Houston Unido/United–

Occupy Houston has passed a proposal for an anti-police brutality
march in solidarity with the Oakland General Strike/Mass Day of
action.

We’ll meet 11:30 am, Wednesday, Nov 2, at Tranquility. Then at noon,
we’ll march to the Harris Country Sheriff’s office at 1201 Franklin.

If you can help get the word out to other interested groups, please
do. And if you can make it out, even better! Unfortunately, we’re
still working on flyers/press info–so if you would like those
materials, let me know and I can forward them to you once they’re
available.

Thanks,

-Jim

I would like to open this letter by recognizing your recent efforts to shed light on the cases of many problems that many middle class United States citizens have begun to feel lately.  The unemployment, the disenfranchisement from the political process and, in many cases, the dispossession of personal and real property all have their roots in imperialistic capitalism and corporate greed, a point which your movement has not shied away from.  You have identified the source of the problem to a great degree.  For this, I commend you.

At the same time, I feel compelled to share some thoughts with you.  I do not write this letter as a critique.  Instead, I hope that this will serve as somewhat of a contribution, however modest.

I would like to first point out that while corporate imperialism has recently affected the white middle class a great deal, many peoples, like the Chican@/Mexican@/Ixachilanka have been historically and chronically victimized by similar branches of imperialism.  For five hundred years, we have been survivors of the worst genocide in history called the American Holocaust.  Some estimate that we lost one hundred twenty million people due to white European occupation of our lands and their extermination policies.  Today you are protesting the same force which masterminded the American Holocaust.  That force is a mix of imperialism, greed and racism.

In fact, in one way or another, many of your leaders are beneficiaries of the imperialist legacy that we have continued to deal with for five centuries.  I point this out not to condemn you, in particular, but rather as a suggestion that your movement address the historical cost perpetrated by the same powers that you now protest.  Moreover, rather than simply addressing the historical legacy, it is my hope that you would strive to advocate for some form of reparations, along with your other demands.  If it is to be a truly inclusive and comprehensive movement for justice, this is necessary.  To fail to account for the historical legacy left by our common enemy, is to limit the benefits of your movement to a more narrowly defined constituency.

Chronic unemployment, an issue for some in the Occupy Movment, is not unique to the United States.  In many countries all over the world, chronic unemployment is due in large measure to US intervention in vulnerable countries.  This is often done at the behest of capitalist and imperialist interest in these countries.  In 1933, Major General SD Butler reported to Common Sense “I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped pacify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers.”  People of color all around the world feel the full force of this continued policy.  Relative to the other consequences of war, unemployment is a small problem in these countries, which often is created at the hands of the same crony capitalists that you are protesting.

One of the demands at the national level of the “occupy” movement is an end to the electoral disenfranchisement of voters.  History teaches us about the chronic disenfranchisement of minority voters in the US.  Poll taxes, reading requirements, ancestry requirements, directed toward racial minorities have been the norm in this part of the world for longer than they have not been. 

Furthermore, on September 11, 1973 the US collaborated in the removal of the democratically-elected President of Chile.  In 2002 crony capitalists conspired to kidnap the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.  In 2004, democratically-elected president of Haite, Jean-Bertand Aristide, was forcibly removed from office and whisked away in a US aircraft.  In 2009 democratically-elected Nicaraguan president, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a coup, which also seems to have been orchestrated by US officials.  As you protest the recent changes in voter ID requirements and the manipulation of voting machines, please know that we have survived these, and many more incidents too numerous to mention.

Finally, many of your supporters are outraged by the recent mass of home foreclosures, often accomplished by fraudulent documentation.  As a Mexican in the US, I can tell you that we are reminded yearly of the extra-legal appropriation of Mexican lands by US imperialists to the tune of lands from Texas to California.  It goes without saying that Northern Natives also suffered the dispossession and forced removal from all of their lands, also at the hands of the same class of people that you protest today.

In this letter, I picked out a few demands generally vocalized by the occupy movement, but our experience, as a people of color, has an added layer and added history in virtually all of your demands.  It is my hope that if the movement will strive for true inclusiveness, the movement will be open to an added layer of complexity, history, and contemporary and historical needs and demands. 

It is not simply the inclusion of people of color that will make the difference. Instead, the inclusion of our experience, perspective on and solutions to the same beast that you fight today will truly speak to the inclusiveness of your efforts.

Adelante En La Lucha,

Hector A. Chavana Jr.

OurNewAnahuac.net

Also damning is a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center which reports that more Latino children live in poverty than do white children, despite the significant difference in the total population count. Over six million Latino children in the United States live in poverty today.

One recent statistical bright spot, however, is also cause for pause. Latino college enrollment rates spiked significantly from 2009 to 2010. College education has always been an important vehicle in this society for upward economic mobility. A college education will serve the graduates very well. More power to them.

However, the benefits largely are individual and do little to alleviate the greater problems that the community faces. We simply can’t study our way out of this community problem. The model that the white community has used for generations simply will not work for us as a community. For generations, the white community has sent their children to college, which leads to a career and a family. It works for them because they have a much greater base of wealth in their community.

If we emulate this pattern without implementing any collective efforts to uplift our community, we will only produce a class of Latinos which will effectively be isolated from the bulk of our people, with little interest in the community’s well being. Some of this has already taken root, as policy initiatives like the Dream Act favor granting residency to college graduates before “regular” working class people.

Our success as a group is directly related to our ability and will to work together. What we need is group empowerment. Our most important first strategy in seeking this empowerment is support for mechanisms that can and do support empowerment in the community. Advocacy groups, conscientious small businesses, alternative media, mutual aid societies, progressive houses of worship all have the ability to help empower our community as whole because, by nature, they are collective enterprises.

Too often people are turned off by my direct discussion of race. People prefer to see our problems as something different than a racial issue. Some see it as exclusively a class issue. Some simply don’t like defining ourselves via race or ethnicity. In reality, until the statistics suggest that we do not constitute more than half of all felons, and that we do not have more poor children than any other group, it is nothing less than a racial problem…like it or not. The disparity is too great to call it anything else.

Our goal as individuals should be to support the mechanisms of power that, apart from having the ability to help our community, actually do so. Join the community organizations, spend at those businesses that give something back, pray with those who empower, and most importantly, tell others to do so. These are our first steps.

One of the biggest dramas that played out over the past week was outlandish commentary by a controversial comedian, Katt Williams. Katt Williams had been among my favorite comedians, despite, or perhaps because of, his many controversial remarks.

Overnight a barrage of internet postings denounced some racist rant that Katt Williams, who is black, had spewed against Mexicans and Chicanos. It surprised me, as it may surprise you, that I really did not pay much attention to it…at first. In fact, I didn’t bother to investigate what he had said. I wondered how bad it could be, but I also thought that there was much more important things to worry about than a few words by an entertainer.

I ignored it the first day. By the second and third day the online outrage continued, with more and more people denouncing Katt Williams as a racist. A boycott was announced. Still, I didn’t pay much attention, because I figured that it could not have much of an impact on serious issues at hand. Our schools are falling apart; our families are being broken apart by ICE; and some people are letting a joker get them upset.

Finally, another day passed, and I saw one of my favorite authors post an opinion editorial. Then I saw a young lady post a YouTube video about the situation. I decided not to ignore it any longer.

What I saw Katt Williams say did not shock me. It is not that what he said was inoffensive, but much of what I had already read had prepared me for the worst.

Challenging the historical fact that these lands were taken by the United States by force, Willams taunted, “”… it appears to me, y’all like it over here a lot… If y’all had California and you loved it, then you shouldn’t have given that mothaf*cka up. You should have fought for California, goddamnit, since you love it.”

He went on to the oldest of slights, “So if you love Mexico, bitch, get the f*ck over there,” oddly acknowledging in the same breath that blacks had often been told to go back to Africa.

Critics were quick to point out that we did not “give up” California, but rather that the United States was quick to take advantage of the toll that Mexico had taken in kicking out other colonizers a few years before the US invaded. In fact, California was lost in a bloody, bloody war, and was not “given up.”

Others pointed out that Williams was pouring fuel on a very hot fire in that his comments were made in Arizona, one of the most anti-Mexican states in the country, and a breeding ground for KKK and Nazi type groups. Williams, they said, was using the same language that these groups used in their rallies.

Some suggested that he had broken unwritten rules of minority solidarity, and others wondered aloud where the black community was to denounce of their own lost souls.

As for me, I remained amazed at the number of people that responded so quickly and loudly to this comedian, someone with no formal power or position. In essence, it reminded me of something that I had overlooked in those first few days of the news breaking, and frankly something that I had forgotten about. In this celebrity-driven culture, it is often the celebrities that have the power to inspire action and reaction in the people. In the end, I just wondered where our celebrities were hiding during all of this mess.

To the extent that that is true, to the degree that Black America remains more concerned about how Obama is doing as he seeks another term in office, rather than how the African American people are doing under Obama’s center-right, Wall Street- and war-loving regime – Blacks are doomed to a period of suffering unprecedented in the modern age.

Presumably to protect the dignity of First Black President – her highest priority – Jackson-Lee joined the 95 House Democrats that voted for the certainty of losing trillions of dollars for tens of millions of needy citizens, rather than risk the possibility of unknown financial dislocations. The same number of Democrats said “No” to the president and his GOP interlocutors. Among the 40 full-voting, Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the split was 15 “Yes,” 24 “No” and one Non-Voting (NV).

In essence, the report concluded that Latinos’ wealth, the little that we had accumulated over the past few years, has been devastated by the recent economic crisis. The major culprit in the sixty six percent decline in our wealth was the mortgage crisis.

The study reported that almost a quarter of Latinos had no assets other than a car, and that over 30% of Latinos has zero or negative net worth. Similarly 2010 report on the wealth gap reported that single Latinas had about $120 of wealth, compared to over $40,000 in wealth that white women owned. Generally, assets are considered any sort of cash savings, retirement accounts or property.

This portion of the story is clear, and I think unsurprising. It tells the story of a significant portion of our people who simply own barley enough wealth to get by, and perhaps not even that. With $120 of assets, a person is unable to get sick, without facing homelessness, and spending patterns become less about building wealth and more about surviving a physical and emotional stress.

The Pew study indicates that the average net worth of Latinos fell from about $18,000 in 2005 to about $6,000 in 2009. The story indicates that the mortgage crisis was mostly to blame. The study reports, “Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Hispanic household wealth in 2005 was derived from owned homes.” Moreover, Latino homeownership fell four points from 51% to 47%.

It is also significant to note that Latinos are concentrated in states in which the housing declines were most devastating-California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. Perhaps this is not a coincidence, but rather a cause of these states’ great trouble in the mortgage industry, since it became clear that many lenders encouraged minorities to take risky loans.

This portion of the story continues to tell more about the intentions of our people. One argument that many people make about minorities in general is simply that we are poor because we choose to be poor, or that we are poor because we choose to spend our money on frivolous items, rather than focusing on savings.

This portion of the story disproves that. It speaks of a people who were very much interested in “doing the right thing” with their money by purchasing homes, while there was mortgage products that gave them the opportunity to do so.

Sadly, it also tells the story of Wall Street manipulators, and their agents, who took advantage of our interest in bettering our economic lot.

It is generally true that people of all races are worse off now than they were in 2005. The net worth of whites, for example dropped from about $134,000 to about $113,000, still twenty times more than the net worth of Latinos. But my analysis is not about all races, it is about dispelling the myth that our people are poor simply and only because we make defective decisions, which is not true.

This is story, is only a four-year slice of the same story that our people have faced for a century and a half of US occupation. It is the story of a people who have unfailingly tried to fit in to the society, to play by the rules, to do what is asked to succeed, only to find out that the system, be it economic, political or cultural, continues to make sure that they remain locked out.

It is the same story of my grandfathers’ generation who went to fight WWII, because that was what was asked of them, only to come back and find, again, that their children were not allowed into the best schools, and that their brothers in arms could not be buried in the white cemetery.

Yet generation after generation, parents teach their children to continue to comply, to do what is asked of them, to chase, well, a dream.

He buried the campaign of Donald Trump by releasing his birth certificate, just before the White House Correspondent’s dinner.  It is too obvious that he was providing fodder for the comedic twists that night.  Trump was laughed out of his candidacy.

Then on May 1, the day that otherwise would have been cast as “Immigrants and Latinos Stand Against Obama’s Inaction on Comprehensive Reform,” we got the death of OBL instead.  We weren’t laughed out, just simply ignored.  Impeccable timing by his ilk.

This weekend, I was invited by some friends of mine to visit Cleveland, Texas.  The trip was not a leisurely one.  We were invited to meet with a community which had been affected by a horrific incident-the gang rape of an 11-year old by a group of men.   This young girl was lured to an isolated location, where men from the age of fourteen to twenty seven years of age took turns having sex with her on different occasions.  I was also informed that in later incidents, members of the same group threatened to kill this young girl if she did not return to the same location to be raped again.  If this isn’t enough of a tragedy, this child, her parents and the community quickly became victims of an ensuing media circus. 

Racial Perspective

One of the most attractive parts of the story for mainstream media types is that the victim of this rape was a so-called Latina.  All of the accused are black.  Traditionally, there is little else that attracts mainstream media more than racial problems, especially when the two sides are people of color. 

Quanell X, a local activist, staged a town hall meeting in Cleveland to discuss some points of concern with the situation.  Many people involved in social justice and human rights have learned to be guarded with the criminal justice system.  Having protested cases like Pedro Oregon’s murder at the hands of HPD in the nineties to most recently the detention of babies in immigrant jails like Hutto, I understand the apprehension of other activists when it comes to issues of criminal justice. In general, Mr. X is correct in questioning law enforcement’s process with people of color. 

In his speech, he clearly said that any adult who had sex with a child should “have his butt whooped” and go to jail.  He also said that he told one of the accused who had admitted to his crime that he had to pay for his crime, even if the accused did not know her age, and he scolded black elders for losing control of their neighborhood.  He said that those who admitted their involvement did the right thing, and that those who were involved needed to pay for their crime. 

However, he made some other statements, which many people, including myself, interpreted as blaming the victim and her parents.  “This rape did not happen one night. It did not happen in two days, this was going on over a protracted period of time so I have to ask the question if this young girl did not live in that neighborhood…(if she was) so much experiencing sex with so many African -American men (sic)…where was her mother.” 

I spoke to Quanell X about his comments for this piece.  He was adamant that he did not intend to blame the child.  “She is a baby,” he said.  “If these brothers are guilty of what they stand accused of, they are worthy of death.”  He repeated that phrase for emphasis.  However, he stood by the assertion that the parents bear some responsibility. 

I am relieved that he does not blame the victim, but I do not see the parents as being negligent in this case.  The NY Times reports that she was an honor student, and local witnesses claim that her siblings were as well.  Even if they were negligent, I don’t know that it would be accurate or correct for them to bear any responsibility for having been manipulated, even if that manipulation spanned a few months.

 Women’s perspective

As I heard Quanell X’s comments with a female listener, she quickly responded, “How can he say she was having sex?  She was being raped.” That sums up the sentiment of many women who have been following this case.

In Cleveland, Yolanda Navarro Black, made it clear that “CHILDREN CAN’T CONSENT TO SEX.”  She explained that it was not as much a racial incident, as it was a women’s issue.  Nothing else matters, except for the fact that a minor child had been raped by adult men.  It doesn’t matter whether the child thought she wanted to.  It does not matter how the child dressed.  It does not matter whether her parents were respectable or not.  “A child can’t say yes.”

A group of women organized a press conference to reiterate the same message.  They made it clear that this was not so much a racial incident, as it was a women’s issue.  

“We’re talking about race, why?” said Councilwoman Jolanda Jones in an interview about the press conference.  “I was a victim of rape at eight years old, and I didn’t report it until I was twenty one.  Part of the reason was because the rapists threatened to kill me and my family members.”  Reportedly, this is how the Cleveland rapists convinced the child to return to be victimized again.

Sylvia Gonzales, LULAC’s National Vice President for the Southwest, is preparing to take up a collection and to fundraise for the victim’s family.  “They are very much in need due to this incident,” she says.  She can be reached at 832-283-5752.

I applaud these women for putting ethics first and for questioning a strong personality in defense of women and family, before any man did the same.

Organizing/Bigger Perspective

In the end, I believe that race is pertinent.  Quanell X says that he believes that three of the accused are innocent.  From my experience, it is plausible that three out of the nineteen black men could be charged with insufficient evidence to support these charges. It is also plausible that race could play a part in their charges.  While I strongly object to his take on the victim’s family, I believe in due process, and that the guilty should spend a lifetime paying for their crimes.

For my part, I told the good people in Cleveland, that it was extremely important to have a standing organization which is prepared to deal with all injustices as they come.  Injustice exists most often when the people fail to organize in its own self-defense.  I encouraged them to begin meeting with the aim of preparing themselves for the likely event that justice might not be served in this or in many other cases to come.  Previous preparation is the key to fighting injustice.