Beacon Broadside

Labor Day: Why Unions Still Matter

In honor of Labor Day, online orders at Beacon.org are 20% off with the code LaborDay12. Offer ends Sept. 4, so shop now!

Bill Fletcher Jr. is the author of "They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions. Fletcher is a long-time racial-justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author. He has been involved in the labor movement for decades, and is a widely known speaker and writer in print and on radio, television, and the Web. He has served in leadership positions with many prominent union and labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union. Fletcher is currently the director of field services for the American Federation of Government Employees. We conducted this Q&A with him via email in honor of the Labor Day holiday.

How have attitudes toward labor unions changed in the United States over the past few decades?

Attitudes towards unions have fluctuated depending, in part, on what segment of society you are talking about. More than half of non-union workers would like to be in a union or an association of workers. This has been fairly consistent. What has changed is that unions, particularly public sector unions, have become punching bags for politicians. This might be the result of trying to find ways of saving money that do not depend on raising taxes on the wealthy, or there might be very ideological reasons. In either cases, the elite in this society has turned on unions with ferocity. As unions have weakened, so too has their presence in the media. As regular people know less and less about unions, their opinions can be shaped and reshaped by anti-union forces in and outside of the media.

Was there ever a time that unions were viewed more favorably by the public and the media?

Absolutely. Here the answer depends, in part, on what part of the USA, but in general in the 1930s-the late 1960s, unions were viewed very favorably. In the 1930s and 1940s they were seen as being at the leadership of a movement for social and economic justice. This became less true after the Cold War devastated the unions and frightened them away from anything that was perceived as being left-wing. But that said, unions were seen as helping to raise all boats.

What are some of the greatest difficulties that public unions face today?

State, county and municipal budgets rely to a great degree on regressive taxes. As these bodies have allowed the wealthy and the corporations to pay less in taxes (and/or get tremendous tax breaks) the revenue had to be obtained elsewhere. Politicians began looking at public sector workers as a convenient target. Additionally, as private sector workers have found themselves to be victims of concessionary demands and, as a result, lose many hard-won gains, they have often found themselves focusing their anger and resentment on the public sector workers. Also, public sector unions face the constant threat of privatization of jobs, so there is a regular defensive battle to protect what they have. Public sector unions, in too many cases, stopped organizing, whether that was with regard to other public sector workers or organizing workers who worked in privatized facilities. In some respects, and quite ironically, one of the greatest challenges facing public sector unions is to figure out how to support the re-organizing of the private sector workforce. Federal workers face many of the same threats as state, county and municipal workers, and, as we have seen over the last few years, have been made scapegoats for budget deficits.

What do you see as the biggest benefit of unionizing a workplace?

It provides workers with an opportunity to gain a voice in the workplace; a possibility for raising their wages and benefits; and a means to begin to democratize the workplace such that the workers end up having real rights rather than being the subject of arbitrary treatment by employers.

What advice do you have for workers interested in unionizing?

First, make sure that there is not, already, a union at your workplace. If there is, speak with a representative of the union about it. Second, go to www.aflcio.org and read up on unions. Contact the central labor council—a body of unions from across the board who meet regularly and attempt to coordinate their work (central labor councils are usually at the county or municipal level)—and ask them which union would be most appropriate for the type of the job in which you work. Get some of your co-workers together and meet with a representative from the union. Even if there is no union that covers your sort of job, put together an informal committee of workers in your workplace who commit to working together for justice in your workplace...and then call me.

Beacon Buzz: Labor Day Sale, the Tweet Laureate, and more!

Labor Day Sale:

In honor of Labor Day, online orders at Beacon.org are 20% off with the code LaborDay12. Offer ends Sept. 4. Some suggested titles that will help you brush up on your knowledge of the holiday:

"They're Bankrupting Us!" And 20 Other Myths about Unions by Bill Fletcher Jr.

From Wisconsin to Washington, DC, the claims are made: unions are responsible for budget deficits, and their members are overpaid and enjoy cushy benefits. The only way to save the American economy, pundits claim, is to weaken the labor movement, strip workers of collective bargaining rights, and champion private industry. In "They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions, labor leader Bill Fletcher Jr. makes sense of this debate as he unpacks the twenty-one myths most often cited by anti-union propagandists. Drawing on his experiences as a longtime labor activist and organizer, Fletcher traces the historical roots of these myths and provides an honest assessment of the missteps of the labor movement. He reveals many of labor's significant contributions, such as establishing the forty-hour work week and minimum wage, guaranteeing safe workplaces, and fighting for equity within the workforce. This timely, accessible, "warts and all" book argues, ultimately, that unions are necessary for democracy and ensure economic and social justice for all people.

Read a review at Labor Notes.

 

“All Labor Has Dignity” by Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited and introduction by Michael K. Honey

People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. He fought throughout his life to connect the labor and civil rights movements, envisioning them as twin pillars for social reform. As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap, and the near collapse of a financial system that puts profits before people, King's prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today. They help us imagine King anew: as a human rights leader whose commitment to unions and an end to poverty was a crucial part of his civil rights agenda.

Covering all the civil rights movement highlights-Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and Memphis-award-winning historian Michael K. Honey introduces and traces King's dream of economic equality. Gathered in one volume for the first time, the majority of these speeches will be new to most readers. The collection begins with King's lectures to unions in the 1960s and includes his addresses during his Poor People's Campaign, culminating with his momentous "Mountaintop" speech, delivered in support of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis. Unprecedented and timely, "All Labor Has Dignity" will more fully restore our understanding of King's lasting vision of economic justice, bringing his demand for equality right into the present.

 

Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century by Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelly, and Howard Zinn

Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the 'counter girls' at the Detroit Woolworth's during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley's story of a movie theater musicians' strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology.

"Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same."-John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO

"Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate."-Mary Carroll, Booklist

"Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action"-Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune

 

"Political" News:

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by @ElinorLipman

Featured on Amazon's Omnivoracious Blog with an original poem by Lipman.

Beacon launched a new “campaign” to name Elinor Lipman Tweet Laureate of the United States (would this be TLOTUS?).

The campaign includes a Twitter-based giveaway for a free copy of Tweet Land of Liberty and a limited edition campaign button. To enter, this text:

I support a funnier America! @ElinorLipman for #TweetLaureate: http://goo.gl/Bjnjp  #TweetLandofLiberty

Be sure to watch and share the Campaign Video.

Notable Mentions:

The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise

Wall Street Journal review Aug 22: “Readers will learn more about slavery in the American South from these autobiographical accounts than they could from any textbook.” 

 

Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman

Kirkus Reviews online August 29 and in print September 15: “The searching, intelligent account of a gay man's experiences growing away from God and into a thoughtful and humane atheist… Brave and refreshingly open-minded.”

 

 

Upcoming Author Events:

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel 

August 30th-31st, 2012: Concordia College, Moorhead, MN/Fargo,ND (Live Webcast available of this event!)

September 10th, 2012: Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY

September 17th, 2012: Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MN

October 9th, 2012: College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, MN

October 11th, 2012: : Chicago Ideas Week, Chicago, IL

Upcoming media appearances: MSNBC/Melissa Harris-Perry Show, Sunday, September 9^th

WNYC Radio/Brian Lehrer Show (NPR New York), Tuesday, September 11th

 

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by Elinor Lipman

September 6th, 2012: Corner Bookstore (NYC)

September 23rd, 2012: Writers for Obama and Elizabeth Warren at the Hotel Northampton (Northhampton, MA)

September 24th, 2012: Broadside Books at 7 PM

September 27th, 2012: Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

September 28th-29th, 2012: Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL

October 2nd, 2012: Port Washington Public Library (Port Washington, NY)

October 10th, 2012: Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA)

October 11th, 2012: Worcester Public Library

October 17th, 2012: Hewlett Woodmere Public Library (Long Island)

October 30th, 2012: Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

“They're Bankrupting Us!” And 20 Other Myths About Unions

In honor of Labor Day, online orders at Beacon.org are 20% off with the code LaborDay12. Offer ends Sept. 4, so shop now!

This highly readable and accessible book unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about labor in the United States. 

From Wisconsin to Washington, DC, the claims are made: unions are responsible for budget deficits, and their members are overpaid and enjoy cushy benefits. The only way to save the American economy, pundits claim, is to weaken the labor movement, strip workers of collective bargaining rights, and champion private industry. In "They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions, labor leader Bill Fletcher Jr. makes sense of this debate as he unpacks the twenty-one myths most often cited by anti-union propagandists. Drawing on his experiences as a longtime labor activist and organizer, Fletcher traces the historical roots of these myths and provides an honest assessment of the missteps of the labor movement. He reveals many of labor's significant contributions, such as establishing the forty-hour work week and minimum wage, guaranteeing safe workplaces, and fighting for equity within the workforce. This timely, accessible, "warts and all" book argues, ultimately, that unions are necessary for democracy and ensure economic and social justice for all people.

About the Author

Bill Fletcher Jr. is a long-time racial-justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author. He has been involved in the labor movement for decades, and is a widely known speaker and writer in print and on radio, television, and the Web. He has served in leadership positions with many prominent union and labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union. Fletcher is currently the director of field services for the American Federation of Government Employees.

Read "What is a Union?" from “They're Bankrupting Us!” on Scribd.

Watch Bill Fletcher Jr. on Moyers and Company

After Katrina, Neighborhoods Led Their Own Recovery

Our thoughts today are with those on the Gulf Coast threatened with flooding and storm surge as Hurricane Isaac brings its deluge ashore. It is seven years to the day since Hurricane Katrina hit this same area, and I had scheduled this blog post in honor of the anniversary weeks ago: an interview with Tom Wooten, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina. Wooten's book tells the story of the community leaders and neighborhood groups who led the recovery efforts in New Orleans. In running it today, we wish to honor the strength and resilience of this uniquely wonderful city. —Jessie Bennett, Blog Editor of Beacon Broadside

You were a student at Harvard when you decided to write this book. How did you come to be interested in the story of New Orleans' recovery?

I had a longstanding interest in disaster recovery as a result of research project I was undertaking with my college roommate. That project was about a flood that occurred in western India in 1979 that was the deadliest dam collapse in human history. His mother's family survived the disaster, and we wrote a comprehensive history of the events surrounding that flood. One of the big questions that came out of our research in India was related to ideas of community agency in the wake of a disaster. Many of the people who survived that flood felt as if the government had been very heavy-handed in coming in and dictated the way that the city that was destroyed would be rebuilt. I became very interested in what a recovery would look like that was being driven largely by neighborhoods themselves. It turned out that in New Orleans, there were answers to many of my questions. 

When I was a junior in college, I traveled to New Orleans for the first time, and began to get a sense of the neighborhood-based nature of the recovery taking place there. All levels of government—the city government, the state government, and the federal government—had largely fallen down on the job. As a result, often out of desperation, neighborhood groups were stepping in to fill the void. They were doing things like opening their own charter schools, passing self-taxing initiatives, running their own police forces, providing very comprehensive social services to members of their communities, in order to spur recovery. Many of these things are things we expect larger nonprofits to do or expect city government to do, but neighborhoods were doing this instead.

Do you think that there is something unique about this particular disaster recovery? Is there something particular to the character of the city of New Orleans that shaped this recovery?

New Orleans is a unique place. Among large cities in America, New Orleans before Katrina had the lowest rate of people who were born there leaving the city. People fall in love with New Orleans, and it is because it is like nowhere else in the United States. And so people across the city were incredibly invested in bringing the city back. The disaster was also unprecedented because it was tremendously large—the biggest landscape scale disaster to hit an American city. The destruction within New Orleans itself stretches for more than twenty miles, from end to end of the city. Eighty percent of the city was under water, and hundreds of thousands of people were affected and still are today.

Another unique feature of the recovery in New Orleans is that it has been largely driven by neighborhood groups. It is not a recovery that is being led by the city government or the state government or the federal government. Neighborhoods like Broadmoor, Lakeview, the Vietnamese community New Orleans East, have really taken leadership in all aspects of their recoveries. A number of New Orleans neighborhoods have made innovative partnerships with larger nonprofits, with universities, with corporations, to help resource those neighborhood based recovery efforts. A number of organizations have partnered with groups in the Lower Ninth Ward, to rebuild houses, to spearhead greening initiatives in the neighborhood, and many residents have returned to the neighborhood as a result of those partnerships. Similarly, Hollygrove has a tremendous partnership with the AARP which provided a comprehensive set of consulting services for the neighborhood to help them with crime prevention, education, health care, commercial development, and a number of other issues facing the neighborhood.

We watched the government fail on many levels in the wake of Katrina. Does this show that the government is a less effective actor in the face of a disaster? Should we rely on private organizations and neighborhood groups to provide these services?

Stories from the New Orleans recovery can be uplifting when you consider what neighborhoods have managed to accomplish, both on their own and through partnerships with private entities. That said, there are a number of things that we can take from this disaster that show us ways to do recovery better. A lot of that has to do with partnerships that should exist between communities that are struggling to survive after a disaster and higher levels of government. Neighborhoods in urban environments post-disaster should not have to open schools on their own. They should not have to self-tax to fix streets or provide extra police coverage. There are things that we expect different levels of government to do, and whether you're liberal or conservative, I believe that we all want government to work well at the tasks that we assign it. We saw that this didn't work well in New Orleans.

In the future, there will be more landscape-scale disasters of the type that we saw in New Orleans. We have a number of coastal cities, and we have climate change that is raising sea levels and changing weather patterns. We have cities that are in places that are prone to wild fires; we have cities that are prone to tremendous earthquakes. We don't want what happened in New Orleans to happen again in another American city. And government reforms are key to making sure that we respond better in the future.

Quite simply, there is tremendous potential for partnerships between communities and neighborhoods on the one hand, and higher levels of government on the other. We should work hard to make sure that potential is reached.

One of the problems seems to be that FEMA is set up to help during isolated incidents, to help small communities recover, but when something happens that is this vast, it has a more difficult time responding.

Historically, FEMA has been set up to respond very well to small disasters that are contained to an area--perhaps a tornado that destroys 300 homes. They can respond very quickly and very well to that. But we as a nation have proven through the experience of New Orleans have proven that we are not able to handle a landscape-scale disaster very effectively. In the future, the federal government needs to think about what role it will play when other landscape-scale disasters take place.

Who were some of the people and groups that you encountered who were instrumental in New Orleans' recovery?

In Broadmoor, the neighborhood association president is LaToya Cantrell, and she is a tremendously powerful individual. Even before the storm, she could command a large crowd's attention just by her presence. She's a good listener and empathetic, and she has an amazing and broad base of support across the neighborhood.

Many of the leaders I've interviewed, including LaToya, have put themselves on the line for their neighborhoods, have spent years upon years working harder than any person should have to work to make their communities come back. There's a lot of burnout that's taking place right now, but it's exciting to see that as progress becomes clear, it's exciting to see some of these leaders getting to kick back a little bit.

Terry Miranda, who is from Lakeview, his contribution to the book is that he is able to narrate New Orleans history and make sense of many nonsensical things very well and even poetically. He always rides around the city on a bike, and he'll give me insights into city history, neighborhood history, and he seems to know everybody. Very often a Sunday afternoon bicycle ride will involve dozens of conversations with people on porches and lots of funny stories about the people and the city. [Photo at right, courtesy of Tom Wooten, is of one of those bike rides led by Terry Miranda.]

I love New Orleans, and many of the young people who have come in since the storm have adopted the city as their own. It's a city that, very rightly actually, is very skeptical of outsiders coming in. There have been a number of outside agendas in the wake of Katrina that have not panned out very well for the city. So if you come in with an idea of how things should be and how you're going to fix things, you're probably not doing the city any favors. If you come in open to how the city works and ready to contribute to things that the residents are already undertaking, the city will really embrace you. 

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus

While the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, Beacon Press announces our own campaign: 

Elinor Lipman for Tweet Laureate!*

*This campaign is intended for parody only. Beacon Press does not endorse any one candidate, especially Tweet Laureate, since it doesn't exist. The book, however, is real, and you can win a copy!

In June 2011, much-loved novelist Elinor Lipman made a pledge to post one political tweet poem a day until the presidential election. For over a year, she has risen early to read the headlines and track the latest political debacles, then brought the tumult of the election season to the Twittersphere in the form of one 140-character rhyming poem every day.

And now, the best of these gems has been collected in a book: Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus. (Available wherever books are sold, in paperback and for Kindle, Nook, iPad, or Google ebook.) 

 

Elinor Lipman's proven track record of providing a daily dose of much-needed humor in verse makes her the best (and, as far as we know, only) candidate for Tweet Laureate. Tweet your support and be entered to win a campaign button and a copy of Tweet Land of Liberty!

To enter, this text:

I support a funnier America! @ElinorLipman for #TweetLaureate: http://goo.gl/Bjnjp #TweetLandofLiberty

 

Lipman has already gathered endorsements (if not generous financial contributions to a shady Super PAC) from a wide range of supporters:

"First I laughed my way through Elinor Lipman's book of political tweets. Then I put my ear to the ground and listened to Molly Ivins guffawing from the grave. Lipman is a piquant poetic rock star! " —Wally Lamb 

"This year, has there any better way to revel in the political process than to pour a cup of coffee, log into Twitter, and read one of Elinor Lipman's clever, catchy tweets about the race for the presidency? With humor, wit, and no small share of brilliance, Lipman has cataloged the 2012 election in delectable sound bytes that manage to capture what we're all secretly thinking—in rhyme, and in less than 140 characters." —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Lone Wolf and Sing You Home 

"If brevity be The soul of wit/ Then Elinor has A surefire hit." —Alex Beam 

"Devilishly and deliciously witty. We could all use a laugh a day and Elinor Lipman has given me that." —Judy Blume 

"It's nice to see that Lipman's wit has escaped the hell of Twitter and collected itself in a book." —Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom 

"A devotion of fearless, sassy, sublime insights, that should be carried into the voting booth of our daily lives—each poem read again and again—before any lever is pulled." —Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry 

"So it has come to this! Of thee I zing. I love it." —Lois Lowry 

"The only sane, smart and witty thing to come out of the Republican primaries." —Stephen McCauley 

"Jon Stewart in 140 characters -- and in the morning. What could be better?" —Stacy Schiff 

"Winsome, witty and winning! I don't know how she does it!! " —Anita Shreve 

"Elinor Lipman tweets like a nightingale with an eagle eye." —Cathleen Schine 

"Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, Calvin Trillin, and Elinor Lipman!!" —Mameve Medwed 

"Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets." —Firoozeh Dumas 

"There once was a Lipman on Twitter, who made every liberal titter." —Michael Lowenthal 

"I'm beset with Lipmania." —Henry Alford 

"Wise and sassy and too fun to miss!" —Jill McCorkle 

 

The 90th Birthday of Howard Zinn

Today marks the 90th birthday of historian, playwright, and activist Howard Zinn (1912-2010). A former bombardier in WWII, Zinn became active in the civil rights movement while teaching at Spelman. After being fired for supporting student protestors, he became a professor at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He is the author of many books, including his landmark work, A People’s History of the United States (Harper Perennial), and his memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train (Beacon Press).

Read an excerpt of You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train at Scribd.

Read a post from the Zinn Education Project about how Howard Zinn "did not merely record history, he made it."

Watch a tribute to Howard Zinn on Democracy Now.

Photo by Rosyln Zinn.

A Year After the Departure of Steve Jobs, Does Apple “Think Different?”

Award-winning journalist Fran Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love, The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism, and books on health care and investing.

Because Apple fans love their iProducts so ardently, they have often attributed to Steve Jobs and Apple almost every positive quality they want to see in a CEO and a company, whether deserved or not. Thus, they have assumed that Apple reduces its energy use, recycles its electronic waste, treats its workers well, and generally is a socially responsible corporation.

Toward the end of Jobs’ reign, fans gradually and grudgingly began to realize that their heroes didn’t deserve all those haloes.

Now, ironically, Jobs’ successor, Timothy Cook, may turn out to be the real hero of the myth.

This week marks one year since Jobs stepped down as CEO. He would die just six weeks later. During the transition to the Cook era, customers and investors have, understandably, focused on the products and stock price.

But quietly, Cook has made some important changes in the area of corporate social responsibility.

While he was still the heir-apparent, Cook visited the major Chinese factory that manufactures iPhones, iPads, and other devices, after a series of suicides there by workers protesting the long hours and low pay.  Jobs never bothered to check in person.  Early this year, Cook brought in an outside monitor to follow up on the complaints and again inspected the site himself. 

Even more amazing, Cook publicly identified 156 Apple subcontractors and published the monitor’s report. This, from the company that never talks to the press?

True, Cook has continued the tradition of shunning reporters. However, he showed up at a big meeting to speak with financial analysts—which Jobs rarely did—and has schmoozed with members of Congress.

Such outreach is important, because social responsibility is simply impossible without open communication. Transparency enables customers, neighbors, suppliers, employees, investors, and social activists to see exactly what the company is doing and, in turn, push the company on their own goals.

And Apple employees have started to relax. It’s no longer the case—as Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon famously wrote in their 2005 book iCon—that “You didn’t want to encounter him [Jobs] in a hallway, because he might not like an answer you gave... And you sure as hell didn’t want to get trapped on an elevator with him, because by the time the doors opened, you might not have a job.”

The new CEO is—well—a normal person, not a demigod. He is private but not obsessive and mercurial.

Of course these changes haven’t transformed Apple into the ideal of a socially responsible company. There are still serious problems in the factories in China and far too much wasted packaging and planned obsolescence for the products.

Nor does the praise of Cook diminish Jobs’ incredible talents and achievements. Probably only an obsessive and mercurial creative genius could have had the vision and persistence to transform the floundering concept of a portable music player into the iPod or to revive a cartoon shop called Pixar—to name just two of Jobs’ successes. 

Cook may never invent or inspire the invention of a better product.

But he may well reinvent Apple as a better corporate citizen.

IPad photo from Bigstock.

Read Fran Hawthorne's post about Trader Joe's 

View a "Consumer Resources List" to find out how to shop your values

Listen to Fran Hawthorne on The Brian Lehrer Show 

Beacon Buzz: How Evangelicals Could Grow to Love Muslims

Notable Mentions:

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel

Opinion piece on the CNN Belief Blog: "How Evangelicals Could Grow to Love Muslims"

It is easy to draw a straight line between the evangelical anti-Catholic prejudice of previous generations and the Islamophobia of today, essentially saying that “evangelicals have to hate someone.”

But that’s too cynical a take for me. The more interesting - and certainly more hopeful - storyline is the one about change.

Evangelical attitudes changed markedly towards Catholics in the past generation, and they are changing towards Muslims now.

Column in USA Today: "The Dilemma of Religious Diversity"

My point is that in this era, the question of age when it comes to engaging religious diversity is moot. We are literally born into a condition of interfaith interaction. Our children will be raised in an environment of religious diversity — from a Mormon presidential hopeful, to Olympic athletes competing in Islamic head scarfs, to the images of a Wisconsin Sikh community mourning after a terrible attack.

 

Overdiagnosed:Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin

Op-ed by Dr. Welch in the New York Times Aug 20: "Testing What We Think We Know"

The truth is that for a large part of medical practice, we don’t know what works. But we pay for it anyway. Our annual per capita health care expenditure is now over $8,000. Many countries pay half that — and enjoy similar, often better, outcomes. Isn’t it time to learn which practices, in fact, improve our health, and which ones don’t?

 

Harvest the Wind: America’s Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability by Philip Warburg

Author letter to the editor in the New York Times

According to a report released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in June, America could supply nearly half our total power needs from wind and solar energy by 2050, using technology that is commercially available today. Imagine what that would do to our country’s carbon footprint.

To move America toward a more sustainable energy future, we need national leadership that will check the excesses of well-entrenched fossil fuel interests while encouraging cleaner alternatives like wind.

 

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

Read an excerpt online at Utne.com: "The Price of Food"

 

A Queer and Pleasant Danger by Kate Bornstein

Santa Cruz Sentinel interview:

The Village Voice featured Bornstein in the piece “The Top 25 People Crippling Scientology--2012 Edition!”

 

Dispatches from the Abortion Wars by Carole Joffe

Opinion piece at RH Reality Check examining the differences in rhetoric and life choices by some pro-life candidates.

Appearance on Boston Public Radio at WGBH discussing Rep. Todd Akin's comments on abortion and rape. 

 

Author Events:

Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus by Elinor Lipman

September 6th, 2012: Corner Bookstore (NYC)

September 23rd, 2012: Writers for Obama and Elizabeth Warren at the Hotel Northampton (Northhampton, MA)

September 24th, 2012: Broadside Books at 7 PM

September 27th, 2012: Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

September 28th-29th, 2012: Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL

October 2nd, 2012: Port Washington Public Library (Port Washington, NY)

October 10th, 2012: Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA)

October 11th, 2012: Worcester Public Library

October 17th, 2012: Hewlett Woodmere Public Library (Long Island)

October 30th, 2012: Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)

 

Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade, Thomas N. Dewolf and Sharon Morgan (October)

October 9: Gather at the Table book launch — 6:00pm, Martin Chapel; Eastern Mennonite University, 1200 Park Road, Harrisonburg, Virginia

October 14: Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church — 10:30am, 7400 Temple Hills Rd. Camp Springs, MD

October 17: Bloomsburg University — schedule pending, 400 East Second Street Bloomsburg, PA

October 24: Trinity Church Boston — 7:00pm, 206 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA 02116

October 25: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center — 5:00pm, 77 Forest Street, Hartford, CT

November 9: African American Jazz Caucus event– schedule & location pending, Indianapolis, Indiana

November 10-12: Southwest Michigan Black Heritage Society – multiple events in multiple venues, details to come, Kalamazoo, Michigan

 

Mary Oliver (award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, including twelve available from Beacon Press.)

October 15, 2012 New York, NY: 92nd Street Y

Wednesday & Thursday, October 24 & 25, 2012 Boston, MA: Boston Museum of Fine Arts 

Sunday, October 28, 2012  Bethesda, MD:  The Strathmore PAC.  Evening Joint Reading with Mary Oliver & Billy Collins

Monday, November 12, 2012 Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University  

The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives

Buy from Beacon Press

Qty:

Available in hardcover and ebook wherever books are sold.

"This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the historical reality of the slave experiences. Carbado and Weise have diligently selected narratives that will challenge readers' presumptions and cut against the mythology that slaves were passive, that mostly men (and not women) ran away, that slaves typically ran North (not South), and that gender and racial passing were rare occurrences. A landmark achievement, The Long Walk to Freedom allows fugitive slaves to speak for themselves—on their own terms and in their own voices." —Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania

"The editors step aside and let these remarkable men and women tell their own stories." —Kirkus Reviews

In this groundbreaking compilation of first-person accounts of the runaway slave phenomenon, editors Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise have recovered twelve narratives spanning eight decades-more than half of which have been long out of print. Told in the voices of the runaway slaves themselves, these narratives reveal the extraordinary and often innovative ways that these men and women sought freedom and demanded citizenship. Also included is an essay by UCLA history professor Brenda Stevenson that contextualizes these narratives, providing a brief yet comprehensive history of slavery, as well as a look into the daily life of a slave. Divided into four categories-running away for family, running inspired by religion, running by any means necessary, and running to be free-these stories are a testament to the indelible spirit of these remarkable survivors.

The Long Walk to Freedom presents excerpts from the narratives of well-known runaway slaves, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as from the narratives of lesser-known and virtually unknown people. Several of these excerpts have not been published for more than a hundred years. But they all portray the courageous and sometimes shocking ways that these men and women sought their freedom and asserted power, often challenging many of the common assumptions about slaves' lack of agency.

Among the remarkable and inspiring stories is the tense but triumphant tale of Henry Box Brown, who, with a white abolitionist's help, shipped himself in a box-over a twenty-seven-hour train ride, part of which he spent standing on his head-to freedom in Philadelphia. And there's the story of William and Ellen Craft, who fled across thousands of miles, with Ellen, who was light-skinned, disguised as a white male slave-owner so she and her husband could achieve their dream of raising their children as free people.

Gripping, inspiring, and captivating, The Long Walk to Freedom is a remarkable collection that celebrates those who risked their lives in pursuit of basic human rights. 

Read the Introduction at Scribd.

About the Editors
Devon W. Carbado is professor of law and African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and the coeditor of several books, including Race Law Stories (with Rachel Moran) and Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (with Donald Weise). Donald Weise is an independent scholar in African American history and coeditor of The Huey Newton Reader (with David Hilliard). He lives in New York.

Finding Common Ground With “Sacred Ground”

Chris Stedman is the Assistant Humanist Chaplain/Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University, the emeritus managing director of State of Formation at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and the founder of the first blog dedicated to exploring atheist-interfaith engagement, NonProphet Status. Stedman writes for the Huffington Post, the Washington Post's On Faith blog, and Religion Dispatches. His first book, Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, will be published by Beacon Press in November. 

Buy from Beacon Press

Qty:

Available in hardcover and ebook wherever books are sold.

On my last day of work at Interfaith Youth Core, I had lunch with its founder, Eboo Patel. As we ate I told him that, inspired by his book Acts of Faith, I was going to write a book of my own about atheism and interfaith work.

“Yeah?” he replied, grinning and taking a bite of his sandwich. “When?”

“Oh,” I offered, realizing I hadn't actually thought about details. “Someday...”

“When?” he said again.

“In five years? Maybe 10?”

He thought for a second, then said, “Why not start now?”

I chewed on my sub, and on his question. Why not now? I came up with several reasons immediately: I'm young; I like to write but have little formal training; I'm really young. But I swallowed those thoughts and said: “Sure. Why not? I'll start writing and see what happens.”

As soon as I started writing, I couldn't stop. Before I knew it I had a book contract, and then a finished book. (My book, Faitheist, will be released Nov. 6 and is available for preorder.)

While I was writing, so was Eboo. I got a copy of his excellent new book, Sacred Ground—a vital, urgent exploration of America's dark history of both prejudice toward religious minorities but also its principled promise of religious liberty—a few weeks ago. When I read the chapter on interfaith leadership, where he describes some of the journey I share in Faitheist, I was moved.

A story about an atheist in a book like Sacred Ground is good for atheists; it demonstrates that we have a unique contribution to make to America's diverse religious landscape. And it will promote the idea of atheists as largely goodhearted people who want the same things most Americans do to people who might believe otherwise—people whose perceptions of atheists are based on caricature rather than meaningful relationships.

Storytelling can do that. It can connect and inspire us to new ways of thinking, to greater empathy and to increased familiarity with different experiences, identities and values.

I thought more about the power of narrative as I followed the news cycle last Sunday with a broken heart, when a white gunman stalked into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and shot and killed six people and wounded several others. I surveyed reactions to the shooting and found they were significantly more muted than the response to the Aurora tragedy several weeks before. Perhaps people are becoming more accustomed to awful, violent outbursts such as this, but I wonder if the reactions don't say something about the way we see “others” in this country.

Upon hearing news of the shooting in a Colorado movie theater, many people likely conjured an image in their mind. They could imagine what it was like there, and they could imagine themselves in it. But how many Americans can envision a Sikh gurdwara and what goes on inside? Many people can imagine themselves in a movie theater, but how many can picture themselves, or people they love, in a gurdwara? How many people know about American Sikhs' sacred ground?

This is just one reason why Sacred Ground is such an important book—and why it is so important for people to share their stories. The day after the horror in Wisconsin, my dear friend Valarie Kaur, a longtime Sikh activist, shared her story on CNN. We tell these stories—stories of being Muslim, of being Sikh, of being an atheist and of finding common ground—with the hope that they will accomplish what Sacred Ground suggests: that familiarity with diversity changes how we think about it.

My hope is that Sacred Ground, Faitheist, Valarie's words and work, and the cumulative efforts of everyone who promotes pluralism will build a world where tragedies like the one in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, never happen again. We all—Muslims, atheists, Sikhs and everyone else—have stories to tell, and sharing them with others will help make the world a place where everyone is free to proclaim their beliefs with pride and without fear of violent recourse.

I'm happy to say that we are building that world—in the last week alone, atheist friends donated to rebuild a mosque destroyed by arson in Joplin, Missouri; Muslim friends petitioned to free Alexander Aan, an atheist jailed in Indonesia; religious friends decried Pat Robertson's statement blaming atheists for the shooting in Wisconsin (following a trend of blaming atheists for tragedies such as this, an issue I explore in Faitheist); people of all different beliefs (atheists, Muslims, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Pagans, Christians and others) joined me at a Sikh gurdwara for a memorial where we shed tears of mourning and of happiness. When a mosque in Illinois was shot at on Friday—just two days after Rep. Joe Walsh said at a town hall meeting just 15 minutes away that there are Muslims in Illinois towns “trying to kill Americans every week”—atheist and religious friends reached out to him and asked him to condemn this act as awful and un-American. So when naysayers claim that building bridges between different communities is impossible or a waste of time—that it is not possible for atheists to be in solidarity with those who believe in sacred ground—I am encouraged by the reality that we are improving the world through the stories and values we share and the actions we take together.

So to you, reader, I ask the question Eboo posed to me over a set of sandwiches: You have a story, and sharing it will help build a better world. Why not start now?

Related posts at Beacon Broadside

Interfaith Work is the Antidote to Atheist Islamophobia

Dear Religious Americans: How Many Atheists Do You Know?

Eboo Patel: The Holiness of Common Ground

Photo at left of Eboo Patel and Chris Stedman courtesy of the author.

Beacon Buzz: A Moving Portrait of New Orleans Post-Katrina

Notable Mentions:

We Shall Not be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina by Tom Wooten 

Review in the Wall Street Journal which calls the book a: “moving portrait.” 

UTNE online excerpt: “In We Shall Not Be Moved, Tom Wooten presents vivid narratives through the eyes and voices of residents rebuilding their homes after Hurricane Katrina, telling a story of resilience as entertaining as it is instructive and how citizens, remarkably, turned a profound national failure into a story of hope.” 

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America by Eboo Patel

Publishers Weekly: “…an accessible and inspiring introduction to the meaning and practice of pluralism.”

Excerpt published on Huffington Post

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today by Kate Bornstein

Review in The Gay and Lesbian Review July-August issue: “There are a number of adjectives that one could use to describe A Queer and Pleasant Danger: snarky, funny, anguished, frightening, heartbreaking, brave, honest…this is a book that is dangerously appealing.” (Subscriber only access)

 

Coming Soon:

Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia by Kate Whouley (Paperback out September 25)

• October 2012 Indie Next List "Now in Paperback" pick

Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction by Elizabeth Gehrman (October)

 “Vanishing species these days are a dime a dozen. The truly rarer bird is the human being whose life stands between a creature and its permanent oblivion. David Wingate is a truly pivotal person on whom the fate of a whole species turned. It’s a remarkable seabird whose existence depended on this rare man. And this book, rendered with style and grace, is his story.”

—Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World 

Author Events:

Kate Bornstein (A Queer and Pleasant Danger)

A packed house at Powell's Books the other night, and marquee billing!

August 15, 7pm Oakland, Diesel Books

August 16, 7:30pm Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz

 

Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade, Thomas N. Dewolf and Sharon Morgan (October)

October 9: Gather at the Table book launch — 6:00pm, Martin Chapel; Eastern Mennonite University, 1200 Park Road, Harrisonburg, Virginia
October 14: Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church — 10:30am, 7400 Temple Hills Rd. Camp Springs, MD
October 17: Bloomsburg University — schedule pending, 400 East Second Street Bloomsburg, PA
October 24: Trinity Church Boston — 7:00pm, 206 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA 02116
October 25: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center — 5:00pm, 77 Forest Street, Hartford, CT
November 9: African American Jazz Caucus event– schedule & location pending, Indianapolis, Indiana
November 10-12: Southwest Michigan Black Heritage Society – multiple events in multiple venues, details to come, Kalamazoo, Michigan

 

Mary Oliver (award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, including twelve available from Beacon Press.)

October 15, 2012 New York, NY: 92nd Street Y

Wednesday & Thursday, October 24 & 25, 2012 Boston, MA: Boston Museum of Fine Arts 

Sunday, October 28, 2012  Bethesda, MD:  The Strathmore PAC.  Evening Joint Reading with Mary Oliver & Billy Collins

Monday, November 12, 2012 Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University  

Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America

An inspiring call for Americans to defend the values of inclusiveness and pluralism by one of our best-known American Muslim leaders 

There is no better time to stand up for your values than when they are under attack.

In the decade following the attacks of 9/11, suspicion and animosity toward American Muslims has increased rather than subsided. Alarmist, hateful rhetoric once relegated to the fringes of political discourse has now become frighteningly mainstream, with pundits and politicians routinely invoking the specter of Islam as a menacing, deeply anti-American force.

In Sacred Ground, author and renowned interfaith leader Eboo Patel says this prejudice is not just a problem for Muslims but a challenge to the very idea of America. Patel shows us that Americans from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. have been "interfaith leaders," illustrating how the forces of pluralism in America have time and again defeated the forces of prejudice. And now a new generation needs to rise up and confront the anti-Muslim prejudice of our era. To this end, Patel offers a primer in the art and science of interfaith work, bringing to life the growing body of research on how faith can be a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division and sharing stories from the frontlines of interfaith activism.

Patel asks us to share in his vision of a better America—a robustly pluralistic country in which our commonalities are more important than our differences, and in which difference enriches, rather than threatens, our religious traditions. Pluralism, Patel boldly argues, is at the heart of the American project, and this visionary book will inspire Americans of all faiths to make this country a place where diverse traditions can thrive side by side.

Buy Sacred Ground from Beacon Press
Amazon (Kindle) | BN.com (Nook) | Indiebound | Apple iBookstore | Google Play

Read a selection from the book at Scribd.

Read Eboo Patel's posts at Beacon Broadside. 

About the author: Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core and the author of Acts of Faith. He was a member of President Obama’s inaugural faith council, is a regular contributor to the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN, and public radio, and speaks frequently about interfaith cooperation on college campuses. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two boys.

“Interfaith cooperation is one of America’s founding ideals. It still sets us apart from much of the world. Eboo Patel has lived that value and, in this book, spreads that good word. Uplifting and invaluable, Sacred Ground is essential reading for our polarized era.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin

“At a time when ignorance and suspicion are holding us back from building true community with our neighbors, Eboo Patel offers a light in the darkness. He challenges the bigotry and intolerance that is seeping into our political rhetoric, reminding us that America is a country built on the pillars of pluralism and tolerance. In both Sacred Ground and his wonderful interfaith work, Eboo offers an opportunity for us to move to higher ground in our relationships with our Muslim brothers and sisters, and to play our part in building a ‘beloved community for all people,’ both in the United States, and around the world.”—Rev. Jim Wallis, author of God’s Politics

“Eboo Patel is a remarkable young man with the wisdom to seek truth and the courage to speak it. One of America’s foremost advocates and practitioners of interfaith understanding, he has written a book that combines timely social commentary with compelling history and a wealth of personal anecdotes. Sacred Ground is a refreshing, thought-provoking, myth-smashing, and deeply patriotic exploration of American identity and ideals.”—Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

“Sacred Ground is simultaneously a chronicle of religious tensions in post–9/11 America and an account of how to create, through trial and error and critical self-reflection, the most successful interfaith movement in the country. Patel probes like a professor, inspires like a preacher, and writes like a poet. I really loved this book; it is a tale that is truly hard to put down.”—Robert D. Putnam, author of American Grace

“Eboo Patel has been a transformative force in our young and tumultuous century. And he has an utterly original experience of what robust religious identity can mean in modern lives. With this book, he opens the idea of "inter-faith" into a vision of America that is practically informative, refreshingly challenging, and full of hope.”—Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s On Being

James Baldwin in San Francisco, 1963

Amy Alexander is the author of  Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention and is co-author, with Alvin F. Pouissant, of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis Among African-Americans. This post originally appeared at her blog.

Last week a silly “debate” over Olympic champion gymnast Gabby Douglas’ hair dominated social media. Fortunately, by the weekend, the same social media network that so often exasperates me coughed up an unexpected jewel:

A 1963 documentary, Take This Hammer, featuring James Baldwin in San Francisco.

A Facebook friend, Darryl Cox, put the link on my Wall after I’d posted a story on gang violence in SF that I’d read in The San Francisco Chronicle. Cox, who had worked in city government in San Francisco decades ago, is an excellent source of contemporary black history on “the Paris of the West.”

Cox told me that Take This Hammer had only aired once in San Francisco, in 1963, and that it had upset the powers that be in my hometown. I watched it for the first time last week, on August 3—coincidentally, one day after what would have been Baldwin’s 88th birthday. It was produced by KQED on behalf of National Education Television, predecessor of WNET in New York.

In it, Baldwin is an expert interrogator of his subjects, black residents of San Francisco. He is physically small but armed with an alarmingly direct gaze, a fearsome intellect, and a sharp way of drawing out his subjects. The producer or director also made the wise decision to cut in excerpts of Baldwin talking directly to the camera, seated in what appears to be a tidy apartment, smoking, wearing a natty white shirt and neck-kerchief, and succinctly, somewhat dispassionately deconstructing his findings.

Among several pungent comments and observations by Baldwin, during the 44-minute long documentary:

—”There will be a Negro president of this country, but he won’t be president of the same nation we are sitting in now.”

—”The Liberal can’t be safe and heroic too.”

—“You cannot pretend you’re not despised if you are.”

I am greatly moved by this documentary. For starters, Baldwin is a literary and journalistic hero of mine. Second, as anyone who has read my opinion-writing during the past decade probably knows, I was born in San Francisco in 1963.

Growing up there, I felt a thrill of endless possibilities—much as the techie-hipsters and financiers who currently throng its streets likely experience—a pervasive sense of optimism aided in no small part by the city’s spectacular vistas, cozy layout, sophisticated understatement. (Though a journalist friend, Tim Golden, once told me that he found the city and some of its denizens a mite ‘precious’ for his liking.)

Related from Beacon Press:

Amy Alexander on covering the LA Riots

Forthcoming new edition of James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son

Kai Wright on Remembering James Baldwin

My family was middle-class, we lived for a time in subsidized housing on Potrero Hill, then Bernal Heights, then in a tidy house on the West or ‘ocean’ side of the city, which my Mom bought. I attended well-funded public schools in the Sunset District and went to church camp in Sonoma County every summer. Only when I reached my mid-20s and entered the workforce in earnest did it occur to me that my race or gender might be features that could slow my professional development and possibly dampen my chances for a successful career. As a 1963 resident tells Baldwin in “Take this Hammer,” no blacks had to fear a Bull Connor or a Klansman chasing them down the city’s hilly inclines. But one might just be “killed with a pencil,” instead, in the city’s corporate or retail workforce. My adult family-members all worked in government agencies, which offered job security and enforced meritocracy. There were few immediate role models for me as I made my entree to private industry—the news business—during and after college.

I outline that dynamic in greater detail in my current book, and acknowledge that the media business in the Bay Area—such as it was in the 1980s when I came of age—was and is a unique animal within the overall workforce in San Francisco. And now, of course, the media industry has been all but subsumed by the tech industry, and the population of black residents has been diminishing steadily since the early 1980s. Are native blacks who remain being employed at these shiny new enterprises? What do you think?

The sentiments expressed by the city’s black residents who were interviewed by Baldwin in ‘63—particularly the young adult males who are frustrated over being shut out of the workforce—are devastating... and familiar. I have watched this documentary three times since Darryl Cox shared it with me.

I am still processing Take this Hammer and will probably write about it again.

For now, I hope you find the time to watch it in full: I love my hometown but I hope you can forgive me if I am also a bit cynical about its legendary reputation as a citadel of social and economic egalitarianism.

Take This Hammer lives, by the way, at the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, which is housed at my alma mater, San Francisco State University. I believe it deserves a home, too, at the Paley Center in New York. Then again, as a black SF native and a Baldwin adherent, I am not exactly impartial about its historic significance.

(Oh, and a viewing tip: Unless you need them, disable the captioning feature before watching.)

Accountability vs. Retribution in Juvenile Justice

David Chura is the author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He has worked with at-risk teenagers for the past 40 years. For 26 of those years, he taught English and creative writing in community based alternative schools and in a county penitentiary. His writings have appeared in the New York Times as well as other scholarly and literary journals. He blogs at kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com.

This post originally appeared at Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. 

“You don’t care about the victims. All you care about are those kids.”

It was a comment I’ve heard in one form or another at book events, at juvenile justice talks I’ve given, or in response to pieces I’d written about our national policy of retribution towards troubled kids. I have to admit, though, this guy was a bit more, shall I say, challenging, as he stood up after my reading and made his comment.

I’d read several advice articles for authors on giving readings suggesting you have “pat answers” ready for the Q & A. It keeps things moving. It may be good advice, but I’ve found it doesn’t work for me. Juvenile justice is too potent a topic be “pat answered” away. Besides, I wrote I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup about the young offenders I taught for 10 years in the adult county prison to get people thinking about this much-neglected issue. So I do my best to address each concern sincerely.

Fielding the man’s rather angry question, I talked about my belief that kids should indeed be held accountable for their actions; that they should learn that what they did affected not only their victims and their families and communities but also the young offenders themselves and their families and communities. What I couldn’t support was the punitive quality of that accountability as it is now practiced in our prison system.

I could tell that evening’s questioner was pretty disgusted. I was one more bleeding heart, one more knee jerk liberal, one more sucker taken in by “those kids.” He was gracious about it. He didn’t say any of that out loud. He didn’t have to. I’d heard it all before.

But his comment stayed with me long after the event: What did I feel about the victims?

I talk a lot about victims in my book. But the victims in this case are the locked up high school students I worked with for those 10 years. In telling their stories — stories of childhood neglect and abandonment; of sexual abuse; of violence in the home and on the streets; of parental addiction and disease — I wanted readers to at least be aware of the fertile ground of mistreatment in which these children grew up. From my challenger’s point of view I’m sure I do go on too much about “those kids” and not about the people who suffered because of their crimes. (It’s important to note, however, that many of the teens I came across in jail — and this holds true for prisons nationally — were serving time for victimless, nonviolent offences.) I was beginning to wonder if maybe the guy was right. Maybe I didn’t care about crime victims?

Like all good questions, this one stayed with me well afterwards. Yet despite the doubts he raised for me I knew that I did care deeply about the people hurt by crime; that, in an odd twist on the title of my book, “I don’t wish nobody” to have their lives damaged by the irresponsible acts of others, young or old. I turned the question over and over until finally I understood more clearly where I stood: the only way to protect society from youthful offenders and to prevent more crime was to protect the offenders themselves.

Study after study has shown that the harsh treatment of young people locked up in our nation’s jails has not only failed to reduce recidivism but has also created angrier, more bitter, more violent juvenile offenders. Lock a 14- or 15- year-old up in an adult prison with its toxic environment of noise and dirt; of abuse, intimidation and paranoia; of violence and aggression, and that kid will not leave jail with a heightened sense of responsibility towards society, ready to re-examine and change his or her behavior.

I know that my reasoning wouldn’t convince those who feel that any punishment for criminal actions is not harsh enough to give victims the justice they seek. But the more I think about it the more convinced I am of the wisdom — and commonsense, which wisdom often is — behind it: if we truly care about victims, if we want to shield people from the hurt of crime we must look at and change the way we bring juvenile offenders — all offenders, really — to true justice.

During my tenure as a jailhouse teacher and while I was writing my book, I always thought of the kids I taught as children of disappointment, children let down time and time again by the world of adults — parents, teachers, clergy, neighbors. Prison breeds disappointment, and as I did my own 10-year jail bid I watched many of my students come in as children of disappointment and leave young adults of disappointment.

That’s a transformation no one truly wants and protects no one.

Read more posts by David Chura

Confessions of a "Failing Teacher"

Keeping Locked-Up Kids and Their Families Connected

Making Connections to Help At-Risk Girls

Beacon Buzz: Eboo Patel on Oak Creek Shootings

Our Authors Weigh In:

Eboo Patel (Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America, out August 8) on the shootings at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin:

The shooting in Oak Creek reminds us that the forces of prejudice are loud. They sling bigoted slurs and occasionally bring 9mm guns to places of worship. But we are not a country of Wade Michael Pages.

We are a country whose first president, George Washington, told a Jewish community leader that “The Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

We are a country where Jane Addams welcomed Jewish and Catholic immigrants streaming in from Eastern Europe in the 19th century as citizens, not as strangers.

We are a country where a young black preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr., learned nonviolence not only from Jesus Christ, but also from an Indian Hindu named Gandhi and from a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh.

And we must be a country where a new generation of leaders rises up to write the next chapter in the glorious story of American pluralism, or else we will forfeit the territory to those who would shoot at our neighbors while they worship.

Eboo Patel and Hana Suckstorff at Sojourners

Mark Hyman (The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today’s Families) answering the question: Are Olympic Parents Supportive or Overbearing?

Exuberant parents aren’t the problem in youth sports. Overzealous, overly ambitious parents are. Undoubtedly, they are part of the U.S. delegation too. As parents, we make a horrible mistake when we confuse our ambitions with what kids truly want and need from sports. 

The New York Times  “Room for Debate”

Notable Mentions:

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

Washington Post review: “In The Land Grabbers, Pearce has produced a powerful piece of journalism that illuminates how the drive for expanded food production is transforming the planet. Anyone who cares where her next meal is coming from should read it.” (Amen!)

 

A Twist of Faith: An American Christian's Quest to Help Orphans in Africa by John Donnelly

Review at Humanosphere, a blog attached to Seattle’s KPLU: “A rousing good read and cautionary tale of one man’s mission to help AIDS orphans in Africa — and how good intentions can pave the road to hell…”

 

The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness by Tim Caulfield

Reviews at the New York Times ("though he may write with the cheerful self-deprecation of the slacker dude, he thinks with an academic’s rigor and precision and knows the health maintenance territory inside out"), Health Affairs ("he also discovered that finding the cure for anything is maddeningly elusive"), and Science-Based Medicine ("You’re never left wondering what the science says, but it’s distilled with his own particular perspective").

 

Coming Soon:

The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals by Lauren Slater (November)

Kirkus Reviews in print (Aug 15) and online (now): “Slater continually surprises with connections she makes. Beautifully written, and not just for animal lovers.”

 

Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction by Elizabeth Gehrman (October)

Publishers Weekly review July 23

 

Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman (November)

“Chris Stedman’s remarkable work has spanned from advocating for LGBTQ rights among Evangelical Christians to, in his current role at Harvard, founding the first-ever atheist-led interfaith initiative -- and he's only twenty-five. Part memoir and part blueprint, Faitheist not only recounts his personal journey (which would be a riveting story on its own), but also shows -- sensitively and humorously -- how Humanists can live out our values with both empathy and honesty. This book represents the growing secular movement at its very best.” —Greg M. Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, author of Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

“If Chris Stedman had become a pastor, he’d have a big, big church. Instead, he’s a humanist hero, a compelling writer whose efforts to build bridges between non-believers and the faithful will leave a lasting mark. Faitheist should be required reading in Sunday schools and Richard Dawkins’s house alike.” —Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple

Author Events:

Kate Bornstein (A Queer and Pleasant Danger)

August 9, 12:30pm Seattle: Amazon.com Meet the Author/Glamazonians Q&A and interview for Omnivoracious blog

August 11, 7pm  Seattle, Elliott Bay Book Co.

August 13, 7:30pm Portland, Powell's Books

August 14, 7:30pm San Francisco, Books Inc. in the Castro

August 15, 7pm Oakland, Diesel Books

August 16, 7:30pm Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz

 

Mary Oliver (award-winning author of numerous books of poetry, including twelve available from Beacon Press.)

October 15, 2012 New York, NY: 92nd Street Y

Wednesday & Thursday, October 24 & 25, 2012 Boston, MA: Boston Museum of Fine Arts 

Sunday, October 28, 2012  Bethesda, MD:  The Strathmore PAC.  Evening Joint Reading with Mary Oliver & Billy Collins

Monday, November 12, 2012 Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University  

We Shall Not Be Moved: Rebuilding Home in the Wake of Katrina

Drawing by Jamie Devol

"It was heartbreaking, but we couldn't give up. I just said, 'Well, I've got to get in and do it.'"-Phil Harris, eight-decade-long resident of Hollygrove

As floodwaters drained in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans residents came to a difficult realization. Their city was about to undertake the largest disaster recovery in American history, yet they faced a profound leadership vacuum: members of every tier of government, from the municipal to the federal level, had fallen down on the job. We Shall Not Be Moved tells the absorbing story of the community leaders who stepped into this void to rebuild the city they loved.

From a Vietnamese Catholic priest who immediately knows when two of his six thousand parishioners go missing to a single mother from the Lower Ninth Ward who instructs the likes of Jimmy Carter and Brad Pitt, these intrepid local organizers show that a city's fate rests on the backs of its citizens. On their watch, New Orleans neighborhoods become small governments. These leaders organize their neighbors to ward off demolition threats, write comprehensive recovery plans, found community schools, open volunteer centers, raise funds to rebuild fire stations and libraries, and convince tens of thousands of skeptical residents to return home. Focusing on recovery efforts in five New Orleans neighborhoods-Broadmoor, Hollygrove, Lakeview, the Lower Ninth Ward, and Village de l'Est-Tom Wooten presents vivid narratives through the eyes and voices of residents rebuilding their homes, telling a story of resilience as entertaining as it is instructive.

The unprecedented community mobilization underway in New Orleans is a silver lining of Hurricane Katrina's legacy. By shedding light on this rebirth, We Shall Not Be Moved shows how residents, remarkably, turned a profound national failure into a story of hope.

“Compelling beyond belief, deserving the broadest possible readership, and mandatory reading for urban planners and community organizers, this is a tour-de-force about one American city and what it means to fight for the survival of your hometown.” Booklist

"Mr. Wooten meticulously tracks the work of civic groups in five parts of New Orleans as they labored to prove that their neighborhoods were worth saving, underscoring the importance of fostering such groups long before a catastrophe hits." The Wall Street Journal 

“Few disasters are ever truly ‘natural,’ and, as Tom Wooten shows, reconstruction after catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina is shaped heavily by individuals, their communities, and the structural barriers they face. Portraying a diverse range of community leaders, Wooten spins a compelling tale based on deep knowledge of local worlds, linked to an understanding of the large-scale social forces that affect these worlds in ways too often invisible to journalists and other chroniclers of events like Katrina. The stories in We Shall Not Be Moved show the essential role of local knowledge in long-term recovery and reconstruction.”—Paul Farmer, author of Haiti After the Earthquake

“A moving portrait of a city’s struggle to rebuild. It is not an account of Katrina per se. . . . Rather, it is a story of the arduous endeavor residents have undertaken in New Orleans. . . . Every bit as gripping and important as tales from the storm itself.” Walter Issacson, from the Foreword

“In this moving book, Tom Wooten narrates the daily struggles of residents of five neighborhoods in New Orleans to overcome the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. We Shall Not Be Moved brilliantly weaves together the stories of community residents, including accounts of their unprecedented organizing and rebuilding efforts. Wooten’s revealing nonfiction narrative is a must-read.”—William Julius Wilson, author of More Than Just Race

About the Author:

Tom Wooten is coauthor of No One Had a Tongue to Speak. Since graduating from Harvard in 2008 and moving to New Orleans, he has worked as a researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School, as a neighborhood volunteer coordinator, and as a fifth- and sixth-grade writing teacher. In 2011, Wooten was featured as a Forbes 30 under 30 in Law & Policy.

Read more about Tom Wooten and his work at tomwooten.com.

Even With Olympian Goals, Children's Needs Should Come First

Mark Hyman is a sports journalist and the author of Until It Hurts: America's Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids and The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families.

Today's post is Mark's response to the question "Are Olympic Parents Supportive or Overbearing?" for the New York Times Room for Debate blog.

The United States Olympic team comprises 529 athletes, and it’s difficult to generalize about who they are. They represent 25 sports. They come from 44 states. The tallest is 7-foot-1. The shortest is 4-foot-11. There’s a 15-year-old swimmer and an equestrian athlete who could be her grandmother.

The parents of these athletes are equally diverse. No doubt, many are perfectly wonderful. For years, they’ve shouldered the responsibilities of sports parenthood without complaint or expectation. Some go to Olympic venues where their children are competing and hold their emotions completely in check. Others like Lynn and Rick Raisman, parents of the gymnast Aly Raisman, don’t even try. The last time I checked, video of the Raismans’ synchronized squirming had passed 100,000 views on YouTube.

Exuberant parents aren’t the problem in youth sports. Overzealous, overly ambitious parents are. Undoubtedly, they are part of the U.S. delegation too. As parents, we make a horrible mistake when we confuse our ambitions with what kids truly want and need from sports. I’ve been writing about the issue for years yet I’m still taken aback by some of the stories. A noted orthopedic surgeon in Los Angeles who operates on the damaged elbows and shoulders of youth pitchers once told me of a recurring conversation he has with patients. A young person confides that he does not want an operation and would prefer to quit his sport. But he’s stuck. “I don’t know what to do because I don’t want to disappoint my parents. It’s so important to my dad.”

Extreme Olympic parenting has been well documented. In her classic book "Little Girls in Pretty Boxes," Joan Ryan exposed the culture of excessive, often abusive, training including the story of a 14-year-old gymnast who suffered a broken wrist in the gym. Rather than take a break, she dulled the pain each day with prescription drugs and a dozen Advil. Subtract the parallel bars and it sounds like child abuse.

All the more reason to celebrate parents who keep things in perspective -- even if they don’t always stay in their seats.

Related posts on Beacon Broadside:

The Summer Games: On Raising Olympian Michael Phelps

A PGA Champ Who Had a Real Childhood

The Business of Youth Sports Drinks

Baby Beckham: Sports Training for the Very, Very Young

Moral Injury: The Crucial Missing Piece in Understanding Soldier Suicides

Rita Nakashima Brock is Founding Co-Director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School. She was a professor for twenty years, directed the Fellowship Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, a prominent advanced research institute, and from 2001-2002, was a Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School Center for Values in Public Life. This piece was co-authored by Col. Herman Keizer, Jr. (ret.), Co-Director of the Soul Repair Center, who served for 34 years as a military chaplain, and Dr. Gabriella Lettini, co-author with Brock of Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War.

This piece originally appeared at Huffington Post.

The crisis of military suicides, averaging one a day, has captured national attention. The July 23 cover story in Time magazine summarizes much of this coverage. Unfortunately, it is misleading.

The article presents the suicides of two officers—a helicopter pilot who served in Iraq and a medical doctor who did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. This example skews the article in two ways. First, in focusing on officers, it selects a group that tends to see less direct combat than the enlisted men who both do more direct fighting and commit suicide at higher rates than officers. Second, in contrasting the two officers' deaths, it suggests that suicide rates are the same for those who serve and those who do not serve in combat. However, the medical doctor first was an enlisted soldier who worked on a bomb squad and served in Bosnia. He was also in Oklahoma City just after the federal building was attacked—years before he decided to become a doctor. It's likely he saw war conditions during his earlier service. We need to remember that the U.S. has sent its forces into violent conflicts every year since World War II, except one, so Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only ways a soldier may have experienced combat.

The most serious blind spot in the reporting on military suicides is an absence of discussions about the moral impact of military training and its implementation in combat. Soldiers are trained to kill, which is regarded as criminal behavior in civilian life, and they are trained to be lethal without even thinking about it, a method of training called reflexive fire training.

We suggest that moral injury is likely one of the most important factors in military suicide rates.

Moral injury is not PTSD. The latter is a dysfunction of brain areas that suppress fear and integrate feeling with coherent memory; symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, dissociative episodes and hyper-vigilance. PTSD is an immediate injury of trauma.

Related posts on Beacon Broadside:

An Epidemic in the US Military

Casualties on the Home Front

Rita Nakashima Brock on the Obama Legacy at Occupy Oakland

Moral injury has a slow burn quality that often takes time to sink in. To be morally injured requires a healthy brain that can experience empathy, create a coherent memory narrative, understand moral reasoning and evaluate behavior. Moral injury is a negative self-judgment based on having transgressed core moral beliefs and values or on feeling betrayed by authorities. It is reflected in the destruction of a moral identity and loss of meaning. Its symptoms include shame, survivor guilt, depression, despair, addiction, distrust, anger, a need to make amends and the loss of a desire to live.

While the Army has long provided protective training for soldiers sent to war, this is clearly now inadequate. Battles with insurgencies make violence against civilians commonplace and acceptable in ways that violate international standards for the conduct of war and the moral code of conduct for soldiers. For example, "Sniper Wonderland," a military drill chant says:

See the little girl with the puppy;
Lock and load a hollow pointed round...
Take the shot and maybe if you're lucky;
You'll watch their lifeless bodies hit the ground....

The most recent Army attempt to prepare troops for battle appears to have failed miserably. Its "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness" (CSF) program, begun in 2009 with a $125 million investment and lauded in a New York Times Magazine article in March 2012, has been widely criticized. It bypasses the difficult ethical questions that many healthy human beings ask about war, and its spiritual fitness component has no moral content. It suggests that a soldier's commitment to a higher purpose—mission first—makes for resiliency. But most people capable of such a commitment also have empathy for others and deep moral values.

The Army's "spiritual fitness" encourages soldiers to see events in a neutral light, rather than labeling them as good or bad, and to create a nightly list of positive things that happened that day. The lack of awareness is startling regarding what it might mean to ask someone to think of killing a child, losing a close friend or torturing detainees as neutral or positive.

Proving a direct cause-effect relationship between such training and suicides is difficult, of course. However, there are certain moral reactions to war and the experience of combat training that indicate a violation of moral conscience in war can have devastating inner consequences in soldiers. A larger proportion of soldiers and veterans who serve in combat seek the counseling help of a chaplain over the help of a clinician. This choice has two likely reasons. First, speaking to a chaplain does not create a negative psychological record in a military career. Second, psychological training does not require knowledge of theological issues, moral discussions of good and evil, or religious meaning. In fact, when soldiers raise moral questions about conscience in therapy, they are often referred to clergy.

The reporting on military and veteran suicides mostly fails to explore the role of moral injury. When a suicide occurs years after a soldier returns from war, combat experience is often disregarded as a primary cause of the suicide. Yet, as Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran, reports in "What It Is Like to Go to War," he was fine for a decade, and then, he crashed. Often, such delays are used to deny VA services or are regarded as a family problem, rather than as a consequence of service in combat.

The alarming rates of reported suicides are squishy statistics and do not reflect the true numbers of soldiers who take their own lives. Many combat veterans tell stories of comrades who shot themselves, but who were reported as "non-combat" or "accidental" casualties. Soldiers who deliberately place themselves in harm's way in hopes of dying are reported as casualties, not suicides. Since many life-insurance policies will not pay benefits to families if suicide is the cause of death, the need to disguise suicide may mean some apparently accidental deaths were, in actuality, planned. We will never know the true suicide numbers, but we do know moral injury causes intense inner anguish.

Moral injury is not a clinical condition that can be medicated or cured by psychology. It requires the reconstruction of a moral identity and meaning system with the support of a caring, nonjudgmental community that can provide a way for veterans to learn to forgive themselves. But any community that wants to offer such support must have the moral courage to examine its own responsibility for war. With such a small percentage of Americans (1 percent) serving in the military, and the escalating unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too few people or communities remember the initial popularity of the wars or care about the cost to the men and women we send to fight on our behalf.

We care, and we believe our whole society bears responsibility for addressing moral injury. Whether or not we supported the wars, they do not end when soldiers come home. Instead, they continue in the souls of those who fought and in their families and communities when they return to civilian life. That is why we believe one right response of moral conscience to military and veteran suicides is to study and address moral injury as a hidden wound of war.