During this holiday season, I am sobered by the reality that most people do not enjoy anywhere close to the luxury I do. While I have certainly worked hard to achieve some of this luxury, I have more been privileged by systems that promote a white, middle-class, male, heterosexual way of being and I have greatly benefited by being born in the most technologically advanced and most militaristically mighty nation the world has ever known.
There is, of course, nowhere to hide from the pangs of hypocrisy as I write. I reflect full well knowing that criticism will emanate from several directions, claiming that I write simply to make myself feel better; that if I was really serious, I’d give up everything I had; that I am a race traitor; that I am just stupid; or that I am (fill in the blank). I get that. But, I write anyway. This is my space, in part, to figure it out—to dialogue with myself and to create dialogue with and for you. Thus, I forge ahead.
As I write from the study of my old shotgun house in the more progressive (read: mostly white, urban, professional) neighborhood of Louisville with the scent of pine emanating from the glowing Christmas tree behind me and the warmth of a space heater rising up my legs from a position near my feet, I reflect, yet again, on the hopeful struggle and my place in it. I write to make better sense of my position as a college professor—how I can help my students (soon to be teachers) craft new lenses with which to view the world, come to a more critical consciousness about the structure of injustice that exists, and to harness the courage to do something about it; how I can best help my service partners (emerging from service-learning relationships tethered to my college courses) meet the needs of their constituents in the local community; and how I can most strategically help my friends and service partners in the Caribbean (whom I have worked with in their schools and children’s homes since 1998) either escape their grinding poverty or carve out a more dignified existence and lead progressive change in their communities. Generally, I want to (re)examine how I can best leverage my privilege toward a more socially-just condition.
In this offering of the hopeful struggle I focus on some colliding political and economic forces that, together, create the systemic oppression I work to combat and seek to assuage with my service partners. I follow with more hopeful news based on a recent text and some emerging possibilities I’ve witnessed lately.
Colliding political and economic forces that contribute to injustice
While my training is more sociological and anthropological than it is economic or political, I offer this take on disturbing economic trends I see articulating which socially and politically complicate the lives of the most vulnerable in our nation and in our world. In my research, local service work, and international service work in the Caribbean, I have noted the intersection of five oppressive issues/realities that impinge on the economically disenfranchised: tax cuts, welfare reform, globalization, privatization/corporatization, and threats to rights and democracy.
Tax Cuts
Perhaps one of the most insidious and short-sighted economic policies of the Bush administration has been the implementation, protection, and promotion of tax cuts. This in the face of one million people falling below the poverty line in 2002 for the second year in a row—the first time that had happened in a decade (USA Today, 9/26/03). Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/11/03) argues when you hear tax cuts, you should think benefit cuts as $69 billion in tax relief went to people earning $1 million or more (Rethinking Schools, 2003)—money drawn from programs intended for the poor, given to the rich. The administration continues to defend these tax cuts, even in the face of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, citing a low unemployment rate. Unfortunately, the jobs people are able obtain remain at the bottom rung—with low pay and few, if any, benefits (Krugman, NY Times, 8/26/05).
Welfare reform
The tax/benefit cuts have been particularly hard to take for the poor as these came on the coattails of welfare reform, foisted upon us by the Clinton administration. Short limits have been placed on eligibility for welfare benefits and few educational incentives are offered. Once the dole runs out for individuals, they are forced into low paying, sometimes multiple low-paying, jobs with no benefits and hardly any opportunity for advancement.
Privatization/Corporatization
In 1960 CEO salaries’ averaged 11 times that of their average worker. In 1999, that gap widened to 458 times (Cavanagh and Mander, 2004). Additionally, in 1970 the average worker made, adjusted for inflation, $32,500. In 1999 this salary yawned to $35,864. CEOs over the same period sprinted from 1.3 million to 37.5 million (Krugman, NY Times, 10/20/02). As corporations gain more and more power, the federal government reduces more and more oversight (think Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc.), seeks to fund private enterprises (faith-based organizations, vouchers for private schools) and heavily scrutinizes unions; therefore, the average worker stands less and less a chance to obtain the mythical American Dream of middle-classness.
Globalization
In addition to moves toward privatization/corporatization, we cannot also ignore the neoliberalism of corporate globalization, which structures not only the lives of people worldwide, but workers here in the US. According to Cavanagh and Mander (2004), the globalized economy based on this neoliberal model depends on three things: never ending supply of resources, ever-expanding supply of accessible new markets, and steady supply of cheap labor to exploit. None of this, of course, is sustainable.
Neoliberalism is spread through a number of mechanisms: Outsourcing—when a corporation farms out a particular element/step of its manufacturing process; Offshoring—when a corporation moves its full operation out of the US to another country; Technological advances—now with fiber-optics and broadband capability, information flows much more easily and speedily across national boundaries; Free Trade agreements, which ease restrictions on trade between partners; International Financial Institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, who set up development programs/loans with developing countries; and War—from the Cold War to the current War on Terror, the US has sought ways to force their market brand of capitalism into many places around the globe, assuring open markets abroad and cheap prices at home.
These policies have forced 4 billion people to survive on less than $4/day; 1 billion on less than $1/day. Additionally, this has helped 458 people to own as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population (Bigelow & Peterson, 2002).
Threats to Rights and Democracy
Along with these factors, various rights and long fought-for gains in freedom and democracy are also under assault. Title IX withstood a recent challenge. A twenty-five year limit was placed on Affirmative Action. Prisons are being populated at an alarming rate (while the crime rate continues to stagnate or decline), filling them with black and brown and/or poor people, and creating the “prison industrial complex.” Finally, a regulation of knowledge has seeped into our public education system through rabid standardization and an anesthetizing focus on high stakes tests. This control of information complicates the teaching of more critical thinking, as the focus must be on regurgitation of ‘state’-controlled information; consequently limiting the progressive possibilities of a democratic system.
To pick up on this final point, I want to include here some startling revelations from Jonathon Kozol’s (2005) recent book, The Shame of the Nation. In it he chronicles the backsliding of any educational progress we thought we made after the Brown decision in 1954. Kozol subtitled his indictment of our current educational crisis as “the restoration of apartheid schooling in the US.” Kozol argues, “It is harder to convince young people they ‘can learn’ when they are cordoned off by a society that isn’t sure they really can” (p. 37).
While he outlines a number of problem areas in this apartheid system, three main points stood out for me: (1) We have made few strides in our funding of schools since his earlier work, Savage Inequalities (1991), which called our attention to an inequitable system. As Kozol reports we still have a two-tiered system of education for which public school students in wealthier suburban schools are funded at twice the level of poorer urban and rural schools. (2) In his most recent visits to under-served and under-funded public school classrooms, Kozol has also observed a return to a Skinnerian classroom management philosophy, establishing a more ‘totalitarian’ classroom management style that resembles procedures commonly employed by penal institutions and drug rehabilitation programs. (3) Finally, related to my comment above regarding the regulation of knowledge and morbid fascination with standardized (high-stakes) testing, Kozol also discovered from his observations that content has become more important than children—as children are viewed with a new “primitive utilitarianism” in which they are regarded as investments, assets, or productive units—or else, failing that, as pint-sized human deficits who threaten our competitive capacities (p. 94).
Near the end of Shame of the Nation, Kozol reflects, “As things stand today, the children in the schools we have examined in this book are not protected by their nation. Yet they are expected in school to perform at national standards, are graded on what are, in fact, no less than national exams that measure their success or failure according to nationally determined norms, are expected to vote someday in national elections, compete for earnings in a national job market and, because of their race and poverty, are more likely than most citizens to imperil their lives by serving in our nation’s wars” (p. 262).
Hopeful revelations
While these intersecting factors seem intractable, I remain hopeful that we can continue to present options to this oppressive collision of factors and am humbled by workers and social revolutionaries with whom I have the honor to know and be inspired—groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Kentucky Jobs with Justice, Kentucky Youth Advocates, and a budding network of progressive educators: the Progressives Engaged in Struggle Support (PrESS) Network.
Alongside the more sobering, critical work of Kozol, I supplemented this reading with the more hopeful work of Bill Ayers. His new text, Teaching Toward Freedom (2004) should be mandated for any educator/citizen working toward ameliorative social change. Ayers particularly renewed my hope when he observed, “If society cannot be changed under any circumstances, if there is nothing that can be done, not even small and humble gestures toward something better, well, that ends the conversation. Our sense of agency shrinks, our choices diminish, and our obligation to our fellow human being ends” (p. 151).
Recently, I have witnessed a renewed sense of agency and solidarity (and, frankly, “obligation to our fellow human beings”) through a recent struggle at my university involving a student who professes belief in the national socialist movement (a neo-Nazi organization). While the controversy is far from over I am emboldened by the way so many faculty, students, and staff (mostly of color, but some white) have stood together, withstanding critique from mostly white and male faculty and administration, and demanding that the university begin to reassess the situation as more than one regarding free speech, but also one that involves issues of community and safety.
I have also been encouraged by the way so many faculty and staff have worked to help a young man whom my partner and I brought to the university from the Caribbean. Their outpouring of assistance to him has greatly eased his difficult cultural transition and helped him perform quite well, academically, his first semester.
I’m also heartened by the work of my teacher friend in the Caribbean who continues to tirelessly fend for the youngest members of her community, trying to build a respectable and sufficient educational facility for them. This young woman, without a high school degree, continues to advocate locally in her community, with the Ministry of Education, and with the government to make sure these children receive the kind of education they deserve. (She is quite humbling to work with!)
So, I remain hopeful. Transformation is possible and it is happening. In my recent reflections, I’ve focused much on how our market brand of capitalism creates the sense for a need of instant gratification. If we can’t get it now, we must be doing something wrong or we need to take another course or manufacture a new desire. I reject this. My experience in this struggle (about eight years now) suggests that I should look in the near opposite direction that our consumeristic culture would point us toward. We’re convinced resistance won’t work because there is no easy answer and there are no instant results (e.g., the colliding political/economic realities discussed above). So, why would it be worth it? I look to a close friend and teaching comrade, Milton, who has been in the struggle for forty years. And, he is still in it. That is my inspiration. To walk arm and arm with him, my brother. And, it is to walk arm and arm with my avowed partner for life, Gina, who has chosen to engage this struggle with me. We strengthen and empower each other. And, it is to walk arm and arm with my brothers and sisters who helped organize a recent teach-in intended to examine the social implications of Hurricane Katrina. A renewed solidarity that crossed several forms of differences emerged from this event. We created a broad-based, multi-issued grassroots cooperative poised to better understand and combat oppressive social forces (like tax cuts, globalization, etc.)
We are always struggling in the tension between reality and possibility. This tension is the contested terrain upon which I toil: sowing labor, critique, and reflection, and reaping courage, hope, and possibility. Ayers argues, “Teachers in an open democratic society must learn to think freely and without fear, to have and to use minds of our own to discover and to make sense for ourselves without any connect-the-dot formulas, without bowing or genuflecting to any authority, and without any absolute guarantees whatsoever” (p. 10). There is no there. It is the journey—the hopeful struggle to make the world just a little more beautiful; to crack open a wider creative space; to pursue more peaceful possibilities.
Other writings of Adam Renner on pucknation dot com:
the hopeful struggle: Connecting Some Dots
the hopeful struggle: The hurricane that challenges an American 'way of life.'
