LIVING FOR CHANGE
If Not Now, When?
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Aug 22, 2010
I won’t be marching with Jesse Jackson in the March called by the UAW and the NAACP
to commemorate the August 28, 1963 March on Washington.
That’s not only because at 95 my marching days are over.
As early as 1963, Malcolm X called the “I have a Dream” March a “Farce on Washington” because John Lewis had been forced to delete from his speech any references to Revolution and Power by the MOW’s “Big 6” organizers: A. Philip Randolph, Dr. King (SCLC), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), James Farmer (CORE), Whitney Young (Urban League), and John Lewis (SNCC).
Marchers were also instructed to carry only official signs and allowed to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.”
Malcolm never put lipstick on a pig. Malcolm thought outside the box. If he were alive NOW, he would be telling us that we should no longer be marching. We should no longer be protesting. We should no longer be dreaming. We should no longer be encouraging democratic illusions.
• WHEN millions of Americans do not have meaningful work,
• WHEN as a result of our obsession with economic growth, wildfires in Russia burn dangerously close to nuclear plants and millions drown from floods and mudslides in Pakistan, China and Iowa,
• WHEN Congress decides to cut back food stamps for the poor and hungry in order to provide paychecks for public employees because trillions are being thrown away on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and military bases around the world,
• WHEN our cities are dying because corporations are exporting jobs oversea to make bigger profits,
• WHEN our prison population is the highest in the world because our schools structured in the factory age have become pipelines to prison,
IT IS TIME TO STOP DREAMING AND PROTESTING.
Instead in every community and city we should be discussing how to make the “Radical Revolution of Values” not only against Racism but against Materialism and Militarism that Dr. King called for in his 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech.
King’s call for this “Radical Revolution” came only four years after his 1963 “I have a Dream” speech. But in those few years, youth in Watts, California and other cities had risen in Rebellion. In Chicago King and anti-racist marchers had experienced the raw ugliness of Northern racism. The genocidal war in Vietnam had exposed our country as the world’s worst purveyor of violence and on the wrong side of the world revolution.
That is why in 1967 King decided that the time had come to warn the American people that unless we make a Radical Revolution in Values, we face spiritual death.
In 2010, 42 years later, we are experiencing massive physical and spiritual death.
Why are we STILL marching and dreaming?
Why are we not making a “radical revolution in values”?
Why are we STILL obsessed with economic growth?
Why are we STILL allowing corporations to deprive us of jobs by replacing human beings on the line with robots and by exporting jobs overseas to make greater profits?
Why are we STILL accepting the dictatorship of technology and of corporations?
THE TIME HAS COME to
• slow down global warming by building sustainable local economies and by living more simply.
• reject the dictatorship of technology so that it is no longer normal and natural to replace human beings with robots.
• stop corporations from exporting jobs overseas.
• end factory-type schooling and start engaging schoolchildren in local community rebuilding.
LET’S START THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX!
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Education Foundations
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Aug 22, 2010
In all the debates over the fate of public education one reality emerges incontrovertibly. Our children and the schools crisis have become a means for a few individuals and corporations to make a lot of money. The Obama administration is pouring billions into efforts to transform our schools, encouraging experimentation and change. The current level of funding, $3.5 billion is about 28 times as much as what was spent in 2007.
As a result, the New York Times reported, people are lining up to get a piece of the education pie. In a recent article the Times reported on a husband and wife team offering new curriculum, corporations with records of failure refashioning themselves, and text book and technology companies marketing whole reform packages.
Jack Jennings, the president of the non-profit Center on Education Policy, said, “Many of these companies just smell the money.” Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor who has formed his own consulting company, said he was astonished to see so many untested groups peddling strategies to improve schools, “This is like the aftermath of the Civil War, with all the carpetbaggers and charlatans.”
In no other area of public responsibility would we, the people, allow such uncontrolled, unthoughtful and untested experimentation to be performed on our communities, let alone our children.. It is unimaginable that the disparities in health care, for example, would be addressed by simply putting billions of dollars up for grabs to anyone who claimed they knew how to provide better services. Yet our communities have been reeling from a series of experimentations in education foisted on us and our children.
One reason why education has been thrown into such turmoil is the extraordinary amount of money offered by powerful foundations who push the often-uninformed visions of private individuals into the public world.
It is almost impossible to understand how these foundations, who demand accountability from the first grader sitting in an urban classroom, have no publicly shared system to evaluate, control, assess or weed out the crackpots in their list of approved school consultants and “transformation” experts. Nor are we aware of any accountability system used by federal, state or local governments.
Diane Ravitch, the New York University education historian and former intellectual architect of No Child Left Behind, places much of the blame for this on large foundations such as Gates, Walton and Broad. She argues that the track record of mega foundations in education has not been good. In her recent best seller The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How testing and Choice are Undermining Education, she points out that Ford Foundation efforts to push community schools in New York City created more turmoil than learning. The Annenberg Foundation’s $500 million reform effort that began in 1993 created a lot of excitement but few results, and the nearly decade-long $2 billion effort of the Gates Foundation to push small high schools produced disappointing results.
She comments that, while foundations are very concerned about teacher accountability, they themselves are accountable to neither voters nor stockholders. Moreover, because they weld so much economic power, few people are willing to criticize them.
Ravitch says, “There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people.”
These same mega-foundations are messing with Detroit Public Schools, as are our own middleweight and minor ones, from Kresge to Skillman. For more than 30 years, their various schemes have undermined the stability, innovation and experimentation at the grass roots level that have been the most successful means of creating education for active citizenship.
Place-based education, service learning, small class size, community engagement, Freedom Schooling and expanding the creative talents of our youth to foster social change are all efforts that have grown out of the work of community activists, teachers, youth and students. These efforts, based on vision and compassion, are the real source for transforming our schools and our country. They are the foundation of a new education and a new country.
By Zuleika Irvin
From the Institute for Democratic Education in America
July 24, 2010
I recently went through a book I picked up in the Children’s room at the Central Library. This story, “The Apple and the Arrow,” by Mary and Conrad Buff, has a plot with many parallels to the state and nature of schooling. It even represents the struggle against traditional schooling. As I read the book I noted my analysis. This book is not a novel “of comparable merit” to books on the “Advanced Placement” book list, but it managed to highlight many things that I am currently contemplating.
“PROLOGUE
Many many years past,
Over six hundred years ago
In the year twelve hundred and ninety,
Thirty-three men gathered on a mountain meadow
Gathered together at midnight.
Peaceful men,
Herders of cattle,
Hunters of chamois,
Skilled with the crossbow.
From different cantons they came,
Some hailed from Uri,
Others from Schwzy,
Still others from Underwalden.
And on that moonless night
Over six hundred years ago,
Thirty-three men talked long
Seeking an answer for freedom,
Seeking an answer for peace.
Thirty-three men on a mountain meadow
Many many years ago.“
Although the theme immediately points to the fight against monarchical oppression, I find that these men are much like those advocating for alternative child-led learning. Like them, we come from many parts of the world, with different skills. We come together in various ways to discuss our views and goals, in places that are small like their meadow. We speak of freedom for the youth, for parents, for teachers, against the powers that have come over us. We do this today.
Albrecht the King
A young boy, Walter, who has overheard about the gathering in the prologue, comes home by nightfall after being out with his younger brother, Rudi, for most of the day. When his father doesn’t return, Walter asks his mother Hedwig for more information about the other day. She explains that these men are planning a revolt against Albrecht. This is the new ruler and son of the former ruler, King Rudolph who came to pass. Rudolph was very passive and didn’t bother their canton (village) much other than to collect yearly taxes and solve disputes by sending a yearly judge. When Albrecht became king, he decided to tighten reign, setting up tolls for travelers and appointing bailiffs to watch over citizens of various cantons. His ultimate desire was to collect bags of gold in any way possible.
King Albrecht is very symbolic of the government we have today. When it comes to education, money is the ultimate goal. Schools are forced to test in order to get money from the government. Those who do poorly, due to lack of resources and funding, suffer even more because they cannot raise scores enough to get more money. There are barriers on all levels of schooling as a means of collection. Be it grades, scores, assignments or something else, students, teachers and parents always release their power to those above them. Parents release their children. Students release their time and mental effort. Teachers release their true plans and skills for those of the standardized variety. The powers above us set up any method of submission they can get out of the people.
Gessler the Bailiff
Gessler is a bailiff appointed to watch over a canton named Altdorf, which is near many of the cantons, including the canton Uri that Walter and his family lives in. He is “a low-born” commoner and the power has gone to his head. Gessler over time has come to abuse his power, creating ways to collect gold for himself. He took out the eyes of a man’s father, simply because that man’s son fled the village. Gessler also herds villagers as slaves to build a castle for him, equipped with prisons.
There are many “Gesslers” in modern schooling. When you go from the Department of education (more of an Albrecht) down to the teacher, you will find a Gessler. The state controls the boards of education, who control districts, who control schools and their administration. The administration then controls the teachers and students, and the teachers control students as well. The students are only left to control one another in any simple way they can, be it bullying, starting rumors, or creating cliques in schools that are already segregated by age or even by gender. In the more affluent areas, this hierarchy is more pleasant and teachers and parents have some say. Administration is nicer. Students have more clubs and opportunities, but it is still under the same system. Low income areas just feel it for what it really is.
Here at Alt.Latino, we keep our noses not just in the music press/blogosphere, but also in the news.
As we all know, this year’s immigration legislation in Arizona has resulted in a whole lot of political controversy. It has also resulted in a flurry of protest and songwriting that reminds me of the passion in the early 1970s against the Vietnam war. (Yes, I’m old enough to remember that firsthand.)
Read and listen here. In English and Spanish.
The Michigan Roundtable is hosting a discussion with essayist, author and educator Tim Wise, author of Color-blind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and Retreat from Racial Equity.
October 6 @ 7pm
Schoolcraft Community College
Free to the public – but you must pre-register here.
Call for Envisioning/Creating Reconciliation Councils in Every Neighborhood
By Larry Sparks
In these times of troubles, most Americans are unaware of the potential in our every day decisions. The challenges we face are the consequences of the courage shown and the choices made by our ancestors and elders. Our decisions and choices are our gifts to our children and friends. We are now in a very similar puzzling time of douth and question every value we have. Million of us cultural creatives have come to realize that what is was created based on our valuing things more than people. Thinking our problems are personal failure as oppose to systemic degrading value that create roadblock to humanizing or self and society. Most of these choice were created by representatives who cared more for their self interest then in our human need, thus turning every aspect of our lives into things. Even having the arrogance to turn corporations into human being and giving inanimate object human voices to sell stuff.
Very few people realize that in our era of materialism and ill reason, we have to go against our common sense in order to become more human human beings. We have the opportunity and responsibility to become fifty times grander than we ever thought we could be, the responsibility and opportunity to transcend the mundane and become the extraordinary. Out of today’s negativity, by the everyday choices we make, we can move to and advance our species to the next stage of human evolution.
Going beyond race class age sex we find ourselves in a revolutionary period where a simple act of picking up a piece of trash is a revolutionary act, a symbol of creating new human relations with our neighbors in beloved community. Out of this decision-making awareness and consciousness, we can once again regain our humanity by choosing not to destroy the planet.
We need a new Declaration of Independence from dehumanizing acts of hate, lust and violations/violence of all kind. We need to meet the challenge of Martin Luther King Jr,’s ‘s call in the last three years of his life to create beloved communities by making a radical revolution in values and taking a stand against militarism, materialism and racism. We need to go beyond Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in which he continued to define our identity, self-worth, and relationships by the consumer madness of the “great middle class.” If we continue to view our human identity that way, we will continue to destroy ourselves and the Earth.
By acknowledging that we are our “brother’s keepers”, we recognize that we are only one of the many species who reside on Planet Earth. Without this respect and recognition we become damaged human beings like the guy who says, “I don’t care, I’ll be dead anyway.” Technocrats in our country have turn everything into commodities, thus losing our capacity to think in a socially conscious human. Should society be organize based on individual advancement or should it be taking the best of what we have accomplish over 3000 generations
and make a way out of no way, that way being higher more advance human self worth? Taking our historical lesson to create a new American.
What are the organic ethical and sacred principles that will guide us through the 21st century? How do we join and bring to life, as our mentor Grace Lee Boggs and her late husband Jimmy Boggs envisioned and to which they dedicated their lives, the noble quest for a renewed America, an America which we can all be proud to call our own?
Aug. 31 meeting, Tuesday @ 6:30 pm
Boggs Center
3061 Field Street
Detroit, MI 48214
The Boggs Center is hosting a conversation and discussion to advance our reflection, theory and practice of transformational organizing and movement building in our city and our country. Please read the selected reading which is accessible from the Boggs Website. Please let a member of the Boggs Board know if you plan to attend.
Creating Neighborhood Community (Resiliency) Councils, Moving towards a Self-Governing America which are based upon the principles of local sustainable economics and participatory democracy. We invite you to a political discussion based upon the attached reading to explore together a vision for movement building in our city. While this excerpt was written in 1982, we believe the concepts and theory are relevant for our work today as we engage in resistance struggles and creating positive alternatives to our concerns relating to food security, education, creating safe communities and advancing real forms of work.
The reading is from the American Manifesto which was written primarily by James Boggs and Grace Boggs during the era of the National Organization for an American Revolution.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Metaphor For Detroit
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Aug 15, 2010
Last week I wrote that, since it’s founding by Luther Keith and Arise Detroit in 2007, Detroit Neighborhoods Day seems to have been “mainly an Events Day, a day of parades, visits to libraries and museums, appearances by celebrities and non-profit sponsors etc.”
I am glad to report that this year’s Detroit Neighborhoods Day on August 7 was much more. In many neighborhoods (perhaps because of the 2nd USSF) volunteers assumed responsibility for forging new ties to rebuild their neighborhoods.
For example, on W. McNichols a group cleaned up a vacant building to turn it into a community hub for social justice and incubator for small business.
“Elsewhere residents cleaned parks, cleared invasive plants from forest areas on Belle Isle, hosted a funeral procession to symbolically bury violence on the city’s east side, built a new playground in the city’s Brightmoor neighborhood and helped build and renovate houses.” (Detroit Free Press, August 
As one volunteer put it, after pulling weeds and building a bench at Gordon Park on the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Clairmount, near the site of the 1967 Rebellion, “It’s kind of like a metaphor for Detroit. If we want to see something different, we have to do it ourselves.”
When he was leading the pre-World War II struggle against British colonialism, Gandhi said that in order to change the world, we must become the change we want to see in the world.
In the 18th century, long before Gandhi, the American colonists had to do for themselves because the British government was so far away. The result was the first American revolution.
In the 21st century we find ourselves again at a point where we cannot look to those in power to meet our daily needs. Capitalism has abandoned us. Replacing human beings with robots and exporting jobs overseas to make more profit, it is no longer providing us with jobs.
The U.S government cannot meet our urgent domestic needs, e.g. for meaningful work, for green energy and for infrastructure (mass transport, new bridges) because it is squandering trillions of dollars on unwinnable wars in the Middle East and hundreds of military bases all over the world.
So if we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves. That is what Detroit is about and that is how the next American revolution is beginning.
The Social Forums, declaring that “Another World is Necessary and Possible” (which began in 2001 after the 1999 Battle of Seattle launched the struggle against corporate globalization) have also inspired a generation of young people to begin living their lives in non-alienating, more cooperative ways that preserve life on Earth and at the same time transform themselves.
For examples of these “pre-figurative” efforts and a deeper understanding of why they are emerging, I recommend a new book, Uses of a Whirlwind, edited by the Team Colors Collective, published by AK Press and available at the Boggs Center.
One article, p.19, describes how a woman’s bookstore in Manhattan became a café and events space where staff and volunteers strive to create horizontal rather than hierarchical relationships as they work together to carry out their many responsibilities.
In “Organizing Encounters and Generating Events,” p. 245, Michael Hardt explains how people want to go beyond representative democracy and create spaces where we/they can create a new social fabric. In “Radical Patience: Feeling Effective Over the Long Haul,” p. 305, Chris Carlsson describes how, as capitalism seeks to commodify us and all our relationships, some of us are struggling to become actors in our own drama.
The concluding article, p.347, is a discussion with me on “The power within us to create the world anew.”
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Engaging Education
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Aug 15, 2010
After months of destabilizing public schools, Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is now pushing for student enrollment. Saying that the DPS is “redoubling efforts to recruit and retain students, ” Bobb has announced an expanded “I’m in campaign” complete with parades, a mobile enrollment van and celebrity support.
While we welcome this initiative, we also recognize that it reflects the short-sighted and compartmentalized actions of Bobb and his office. There is no question that his top down approach to the crisis by closing schools has done more to erode confidence in DPS than any reports of low-test scores. School closings and reassignments have been handled so undemocratically that many parents have already enrolled their children elsewhere. Likewise, there was no coordinated effort to re-enroll existing students at the end of the school year.
So we are faced with a dramatic effort, in the last days of summer, to pull students into DPS through hype. Rather than patient work and dialogue to build real connections with students, parents and community organizations, we get parades and picnics.
Meanwhile, efforts continue to shift control into the hands of the mayor, and now maybe some of the City Council. In an extraordinarily one-sided approach to the issue, WDET recently offered a platform for New Detroit, Skillman and council members supportive of the move. And Emergency Financial Manger Robert Bobb is using the enrollment effort as a way to bring his much touted voice of parents, the Detroit Parents Network, closer to him, using them as part of his door-to-door campaign.
After months of telling us how bad DPS is, we are now being treated to “Great Things are Happening” behind these doors; theme songs, t-shirts and lawn signs.
This kind of contradictory behavior only takes us further away from the real conversation that we need about education today. The reality is that there is much in DPS that is working for our children and our community. Instead of pushing questions of control and governance, of test scores and of multi-million dollar expenditures for increased surveillance of our young people, we should be looking at which programs are most clearly developing responsible, socially conscious young people. Many of these programs are found behind the doors of DPS. They are also found in the hundreds of neighborhood and community organizations that work with young people on a daily basis, offering recreation, art, and intellectual challenges of all kinds.
The most innovative and thoughtful programs have emerged because they have recognized that the century-old factory approach to education is no longer sufficient to develop 21st century young people. They are based on recognizing that we are living in a moment of great transformation, requiring new thinking by all of us. Further, they recognize that the chaos around public education is a symptom of this transformation.
Young people across the country are struggling with a system that is attempting to control them by high stakes testing, that is treating them as unthinking beings waiting to have “education” dumped into their heads. They are told that education will give them a job and a future, while they watch neighbors and family members look for work and wonder if the planet will survive.
In every way possible our young people are telling us that they are not willing to be bystanders as things fall apart. They, like all of us, want to be of use. They want to be engaged in creating a future for themselves and the Earth.
If Robert Bobb wants to change Detroit Public Schools, he should be asking which programs, which teachers and which schools are engaging the hearts and minds of our young people in solving the problems we face as a community? How can we build upon these to create an educational system that prepares our youth for leadership in a democratic, diverse society at a time of great change?
Engaging students, parents, teachers and community members in this conversation would go a long way to achieving the new kind of education we so desperately need.
by Scott Kurashige
From The Huffington Post
August 7, 2010
Although George W. Bush and the Republicans partied hardest on election day 2004, one of the most far-reaching developments was the election of the previously obscure Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate. Most observers expect fall 2010 to bring more disappointment for the Democrats and their supporters. But the election will likely elevate to the national political stage one of the most intriguing figures the party can put forward.
Like Obama at the start of 2004, Detroit’s Hansen Clarke is currently a state senator serving an urban district. But his stunning Democratic primary victory over incumbent Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick last week puts him in line to become Detroit’s junior congressperson alongside the stalwart John Conyers.
With a camera-ready face and youthful smile that belie his 53 years of age, Clarke speaks with force and passion about the crises and opportunities Detroit is confronting. He is the perfect conduit to spread the story of an underdog city rising from the ashes of industrial decay.
While Clarke is unlikely to follow Obama’s ascension to higher office, his life is just as (if not more) reflective of the multi-ethnic identity and grassroots politics taking shape in twenty-first century America. Clarke is the son of a Muslim immigrant father and an African American mother. The former came to the U.S. from India (what is now Bangladesh) at a time when most Asians faced blatant discrimination and were deemed ineligible for naturalized citizenship.
STORE
NOW AVAILABLE AT THE BOGGS CENTER STOREThe American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (2009 edition)
Revolution & Evolution in the Twentieth Century (2008 edition)
Living for Change (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)
Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future
Let's Talk About Malcolm & Martin
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