DemocracySpace.org

Friday digest-open thread 5/2/08

Have you registered yet for "Making Every Voice Matter," Everyday Democracy's National Meeting, set for June 12-14 in Denver? There are only 10 days left to get the early-bird rate, good through May 12. (Until then, individual registration is $200; afterward, it's $230.) Team, youth, and single-day discounts are available. Registration includes meals, workshops, and a fabulous Friday-night Civic Fair. Click here to get much more information, and here to check out the preliminary conference program. We hope to see you in Denver!

Last Friday, three New York City police officers were acquitted of all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed man who was killed in November 2006 in an incident in which the police fired 50 bullets. As seen on our website, New York Faith & Justice - a diverse group of churches, faith organizations, and individuals dedicated to addressing poverty-related injustice - called this week for NYPD  Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to endorse the Conversations for Change project and mount a city-wide truth commission on police-related violence. The Conversations for Change aim to bring together citizens and police officers, using discussion guides developed by Everyday Democracy (formerly the Study Circles Resource Center). Pilot circles have taken place, and the project will culminate in a five-week community-wide series of up to 50 small group conversations between police and members of their communities this fall. Click here to learn more about New York Faith & Justice and here to see Everyday Democracy's tools for forging better police-community relations.

Our friends at Movement Vision Lab have gotten into the podcasting game, with portable interviews of leaders like Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union, Gabe Gonzalez from the Center for Community Change, Burt Lauderdale of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and Emira Palacios of Sunflower Community Action in Kansas. You can access individual interviews or - better yet - subscribe to the podcasts via the link to iTunes from this page.

This week marked the fifth anniversary of President George W. Bush's declaration that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, and yet the war continues with no end in sight. As seen on the NCDD website, an organization called Vets4Vets is offering free weekend workshops all over the country where returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have a chance to share their stories and set up peer groups for continued support and conversation. More than 500 Iraq-Afghanistan veterans have taken part in 22 weekend workshops over the past two years, and local groups are meeting in eight cities across the U.S. with more forming every month. For more info, check out Vets4Vets' website.

What have you been working on this week? What's ahead? Share your comments below.

April books roundup

It's time for our monthly roundup of recent books of interest to people who are working, organizing, and educating for positive community change. This month's selections include Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon; Fight  Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community by Bill McKibben and the Step It Up Team; and The True Patriot: A Pamphlet by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer. You can get these books at your local bookseller, or online, or at the links offered below.

Slavery by Another Name tells how for decades after the Civil War, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, charged with outrageous fines, then sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. The practice was finally given up due to government embarrassment over possible enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II. Blackmon, a white man who is Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, started writing nearly a decade ago about how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century. This book grew out of that reporting. (Order here.) Click here for more of Blackmon's writings on race, school resegregation (he attended Mississippi schools as they were integrated in the 1970s), baseball, and more.  You can also read an excerpt from the book and listen to a "Talk of the Nation" interview with Blackmon here.

Earth Day 2008 may be behind us, but many communities are eager to keep the momentum going. In Fight Global Warming Now, McKibben and his collaborators offer a hands-on, locally oriented guidebook for halting climate change. McKibben draws from the lessons of 1,400 Step It Up demonstrations held last spring, one of the biggest days of environmental action since the original Earth Day and one that came together in mere months. He pledges that proceeds from the book will go back into efforts to combat climate change. (Order here.) Another recent McKibben book - Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future - is recently out in paperback, and it's a good companion to Fight Global Warming Now. McKibben shares why, particularly in our current era of unequal wages and dwindling natural resources, "more" usually doesn't mean "better." He shows how communities around the world are building vibrant local economies where people work together to create more of their own food, energy, and even entertainment.

The True Patriot has been out for a few months, but it may be a good prism through which to view the rest of this presidential election year. "We believe all politics is fundamentally about morality," Liu and Hanauer write in the slim book's introduction. "What rules do we need to live a good life together? How should those rules govern the choices we make not only as individuals but as a community?" Written in the style of Thomas Paine's classic Common Sense, The True Patriot has a decidedly progressive philosophy but one that calls to conservatives as well by appealing to core American values, like sharing of sacrifice. In a radio interview, Liu said, "I think if you take these values seriously, you’re able to find a zone where people of both parties can come together and say, 'You know what? This is the essence of true patriotism: whether we are looking out for the next generation, whether we have a sense of obligation and responsibility, not just to ourselves but to those who are going to come after us.'" (Order here.)

What are you reading these days? What's next on your list?

Friday digest-open thread 4/18/08

It's time to announce the spring selection for our Everyday Democracy Book Club. Join us here at Democracy Space at 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 15, as we'll meet with Everyday Democracy senior associate Matt Leighninger to discuss his book The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance - and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. In the book, Matt - who also is executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium - tells how communities all across the nation are seeing how officials and citizens can work together to address pressing issues.

This will be a great opportunity to share stories of "shared governance" and learn from other communities (and Matt's considerable expertise). Order the book from your local bookstore or online, and be sure to mark your calendar for May 15. And if you missed our last book club with Frances Moore Lappé, you can read the transcript here.

Speaking of the DDC, thanks to Joe Goldman for his tip on this recent article on Politico.com, in which e-democracy advocate Steven Clift asked this timely question: “Isn’t it interesting that the best-designed government websites are those collecting your taxes, while the worst sites are those giving you a say on how your taxes are spent?” The article tells how many other governments are way beyond ours in offering the public a chance to comment on legislation, submit petitions, and more. For example, write authors Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifr, "In England, anyone can submit an e-petition directly on the 10 Downing Street website, and the most popular ones are featured on the site’s home page. More than 7 million people — one in 10 British citizens — have signed one of those petitions since the site’s launch in the fall of 2006."

Next week, Everyday Democracy will be holding the first of two Learning Exchanges for the nine communities involved in our Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative. Two important articles on this topic crossed our desks this week. Education Week had the bad but not unsurprising news that the academic achievement gap grows fastest for bright African-American children, particularly in schools with higher black populations, "where test scores are lower on average, teachers are less experienced, and high-achieving peers are harder to find."

Meanwhile, criminal injustice is in the spotlight in the current issue of the alumni magazine for Brown University, where economics professor Glenn Loury has been working to bring greater attention to the fact, as author Beth Schwartzapfel wrote, "that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery." Click here to read "A Nation of Jailers."

The good news is that many communities are proactively deciding to address racial inequity, often with the help of resources from Everyday Democracy. If you caught yesterday's water cooler, you learned how Lynchburg, Virginia, successfully held the action forum for its first round of "Many Voices - One Community" dialogues on race and racism this week, and how activists from New Haven and Stratford, Connecticut; Jacksonville, Florida; Syracuse, New York; and Memphis, Tennessee are being - and leading - the change they want to see in their communities.

Next week at DemocracySpace: We'll have news from communities walking the walk for Earth Day and two days of live blogging from the CCRE Learning Exchange. If you like what you read here, you can get it delivered right to your email box by subscribing via the link atop the right-hand side of the page.

Happy Passover to our Jewish readers!

YouthBuild, MTV team up

It's not every day that low-income youth get their voices heard in the nation's capital, but it's happening this week. Last night, nearly 500 youth held an "Our America" town hall at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington to unveil a "Declaration of Inter-dependence” informed by their life experiences. Today, about 100 of them are on Capitol Hill to advocate for change in six key areas of the declaration: the public school system, family supports, economic development in low-income communities, the justice system, the environment, and the role of young people in society.

Participants in the town hall included young people from 28 states who have had setbacks such as dropping out of high school, being homeless, having a teen pregnancy, or doing time in jail, but who are rising above such difficult challenges. The town hall was sponsored by YouthBuild USA, Think.MTV.com, and dozens of other national organizations with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. MTV News correspondents Sway Calloway and Kim Stolz served as emcees.

“We have gathered in Washington DC to bring attention to the conditions facing young people in low-income communities, and to call upon our elected officials and presidential candidates to join with us in finding solutions,” explained Antonio Ramirez, President of YouthBuild’s National Alumni Association, and a speaker at the event.

“We wrote the Declaration of Inter-Dependence because we believe it is our responsibility as young leaders to think through the important issues facing our communities and our nation, and to make proposals that can lead to changes and improve these conditions," said Verondha Henry, another YouthBuild graduate. “We recognize that there is an interdependence between young people in low-income communities and the future of America. In the Declaration, we voice our views about the public schools, the justice system, the system of family supports, the economy of our local communities, and how to improve these systems to break the cycle of poverty.”

“This is a unique gathering of low-income young people whose voices are too often overlooked and have been absent from policy decisions on issues that directly impact their lives and futures,” said Dorothy Stoneman, president and founder of YouthBuild USA, a national nonprofit in which low-income youth work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas while rebuilding affordable housing for poor people. “Their leadership and commitment demonstrate that young people should be part of the conversation and they should be encouraged to take action to transform America’s most pressing problems."

To keep the momentum going, YouthBuild now has an "Our America" group page on ThinkMTV.com described as a place that's "open to ALL youth who want to amplify their voices and share ideas for tackling poverty in this nation." Elsewhere on the Think.MTV.com site, users can share their views on a wide range of issue-oriented forums, including poverty. Check out the full list here. And while you're on the MTV site, have a look at the Teen Hero Awards page for info on how teens you know can try to win grants for their charities of choice.

Friday digest-open thread 10/26/07

Welcome to this week's round-up of news and views. Your comments and additions are welcome!

Two weeks ago tomorrow, presidential candidate John Edwards called for a new Citizens Congress that would engage American in discussions of major issues. But young Americans aren't waiting: They're seizing opportunities to have their say now, including the Democracy 2.0 Declaration drafted by 47 youth leaders convened by Mobilize.org in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. You can read the declaration and sign on in support here. Thanks to Sandy from NCDD for passing along word of the petition.

Speaking of Edwards' proposal, Mica Stark published an op-ed in the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union Leader this week. Stark noted that although the war in Iraq, health care, the environment, and education are key issues in the 2008 elections, Edwards' call for a Citizens Congress ranks among "the more important speeches of the cycle thus far on the health and state of our democracy. ... While the merits of Edwards' proposal need to be debated, the issue of how the public can be more involved in policymaking and governance should be front and center during the primary, and voters should be pressing all the candidates, on both sides, for their specific ideas in how they see citizens participating and partnering with the next administration in solving our collective problems. ... After election day, most citizens are left on the sidelines as spectators with little opportunity to shape the decisions being made on their behalf." Read the full essay here.

As noted on the Study Circles Resource Center website today, a schools action team that grew out of study circles in the Mundelein, Illinois, area, is exploring ways - including blogs - to improve communication between the local schools and residents. Student study circles are planned soon, too. Read more here, and click here to see how your community can use study circles to work on education and other issues.

At least 1,800 Southern California homes have been destroyed in the wildfires that have swept across the state this month. Against that backdrop, it's some comfort to know that Habitat for Humanity's annual Jimmy Carter Work Project is in Southern California this year. Next week, thousands of volunteers - including former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn - will build 30 news houses and repair 70 more in an event designed to call attention to the 1.6 billion people worldwide who need affordable housing. Here are stories from some of the families involved in next week's build.

The Georgia Supreme Court today ordered that Genarlow Wilson be released from prison, ruling 4-3 that his sentence of up to 10 years in prison on a teen sex conviction was cruel and unusual punishment. In a highly publicized case, Wilson, an African-American, was convicted in 2005 of aggravated child molestation for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17. He's now 21. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today that when Wilson was sentenced, his crime "carried a mandatory 10-year sentence with no parole. However, the law was changed in 2006 to make Wilson's crime a misdemeanor with a maximum 1-year sentence."

Here's an interesting essay by writer, researcher, and civic strategist Brad Rourke, who had the recent misfortune to send an email to an unintended recipient. Rourke raises intriguing questions about the balance between immediacy and accuracy in both private (emailed) and public (blogs and the like) online communication. Thanks to Molly for the tip on this.

And with that, this blogger hits the publish button on today's digest, hoping that everything here is fair and accurate - and knowing that one or more readers will let us know if it is not. 

Friday digest-open thread 10/19/07

John Mellencamp has a long history of addressing racism, in such songs as "Jim Crow," "We Are the People," and "Our Country." He's at it again with a new and very timely song called "Jena," which will be on his next CD but is already streaming at his website and on YouTube (click on the image below to play):

Here's Mellencamp's statement on the song:

"I am not a journalist, I am a songwriter and in the spirit and tradition of the minstrel, I am telling a story in this song. The story is not, strictly speaking, about the town of Jena or this specific incident but of racism in America.

"The song was not written as an indictment of the people of Jena but, rather, as a condemnation of racism, a problem which I've reflected in many songs, a problem that still plagues our country today.

"The current trial in Jena is just another reflection of prejudice in our nation. If the song strikes an emotional chord with people and if they examine it and interpret as they will, something will have been accomplished. The aim here is not to antagonize but, rather, to catalyze thought."

John Edwards' call last week for a Citizens Congress continues to draw attention. John Gastil, co-editor of The Deliberative Democracy Handbook, has an op-ed in the Seattle Times. He writes:

"At the present time, our elected officials record our sentiments through polls, talk radio, blogs, ad hoc public forums and the blunt instrument of elections. The public voice Washington hears is already thrice filtered, by special-interest campaigns, media frames and politicians themselves.

"Edwards proposes an alternative means of public expression in American politics. ... the immediate inspiration for Edwards appears to be the "21st Century Town Meeting" developed by the civic organization AmericaSpeaks. Edwards refers to this when he cites the 'citizen-centered projects' that have given ordinary people a voice in designs for the World Trade Center memorial, the redevelopment of New Orleans, [and] health-care reform in California. ...

"... Edwards' proposal is currently a 150-word sketch on a campaign Web site. At this stage, I find myself in the same position as a fan who discovered and adored a garage band before it went mainstream. Having studied deliberative reforms for 15 years, I hope that Edwards' proposal remains true to its roots. The Citizen Congress can satisfy this hard-core fan only if its final form is transparent, representative, deliberative, directive and influential."   

Read it all here. NCDD has a page featuring coverage of and reaction to Edwards' plan. Click here.

Words to ponder:

"What is democracy? The tedious, hard, perplexing, messy, and seemingly endless task of working through what kind of people we are going to be and what kind of communities we will live in. Politics is the work of democracy, and it encompasses practically everything that we can and must do together: how we educate our children, design our communities and neighborhoods, feed ourselves and dispose of our wastes, care for the sick and elderly and poor, relate to the natural world, entertain and enlighten ourselves, and defend ourselves. It also affects what values we seek to defend, what roles are chosen for us by virtue of our identity, and what roles we create for ourselves."

- Bill Moyers, from a 1997 essay, quoted in this column on study circles by Florida resident Mark Kaufman.

House hears Jena Six testimony

The president of the Southern Poverty Law Center told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that because the federal government "has a strong interest in promoting racial harmony in our nation’s schools ... in some cases, this interest may require federal officials to investigate and prosecute hate crimes ..."

Richard Cohen's testimony came during an often-emotional hearing in which Democratic legislators and activists lambasted federal authorities for not intervening in the Jena Six case, in which six black students were accused of beating a white classmate after nooses were hung from a tree on their Louisiana campus.

But Cohen added, "We believe that the bulk of the federal effort should be aimed at preventing hate crimes from occurring in schools in the first place and at helping state and local officials to respond to the tensions that often occur in the aftermath of such crimes."

Cohen gave all the lawmakers a copy of a new brochure, "Six Lessons From Jena," created by the SPLC's Teaching Tolerance project. The brochure, written by Jennifer Holladay, also has been mailed to more than 50,000 educators. Its lessons include:

1. Don't ignore obvious signs of trouble.
2. Examine your school's climate.
3. Take bias incidents seriously.
4. Provide forums for meaningful discussion.
5. Use bias incidents as teachable moments.
6. Bridge divisions in the school - and the community.
   

As the web version of the brochure notes via a link to this article ("One Conversation at a Time"), the Study Circles Resource Center has long experience in helping schools examine racial issues and create more positive school experiences for all students. Learn more about SCRC's work to fight racism  and help every student succeed.

In his testimony (a full transcript can be found here), Cohen also reminded House members that "the problem of hate crimes and racial unrest at schools is not confined to the  South—the recent noose hangings at Columbia University in New York City and at the University of Maryland are examples of its widespread nature—and is not confined to tensions between black and white students."

Cohen said that although the Jena noose hangers were never charged with a crime, they probably could have been, but he added "we would never contend that the noose hangers should have been sent to prison, charged with a crime, or even expelled for that matter. Although we believe that the Jena 6 were seriously overcharged, sending white students to jail would be a poor way of balancing the scales.

“The federal government should be prepared to investigate and prosecute serious hate crimes that occur in our nation’s school when state and local authorities fail to take appropriate action. But the criminal law is a blunt instrument, and too many of our young people are already being pushed out of our schools and into our prisons,” Cohen said. “A far wiser course than increasing federal prosecutions would be increasing federal investment in services designed to soothe the racial and ethnic tensions simmering in
our nation’s schools and to respond promptly when hate crimes occur.

"Congress should consider mandating an increase in the staff of the Community Relations Service," Cohen added. "As our nation’s diversity has increased, the size of the Community Relations Service has decreased.”

For many years, Teaching Tolerance has offered its Mix It Up program as a way for students  to talk about racial differences in one of the most segregated places they know: the school cafeteria. This year’s Mix It Up at Lunch Day is coming soon, on November 13. Learn more here.

One in three little black boys

In a column posted today on The New Yorker website, Steve Coll writes about why the Jena Six "narrative has resonated so broadly. Many African-Americans understand the case not only as the civil-rights era redux but as a stark illustration of a here-and-now problem, one about which whites are mainly silent: the mass incarceration of black youths - America’s 'school-to-prison pipeline,' as some scholars have christened it."

Coll cites the work of The Sentencing Project, which recently reported that African Americans are jailed at nearly six times the rate of whites - and that, if current trends continue, one out of three black boys  born today can expect to serve time in jail during his lifetime. Hispanics are jailed at a rate twice as high as whites, with the Hispanic share of the state and federal prison population rising 43 percent between 1990 and 2005.

The Sentencing Project found that in seven states - Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota - the rate of incarceration for blacks was more than 10-to-1 that for whites. In the District of Columbia, the ratio is 19-to-1. South Dakota had the highest rate of blacks incarcerated per 100,000 people, with 4,710. The rest of the top 10 includes Wisconsin, Iowa, Vermont, Utah, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas. Hawaii was at the bottom, with 851. Yet Hawaii imprisons nearly twice as many blacks as whites. (See the full report here.)

As Coll writes, "Discrimination in the American justice system is not only a Deep South thing; it is a national embarrassment. Tocqueville, who initially came to America to study its penal system, might wonder how a democracy can so earnestly debate the justice of detaining foreign nationals at Guantánamo while displaying not a whiff of discomfort about the record number of its own citizens - now more than two million - stuffed into jails and prisons, or about the causes of racial disparity in this forgotten population."

So what will we do at this moment? Are we content to watch people of color imprisoned at such disproportional rates? Perhaps the presence of such states as Vermont, Montana, and South Dakota on this list will convince us that all communities - no matter what their racial make-up - can benefit from facing racism head on.

Nation looks at Little Rock legacy

A commemoration ceremony was held in Little Rock, Arkansas, this morning to mark the 50th anniversary of the integration of Central High School. All across America, people are re-examining the events of September 1957, when federal troops had to be called in to escort nine black students to their classes. Many are doing so partly through the prism of last week's march protesting unequal justice in Jena, Louisiana, and remarking that although much progress has been made toward racial equity, we still have miles to go. Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald writes:

Five decades later, there is a starkness, a black and white purity, to the issues argued those tense days in Little Rock streets: inclusion versus exclusion. It is enough to make one nostalgic. After all, after affirmative action, after busing, after O.J., after Cosby, after Imus, there is little starkness, much less purity, to the conflict between pale and dark. All is complexity, all is gray.

Or maybe that's just the self-deluding conceit of a generation that is pleased to think of itself as enlightened beyond history, pleased to look back on past events and tsk tsk the behavior of the poor, benighted souls who lived through them.

Yet in Jena, La., six American children with dark skin were charged with attempted murder after jumping a pale child whose injuries amounted to a black eye and a concussion.

In Tulia, Tex., 38 mostly dark-skinned people were convicted of drug dealing on the perjured testimony of a pale cop known to describe dark people with a racial slur.

In Paris, Tex., a dark-skinned girl who shoved a teacher's aide was given seven years by a judge who had earlier given probation to a pale-skinned arsonist.

All this not in 1957, but now.

Yet, it has become common for some pale Americans to deny that these and other inequities have anything to do with skin tone. That's an absurdity we left in the '50s, they say. We are beyond that. There are no pale Americans and dark Americans. There are only Americans. They wish dark Americans would understand this and get over it already.

The Study Circles Resource Center knows that America can't "get over it already" until the reality of structural racism is acknowledged and addressed in every area of our lives, from education to criminal justice to economic opportunity. For more than 15 years, SCRC (soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy) has provided resources to help communities address racism and work toward equity. Click here to learn what you can do.

For a look at life at Central High School in 2007, read this account from ABC News. Click here to read the fascinating biographies of the "Little Rock Nine," who were guided past taunts and jeers to class 50 years ago this morning. A documentary film "Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later" airs tonight on HBO.