The Take Back America Conference in Washington DC on Tuesday included a panel discussion of "Poverty and Politics: Katrina's Clarion Call." Arlene Holt MC'd. Professor Peter Edelman began by stressing how little attention is paid in this country to poverty and race, and how much is needed. Edelman recommended this report:
He said the response to Katrina was a question of race, but a lot of solutions are race and gender neutral: wages, EITC, refundable child tax credit, etc. But we also, he said, have structural racism. We have a criminal justice system that arrests more, processes more, incarcerates more people of color. It's a racial issue and we're going to fight it as such. Schools too. The worst schools are the schools provided for people of color. Gentrification too.
Maude Hurd, President of ACORN, said that ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has over 350,000 families in its membership. We have to have low-income folks at the table where decisions are made to get real change. In 1982 an organizer knocked on Hurd's door and it was the first time anyone had asked her what her concerns were. Everyone else had always told her what the concerns were. She and her neighbors joined ACORN, paid dues, held a meeting, cleaned up a vacant lot, dumped the trash at City Hall, and established a program to clean up publicly owned vacant lots. She's been active in ACORN ever since. Hurd also described ACORN's efforts to register and turn out voters. They knocked on 1.5 million doors to turn out voters in 20 states in the last elections.
Rinku Sen began her comments by pointing out that the word "race" had been in the original title of this event, and that it was replaced with the code word "Katrina." Sen talked about racial divisions in reataurants in New York, where hosts tend to be white and kitchen workers tend to be people of color. Progressives like to avoid talking about race when dealing with the minimum wage or health care, in order to avoid conservative backlashes. The hope is that conservatives won't figure out that a policy will benefit disproportionately people of color. But conservatives are conservative, they're not stupid. The racist attack is inevitable. Our silence won't avoid it. Are we ready for it? The key to that is to go on the offensive: redefine racism as being about the rules and structures, not individuals' opinions. We need to ask not "Is that person racist?" but "Is that person promoting policies that will help reduce the racial gap?" And we need to connect racial disparities to the conditions that cause them. Otherwise we leave it up to the rightwing to explain things their way (e.g. through welfare queens and pathologies). Color Lines has racial justice report cards on politicians. People of color need to be at center of progressive movement.
Rep. Maxine Waters says our voices have been muted by
right-wing talk shows defining us, rather than we defining ourselves.
When you mention race, you get accused of using the race card and race
baiting. Many elected officials started backing off. They were being
called race baiters, and the progressive community wasn't defending
them. When you talk about this president's tax breaks for the richest
one percent, you're accused of being divisive and putting the poor
people against the rich. I wish we COULD pit the poor people against
the rich. Look at what America discovered about poor people when
Katrina happened. And the rest of the world looked at Katrina and said
"Oh no, these are the folks with their great democracy who try to tell
the rest of the world how to run their countries." Katrina exposed this
nation for its hypocrisy. People who run to New Orleans to party don't
look behind the French Quarter. But because of Katrina and Rita, this
became a discussion in America. I just left a meeting with Governor
Blanco. We're still working on it. People are still without housing. HR
1227 forces HUD to rehabilitate by August 3,000 units so people can
come back. We've gotten a moratorium on the elimination of public
housing. Any redevelopment will be phased and it will replace every
unit of public housing eliminated. And it will have to involve the
residents in the decision making. We also took another $1.2 billion
from FEMA for the Road Home program, and we have made it possible to
use CDBG as matching funds.
Poor people, Waters said, don't have
a lot of representatives. Right wing Congress Members with poor people
in their districts don't represent them. But it appears that a
discussion of poverty is getting back on the agenda. People ask who I
am supporting for President. I'm not supporting anyone yet, because
they're not talking about poverty or race. The closest to it is John
Edwards. But we've got a long way to go. We've got to stop liking
candidates becuase they're cute or because they stop by your church,
etc. Don't worrk about who can beat the Republicans. "The Republicans
are dead in the water, and we need to put our foot on their necks and
drown them." We need to decide which candidate will act on our behalf.
Waters
said she is going with Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey to Iowa to put heat
under candidates to force them to talk about poverty and race and
progressive politics.
Vanessa Gueringer of ACORN spoke about
bringing back the lower Ninth Ward in Louisiana. There are still
thousands of displaced people wanting to come back, she said. There
were 15,000 families pre-Katrina, many elderly. It's the home of Fats
Domino. In 1965 the Corps of Engineers blew the levies and flooded our
neighborhood in order to protect downtown New Orleans. Many children
died. Many are dying now. I just got a call that an elderly woman has
died. (Gueringer spoke in tears.) Everything that has been done to
rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward has been done by ACORN. The Road Home
Program is a joke - we have not received money. The City of New Orleans
has about half its population back. The Lower Ninth Ward now has about
2,500 families. ACORN has a No-Bulldozing campaign, a campaign that has
restored water, a campaign that has brought back basic garbage pickup.
ACORN has been our savior. We are determined to fight to come back.
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