Asian Pacific American Heritage Week at UI!!

There's a lot going on for Asian Pacific Heritage Week!

Next Wednesday, April 4th, you can attend Our History is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese Cuban Generals in The Cuban Revolution at 3:30pm. Location: the Ohio State Room (343) of the IMU.

You can learn more here.

Click on any of these images to see larger versions.

Clips for the Day

Rep. Maxine Waters asks about insurance claims made after Hurricane Katrina


Damali Ayo panhandles for reparations


"Terrorist" prisoners of war performing for visitors to a prison on International Women's Day in 1992. Not long after this, the Fujimori government killed many of the people in this prison.


A response to the First World "liberation movement annihilator" (KRS One, Last Emperor, and Zack de la Rocha)


Zapatista thoughts (listen to Jacob's interview on the radio show today for more!)

You can do something!

Wow, I never can predict what will resonate the most with you all. I'm glad you are thinking about the urgency and the seriousness of mass incarceration and youth incarceration. As far as alternatives go, we'll get to that when we read Andrea Smith's book. For now, I want to make sure you all get the message that you can do something. I'd even go so far as to say we all must do something. I know these problems seem really big, really overwhelming. They are really big and really overwhelming. That doesn't and shouldn't serve as a reason to do nothing. In fact, it's the big problems that need our attention the most. Now that we have the radio shows archived (thanks to Nate), you can listen to how other young people have responded to injustice by taking direct and meaningful action. (All the links are to the right.)

You can do it too. In fact, I know some of you already are making a difference through your activist and volunteer work. It might take some initiative,creativity, and experimentation, but each of you can do something, and we all can do more than what we are doing now.

You can do a lot while you are a student too. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
When I was writing my dissertation and TAing multiple sections for my university's version of Rhetoric (which was actually a 6 semester hour course), I worked (without pay) as a volunteer court-appointed special advocate (CASA) with abused youth for 20-30 hours a week. No one told me about CASA, and I didn't have a model to follow in integrating community action into my grad student life. Sometimes we just have to jump in there and make something happen. By spending a few years as a CASA, I learned more about what is wrong with the system, and I had my life changed by the kids with whom I worked. Here's a little article I wrote 7 years ago. If you click on the images, you can access bigger versions.
I know many of you are familiar with a variety of action resources. Why not start sharing info and challenging one another to step up your activist game to the next level?

Since some of you are thinking about kids a lot, you might be interested in contacting one of the following local organizations regarding volunteer opportunities. These are not the only options - just some places to start. Earlesha can tell us about the Broadway Neighborhood Center in class. I can talk about YEA! too.

Cedar Rapids CASA

Urban Dreams (check out U-CARE in Iowa City under "Programs")

Jane Boyd House in Cedar Rapids

You might also feel like you want to introduce a kind of activism to the area that isn't here right now. Go for it! Here are a few organizations that address issues we've been studying:


Critical Resistance

Books Not Bars

October 22nd Coalition

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence


"Apathy is a luxury of the privileged." I heard that somewhere – can't remember when or where. But there's something to it. When we are under attack (or make common cause with those who are), there's no time to question what we can do, because we honestly have to do something, anything.

So, go out there and do something!!

One last note:
You can also ask a former president, Jimmy Carter, questions about Palestine or service/activism. He's coming to UI, as you probably heard. Click here for info. If you are a University of Iowa student, submit your question via the Lecture Committee website or at the University Box Office at the IMU. You can submit a question anonymously or put your name in for a drawing to meet with Carter.

From Earlesha

Hey Guys,

I don't know if you guys heard about the 14-year-old black teenager in Paris, Texas, Shaquanda Cotton, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for supposedly shoving a hall monitor. Meanwhile, a white teenager committed a more radical offense and received probation. This is a true injustice, and since we are discussing this in class, I thought I'd forward it to the class. Maybe we can have a discussion about this on the blog.

To my surprise, the mainstream media has brought great attention to this injustice. I first learned about this in the Chicago Tribune and a journalism classmate of mine just forwarded me more stuff that was written by the Tribune reporter who broke the story. I'd like to know what you guys think...

Earlesha

Here's the actual story and commentary by the Tribune reporter:

Commentary (I received from one of my masters journalism classmates)

LETTER FROM CYBERSPACE
Tribune reporter Howard Witt hasn't seen a reaction to a story quite
like the one he got after writing about a controversy in the small
Texas town of Paris

Published March 26, 2007, 8:57 PM CDT


Sometimes, as a newspaper reporter, you write a story that touches
enough readers that a few write you letters or e-mails in response.

Less often, but even more gratifying, you write a story that actually
changes something, like getting a bad law fixed or a corrupt
politician indicted or a donation for a kid who can't afford
life-saving surgery.

And every once in a blue moon, you write something that literally
explodes across the Internet inways no one could predict.

That has now happened with a story I wrote two weeks ago, about a
14-year-old black girl from the small Texas town of Paris, who was
sent to a youth prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at
her high school. A 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for
burning down her family's house, was sentenced by the same Paris judge
to probation.

If you had Googled the black girl's name, Shaquanda Cotton, the day
before the story was published on the front page of the March 12
edition of the Tribune, you would have gotten zero results. On Monday
afternoon, there were more than 35,000 hits.

The story has been picked up on more than 300 blogs around the
country, many of them concerned with African-American affairs. It has
generated thousands of postings to Internet message boards.

It was the top story on digg.com, a site that ranks Internet pages by
user popularity and recommendations. It became the most-viewed and
most-e-mailed story on chicagotribune.com more than a week after it
was originally published, which is particularly remarkable because
most news stories on the site automatically expire after just a few
days.

And now the story has jumped across the ethernet into the physical
world: Dozens of talk-radio stations across the nation were buzzing
about Shaquanda last week, protests on her behalf were held in Paris,
a petition- and letter-drive aimed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the
judge in the case, Chuck Superville, is under way, and civil rights
leaders from the NAACP and the ACLU to the Rev. Al Sharpton are
weighing whether to get involved.

I've written thousands of stories for the Tribune over the last 25
years, from around the nation and across the world, and I've never
seen a reaction like this before.

What's driving the attention to this story is outrage?most people who
come across it say they are upset at what they believe was an
excessive sentence imposed on a teenager for a moment of reckless
behavior. Many perceive racial discrimination, because, as the story
explained, Shaquanda's case occurred against a backdrop of other
discrimination complaints in the town.

"This sentence is unexplainable. Where is the justice in this?" wrote
one man in a posting typical of many others. "I cannot imagine my
daughter in this situation. I will pass this on to everyone I know."

There's been some outrage in the other direction, as well: A number of
residents of Paris have contended, in e-mails and articles in the
local Paris newspaper, that the Tribune story unfairly portrayed their
town as racist.

"Paris is being burned at the media stake by a journalist that didn't
get the whole story poking the hot irons and igniting the fire," wrote
Phillip Hamilton, a columnist for the Paris News. "...Does racism
exist in Paris? Yes, but not nearly to the extent the Tribune reporter
would have readers believe."

Now it appears all of this ferment might affect Shaquanda's case. Hers
will be among the first cases to be examined by a special commission
being established this week to review the sentence of every youth
being held inside Texas' youth prisons, because of concerns that many
inmates might have had their sentences arbitrarily extended by prison
officials.

The review panel was sparked by a wide-ranging scandal currently
plaguing the state's juvenile prison system in which numerous prison
guards and officials are accused of coercing imprisoned youths for sex.

While that scandal does not directly involve Shaquanda, the high
public profile of her case has caused the special master overseeing
the investigation of the juvenile system to say he wants to review her
case in particular.

Shaquanda also has an appeal pending with Texas' 6th Court of Appeals
in Texarkana, which has heard arguments on her case and could rule at
any time.

But what's particularly interesting to me, beyond the content of all
the reactions, has been the vehemence, and what it may tell us about
the powerful new Internet communications tools we all now have at our
fingertips but don't yet fully comprehend.

I had no idea, for example, of the extent of the African-American
blogging world out there and its collective powers of dissemination.

But now, after reading thousands of anguished, thoughtful comments
posted on these blogs reflecting on issues of persistent racial
discrimination in the nation's schools and courtrooms, what's clear to
me is that there's a new, "virtual" civil rights movement out there on
the Internet that can reach more people in a few hours than all the
protest marches, sit-ins and boycotts of the 1950s and 60s put together.

There's another lesson to be drawn from this episode: Newspapers do
still matter.

Many Americans are very skeptical about the health of the newspaper
business these days. Readership is declining as long-time newspaper
subscribers die off and younger consumers decline to take a paper in
their place. Advertising revenue is bleeding away onto the Internet.

Everybody seems to think they can just flip on their TV or bring up a
Yahoo! page or a blog and find all the news they need.

Well, it is quite true that uncountable hundreds of thousands of
people who had never heard of the Chicago Tribune before have now read
my story about Shaquanda Cotton, thanks to its broad distribution
across the Internet.

But in order for all of that to happen, people had to read it here first.

Howard Witt is the Tribune's Southwest Bureau Chief, based in Houston.
hwitt@tribune.com

Juvies

So, we only got to talk about the film a bit. No matter how many times I watch it, I still cry. And even though certain aspects of how the story is presented might frustrate me, the voices of the youth and the reality of their experience are impossible for me to shake. I could tell many of you were also deeply affected by the film.

I mentioned some updates regarding Duc Ta's case. You can learn more at Justice for Duc. You'll notice that many of the (mostly white) folks who got this film made are artists, like John Densmore (of The Doors), who was the executive producer.

Here's the website for the film: juvies.net.

If you want to watch or listen to an interview Tavis Smiley did with the director (Leslie Neale) and Mark Wahlberg, you can do so by clicking here and selecting the March 15, 2004 program files.

Here's the website for the film: juvies.net. On that site, you can find a few updates and the following poem by Jeffrey, one of the youth in the film. We talked a little today about the frustration involved in communicating with people outside. Some of you with close loved ones in prison hadn't felt frustration directed at you. What do you think might be different for Jeffrey? Does it remind you of anything from Forced Passages?

"Prison Life"

It's waiting on letters when you're doing time and your family won't write

or send you a dime.

It's waiting on visits that never take place from friends or loved ones

who forgot your face.

It's making plans with someone who you thought you knew, but

their plans suddenly change and it didn't include you.

It's hearing them say how much they care, but in your time of need,

they are never there.

It's hearing them promise and it goes straight to your head, but

when push comes to shove, they leave you for dead.

It's feelings and love, honor and pride, pain and emotions and

hurting inside.

It's expressing yourself to your loved ones and friends, but they

can't feel your pain because you're in the pen.

It's calling and hearing blocks on the phone, but you maintain

because life goes on.

It's really messed up when you're doing time, but that's "prison

life," out of sight out of mind!!!

Asian and Asian American Film Festival at UI!

Check out the upcoming Asian/Asian American film festival hosted by WAVES. The films will be screened next weekend (March 30th-April 1st), and they are all FREE and open to the public! Good times!

Check out their website by clicking here.

I will also award extra credit to anyone who attends and writes a short (1-2 page) response paper.

Upside Down

As you read Upside Down, you'll notice that Eduardo Galeano addresses just about every issue we've studied so far. He also reminds us of MLK's comment (shortly before he was killed) that the US was the "world's greatest purveyor of violence." That doesn't make the list of appropriately "Santa Clausified" quotations, does it? Speaking about his experiences in "the ghettoes of the North" in 1967, MLK said:

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government."

Please take a moment to think about that last part. And who were those "angry young men"? (Huey and Bobby started the Panthers in late 1966.) You can read the whole speech here.

Galeano mentions many other famous and not-so-famous figures in the "lessons" he lays out in the primer you are reading. When you get to page 121, keep in mind this book was written in 1998.

I'd like us to start off by trying to visualize the "upside down" world Galeano describes, so I decided to share with you some examples of collage pieces by Philadelphia-based artist Theodore A. Harris. He has collaborated with Amiri Baraka, which I'll tell you about in a week or so. For now, I'd like you to comment on the images below. How does Harris make an argument visually? What story does each image tell? What's up (or down) with the Capitol? How would you apply ideas from the Galeano reading to these powerful collage pieces?

Vetoed Dreams (1995)


Under Occupation (1995)


Collaged Eulogy for James Byrd Jr. (1998)
(Note: In case you don't remember, James Byrd Jr. was brutally beaten by 3 white supremacists and then chained to the back of their truck and dragged to his death in 1998 in Texas. Look it up; it's a horrifying story, but we should all know it. Byrd's arms and head were severed from his body. At the time, then-Governor George W. Bush opposed hate crime legislation. The James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act eventually passed after Bush left Texas to assume the presidency.)


A Target in the Theater of the Backward (1999)

What is fascism?

So, we know George Jackson said it could be summed up as "reform." But why do you think he was able to sum it up that way? What about the word "fascism" lends itself to what we have discussed "reform" means (as a bad, bad word)? I gave you an assignment to look up 3 different definitions of "fascism" and then decide why you think George Jackson thought "reform" offers the most accessible definition? You can submit your answers here.

Also, our high school visitors said the class was "fun." Thanks for welcoming them. In the car ride home, they recapped the whole day, describing their answers to the activities (with Amanda and Vernon) and what they thought of the topics we discussed. You provided them with a really neat opportunity to see college students engaged in discussing topics that are very close to them.

For all that you do, including what you did today, you all have my love.
That doesn't mean those of you who didn't get to your presentations are off the hook, by the way.

(Click on the image above to see a big, beating heart!)

Angela Davis speaks on recent events!

There's no video, but you can listen to the speech excerpt here:
You can also access the video by clicking here and then selecting the stream. (The transcript is there too.)

Support your library and get a free dinner!

Does that sound too good to be true? Well, it's not if you are an undergrad. I just received the following message.

Adrienne,

Last semester you may remember completing a survey about the UI Libraries. We received lots of great data from this project, but we want some more focused information from our largest library user group: undergraduate students.

We have organized a series of focus group discussions for undergraduates in the Main Library during the two weeks after Spring Break:

Wednesday, March 21, Tuesday, March 27 or Thursday, March 29 from 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, March 22 or Tuesday, March 27 from 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.

I am contacting you, because Chiaki Sakai at the library suggested that you regularly work with undergraduates (teaching, advising, etc.). Can you make an announcement in your undergraduate classes about these sessions?

Students can sign-up online for the session that best matches their schedule at www.lib.uiowa.edu/events/students. Besides helping the UI Libraries make changes and improvements, student participants also get dinner (pizza) on us.


Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support of the Libraries.

Kristi Bontrager
Coordinator, Public Relations
University of Iowa Libraries

OPEN POST: Tavis Smiley's interview with Cornel West

Earlesha sent me this link to Tavis Smiley's recent interview with Professor Cornel West of Princeton University. Please take a listen! Earlesha suggested having an open discussion about the interview, especially the "santa clausification" of MLK, which Earlesha suggests can be applied to many other Black activist leaders. I think this is a great idea, so I'm post-dating this post so it stays at the top of the page for a while. What do you all think of what Dr. West has to say?

A note from the author of Forced Passages (who gave me permission to post it)

Adrienne, how's the reading of my book going? I know there's some hesitation, resistance, overwhelmedness going on because it's being perceived as a difficult book. Well, be sure you pass along to the students that they have no excuse whatsoever to not read and comprehend this project in its entirety. If a number of imprisoned people, who are almost entirely self-educated (many of whom did not go to or past high school), will engage my project WITHOUT A SINGLE WORD OF RESISTANCE TO ITS FORM, CONTENT, OR VERNACULAR, then college students should (at least!) do the same. Let me know what happens!
d

Bobby Seale: animated in Chicago 10

Have any of you seen this?

Congratulations, Senator Jackson!!

In case you didn't hear, Vernon won!

Roger White interview this Thursday on "The Insurgency Hour"

On this Thursday's radio show, Dylan, Amanda, Nate, and maybe Martha will interview Roger White, a criminal justice researcher and activist. Roger grew up in Baltimore and eventually made his way to Oakland, California (the birthplace of the Panthers), where he has been working as a criminal justice researcher at the Data Center for about 6 years. Prior to joining the Data Center research team, Roger was a campus organizer in college, a union organizer, and an organizer in poor communities for ACORN. In addition to his current activist “day job” at the Data Center, Roger is very active in the broad APOC (Anarchist People of Color) movement. He also is the author of Postcolonial Anarchism. Roger will discuss the US prison regime, policing, and how anarchists of color in North America are working against white supremacy and all forms of social domination.

Forced Passages: Breaking it Down

On Thursday, one of the things I'll be asking you to do is give our high school student visitors very short summaries of your assigned chapters from Forced Passages. To help give you an idea of what I have in mind, I thought we could practice on two sentences from the first chapter. I'd like you to think about the words Dylan Rodriguez chooses in the sentences below. And here's some added motivation for you. I just heard from the author that "a number of imprisoned people, who are almost entirely self-educated (many of whom did not got to or past high school)," have engaged his project without resisting the content or how it's written!

Okay, here are our "practice" sentences:

"Fatal unfreedom, historically articulated through imprisonment and varieties of (undeclared) warfare, and currently proliferating through epochal technologies of human immobilization and bodily disintgration, forms the grammar and materiality of American society." (page 1)

"Fatal unfreedom" is an unusual phrase. It makes you stop and think. What does this word choice convey? Why use the words "grammar" and "materiality"? What is Dylan Rodriguez saying about "American society" in this sentence?

"Imprisoned radical intellectuals critically envision (and sometimes strategize) the displacement or termination of the epochal American production of biological and cultural genocides, mass-based bodily violence, racialized domestic warfare, and targeted, coercive misery." (page 3)

What is Dylan Rodriguez saying in this sentence? "Unpack" the different parts of the sentence by trying to imagine what the "imprisoned radical intellectuals" want (and sometimes "strategize")? Does it remind you of anything Huey wrote?

I think it would be neat if someone wanted to interview Dylan Rodriguez for the radio show about his book or prison abolitionism. He takes a lot of risks as a scholar, as you can perhaps better understand if you read this very short article.

Responses to class with Prof. Souaiaia

I am so grateful to Prof. Souaiaia for coming to our class. I learned a lot and will be reflecting on what he said, and I'm sure you feel the same. His comments about how nationalism can be an attractive option for those wanting to avoid marginalization certainly speaks to what we encountered with Black nationalism at the beginning of the semester, as did his discussion of how religion can be used as a tool for political goals. And so many of the people we have studied (like Huey) closely followed and identified with the work of Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria, whom Prof. Souaiaia also mentioned. I know several of you have more you want to discuss with Prof. Souaiaia, and you may also have thoughts to share about today's class. Here's a place for you to record thoughts and questions (in the comments section below), and maybe we can follow up with him somehow this semester. He's teaching this summer, by the way, so you won't have to wait too long to take a class with him if you aren't graduating and next fall seems too distant.

Also, this Saturday at 9 am, Prof. Souaiaia will be speaking as part of a panel entitled "Understandings of Indecency and Obscenity in Abrahamic Religions" in the Minnesota Room (347) of the IMU. He will be speaking on "“Obscenity in Islamic Law and Cultures."

Amanda, we all hope you feel better really soon!!
And Vote Vern!

I'll make a separate post about next week before long.