By Tamara K. Nopper and Kenyon Farrow

September 17, 2012

In January of this year, a “new sign of the deep dissension” between the labor movement and the Obama administration over immigration enforcement was reported by the New York Times (NYT). As the Immigration Enforcement and Customs (ICE) agency sought to train deportation officers to refocus arrest efforts on immigrants who have been convicted of crimes, some 7,000 deportation officers represented by the National ICE Council were still waiting on permission from their union to participate in the training. Yet it didn’t appear that social justice concerns motivated the council leadership’s prevention of its members’ participation. Rather, they were critical of the Obama administration prioritizing immigrants with convictions. This purported shift was perceived by some as an attempt to pander to immigrant rights groups; as Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council, was quoted saying, “Law enforcement and public safety have taken a back seat to attempts to satisfy immigrant advocacy groups.”

Although the NYT article didn’t mention it, there were other signs of dissension between the labor movement and the Obama administration over immigration enforcement.  A few days before the NYT article ran, the AFL-CIO, with the National Immigration Forum, sent Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano a letter requesting the federal government review and in some cases, terminate, Secure Communities, a program which permits state and local police to check DHS immigration databases when taking fingerprints of people they are booking into jail.  Whereas the leadership of the National ICE Council, a local of the American Federation of Government Employees, was concerned about its officers being constrained from arresting more immigrants, the AFL-CIO’s letter, dated January 4, expressed dismay with “a pattern and practice of racial profiling of Latinos” in Arizona and demanded that Secure Communities be terminated in Alabama, as well as other states and suspended nationally per further reforms. It appears, then, that there may not only be tension between the labor movement and the Obama administration regarding immigration enforcement, but perhaps a rift within the labor movement itself as the American Federation of Government Employees is one of the 56 unions represented by the AFL-CIO.

Whatever internal strife may exist, it is noticeable that the AFL-CIO has not taken a similar public stance against the racial profiling and criminalization of African Americans.  Nor does the federation appear to prioritize the issue of Black unemployment, which is the highest nationally out of all racial groups. Overall, African Americans and the policing and criminalization they disproportionately experience as workers or job seekers seem of little concern to the AFL-CIO.

Some may take issue with our assessment here and point out that Civil and Workplace Rights is listed as an “issue” on the AFL-CIO’s website. They may direct us to read copies of the newsletter Civil Rights News or point out the AFL-CIO joined Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) on its 2012 Selma to Montgomery March, which reenacted the historic 1965 civil rights march.  Or they may mention the AFL-CIO’s campaign to challenge voter ID laws and voter suppression or that they have the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) included in a list of organizations on their Civil and Workplace Rights page.  Yet a closer examination of materials related to these topics reveals little consideration of criminalization and Black unemployment.  A search of AFL-CIO’s website show that African Americans are barely mentioned at all. Our review of how Black employment was addressed may not be exhaustive but it was comprehensive: it included an analysis of 1) the three years of the federation’s legislative briefs available to readers (totaling 161 at the time of this writing); 2) numerous pages of results for several search terms related to the criminal justice system (for example, we examined 28 pages of results returned when searching for the word “police” on the website); 3) 10 out of the 11 issues of Civil Rights News published between 2007 to today (one issue was unable to be downloaded); and 4) the 11 minute video featured on the Civil and Workplace Rights page and other posts reporting on the 2012 Selma to Montgomery March.  When African Americans are mentioned or featured in these materials, it is usually as the dead, heroic martyrs of the past (as seen in references to Martin Luther King, Jr., historic civil rights organizations, and the Selma to Montgomery March), as disenfranchised voters (but not as workers), or as allies bearing witness and speaking out against the racial profiling and circumscribed job opportunities experienced by today’s immigrants (most notably the “AFL-CIO-sponsored delegation of prominent African American labor leaders who traveled to Alabama last month to see firsthand the law’s devastating impacts on immigrant workers and their families”).

Indeed, with the exception of a graph showing “African Americans are more likely to experience downward mobility” on their Civil and Workplace Rights page (which is noticeably posted without any accompanying report or announcement of a campaign agenda) and some mention of the impact of the foreclosure crisis on African American homeowners, there is little acknowledgement on the AFL-CIO website that African Americans are in a state of economic crisis.  That Blacks work, seek jobs, and belong to unions is barely recognized when in fact, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Blacks are still disproportionately more likely to be members of unions than whites or Latinos. Related, there is little mention of the impact of racial profiling and criminalization on African Americans’ employment status. This is extremely curious given that the AFL-CIO openly opposes voter disenfranchisement, which involves addressing the impact of felony convictions on African Americans’ right to vote in many states and works with the NAACP, who has pushed for felony reentry policies conducive to employment opportunities.

In hopes of pushing the AFL-CIO to expand its agenda, we want to address here why the two issues of police targeting of African Americans and Black (un)employment are intertwined.  This is more than a theoretical exercise given the aforementioned Black unemployment rate—which is higher in each state than the overall rate—and the fact that African Americans have a higher arrest rate, a higher imprisonment rate, and a disproportionate number under some type of community supervision than other racial groups. While the AFL-CIO is of course not the only labor organization in the United States, we purposefully address our concerns to the federation as it involves 56 national and international labor unions representing 12.2 million people in a country with only 16 million people represented by a union (those who are union members or have jobs covered by unions or employee association contracts). Thus, the AFL-CIO is one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in a country and world experiencing one of the worst financial crisis in decades.

This position statement addresses four issues related to the criminalization of African Americans and Black (un)employment: 1) arrest and conviction records and what this means for job applications and licensing; 2) surveillance on the way to work; 3) the health impact of criminalization and what this means for Black employment status; and 4) mass incarceration and prison labor. Our goal is to synthesize some of the ways the criminalization impacts African Americans’ efforts to seek work or maintain employment and also encourage the AFL-CIO to prioritize addressing the Black unemployment crisis.

Arrests, convictions, job applications, and licensing

Research studies on employers’ attitudes shows that African Americans tend to be the least favored job applicants due to racist stereotypes of being lazy, unmanageable, and having bad attitudes. When they are hired, African Americans are twice as likely to be laid off from jobs compared to whites even when other factors, such as human capital and job characteristics, are equal.  Anti-discrimination law and affirmative action policies have had limited impact on addressing racism in the private sector and the latter are not applicable to most small businesses, which have been touted by the federal government as the engine of new American jobs.  Even if anti-discrimination laws and enforcement were effective remedies to anti-Black discrimination from employers, it would not address the impact of the criminal justice system on the employment prospects of African Americans given that “in many states, discrimination against ex-felons is legally mandated.”  While the AFL-CIO is concerned with ex-felons getting the right to vote, it has not prioritized—or barely even mentioned—how ex-felons fare in terms of employment. But the federation needs to prioritize this issue for several reasons.

First, as of 2011, all 50 states banned, to an extent, ex-felons from public employment, a sector often considered an alternative from the private sector’s discriminatory practices against African Americans.  While some states apply ex-felon bans for convictions of certain crimes or restore the right to public employment after a period of time, most states “treat ‘felons’ as an undifferentiated group for the purposes of restricting access to unemployment.” Second, while employers in the private sector may be willing to evaluate a felony conviction against other factors—such as the type of crime an applicant was convicted of, how long ago the conviction happened, the ex-felon’s record since, and other aspects of an applicants’ story—licenses are required to participate in a variety of professions. As “formal permission granted by a governmental body, generally for a fee, to a person, firm, or corporation, to legally pursue some occupation or to legally carry on some business,” occupational licenses are required for many unskilled and semi-skilled occupations.  One such skill is barbering, a profession in which many African American men and some women participate as Black barber shops and hair salons are a niche market that Blacks, to an extent, still control. Third and related, not only are ex-felons banned from occupational licenses, but failing to obtain one and still working in professions that require them can result in legal action being taken against the worker, including arrest, as seen in the sweeps in 2010 of at least nine Black and Latino barbershops in Florida.  In these sweeps, armed agents, under the authority of the Department of Business and Professional Regulation inspectors, entered the shops without warrants and had barbers sit on the ground handcuffed while they rifled through work stations and inspected licenses. Ultimately 37 people were arrested in the sweeps. While the agents, including narcotics officers, claim they found evidence of guns, drugs and gambling, the overwhelming majority of the 37 were charged with nothing more than failing to have a license. For those who may have been barbering without a license while on parole, it can mean a return to prison. Taken together, ex-felons are “barred from more than eight hundred discrete occupations by laws regulating public-employment hiring or licensing.”

While all ex-felons, regardless of race, are vulnerable to limited employment prospects, African Americans in particular are negatively impacted by policies towards ex-felons for three reasons. The first is that as a group, Blacks have a higher imprisonment rate, a larger number under some type of community supervision, have a higher number of former prisoners, and based on previous incarceration rates, are projected to have a larger portion of their population incarcerated in their lifetime.  The second reason is there is more surveillance of Blacks when they apply for jobs, including employers asking African Americans point blank if they have conviction records but not always asking other races the same or being more likely to verify an African Americans’ application in terms of the honesty of its reporting. Research studies have shown this as have stories from workers. Regarding the latter, an African American mentioned to one of us that at his job a white man, a fellow busboy, bragged openly how he had been in jail but never reported it on his application because he knew employers wouldn’t check because he was white.  Third, because ex-felons can be legally excluded from some employment—despite no law requiring they be excluded from all jobs—racist employers can use felony convictions to legally exclude African Americans even when they may be open to hiring white ex-felons as well as undocumented immigrants—who may have felony convictions or questionable employment histories but are unable to be traced without documents attesting to their real identities.  Although, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), convictions should only be taken into consideration if it is related to the job, enforcement of EEOC policies tends to be limited.

Along with felony convictions, the criminal justice system impacts job seekers in other ways. In one of its few blog posts addressing how felony convictions impede employment—in which they mention how African Americans and Latinos are particularly impacted—the AFL-CIO announces new EEOC guidelines on the consideration of criminal background checks in hiring decisions. Notably, the EEOC’s Q & A about its guidelines addresses how revisions were necessary due to “disparate impact discrimination”—where a particular racial group could be disproportionately impacted by convictions even if background checks are conducted uniformly—and technology, which “made criminal history information much more accessible to employers.”  The AFL-CIO blog posts also mentions how the National Employment Law Project (NELP), one of the groups pushing the EEOC to make these changes, conducted a 2011 report emphasizing the use of technology by companies to exclude ex-felons from applying for jobs. Today, an estimated 90 percent of employers, including those in low-wage sector employment, conduct criminal background checks, and in doing so often outsource this task to companies who provide a pass/fail judgment and do not provide other details. Also, these reports may provide false information as “commercially prepared background checks have been found to be rife with inaccuracies.”  These screenings do not just target those with convictions but also those who have been arrested.  Despite EEOC guidelines stating that arrests not resulting in convictions should rarely be considered by an employer, a criminal record can include arrests, including those that were dropped because of factual innocence.

Taken together, as NELP reports, a staggering 65 million individuals with records of arrests or convictions are vulnerable to being excluded from jobs or fired from them due to criminal background checks and the outsourcing of them to companies with limited reporting procedures.  A good share of this 65 million is African American as they have an arrest rate that far exceeds other groups. Given that employers openly defy EEOC guidelines regarding criminal backgrounds, which includes posting ads in sources such as Craigslist dictating “‘no arrests’ or ‘clean’ or ‘clear’ criminal records,” the AFL-CIO, as a labor organization, also needs to consider how the EEOC guidelines that it reports on its blog are not sufficient for addressing the impact of the criminal justice system on Black employment.

Surveillance on the way to work

The issue of racial profiling and police programs disproportionately affecting people of color has garnered attention from many different communities and organizations over the last several decades. Testimonies, research studies, and organizational reports show African Americans are disproportionately impacted by racial profiling, and this includes not only in terms of being stopped and arrested but also killed by police and those representing extrajudicial organizations.  Surely the AFL-CIO must know this reality since some of their material mention that racial minorities have a tenuous relationship with the police and it issued a brief statement on the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.  Yet it is only the enforcement programs targeting undocumented immigrants, immigrants, and Latinos that have gotten attention among the AFL-CIO in their campaigns, legislative briefs, and other materials.

Just as it has openly questioned immigration enforcement programs such as Secure Communities, the AFL-CIO needs to denounce racial profiling and specific programs, such as Stop and Frisk, which focus primarily on African Americans in urban cities.   We are opposed to police harassment if the person is working, on the way to work, or just “standing on the corner,” as no one deserves to be targeted and profiled.  But we want to encourage the AFL-CIO, as a labor organization, to consider the impact policing has on African Americans’ employment status.  Getting back and forth from work is a hassle because of police harassment for many African Americans, particularly those living in cities with Stop and Frisk programs. For example, in a video about Operation Clean Halls, a part of the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop and Frisk program in which the NYPD patrols private apartment buildings, residents, including Black women, talk about the hassle of leaving and entering the building and how it makes them not want to leave their homes, including for work. Even when police programs don’t originally begin as a formal part of Stop and Frisk, they can take on a similar function in terms of racially profiling African Americans.

For example, in New York City, the Taxi/Livery Robbery Inspection Program (TRIP) was reported by the NYT to be “routinely detaining and searching livery passengers without suspicion of any unlawful activity.”  Given that “‘livery cars are the only cabs available outside of Manhattan, virtually everyone who is a victim of this program is either black or Latino.’”  The NYT story describes the experience of Terrence Battle, a Black radio executive who was returning home from work in the early morning hours and stopped by police outside his front door because, as they told him, his “mere entry into a cab with a [TRIP] decal opened him to their search.” Of course police harassment of African Americans on the way to work occurs in cities without Stop and Frisk or other specific police programs.  A case in point: one of us knows a white person who manages a factory in the Midwest who told us that his employee, an African American, was stopped by the police when walking to work and detained. Eventually, this factory manager had to intervene and get the company lawyers involved. The African American employee now walks around with a letter on official company stationary stating that he is an employee and providing his work hours, with the business card of the manager attached. This letter is meant to deter an arrest of the Black man if he is stopped again but it will not make him less vulnerable to being harassed or even save him from an arrest.

Another way that police harassment affects the employment status of African Americans is by making them get tangled up in the system and forcing them to take time away from work if they are employed. For example, in a report documenting “the human impact” of the NYPD Stop and Frisk Program, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) points out that Stop and Frisk arrests “often leave people languishing ‘in the system’ as they are moved from the precinct to the courthouse where they wait to appear before a judge”—a process that can “take days, even if the charges are dropped or dismissed right away.”  Employees have to explain their absences from work, including time they might have been locked up in jail, time to go to court, and time to meet with an attorney if they have one.  Lost time for many who work in hourly wage work, as do many African Americans, is lost money earned. And it can also make you vulnerable to being fired As one victim of Stop and Frisk in New York City comments in the CCR report, “People actually lose their employment because they weren’t able to come into work.  And since jobs are so hard to get right about now, employers don’t want to hear, ‘Oh, you can’t come in today because you [were] just arrested.’” Having to explain to an employer absences due to an arrest will be stressful for anyone as it may cast suspicion on one’s work ethic, morality, criminality, and reliability.  However, given that dominant racist stereotypes of Blacks as lacking a work ethic, being prone to criminality and unsafe, this perception may weigh especially heavy on the shoulders of African Americans who have been arrested and must explain their time away from their job for legal affairs.

Racial Profiling and Mental Health/Physical Health

Clearly, racial profiling and criminalization create situations where Blacks are barred from employment, harassed on the way to and from work, and have their physical movements surveilled and controlled to the point of limiting or discouraging movement outside of one’s immediate neighborhood. But racial profiling, massive imprisonment, and criminalization also affect the physical and mental health of Blacks, most of whom live under the constant fear of arrest.

Science and public health experts have documented the impact of racism and racial profiling on the physical, emotional, and psychological health of African Americans. One need not be the direct recipient of racial profiling to feel its effects either. Other studies point to the stress related to knowing one is a part of an oppressed group, or that one’s racial identity has been historically targeted. Put another way, many African Americans do not have to have a personal bad experience with police in order feel the stressful impacts of racial profiling.

City Limits reported on a public hearing in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York where residents clearly named the physical, psychological, and economic impacts of NYPD’s Stop and Frisk policy. A young Black man at this hearing spoke while “anger rattled his voice” and said he’d been stopped over fifty times, and given as many tickets for offenses like loitering and disorderly conduct. “I’ve got fifty tickets in my house and I ain’t got fifty dollars,” he said.

Here, we see a young Black man clearly reliving the rage he felt. Further, receiving fifty citations for someone who “ain’t got fifty dollars” creates an additional financial burden, and if gone unpaid, could result in higher fines, a drivers’ license suspension, or jail time for simply leaving his home. Creating a situation where it is difficult to leave home to even travel to and from work, the mounting bills from tickets and the overall experience likely fuels anxiety, rage, and potentially, physical symptoms of stress (like high blood pressure and hypertension) that African Americans disproportionately suffer from.

Even if someone works with colleagues and bosses who are sympathetic and won’t judge your character based on how the police treat you, racial profiling can impact African American workers in other ways. For example, one of us knows a Black man who was stopped late one night when he was going to a corner store on a still busy street to buy some cookies. He was surrounded by police with guns drawn and made to put his hands on a patrol car. A person had reported that a Black man with a puffy coat on—which this man was wearing—had robbed them. Having left his home without his driver’s license since he was walking to a store just around the corner, this Black man was cast as more suspicious by the police, even as he could hear the police talking about the suspect wearing a hoodie of a particular color when he was only wearing a white tee shirt under his coat. At a certain point, another patrol car pulls up, this pointing a bright light into his face to purposefully make it difficult for him to see as he was put into a one-man lineup on the street. Nervously, he waited for the person’s identification; fortunately it was correct and he was eventually let go by the police. Before they released him, they asked him what he did for a living. When he responded that he worked for a non-profit organization, one of the cops sneered and commented on the “fancy job” he had.

The next day, while visiting his family, this Black man had a panic attack that made him think he was dying. Literally. He experienced such intense physical pain in his back and arms that he couldn’t sleep for several days in his bed; the little rest he got for the next few weeks was spent sitting in a chair in his living room. He went to his doctor and was put on some temporary medication and told that if he had waited just a little longer to get checked out, he would have had permanent damage to his esophagus. When he told the doctor what happened, the doctor told him his physical ailment was most certainly panic-related and caused by his encounter with the police. This man was “lucky” because he had health insurance, sympathetic colleagues and a boss he could explain his situation to, and the type of job where he could schedule doctor’s appointments. But he nevertheless lost time at work, had to work more later to catch up, and go and back and forth to the doctor’s offices during the workday, all while managing the physical and emotional trauma of what the police put him through. All of this made already stressful work days even more stressful.

Of course men are not the only ones dealing with the health and stress related impacts of racial profiling. The City Limits article mentioned above also recounts the story of an older woman, a grandmother, who “said that she was beaten by police officers in 2008 when she could not produce identification. Both of her wrists were broken during the incident.” The NYT also recently reported that in New York City over 46,784 women were stopped; many mention the stress related to the actual Stop and Frisk.  An additional layer of this stress, which men can also be subjected to, includes instances of sexual harassment and assault in those interactions. 

Not only do these interactions have negative consequences for Blacks in terms of their health and well-being, it also has consequences for the kinds of work Blacks are able to get or keep. Many of the jobs that require criminal background checks in the US labor market are ones in which African American workers are overrepresented when compared to the entire labor force. These include jobs in government public service (15.1% vs. 4.4%), and health care, education and social services (14.1% vs. 5.8%.). While these figures seem to contradict the statement that criminalization of African Americans through racial profiling and stop and frisk techniques impede their employment prospects, we should consider two things. In many cities like New York, Washington, DC, and others with large populations of Black immigrants, we see the increase in jobs (like in health care services) traditionally held by African American workers increasingly held by Black immigrants. While African and Caribbean Blacks are just as likely to be racially profiled, they may be less likely, compared to African Americans, to have established criminal records as a product of racial profiling starting at a young age.

Additionally, when we look at the projects for job growth in the US, we see some potential barriers for African American workers to take advantage of such opportunities in the future. According to the Department of Labor, Black workers disproportionately hold jobs in sectors where there is expected to be the highest rates of job growth from 2010-2020: health/social assistance and education being two of those areas. If we continue to see such high levels of criminalization and racial profiling at younger and younger ages, and with more requirements for drug testing, criminal back ground and credit checks as conditions of employment, will African Americans be able to maintain strong employment numbers in the sectors where they have traditionally been able to maintain not only jobs, but middle class incomes and benefits.

For instance, consider that HIV/AIDS prevention and education programs at community-based organizations are one of the health/social service areas of the economy that employs many African Americans. It is often one of the only ways out of poverty and into income stability that many marginalized Black people (homeless, LGBT, people with HIV, former and active drug users, etc.) are able to attain at all. But doing outreach in the street among homeless, drug users, sex workers, or simply public spaces where Black people congregate on behalf of these community-based organizations can become one of the ways Black people are at risk of coming into contact with law enforcement. One of us knows a young Black transgender HIV/AIDS outreach worker who had been arrested by the police for prostitution when she was doing HIV prevention outreach among Black LGBT youth in NYC. The organization eventually issued work IDs to many of its outreach staff as a way to prevent arrest when they were doing their jobs. But the IDs did not prevent police from arresting her again for “prostitution” because she was carrying condoms as part of her HIV prevention work. Her place of employment had to secure legal assistance for her release from Rikers Island (Human Rights Watch recently documented many cases of police departments using “condoms as evidence of prostitution” across the country).

Prison Labor

One aspect of the perpetual criminalization that Blacks experience is imprisonment itself. The labor movement and unions have invested likely millions of dollars in campaigning for “comprehensive immigration reform,” and an end to the criminalization of undocumented immigrants (which can result in imprisonment in detention centers, and ultimately deportation), and protesting free-trade agreements that result in “outsourcing” (the exporting of thousands of manufacturing jobs from the US to exploit cheaper, nonunionized labor in the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia.). But the labor movement is almost completely silent on the issue of “in-sourcing”—the work that US prisoners are doing for little or no money for state and federal governments as well as many of the private corporations that are targeted by the union movement for other kinds of union-busting policies.

Many criminal justice reform advocates often point to the language of the 13^th Amendment of the US Constitution that abolished slavery after the Civil War “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It is after 1865 that we begin to see the expanded relationship of the criminalization of Blacks (in the North and the South) and the use of Black labor as a major part of the prison experience, such as convict leasing, “chain gangs,” etc. Many prisoner advocates point to the “excess labor” caused by de-industrialization and the economic restructuring of the US economy in the 1970s as the explanation for the exponential growth of the prison system and all of its ancillary logic and institutions. We think the labor and economic arguments are insufficient in explaining this phenomenon; at the same time, the glaring silence on the part of labor unions (and the left as a whole) to highlight prison labor as part of the narrative of what has happened to the US economy, makes it worth discussing here.

Prison labor constitutes a $2.4 billion industry. As reported by Rania Khalek for Alternet, employment law scholar Noah Zatz estimates that “Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States.” Many are working in jobs that help the prison facility operate (laundry, food service, etc.) and many are working for private industry corporations who contract with actual factories located in prison facilities to produce a range of different goods and services that include agriculture and farming, garment making, solar panels, office furniture, auto parts, jet and plane parts, and most ironically, body armor and weapons for prison guards, the US military, and local police forces. Most prisoners make somewhere between $.23 per hour and up to about $5.00 per hour.  Between 1980 and 1994 alone, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the prison labor force has likely grown since then, it is safe to assume that the profits accrued from the use of prison labor have reached even higher levels.

Many prison reform advocates focus their attention on “private prisons,” those facilities owned and operated by corporations, and seem to suggest that government facilities or those without corporate interests are preferable. This is shortsighted advocacy, especially when one considers how labor happens inside federal prisons.

Most federal prisoners work for UNICOR (also known as Federal Prison Industries, Inc. or FPI), for $.23 to $1.25 per day. Prisoners in other facilities may make more. FPI, Inc. was established in 1934 (in a period that most labor advocates mark as a watershed moment in the “protection” of workers because of the passage of the Labor Relations Act of 1935), with the mission to “to employ and provide job skills training to the greatest practicable number of inmates confined within the Federal Bureau of Prisons; contribute to the safety and security of our Nation’s federal correctional facilities by keeping inmates constructively occupied; provide market-quality products and services; operate in a self-sustaining manner; and minimize FPI’s impact on private business and labor.”

The establishment of the FPI was in fact negotiated by the American Federation of Labor, uncomfortable with this new federal initiative that would potentially increase competition with unionized labor. But according to UNICOR’s website, “[AFL Director] Bates and [President] Roosevelt were able to draw out [AFL President] Green’s objections to the proposed legislation as well as his suggestions for improvement, and, ultimately, the American Federation of Labor withdrew its opposition. (Subsequently, AFL Vice President Thomas Rickert became a charter member of FPI’s Board of Directors. Later, William Green’s successor as AFL President, George Meany, also served as an FPI Board member.)”

At the end of 2011, UNICOR operated 94 factories at 70 prison facilities, while using about 15,907 inmates as labor.  UNICOR’s products are organized by several areas, including Clothing and Textiles; Electronics; Fleet Management and Vehicular Components; Industrial Products; Office Furniture; Recycling; and Services. UNICOR’s customers were Department of Defense (47%), the DHS (18%), the Department of Justice (9%), the General Services Administration (5%), and the Social Security Administration (5%). Most of these agencies are required to purchase goods from UNICOR.

But it doesn’t end with UNICOR. According to Abe Louise Young in The Nation, “Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit  (WOTC), private-sector employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can “earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to target group workers.”

Liberals and conservatives alike often cite the numbers of “unskilled” workers in Black communities as one of the more sympathetic reasons for the high rates of unemployment. But if prisoners are able to produce goods that require highly skilled labor like some of the aforementioned products, why are they not “skilled” enough to do this labor in their own communities and as free human beings? Furthermore, even if a prisoner gains a particular kind of skilled trade while incarcerated, they are far less likely to be able to obtain a job using that skill based on their status as an “ex-felon,” and are barred from many social safety net programs (like public housing and welfare in some states) or from getting federal grants and loans to further their education.

In a 1998 interview with the Washington Free Press, prisoner Paul Wright (then editor of Prison Legal News), responded to the labor movement’s lack of investment in prison labor’s impact on US workers and the economy:

“The U.S. garment industry has gone three places: it’s gone overseas to sweatshops in Southeast Asia and Latin America, it’s done by illegal immigrants here in the United States, and it’s done in prisons. I don’t think they would seriously tell you that Joe Blow got out of prison and now he’s working as a seamster in downtown Seattle’s International District. It’s just not happening. The other contradiction you have here is when you have jobs that don’t fall into the category of sweatshop labor, like the MicroJet jobs. MicroJet is a company that uses very cutting-edge and sophisticated technology. By bringing these jobs into the prisons they’re depressing the economy for everyone else out of prison.”

According to Wright, AFL-CIO did pass a resolution in 1998 opposing prison labor. And the AFL-CIO does mention in some of its materials the work conditions of correctional staff. But why has there been, among mainstream labor unions, no major organizing on the issue of prisoners as workers—even when recent prison hunger strikes in Georgia and California cited labor issues as part of their ongoing problems with the condition of imprisonment?  Given the experience of imprisonment, policing and state control as a regular and everyday experience Black life, it begs the us to wonder why unions, if they are worried about their future relevance in US politics, would not seize upon the issue of prison labor (if not for ethical reasons, at least for strategic ones) as a major part of its organizing.

Conclusion

Labor unions have a serious role to play in advancing a social justice agenda beyond the vital bread and butter issues of wages and work conditions. While under serious political attack, labor unions enjoy an overwhelming level of support among African Americans, regardless of union membership. Yet the AFL-CIO, which represents a significant portion of the 16 million people affiliated with unions in the United States, does not appear to take seriously Black unemployment or how criminalization jeopardizes African Americans’ access to work or the conditions under which they labor. As we have demonstrated, racial profiling, criminalization, and imprisonment limit the ability of African Americans to find, secure, or keep employment and yet the AFL-CIO does little to publicly challenge this reality. While individual unions that are part of the federation may prioritize addressing the criminalization of African Americans and Black unemployment, the AFL-CIO has not. As we applaud the AFL-CIO for taking a public stand against immigration enforcement programs such as Secure Communities, and for being part of a larger social justice agenda in terms of defending voting rights, we encourage the federation to prioritize addressing Black workers.  Until this happens, we can only wonder, what is it about African Americans that make them undesirable subjects for labor unions to engage and to organize on their behalf?

To learn more about the authors of the position statement, go to their websites at www.tamaranopper.com and www.kenyonfarrow.com.

Remember the PBS hard hitting political documentary series Frontline? You know, the show you can often count on to give you the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism that explains, in great painstaking detail, everything from Wall Street’s role in foreclosure crisis, the lies that were told to get us into the War in Iraq, how the health insurance industry bought Congress to get the Affordable Care Act?

So imagine that the story of the War in Iraq was told through the stories of the Iraqis, who are describing the day the bombs fell, but the documentary hardly mentions George Bush (Jr or Sr), oil, or 9-11 as the excuse for US invasion? You’re left with a story that seems to be about the inexplicable and yet seemingly inevitable mass death and destruction, but is absent of history, political and policy contexts. You’d begin to wonder, why didn’t people just move out of the way when the bombs were raining out of the sky?

That’s what tonight’s Frontline episode, Endgame: AIDS in Black America was like. The documentary was very unlike most Frontline documentaries, which use the personal narratives of people living through a particular issue as a window into the larger political story, where you’re left with both a micro and macro understanding of what’s going on. Instead, the way the documentary is constructed, heavy on the personal narrative, and with some good analysis by leading AIDS researchers and advocates, lacks any interview or in depth policy, political, or epidemiological analysis with a government official (with ONAP’s Greg Millet as the only exception, but he was not a govt official at the onset of the epidemic), from the 1980s, 1990s or now, that asks any tough questions about what the fuck they were doing about Black people with HIV/AIDS.

The kind of activism focuses on the work the women of ACT-UP did for women with AIDS, but doesn’t name any of the Black women who were living with the virus who were brave enough to organize and be present in that now famous action on the CDC. And Black trans women for whom the epidemic is particularly high aren’t even present AT ALL. And despite the issue of housing and homelessness as a major predictor of HIV infection…it is completely disappeared, especially in the context of the massive rise in homelessness in the 1980s.

It frames Magic Johnson’s announcement as the “wake up call” for Black people, but only brackets the deaths of Max Robinson, Sylvester, Jermaine Stewart, Alvin Ailey and not even mention Eazy E or Rev James Cleveland as other important moments for Black folks in the HIV/AIDS crisis. It also does not talk about Tongues Untied, and the Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ film deals with HIV/AIDS and was a particular political lightening rod that was national news. It doesn’t talk about the work shows like A Different World did, or even artists like Salt-N-Pepa, Prince, or TLC who were talking about safe sex and HIV in their music before the government did anything. Contrary to Frontline’s usual style, they did not include an interview from C. Everett Koop or anybody from the CDC during Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, or Bush Jr.’s administrations. No political figures are held accountable for lack of funding, focus, or for instituting regressive policies that caused the HIV epidemic to rise in the Black community.

In fact, political leaders are treated as heroes. George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program is celebrated (with a sidenote from the narrator that it had controversial elements) without the many critiques that exist. Instead, we’re treated to scenes of the “backwards” South where people still will not eat behind people who have HIV. OK, but the question should be, why in 2012 are people not aware what we know about how AIDS is spread, or better yet, why don’t they believe it? The education system in the south being horrible (Alabama is where they focus the southern portion of the film), the disenfranchisement of Black people continually from all most aspects of political life is not raised. The continued federal funding for abstinence only sex education that is heavy on religious tropes and empty on sexual health information is depicted, but no policy makers are interrogated. And yet, homophobia in Black churches is discussed at length.

The narration, slow and intent on evoking too much “emotion” sounds more like a Lifetime movie of the week than what you normally have with the Frontline brand.

The best part of the film was the opening, dispelling the myth that the first gay men who presented as HIV positive when that MMWR was written in June of 1981, were white. Several were Black. The question the film should have been asking, “If white gay men weren’t the ‘original’ community the virus was discovered in the the US, why was it portrayed that way? Who’s decision was it to racialize the epidemic as such, and why was Black death always given a perfunctory nod, and not anything to be alarmed about to even mount the national hysteria, though not entirely helpful, at least took place? And making the political actors over the last 30 years account for that.

Or, a better framing could have been to open with the segment of analysis given by Dr. Bob Fullilove, Greg Millet, Phill Wilson and Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick at the very end of the film about Washington, DC, and then diving deeper into why DC’s epidemic is one of the worst in the world (if it were a country) and then pulling your happy ass up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and start asking some fucking questions.

Instead, we’re treated to a lot of personal narratives that continue to individualize the epidemic, straight black men with HIV are demonized (if for no other reason that they are almost entirely absent as narrators, but instead only show up as the infectors of Black women), and you walk away from this not understanding a single solitary issue about why the epidemic is so bad in Black communities despite no differences in sexual behaviors or drug use among Blacks.

Bette Davis says as Margo Channing in All About Eve, “I detest cheap sentiment.” She was talking at the time about music. I could say the same about this film. But in this case, cheap sentiment has really unfortunate political consequences.

Now, I may not agree with Barron on SOME of the aforementioned issues. But I know, as an advocate around social services for people in NYC (including people with HIV/AIDS), public education (and the whitening of the CUNY system), and against gentrification and policy brutality, Charles Barron has been one of the few councilmembers Black and Latino NYC can rely on.

Furthermore, why would MoveOn.org take him on, given a range of other MAJOR issues in NYC happening right now? My theory is this. Barron currently represents majority Black Brownsville and East New York, Brooklyn. If he got Ed Towns’ Congressional seat, he’d be representing a district that includes Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill–all neighborhoods that are rapidly becoming white when they’ve been majority Black for decades.  I wonder how many MoveOn.org staff live in this section of Brooklyn (and I don’t mean that there are none, I mean that given how rapidly these neighborhood have gentrified, there are potentially several.). I don’t know if this is the sole reason why MoveOn would take this on, but I really cannot see any other reason why this would be something they’d make a decision, as a so-called “progressive” online organizing website, to make an effort to challenge Barron. Clearly many Democrats are worried what a radical like Barron would mean in the halls of Congress (especially with the un-radical Barack Obama as sitting President, and all the ways the Right-wing will make Barron a national target).

I know Hakeem Jeffries is also running for this seat. I have no opinion about Jeffries one way or another. I know he’s young, has been very present and good some issues like “stop and frisk” and people seem to dig him. But I think we’re seeing evidence that white progressives (and their aficionados) are trying to replace Civil Rights (and in Barron’s case, Black Power) generation Black leaders with Black people they’re more comfortable with (which in 10 years will simply lead to running white candidates in central Brooklyn, Harlem, and the likes). No shade, Jeffries, I don’t know you, so I am not suggesting you’re THAT Black dude. But I am saying MoveOn.org are THOSE whites.

Here’s the email they sent:

Dear MoveOn member,

There are some people who don’t belong in elected office. Charles Barron is one of those people

Barron is running for Congress from New York’s new 8th District, and with very few voters expected to show up for the primary on June 26, he has a legitimate chance of winning. Retiring corporate Democrat Ed Towns has endorsed Barron to spite his political enemies and Barron is furiously working to hide his inflammatory record.

But what Barron doesn’t want you to know is that rather than actually trying to fix problems, he’s spent his career specializing in divisive, offensive, and just plain outrageous statements and behavior. Here’s just a sampling:

• “Out there, they don’t know that [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi was our brother. People say ‘Didn’t he kill all those people?’ I say, ‘I don’t know anything.’”¹
  
• When asked about the gay rights movement, Barron said, “I don’t consider it a civil rights issue of our time.”²
• “The biggest terrorist in the world is the government of Israel.”³
• “I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”⁴
• Barron explained his opposition to gay marriage by saying, “I believe simply in an institution of marriage between a man and a woman. My wife and I believe that. We support every other thing regarding gay rights and we support everything but the marriage thing. We don’t want to have people impose their values or beliefs on us and we’re not imposing ours on you.”⁵
• Barron invited Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe to speak at City Hall despite the fact that, “Amnesty International holds President Mugabe and his government responsible for the attacks against opposition politicians, against members of civilian society, against African farm workers and for creating an environment of fear and intimidation.”⁶

This is the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from the most offensive tea partier. Those tea partiers, frankly, don’t belong in Congress. And neither does Charles Barron.

Can you pass on this email to make sure no voter in the 8th District is fooled by Barron’s recent attempts to whitewash his record?

Thanks for all you do.

–Daniel, Levana, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. “Qaddafi Eulogized in Bed-Stuy,” The Brooklyn Ink, November 4, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276367&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=1

2. “Charles Barron opposes same-sex marriage, fake entries on his Wikipedia page,” Capital New York, November 28, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276370&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=

3. “Backgrounder: Charles Barron,” Anti-Defamation League, Accessed June 13, 2012
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276369&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=3

4. “Vote for Hakeem Jeffries,” New York Daily News, June 10, 2012
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276368&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=4

5. “Charles Barron opposes same-sex marriage, fake entries on his Wikipedia page,” Capital New York, November 28, 2011http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276370&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=5

6. “Metro Matters; Mugabe’s Visit Has Council Speechless,” The New York Times, September 16, 2002
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=276371&id=43645-17193658-N1t1%3DHx&t=6

SlutWalk NYC Speech

Saturday, October 1, 2011

I am a slut. And I have always been a slut. Some of you may find this tongue-in-cheek, or even annoying coming from a male-identified person, right? Because when men call themselves sluts or ho’s, or players or whatever, it doesn’t carry the same social stigmas that it carries for women, particularly women of color. I understand that.

But I am not here to make fun of sexual violence, street harassment or any other form of nonconsensual behavior, often visited on the bodies of women. Nor am I here to try to displace the impact of gendered forms of violence against women, including transgender women, have to face, by doing what people with whatever relative form of privilege try to do when they want to justify being in spaces not deemed for them―to claim that they too, suffer forms of oppression. And then proceed to take over and displace the most impacted voices. But I am here because of this:

When I was 14 years old, as my body started to develop, and my particular kind of Black gay gendered body began to move through the world, I began to receive a lot of attention for older men. I was harassed on the street. I was, on 3 different occasions in one week when I was 15, followed by three different men, one of whom was in a car. When I was about 25 years old and living in New York City, I was once followed by a white van while walking to the train at 4am in the morning on my way home from clubbing in Chelsea, and had to run like hell to get away from it.

Most recently, in conversations about “men on the down low”– bisexual Black men who are not open about their relationships with men to their female partners–gay men are portrayed as the vectors of disease, particularly seen as the cause of HIV rates among Black women, though people are less likely to care that actually Black gay men have higher HIV rates than men who are not out, or so-called DL. And it is difficult to get people to care about the HIV epidemic where we’re concerned, because we cannot be seen as “innocent victims.” While most obviously an expression of the anxieties of bisexuality of Black men,  the “down low” framework also positions Black gay men as predatory, as competitors with straight Black women, as a threat to the success of the Black family, Black marriages, and Black progress in general. In other words, we are sluts.

So with this in mind, I want to challenge the way many straight men working against gender based violence have framed the debate– “Men don’t have to wake up in the morning and wonder if what I put on is going to make me the target of violence.” Unfortunately, many queer, gay, SGL, and transgender men and boys know this reality all too well. I am well aware of the ways in which I am marked, my gender, the sex I have (or am imagined to be having), and my physical body, as a problem―to be controlled and policed by the larger Black community in informal ways, the church, by the state policing apparatus, and by public health epidemiologists.

And like many of us, I have had to struggle with the anxiety that my body and sexuality, regardless of what I wear or how I butch or femme I behave, produces in other people. And that anxiety produces a range of responses from disgust, to titillation, to embarrassment. The weight of that is very real and it can be crushing.

Yet despite all the negativity, the stigma, the present and historical trauma I carry, all of the threats of violence, all the times I have been attacked verbally or physically, all the predatory acts of other people, I have come to embrace the fact that yes, I am a slut too.

I also have come to love my body (which I didn’t always), and often I like showing it off, and I know sometimes I dress like a faggot, even when it is sometimes dangerous for me to do so. I know the irony of the moments at which I feel my sexiest, are the same moments at which I am the most visible, legible as a faggot―which in many peoples’ eyes, is synonymous with slut.  I know stares of disgust I see from men, and sometimes women, and sometimes from other LGBT people who wish I would be less loud, less flamboyant, less exuberant, and less obvious in my own body and sexuality. And I don’t give a fuck!

So I chose to speak at SlutWalk because I believe playing the politics of respectability will get us no where. Being slutty and promiscuous is not incongruent with dignity, self esteem or consent!  I support all of us creating ourselves in the image that speaks most to us―even if that means not accepting the label of slut for oneself, for personal, historical and/or political reasons. But some of us have figured out that while we are both targeted for our gender or our sexuality, we also continue to embrace being utterly trashy and scandalous, and our desire to do so does not take anything away from you, and how you chose to be in the world.

In many ways The Color Purple, the book and film, were huge parts of my understanding of this dichotomy. When I was a kid, I most identified with young Celie. I felt ugly, skinny, and undesirable. But I knew that I wanted to be like Shug Avery―empowered, sexy, queer, creative, worldly, and someone who just didn’t take any shit. She was a Black woman who defied convention, and in the world of the novel, while she struggled with the gendered expectations of a preacher’s daughter and her estrangement from her family, she still chose to live the way she wanted, even being labeled a slut, and rumored to have “that nasty women’s disease!”

So I feel that Black queer, bi, gay, SGL men have had to struggle with our bodies at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, but there are maps toward liberation, even in the midst of what seems like unsurmountable oppression and violence.

But I also want to extend my slutty hand to straight Black men, too.  The recent campaigns targeting  Black youth in different cities to ban “pants sagging” to me represent the way in which even the Black male body, even when it is assumed to be cis-gendered and heterosexual, creates a sexualized anxiety in the eyes of the state, whites, and Black middle-class with “racial uplift” values. And while some Black people reject these forms of criminalization of Black youth, we have an opportunity to work with young straight Black men and boys to fight back against their own criminalization, but also use this a way to critically engage their own sexist and misogynist assumptions about women, queers and trans people. In other words, what would organizing poor and working class Black and Latino straight men look like who both denounced the criminalization and hyper surveillance of their bodies and clothes, at the same time were committed to end the ways they are privileged and encouraged to commit violence against trans people, women and queers, or to act as enforcers of gender standards through street harassment?

I hope that we are able to own the real legacies of trauma many of us face in terms of the ways in which we are sexualized and criminalized in communities and by the state, to say nothing of the acts of violence that have been committed against us.  But that does not negate nor render impossible the many of us who, despite those legacies,  own our overt sexuality or promiscuity, and see it as a liberatory process. So here’s to all of us who realize we’ve been victimized by racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and labeled perpetual sluts and the enemies of whiteness, respectability, patriarchal families, and the nation itself. And despite the pain it sometimes causes, we’ve made a path for ourselves where we still get to be in our bodies in the way we want―to dress slutty, behave scandalously, love fiercely, and fuck consensually.

On the Day of International Memorials for Troy Davis

Riverside Church, NYC.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

The most befitting thing I can say on this day comes from James Baldwin. “To be black and conscious in America is to live in a constant state of rage.”

I was enraged by the state sanctioned execution of Troy Davis. Not 24 hours later, my fire-hot rage would turn to stony indignation upon learning that the same set of bureaucrats who refused to stop this execution, removed the death penalty from the sentence of white man who professed to the guilt of the violence he was charged with. These two incidences, clearly linked to send a message to us, were an articulation of the obvious–black bodies, irrespective of facts, are always criminal. Public displays of violence against black bodies, in so far as it re-iterates the role that Black suffering plays in making white supremacy coherent in every day life, is the preferred method of articulating patriarchal white supremacist control.

So while we mourn his death and all of the things it raises for us―racism, the death penalty, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, the historic trauma of lynchings, etc., I want us to move beyond discourses of innocence, for while it may make us feel more righteous in our defense of Troy Davis, and the many like him who have been executed or who currently languish inside prison walls, we must come to accept that to be Black and “innocent” is an oxymoron in the world we live in.

Once in New Orleans in 2008, a city where I once lived, I was riding a bike in the French Quarter, slowly alongside some colleagues, none of which were Black, who were walking. We were in town for a conference, and I was showing them around when a white unmarked Crown Victoria pulled up, cut me off by stopping abruptly in front of me. Two, what I think were Blackwater private security officers, jumped out, pulled guns, demanding I drop to the ground. My friends stood to my right, and when one of them asked what was going on, the officers asked “Is he with you?” When they responded “yes,” they backed away, and said that there had been a number of robberies by “thugs on bikes.”

Blackness itself is criminal, and my having a college degree, how I was dressed, or any of the others thing Black folks intentionally do to avoid being seen as criminal by white people or the state at large, and none of these would protect me. I also know, had I not had non-Black people to “claim” me as “their” Black―what if I was just taking a slow bike ride down Dauphine through the French Quarter that night―I would have met with a very different fate.

Even the Left in the US engages in other forms of innocence frames outside of prison reform contexts, that still reference and reduce Blacks to criminality. Often the anti-war, or anti-globalization movements, including the current mobilizations on Wall Street explain acts of police violence or arrests as “just for exercising our right to protest.” These statements are an exercise in bad faith―they suggest that the police have some legitimate reasons for arrests, or that white bodies simply protesting the seat of American capital are innocents, not criminal. What would it mean to embrace criminality, as opposed to trying to rhetorically avoid it by notions of innocence or exercising “rights?”

So not only must we move past the politics of innocence, if we’re invested yes, in saving individuals from jaws of the death penalty, but also in radically altering the conditions that create its existence. We must also look critically at the symbolism of Black subjugation that exist in the death penalty and the prison, but also in everyday neighborhood policing and “stop and frisk” methods, and the communities that become disappeared through gentrification, and replaced by various markers of white dominance―the coffee shop, the dog shit, white babies with Black and brown nannies, or the soul food restaurants that lose all their Black customers. All of these, to me, are forms of terror that speak to the everyday and to the exceptional, and our politics have often failed to move beyond policy, to get to the core logics that make policies possible. For me that means we have to make sense out of Troy Davis’ death as symbol―that public displays of Black death and suffering are really necessary to making white supremacy coherent. From Rodney King, to Hurricane Katrina and the failed levies, to the earthquake in Haiti, to Troy Davis, episodic displays of Black suffering and subjugation are ever present.

Afro-Brazilian scholar João Costa Vargas, in an unpopular (yet no less eloquent) speech he delivered this spring at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference at UC Riverside noted “Why doesn’t Black suffering and death appeal and effectively mobilize beyond the seemingly unique catastrophic moments? Why is it that, when Black suffering and death are expressed, they are almost always forced into a conversation that focuses on the experiences of non-Blacks?”

Let us remember Troy Davis not only by calling attention to the need to end the death penalty. Let us not simply use it as a call to end imprisonment as a form of punishment. Both of these are necessary and critical. But if we are serious about ending state violence, we must also be willing to look to different set of political objectives―where the everyday and mundane, the episodic and extraordinary violence visited upon the Black body (symbolizing degradation, suffering, subjugation and death) does not exist as the thing to make all other life relevant.

Writing that influenced my thinking here:

Warfare in the American Homeland, edited by Joy James

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

Never Meant To Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities by Joao Costa Vargas

On Black Men by David Marriott

That said, I am finding myself more interested in the manner in which people are using creative forms to express ideas for audiences. As a result, I am entertaining ideas of getting back on stage in some way, shape or form, or exploring other kinds of writing–more long form, narrative, nonfiction or even fiction, as a method of creativity, political protest, and artistic endeavor.

I’ve posted some of that work here–Yolo Akili’s video work, Brontez Purnell’s growing from punk kid to full fledged performance artist, Awkward Black Girl, and now, another friend, Desiree Marshall (Awkward Black Girl isn’t a friend. But the others are.)

I’ve known Des for many years as our work as organizers and trainers in activist spaces. I was always impressed by her intellect, and the charisma she brought to political work. I’ve known she was also a spoken word artist, and always liked her work, but seeing her here, delivering this poem, “F*ck Facebook” made me see the incredible power she brings to her work as a performer, and her ability to command the audience’s attention. In addition, the piece itself, took me to some internal places about my own uses and experiences of facebook, of failed relationships, and I guess she commanded me, cynical me, away from my critical eye, even my eye as a friend of Des’ into the world of the piece itself. She had me. I loveit when an artist/ performer makes me want to perform again, and inspires me to step my own game up.

I think Des should write a whole show and take it on the road. There’s a space for her in the world, and the gift she has.

Watch and see.

Let me first state that there is no pretense of objectivity or an emotional distance here for several reasons.

One, Brontez Purnell is a very close friend of mine.

Two, this issue cuts at the core of some thoughts and problems I have with existing frameworks of victim, and the demands made on victims of violence to behave (past or present behaviors) in a fashion acceptable to others in order to claim one has been victimized; the role of police and questions of political alignments and authenticity; and the demands on victims to recall and script every fact in exactly the right chronology in order to be seen as credible.

Last week, I received a phone call from Brontez—again, close friend and musician/dancer/writer who lives in Oakland, California. It was the day after he and friend/bandmate Adal had left the Paradiso nightclub when two Black men with some Caribbean accent began harassing them as they left the club. Adal is not queer, but the two men, according to Brontez, assumed that they were a couple, and began calling them “batty boy” and other epithets. Finally, they made the statement, “if we were at home you’d be dead by now.”

Brontez, clearly enraged, went the fuck off. After more words were exchanged, and Brontez says he spit at the car the men were in, and then he was punched in the face. Brontez says he then hit the man’s car with his bicycle lock and they assaulted Brontez and Adal (who’s face was broken in five places). The police were called but no arrests have been made.

After talking to Brontez about the attack—I read an article in the Bay Citizen, followed by a pretty vigorous debate in the comments section. The debate mostly sparked by comments made by Kevin Bynes, who is known for his work in HIV prevention for Black gay men. Bynes, a bay area resident said he witnessed the incident nearby (and I know of Bynes through my own work in HIV prevention), and that Brontez was lying about the details of the incident noting:

I’m sorry I have to tell the truth because I live in this area and saw the entire incident. The so called victim rode around on his bike yelling at the two guys in the black SUV repeatedly and it wasn’t until the so-called victim spit on the driver and tried to break his window with his bike lock that the two accused “gay bashers” reacted by chasing the guy away. This man TOTALLY provoked this situation and initiated the violence. He took the first swing, spit in the man’s face and tried to damage his car. I’m a gay man who lives in this area and the club they were leaving used to be a gay club that was there for 20 + years and the area is VERY safe for gay people. That was NOT a gay bashing and I think it is dangerous for us to suggest that everytime a gay person gets into a fight its a gay bashing. The guy that is being called a victim really harrassed these guys and they did not attack him because he was gay they acted in self defense. In fact the only gay slurs that I heard came from the victim. I’m so sorry that I didn’t speak to the police this morning.

To which Brontez responded:

Yo, this is Brontez. You SADDEN me Mr. Bynes (whoever you are). We we’re unlocking our bikes and these guys stared harassing us. How did you see “everything”? It was only us four outside in the beginning! You act like we just saw these dudes and went in on them and thats a lie. Ive attended the Paradiso since it was Cabel’s Reef and have NEVER had anything like this happen. Me cursing, and yelling at them is true like after someone threatens you with VIOLENCE who wouldn’t? Sorry im NOT the type of girl whos gonna cross her legs and act fucking nice after some jock tells me im “at the wrong club” two blocks from my own fucking house! FUCK YEAH I YELLED BACK AT THEM. If your such a sensible homosexual why didnt you HELP US when these guys were fucking with us? And also my bandmate who was sitting on the sidelines got his face broken and we did NOTHING to warrant that. WE WERE THE VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE, verbal and otherwise. I threw my bike lock AFTER they punched me and Adal (who wouldn’t?) I used this tactic to pause them long enough to get their plate number. You call someone a “batty boy” threaten them with violence and then hit someone that didnt provoke you YES THAT IS A HATE CRIME. I was REACTING to being fucked with. How dare you?

My problem here is not that Bynes disagrees with Purnell’s timeline of the events or that he was “disgusted and ashamed” by Brontez’ behavior.

First, Brontez and Adal both say that the men had been saying shit to them from jump, for which Bynes (in my opinion) was likely out of earshot or just didn’t hear. Brontez is just not the type, drunk or not, to start a fight with two other men for no reason, having been out in San Fran, Oakland, and all over NYC with Mr. Purnell over the years of our relationship—even where it is clear that Adal was trying to convince Brontez to let it slide. But as Brontez himself said, and I very much believe, he wasn’t going to just let that shit slide. Brontez actually states in the article what Bynes re-asserts in his comment—he didn’t expect to be threatened with violence at a place he’d frequented for years (both men live in the neighborhood where this incident took place), so I am not sure why Bynes re-states this point in his comment—unless he flat out does not believe anything at all transpired to make Brontez angry in the first place (The Bay Citizen published a second story where Adal corroborates Brontez’s assertion that the men started harassing them first). Bynes’ assertion that the club used to be a queer space but is still frequented by queers seems to ignore the realities many of us know from experience. Many of us have been at “the club” in any city USA that used to be a queer bar, and the straights who then take it over act brand fucking new and further marginalize queers who continue to go there. And since when did neighborhoods or establishments with lots of LGBT people mean they were free from homo/transphobic violence? That doesn’t make any kind of sense.

So the question for me here, and where I vehemently disagree with Bynes, is how one defines “provocation” and who judges what then is the socially acceptable response. I tend to agree with Brontez. Too often people who are targeted for violence have to have their motivations and their recollection of all the “facts” or chronology of all the events hyper-scrutinized beyond recognition if they at all do anything other than lay down and take the abuse (or in the case of sexual assault, you’re accused of lying if you don’t have any physical evidence that you fought back, or you choose to try to still (and steel) yourself to try to avoid further violence, or are simply in a state of shock). And what is more true than not, most of us, in some way, respond verbally or physically fight back.

I think Brontez was enraged by the situation and responded accordingly. But rage, as bell hooks once stated, is an appropriate response to oppression. I actually have never seen Brontez angry to the point of fighting the way he clearly must have been that night. But any of us, caught at the right place at the wrong time, may have responded similarly. People get tired of this bullshit. I am tired of it. I have had people hurl similar epithets and make threats to me. One day I may walk away. Another day, I walk right into that fire. Once, similar to what happened to Brontez—two Black men started with me, but when I didn’t run or back down, they punched my non-black friend instead—who once they engaged, thought was going to be an easier target. So I know what it means to reach that point where you say to yourself, Fuck it. I don’t give a fuck what happens today. I am not going to be disrespected and let you walk away from here thinking that shit is OK to do. Not now.

That’s what happened to Chrishaun McDonald, a Black transwoman in Minneapolis currently on trial for murder. She was outside one evening this past spring when she and some friends were approached by a white man who hurled both racist and transphobic remarks. I don’t know who threw the first blow, but that man was stabbed (many say not by Chrishaun) and is dead. I don’t celebrate his death and yes those trans women could have done a million things to try to get away from him. But maybe they were tired of running, or were so bold as to think they didn’t have a reason to run.

I am reminded of Sakia Gunn, when she told a man to leave her friends alone—they were lesbians. I don’t know if she kicked his car, or flipped him the finger. I don’t know if she told him he had a dick smaller than hers, called him a faggot or some other name to push his buttons. But he did what patriarchal men do—he assumed it was his right and Christian civic duty to accost them, and “check” them for being “out of hand.” He got out of the car. She, or one of her friends, may have punched him first. She may have spit in his face. But he killed her. Was that justified? Was she “at fault” for provoking him? Should she have collected her friends and run back into Newark Penn Station? She could have done any of those things, but maybe, even at 15 years old, she decided she was tired of running, or it never occurred to her to run.

I think of the New Jersey 4—originally the group of seven—young Black lesbians also from Newark who one night in a “gay friendly” part of town, NYC’s West Village, were walking and a man made a disparaging comment about them being lesbians, and a fight ensued, with the man being stabbed, which he later described as “a hate crime against a straight man.” They could have went to the other side of the street. They could have decided to leave the Village and go home. They could have quoted Bible passages at him. But they didn’t. I don’t know if one of them struck him first. Nor do I care.

I respect these young women for, despite the enormous consequences that none of them could forsee, making a choice to not live in a world where they could be denigrated for being lesbians, bisexuals, aggressives (AGs), queers or however they think of their identities. And they, like Brontez, don’t present as “victims” in the way our society constructs, because they didn’t just let that shit go. They didn’t run. They saw the danger, decided to move towards it and do what it was trying to do to them, even if it meant they might not win. The “behavior,” like Brontez’s was not befitting of any victim—most people in the moment are resisting being a passive victim (and this is not to also say that people who choose not to fight back in certain moments are less than heroic, nor am I glorifying violent retribution). But it is to say that I think anyone who tries to condemn someone for not allowing themselves to be intimidated by people, especially in this case who are saying if they were a few thousand miles away they’d just as soon kill you for simply existing. I don’t know how I’d react.

And if we’re going to claim that we don’t want to see more Black men going to prison potentially, I totally agree, but if that’s your position then it means that we have to find ways to help and de-escalate situations, even if you think someone is in the wrong and not wait till after cops are called to raise judgement about whether someone exhibited exemplary model citizen behavior in the midst of being threatened. Also, I think that those of us who think critically about calling the police (because of the nature of policing and the prison industrial complex as an anti-Black project) have to be clear that we do not begin to use this as a reason to excuse violence, or question a person’s Blackness or other racial/political authenticity against a person who, for whatever reason, calls the police in a particular moment. It’s not as though Brontez is someone the police don’t also target, threaten and violate. And while the fact that these men were likely Caribbean immigrants invokes racist narratives about Black criminality and homophobia in the Caribbean, clearly these men were quite willing to try to intimidate Brontez and his friend using those very same narratives when they declared “if we were at home you’d be dead by now.”

I think Bynes is making an assumption that even if Brontez had never responded, he and his friend would have been safe (on their bikes!!!!) from those men once they turned the corner, even if they were supposedly trying to avoid an altercation right then and there—maybe they were initially shocked that a Black gay man would have the audacity to even respond back to them. Maybe they were trying to impress the women they were with, and they clearly got a response they weren’t prepared for. I don’t know their motives, but I don’t believe Brontez decided to just pick a random fight with two dudes leaving a club he frequents regularly (as a musician this fucks with your ability to make money), two blocks from his own house, in a community he has to continue to live in.

I do hope that rather than starting a war of words (and I have to admit I was mad as hell when I first heard there was some backlash calling one of my best friends a liar), this can actually give us pause to think about what standards we’re holding people to who have been threatened, when one day, it might be you, for whatever reason, who decides not to take the high road.

And now…

LMAO!!!!