat of conflict, in the form of a revolution, induces autocrats to make democratic concessions in an attempt to defuse that threat. In their theory, revolution is more likely in times of economic hardship, so negative economic shocked pen a ‘‘window of opportunity’’ that can lead to a peaceful transition towards democracy.’’

Riots are a backlash against the government, explosive and in you’re face. Riots transform regular people into citizens who want to show off their freedom, by expressing the rights that they have. Rioting certainly doesn’t start out that way. It starts off as protesting against either a corporation, a government, society itself, or a certain person. Unfortunately, anger starts to lead the way within the protest and drives violence as a way to get even more attention. ‘‘The main difficulty in testing whether conflict opens a ‘‘window of opportunity’’ is that riots are rarely exogenous: there might be problems of reverse causality because the expectation of political change might itself lead to riots, and there might be unobservable omitted variables that cause both riots and political change.’’

My mother cried when I was born because she knew that she’d never be better than me.

Annabeth Chase, Mark of Athena (via incorrectpjoquotes)

Whaaaaaa