A Rant about Safe Spaces and Public Squares
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Talk of safe spaces and public squares (especially on college campuses) are back in the news following the events and protests at the University of Missouri last week that resulted in the resignation of University of Missouri system president Tom Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.
First, a working definition of “safe space” is necessary. The blog for the youth advocacy group Advocates for Youth offers a useful definition of "safe space."
Safe space: A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person's self-respect and dignity and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.
According to Wikipedia, the specific nomenclature “safe space” evolved out of the women’s movement. I disagree, somewhat, with Wikipedia’s notion that the first “safe spaces” were gay bars and consciousness raising groups. While, certainly, the name “safe space” was not given to black churches, according to the website of the first majority black church denomination in America, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the seeds of what have come to be known as “safe space" are certainly there:
The AMEC grew out of the Free African Society (FAS) which Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others established in Philadelphia in 1787. When officials at St. George’s MEC pulled blacks off their knees while praying, FAS members discovered just how far American Methodists would go to enforce racial discrimination against African Americans. Hence, these members of St. George’s made plans to transform their mutual aid society into an African congregation. Although most wanted to affiliate with the Protestant Episcopal Church, Allen led a small group who resolved to remain Methodists.
In 1794 Bethel AME was dedicated with Allen as pastor. To establish Bethel’s independence from interfering white Methodists, Allen, a former Delaware slave, successfully sued in the Pennsylvania courts in 1807 and 1815 for the right of his congregation to exist as an independent institution. Because black Methodists in other middle Atlantic communities encountered racism and desired religious autonomy, Allen called them to meet in Philadelphia to form a new Wesleyan denomination, the AME.
Certainly the spirit in which the AME Church was founded was that of creating a “safe space” for African Americans to practice religious worship without racist harassment.
It might be useful to compare the treatment of those 18th century black parishioners to the treatment of black Mizzou students on campus and in Columbia, Missouri in the 21st century as described in the MIzzou student newspaper, The Maneater, written by Jennifer Prohov:
Another student shared a story about an interaction she had with a white man in front of Roxy’s. She said she was with a group of protesters when he came up to her, said, ‘You are a joke,’ then lunged his head backward and spat in her face.
She said it is frustrating for the students demonstrating to resist reacting to such incidents.
“If anything happens, it’s us going to jail, not them,” she said.
During the demonstration, a resident from Todd Apartments yelled at the demonstrators, saying, “You niggers just need to go home,” the panelist said.
Another student shared how his mother had tried very strongly to sway him from choosing MU, even on the car ride before dropping him off his first day. She kept telling him, "This institution is not for you. This institution is not for you. They are not going to protect you." He didn’t believe her, he said.
Then he got to MU.
Three weeks into school, he was walking through Greektown to Taco Bell with several white friends when a man yelled at them, “Oh look, there goes a nigger.” He had to tell his friends to keep moving, he said.
Of course, this type of behavior isn’t limited to black students even at Mizzou. I wonder how secure Muslim students at Mizzou felt (then and especially now, given the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday) when the flag of the Islamic State was burned on campus.
I wonder how Hispanic students at the University of Arizona feel about a white-owned Mexican restaurant called “Illegal Pete’s” being opened near the entrance of the University.
Public spaces have been a daily and quasi-ritual site for white people to assert white supremacy since the beginning (and before) of the American Republic.
And the history of Mother Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina alone demonstrates that many white people really don’t give all that much of a damn about black people in “safe spaces” as well.
(I do find it to be quite ironic that, in a sense, one could say that American law and public policies such as Jim Crow, restrictive housing covenants and redlining arose out of an apparent need for whites to create “safe spaces’...albeit for different reasons.)
Black students (and other minorities) attend college for the same reasons that white students attend college: To find a vocation, to get out from under their parent’s wing, to party, etc. But it seems as if with the exception of attending HBCU’s, black students, by and large, also have to deal with the utter stress of racism in the classroom, in socializing, in off-campus activities, and other areas.
For many white students (especially white men) attending American colleges and universities, public spaces are already safe spaces. That is not necesarily the case for students of color, LGBTs, and many women.
I’m as big an advocate of free speech rights as anyone. However, it also seems as if far too many white people (liberal and conservative) interpret “free speech rights” as license to spew anything that they want at anyone, without regard to whom may be harmed as a consequence.
The idea that people of color, LGBT’s, women, and others should simply “suck it up” infuriates me. Because for minorities, it is often a case of being quite literally a matter of life and death.
For the record, I, myself, can be a bit uncomfortable about “safe spaces” in practice. As a black gay man who is also an agnostic, my skepticism has as much to do with the areas inside designated “safe spaces” as it does with areas outside safe spaces (to an extent I talked about that skepticism of “safe spaces in my essay on the Black Church).
But I understand the need for “safe spaces” (or, for me, safer spaces) .
And I suspect that anyone who doesn't understand that need for others to have a “safe space" has never found it necessary to seek out a room of their own because the one that they are in works just fine.
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Blacks are underrepresented at universities nationwide. FiveThirtyEight: Mizzou’s Racial Gap Is Typical On College Campuses.
Thousands of college students across the country on [last] Thursday joined protests demanding that their schools do more to address racism and discrimination on campus. Students at many campuses are calling for an increase in the diversity of faculty and more resources to help minority students succeed. The data suggests that they have a point: Colleges across the country are far less diverse than the communities they serve.
The protests began at the University of Missouri, where top administrators resigned Monday following weeks of student strikes and demonstrations, and at Yale, where students have engaged in public verbal battles with faculty over racial insensitivity. At Claremont McKenna College in California, student demonstrations and a hunger strike forced the dean of students to resign Thursday. At Ithaca College in upstate New York, students are demanding the resignation of the college’s president over his handling of racial issues on campus. And colleges across the country are scrambling to schedule forums, convene task forces or find other ways to address rising student unrest.
It isn’t surprising that the protests have spread beyond Missouri. On Thursday, we looked at the demographics of the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, in Columbia, and found that African-American students, faculty and staff are all underrepresented there compared with the share of African-American residents in the state overall. Also, graduation and retention rates are lower for African-American students than students of other races. But Mizzou is no outlier on these measures.
Director Spike Lee finally has an Oscar. Slate: Spike Lee’s Long-Overdue Oscar Speech Trumpeted the Need for Diversity in Hollywood.
Spike Lee finally has his Oscar. The director, whose two-nomination, zero-win record remains one of the Academy’s more egregious oversights, was one of three to receive an honorary statue at Saturday’s Governor’s Awards. (The others: Gena Rowlands and Debbie Reynolds). Lee’s Oscar was presented by Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, and Samuel Jackson, and after their introduction the director gave a sharp, playful speech about his evolution from unmotivated Morehouse man to trailblazing auteur.
It took a while for the debate to get to Mizzou and Yale, but it was worth the wait. The New Republic: How the Democrats Saved 2015's Whitest Debate.
Ninety minutes in, it seemed like we wouldn’t hear anything about it, and the debate itself appeared, frankly, to be one of the whitest we’ve seen thus far. Though the immigration debate involved Syrian refugees, color was absent from discussions ranging from the minimum wage to gun control.
That changed about three-quarters of the way through the event, when CBS moderator John Dickerson asked three questions explicitly tied to race relations, calling it “another issue everyone cares about.”
Martin O’Malley gave a solid answer when asked about drug enforcement, offering that he “repealed the death penalty” and “put in place a civilian review board” for police brutality and excessive force complaints. The problem for the former Baltimore mayor, however, is that the board is thought to be ineffective by local critics. “A third of the board seats are vacant. And those who do serve have voiced their own frustrations over the board’s lack of a meaningful role in providing transparency for years,” wrote Baltimore resident Brian Hammock in June. “We have to do better.”
O’Malley’s rhetoric still can’t negate his shoddy mayoral record on the matter, one pockmarked by the police tactics of reckless and widespread incarceration of African Americans in Baltimore in order to drive down crime rates. O’Malley’s tenure arguably poisoned what policing has become in the city after the alleged murder of Freddie Gray last April by six police officers. Comprehensive though his proposals may be, anything O’Malley says on racial justice must be taken with several grains of salt.
Dickerson then asked Senator Bernie Sanders about what he’d say to a black man who asked “where to find hope in life.” Sanders offered a strong answer, reiterating points from his racial justice platform. “We need, very clearly, major, major reform in a broken criminal justice system. From top to bottom,” the senator said. “And that means when police officers out in a community do illegal activity, kill people who are unarmed who should not be killed, they must be held accountable. It means that we end minimum sentencing for those people arrested. It means that we take marijuana out of the federal law as a crime and give states the freedom to go forward with legalizing marijuana.”
These are positions that frontrunner Hillary Clinton has, as of yet, only articulated in general terms. (Or, in the case of marijuana, taken very small steps towards endorsing change.) But when Clinton was specifically asked by moderator Dickerson about the student activism we’ve seen on the Mizzou campus, Clinton offered an answer that helped point her almost universally white Democratic and Republican competitors in the direction that the presidential discussion on race needs to head.
In his second dispatch from the US’s most deprived communities, The Guardian’s Chris McGreal visits Tchula in Mississippi, where crime is high and opportunities are few. The Guardian: Poorest town in poorest state: segregation is gone but so are the jobs.
Most of the traffic has migrated to the interstate highway to the east but the trains still rumble through, day and night, on a track that once divided the stately, columned homes of rich white plantation owners from the more modest brick houses and trailers of the black majority.
The mansions are still there, showing their years and inhabited by the descendants of the slaves and sharecroppers whose labour enriched the former owners. But few white residents remain and almost all of Tchula’s 2,000-plus people are African American.
The town’s curious history has drawn fleeting national attention over the years. Its first African American mayor was slung into jail in 1982 on trumped-up charges by a white establishment trying to hold back the civil rights tide. Two decades later, voters installed the US’s first elected black female Republican mayor, Yvonne Brown, in the hope it would encourage President George W Bush to send money.
But these days Tchula is one of the small communities dotted across rural America struggling to find a way to survive. Jobs in the cotton fields – poorly paid, backbreaking work – receded with the mechanisation of plantations. There was better paid work to be had in the sawmill and sewing factory but that is gone too.
“This whole block here was stores,” said Annie Horton, 63, standing on the edge of the large dirt patch next to the railway line that passes for a town square in Tchula. “We had a Chevrolet dealership, a Greyhound bus station, a TV shop, a couple of furniture stores, dry cleaners, fabric store. It’s all gone.
“We even had a movie theatre here and a swimming pool. We weren’t allowed to swim in it but it was there. When we had desegregation the whites filled it with cement to stop us using it.”
Economic decline has brought with it a creeping malaise smothering the optimism that gripped the town when segregation ended.
“In my heart, I feel for the people in this town,” said its mayor, Zula Patterson. “Their self-esteem is down. We’ve got to help boost it up: yes, I can be somebody; yes, I can do something.”
Tchula is, by one measure – the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2008-2012 of communities of more than 1,000 people, the latest statistics available at the time of reporting – among the four lowest income towns in the country and the second stop for a series of dispatches by the Guardian about the lives of those trying to do more than survive in places that seem furthest from the American Dream.
Antiterror restrictions prevent expats from sending money home. BusinessWeek: Crossed Wires Starve Somalia of Cash.
Liban Gaal is one of an estimated 1.5 million Somalis living abroad who are helping the economy back home stay afloat. The owner of the Somali Restaurant in Windsor, Ont., says he sends $300 each month to a sister-in-law in Mogadishu whose husband died in 2008 on a smugglers’ ship that capsized in the Mediterranean. Without Gaal’s contribution, she and her four children wouldn’t be able to get by. “When you go to Somalia, if you see people begging on the street or living in the bush, that usually means they don’t have someone from the diaspora sending them money,” says Gaal.
Remittances from expatriate Somalis total about $1.3 billion annually, according to the humanitarian group Oxfam International, which estimates as many as 43 percent of households depend on the transfers. That lifeline is getting squeezed as some countries step up enforcement of anti-money-laundering laws as part of a crackdown on terrorist groups. Merchants Bank of California, the last U.S. bank handling large volumes of money transfers to Somalia, stopped in January. Financial institutions in the U.K. and Australia have also ceased the transfers. Banks in Canada continue to process them.
Laws in most countries require banks on each side of a cross-border transaction to check the customer’s background and to report suspicious activity. Somalia’s two surviving banks are struggling and not up to the task of due diligence. Neither is the central bank equipped to police the industry. (It doesn’t set interest rates either.) “When I was governor, there wasn’t even a single computer in the whole building,” recalls Yussur Abrar, who briefly served as central bank chief in 2013. Many foreign banks prefer not to do business with Somali financial institutions, lest they get caught inadvertently funneling funds to local groups such as al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Race in America can sometimes be explained by the illusion of negative and positive space in art; where figure-ground reversal will show a vase in the positive space and the silhouetted profile of two faces in the negative. The Danish psychologist, Edgar Rubin, used this and many other examples to...
... state as a fundamental principle: When two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the immediate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges from the common border of the fields and which operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one than on the other.
Light and Shadow then, are merely, tricks on the eye, yet Light cannot exist without Shadow. It might even be said, Shadow is the only true Light.
There is a sorceress in our night. A sky that only moves memory to make
place for the mangoes of last month. There is an old man who says, Libére
moi. And means, Take everything but my blackness. Only in the dark do
doves find reason. Only in the dark do doves have reason to believe that
vengeance is light hanging on fallen tree. After each fall, we ask, where is
the island, the sugarcane that disappeared in our hunger, the water that
emptied our thirst, the song that robbed our nightmare? They mock us.
They tell us to whisper in their ears. They will obey. But curses beat the air
wild. The air is faint. And they tell us, Stop plotting fire. You are in the wrong
land even if the roosters recognize you. They hated our black. What they didn't
understand is that it illuminates their world.