a year for the workers

That’s what it needs to be at Harvard. Thousands of Harvard employees are struggling against the Corporation for a living wage, for parity, for full time work and for benefits that will allow them to raise their children above the poverty line. This week, the campaigns to support our workers in their negotiations began in full. Student Labor Action Movement (of which I am a part) held an event on Wednesday night to begin to raise awareness and yesterday, janitors and security guards rallied for the right to a union and fair contracts. Both were well covered in the Crimson.

A little context: Harvard is notoriously anti-labor. Last year, as a part of a long standing trend, they finished outsourcing the security guards, destroying the union they had in order to lower costs from wages and benefits. They also pay most of their basic service employees around $10 an hour (about $20,000 a year), which often requires workers to work 2 or 3 or 4 jobs to have enough to raise a family. (more in expanded post)

Cambridge Common will cover labor issues all year, as it is important to know where our money goes. The way Harvard spends our money (as with divestment issues, etc.) is an expression of our collective morality and if we as students allow the people who make our lives possible to live in poverty, we are complicit in their struggles. For now, the important thing to do is read everything you can about this (hopefully the Crimson will continue to do a great job covering the issue) and talk to the people who work around you about their experience. Talk to the people who run your dining halls and guard your houses, who clean your hallways and fix your broken window. Ask them about what they experience, what they are paid, how and if they struggle. Talk to your friends and make it an issue. Make it an issue because the people we rely on to live our lives are relying on us to help them live theirs.

Don’t forget about home…

One of the most amazing, saddening, and intriguing political situations in the world at this time is that of Somalia in East Africa. This is a nation where its political leaders were run out of the country by warlords and they are now scattered throughout the world. Few countries can realistically claim to be anarchic but Somalia is one.

Listen to a rapper named K’naan and learn about his experiences growing up in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu. K’naan spits lyrics like, “I’m sick, as far as lyrics I’m with/as far as gimmicks I spit/barrage and limit the shit/ they talkin, rip it I’m hip/the hop is living/I skip, the obvious women/don’t get, what I’m presentin/no rims my mind is spinnin”. Whoa. Also, you should watch the movie Black Hawk Down in case you’ve never seen it. It is excellent historical fiction about a U.S. military plane being downed in the middle of Mogadishu and attempts by the military to extract their personnel with armed Somalians swarming in from all directions. Action-packed and vivid.

recruiting, the Harvard Black community, and everything

A long, fascinating and expansive debate continues after Chimaobi’s on post i-banking, economic inequalities in America and abroad, corporate culture and the Harvard (Black and general) Community. A must read.

flippity floppity

Jon Stewart goes to town on this administration’s sudden realization that energy conservation is good (video links: WMP and Quicktime).

Chief Justice Roberts

In celebration of John Roberts confirmation as Chief Justice of the United States, a job he will probably hold through a half a dozen Presidents or more, I quote from the New York Review of Books:

The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lacked his advantages.

It’s a fascinating question, not simply about the morality and wisdom of his political ideology, but also about how ideology is constructed (or deconstructed) by experience. I recommend the whole piece.

quick note to readers

Cambridge Common has the “comments” feature enabled for a reason. If I am wrong or Chimaobi’s wrong, either in your opinion or factually, SAY SO. This blog is an unedited, and fast-paced (you can probably tell because I am an egregious speller), and the community of readers is important because you become a part of helping us sift through ideas and facts to construct our truth. Thank you to the over 700 of you who have read in the last three days, now join the conversations!

note: I highly recommend this thread on Black culture at Harvard and social justice at Harvard in general as a great example of how the community give and take can be amazing and thought-provoking.

and the cards came tumbling down

The conservative movement is imploding. There, I said it. I feel much better now.

The president’s popularity is at or just above the lowest of his almost five years, at least partially as a result of rampant cronyism many people are suffering, the Senate Majority Leader is being investigated for insider trading that pocketed him an extra 2 million dollars, in the next few months Rovegate will come to head when the special prosecutor releases his findings, and today, Tom Delay was indicted by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy regarding campaign finance and will step down from his leadership position in the House. Leaders of the Christian right are either comparing American judges to the KKK or calling for the assassination of foreign leaders. Whew, that was tiring: Bush, Rove, Frist, Delay, Dobson and Roberts. I could throw various things Rumsfeld and Cheney should also be in trouble for, but that would just make it obscene (because it is!). If the Democratic Party can’t start kicking some ass with this as the political reality, we really need to quit and just let this be the undemocratic one-party state that the GOP wants it to be.

unreality

the world has reached an entirely new level of absurdity. AP Headline: First Lady Makes Her Reality TV Debut. The layers of unreality are really quite astounding if you think about it.

did you know?

Did you know that, despite what appears to be a very apathetic and “in the system” student body, Harvard was once a hot bed of radicalism? It’s true, “The Kremlin on the Charles” is not referring to John Kerry voters, but to actual communists, socialists, social democrats and radical liberals who once populated this campus. The cold war and the excesses of the late 60s and early 70s left seem to have dampened the dominance of radicals, although the community is strong and growing. In any event, check out this article from Student Underground about Harvard’s radical tradition. You might be surprised.

FUN FACT: Did you know that the Independent was actually founded as a conservative counter-balance to the then radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) dominated Crimson?

FACT CHECK: I believe the student strike referred to in the article only lasted one week, not three.

Northern Discomfort

Today I began working once again for the Mission Hill After School Program (MHASP), one of PBHA‘s myriad after school programs that draws its kids almost exclusively from the Alice Taylor and Mission Main public housing developments (pro-jects) in Roxbury’s Mission Hill neighborhood. Oh, how I missed the hood. I am there far too rarely. Growing up, besides a week I would spend at a Baptist camp in rural New Jersey (Lebanon, NJ to be exact) every year, I spent no time out of the hood. It was where my house, school, and church were and it was the only environment I felt comfortable in. To a large extent, this persists to this day as I have tried and tried to get used to living at Harvard and socializing with princesses and 20 year-old scholars, but I can’t. Last year, the Harvard Black Men’s Forum (BMF) invited former Black Panther and convicted terrorist Kazi Toure to come speak to the overwhelmingly middle-class, White suburban dwelling Black men of Harvard. Yo…big shout out to whoever put that together. He shook up the monotony of BMF Meetings and list debates in a meaningful and personally impactful way. One thing he said to me that will forever stick with me is a question that he posed: “Do you all feel more comfortable in Harvard Square or in Roxbury?” Most of the individuals in the room kept quiet but, to no one in particular, I said “Roxbury, of course.” Why is this? Why after two years is Harvard still a place that I feel like I’m visiting (as oppose to actually living at and being involved in campus happenings) ? Why? Because too many people here, most angrily minorities, are disappointments to myself and society both individually and collectively. (more in expanded post)

Few things get me angrier than investment bankers. I-banking is the ultimate tool job. Undergrads slice each other’s throats to get these positions and are worked to the bone for hours on end. Usually people defend their status as cogs in the wheel of capitalism and global oppression in capitalist terms, “At least they paid me well.” Dummy. You’re like the dog at the side of the table that is ever thankful for the sloppy, fattening scraps that your master throws to you. No matter how many zeros were at the end of your checks, you were making chump change. You know it and I know it. I say this as a self-identifying public servant who makes even less during my summer’s off from school. Nevertheless, I can walk through a community of people of my race such as Mission Hill and not get robbed by my own brothers and sisters. Let me see Goldman Sachs train you on how to stay in touch with the majority of your people. Whoops, only assimilation into greater wealthy White society’s taught there. Blackness revoked!

The purpose of I-banking is to increase the ready capital of one’s clients and therefore perpetuate the unequal and harmful distribution of wealth currently in existence in the U.S. The overwhelming wealth of America ($12 trillion GDP…over 7.5 times that of the combined GDP of the 54 countries that make up Africa) is sickening at times. Most people at Harvard do not care about these facts because they have little or no personal experience with poverty, racism, or related issues. They have never attended a majority Black public school where you enter with nearly 1,000 peers though graduate with only 350. They have never had to restrain their illiterate grandmother from going outside for a walk around the neighborhood due to excessive violence there. They have never had to wait in large rooms with others on public assistance in the basement of their city hall to receive medical care. Nope. Never.

Whether Blacks in Nigeria or Blacks in Newtowne Courts (one of Cambridge’s public housing developments), many are dumbfounded when they hear that Black students attend Harvard University. The combined astonishment, excitement, and inspiration that they feel is remarkable. Just today one of the kids I work with in the aforementioned after school program told me that she wanted to go to Harvard. That’s wassup. So many Blacks the world over are depending on individuals such as myself who are Black, from humble beginnings and “down” to show them the way to equality and freedom that it’s staggering. Sadly, many of these Blacks the world over falsely feel that all Blacks at Harvard are “down”. If they only knew that most Blacks at Harvard are not only complacent in their social and economic positions gained while at (or through) Harvard or innately through parents before coming to this University but many actively seek to enter jobs that will serve to further oppress them, they would cry rivers. Aren’t we supposed to be that “Talented Tenth” that Du Bois talked about over a century ago in The Souls of Black Folk? Aren’t we supposed to bind with our brothers and sisters at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the like along with those at Howard, Morehouse, and Hampton and attend to the immense task of the upliftment of our roughly one billion person race? Yeah, but who wants to do this when you can work 80 hours a week for Lehman Brothers (and never make partner), live in Brooklyn Heights (and never have a BBQ), and send your kids to Collegiate (and never place them in an environment where they’re remotely accepted)?

Getting back to my original point–my discomfort at Harvard–this discomfort lies in my struggle to find a community I feel fully at home in. The Blacks at Harvard are not like the Blacks that I grew up with in Trenton. These two groups of people have no basis for a present day relationship. Their relationship would be one based on history only (“we’ve both been categorized as Black”…”we’re both derived from Southern slave families”…etc.). At the same time, I’m clearly not comfortable in the greater community at Harvard that is White, grew up with two parents, and from “oh, just twenty minutes outside” some city. For these reasons, I find myself regressing more and more into the social justice community. This community is a rainbow coalition of sorts that draws its members from many different populations on campus, even some previously ridiculed or highlighted in this very blog (paragraph at that). These individuals and I get down on the same issues–the liberation of oppressed groups. Whether this oppressed group be women, homosexuals, the poor, Blacks (oh yeah), or whoever else this is what they ride for. That’s why I’m a feminist. That’s why you may catch me at a BGLTSA meeting sometime before I graduate (shout out to Mischa). That’s why you can catch me in the hood in Mission Hill on a regular chilling with people that, not jokingly, have to work to be considered poor.

I recognize my membership and role in a social and economic group that I MUST work to better. If only more people here did instead of, when soliciting recruiters, bringing I-bankers; financial consultants; and violent, imperialist government-supporting U.S. Department of Defense reps to come and make their PR ratings go up then Harvard and the world would be a much better place for it. I bet you they’ll send the Black guy, once again into a social situation at a different institution that he is uncomfortable in. Karma…gotta love it.