Race Class Events





Race Class Events

by carl Ehrhardt

Saturday,

November 19, 2005

 

This week I attended three interesting events. Tuesday

evening, the Black Law Students Assocation (BLSA)

brought an interesting panel of speakers to the law school to discuss the

topic of “Race, Class, and Katrina.” Wednesday afternoon, I attended an event

sponsored by Community Law in Action, The International Youth Foundation, and

the American Visionary Art Museum-- "Activism

With a Heart," a gathering at the American

Visionary Art Museum that coincided with the

publication of the foundation's first book, Our Time Is Now: Young People

Changing the World.[1] Friday afternoon, I attended The Daily Record’s “Leadership

in Law” Awards Ceremony at the Scottish Rite Mason’s Temple

Building in North

Baltimore. All three events

raised questions or issues in my mind: Why isn’t there more news coverage of

events like these? Such events form a special mode of communication, on one

hand suggesting group solidarity, but on they other they can seem narrowly

partisan. How do we move forward from the inspiration such events can

engender to meaningful actions and positive social change?

 

I think I had only decided on

Tuesday to go to Tuesday night’s “Race, Class and Katrina” on Tuesday.  Held at the University of Maryland School

of Law in Baltimore, the panel was moderated by Professor

Sherilyn Ifill. The

speakers were Elijah Cummings[2],

U.S. Congressman for the 7th district of Maryland, Michael

Fletcher of the Washington Post[3],

Kimberly Alton of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law[4],

and Professor Jeanne Woods from Loyola University New Orleans School of Law[5]

who will be temporarily teaching at the University of Maryland School of Law

as she was displaced by the hurricane. Elijah Cummings spoke of the high

poverty of African Americans in the United States and in New Orleans. He called for a reduction in cuts to federal programs

for the poor. He urged the Bush administration not to go back to business as

usual when it comes to poverty. Kimberly 

Alton described the lawsuit her organization, the Lawyers’ Committee

for Civil Rights Under Law, has filed against FEMA and the Department of

Homeland Security on behalf of victims of the hurricane who have yet to

receive any assistance.

 

Professor Ifill

and Professor Woods reiterated that we need to change the mindset in America that poor people of all racial backgrounds somehow

deserve what they get. Professor Woods asked the important question of why we

seem to be more comfortable in America with the race paradigm than the class paradigm.

Congressman Cummings repeated his distaste for the use of the term “refugees”

to describes Black people fleeing the flood in New Orleans. My impression is that this usage was criticized because

it reified the typical United States attitude toward poor people, which is

that they are “other,” part of an undeveloped third world, or even

un-American. In the case of the television images of black victims described

as looters while white victims were described as survivors, we could see the U.S. culture distancing itself from blame for the condition

of the victims. Professor Woods talked about positive rights paradigms and

negative rights paradigms. I thought about how a negative rights paradigm

dominates in the United States, except in the case of the “War on Drugs”

where the right to be left alone is outweighed by the value of a criminal

regime that disparately impacts poor and minority citizens. Making drug abuse

illegal tends to be another tool to cast the poor as morally “other,” and

therefore not our responsibility.

 

The sense of the conference was

that the tragedy in New

Orleans at once an

opportunity to discuss the weak morality of our society, but also a reminder

of how monolithic the current Republican or conservative political tide can

seem. With more young people, many of them born in the 1980s, dying

needlessly in the Iraq war, the Bush administration seems to be encountering

some choppy political water. However, this does not change the fact that

there does not seem to be any real kind of “People’s Movement” in the United States.

 

Wednesday afternoon I attended

“Activism with Heart” put on by the International Youth Foundation. Among the

speakers was Maria D’Ovidio from Argentina who has created a youth-led social enterprise

organization, “Interrupcion.”[6]

The word, which means “change direction” in Spanish, seemed like an excellent

summary of the spirit of resistance to the way things seem to be going with

war and economic greed. Another one of the “youth entrepreneurs” was Harjant Gill, from San Francisco who has made a number of films about gender issues from a

homosexual perspective. Jocelyn Land-Murphy from Canada started the Otesha project (www.otesha.ca/) which seeks to

educate young people about environmental sustainability issues. Mohammed Mamdani from the U.K started a Muslim Youth Helpline (www.myh.org.uk/). Chris Lawson,

treasurer of the Algebra Project, Baltimore, represented hometown youth in

action.

 

Friday Afternoon I attended “Leadership in Law” Awards put

on by the Daily Record at the Scottish Rite Masons’ Temple

at North Charles Street.

This was a chance for the little daily newspaper of Baltimore

legal and business news to remind its audience of its value to them. A Baltimore

City high school student from

Northwestern high school was awarded a $1000 scholarship to college. Lawyers

from the public and private sectors, and judges were recognized for notable

accomplishments in service to the legal profession and the community. There

was something starkly different about it than the prior two events. Of

course, the food was much fancier. It was a sit-down meal. There was more

video production involved than the other two events. Of course, as opposed to

the Youth Foundation event, the audience at the Leadership in Law awards was

99% adult. Chief Justice Robert Bell of the Maryland Court of Appeals, who

protested segregation in Baltimore

as a high school student, reminded the audience that the law and the legal

profession are the ultimate tools for securing justice in our society. The

counter-argument to that is that the law and the legal profession mostly

serve the interests of the privileged and the affluent. The counter-argument

is that there wasn’t much color, both in terms of ethnic and racial

diversity, and in terms of fashion, at this event. There is a sense in the

legal profession that standing out is not a good thing, unless it is within

certain parameters, such as billable hours, or cases won. Otherwise, the

lawyer and the judge want to be seen as plain, average, normal, difficult to

judge.

 

As I write this article, I wonder what I should learn from

all these events. I wonder how they can contribute to action for social

justice, instead of mere info-tainment, keeping the

intellectual cloistered comfortable in his assumption that there is some

value in his merely “thinking” about issues of social inequality and

community well-being.

Carlofbaltimore









 





 

[1] see,

e.g., www.baltimoresun.com/features/lifestyle/bal-to.kids17nov17,1,995992.story

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005).

[2] See,

e.g., www.house.gov/cummings/

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005)

[3] See,

e.g., www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/11/AR2005091101131.html

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005).

[4] See,

e.g., www.lawyerscomm.org/2005website/aboutus/staff/staffkalton.html

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005).

[5] See,

e.g., www.law.loyno.edu/~woods/

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005).

[6] See,

e.g., www.interrupcion.net/interrupcion.php

(last visited Saturday, November 19,

2005)