"cryofan's" new ZNet page: http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2197

Cryofan you are a despicable jackass who should be ashamed ---- really deeply ashamed down to the very core of your idiotic self.  I've seen your earlier comments telling Street he "shouldn't talk about race" - like (you actually seem to think)  the mere mention of race and racism makes one what you call a "faux radical" and a hater of the white male working class.  I shake my head in total amazement at how unbelievably stupid you must be to continually throw out this line.  Street writes all the time about and against your over-class and about and against class injustice. Fact is however that folks can't just forget racial oppression or gender oppression or imperial oppression. Actually, moron,  you can't understand or act against class inequality without understanding and acting against racial inequality.  And if you look at the post and comments you worthless idiot you can see he's thinking and deeply concerened about class - the only thing that can be discussed in your opinion.  You have really got to be one of the dumbest sons of bitches who ever comes around here. And this by the way cryofan is from a Redneck - a proud anti-racist anti-imperialist pickup-driving shotgun-owning union-joining Redneck from Missouri. I'm in your white male working-class buddy and I'm here to tell you you are completely full of shit.

cryofan, your hopless confusion on race and class ripens with time. It's sad to see.

I see Paul is still banging on that same old pseudoLeftist cryptoRightist drum, helping the overclass divide and rule by playing up the Race Guilt meme. Good on ya, Paul. THe overclass is going reward you with career success any day now for your "good deeds"....

There are a few cameras at Traffic lights here in Toronto.. I recently visited a few places predominantly black. these camera are also placed in drug trafficking areas; at first glance blacks dealers seem to be more targeted than white dealers. There is a slight difference on the behavior of black dealers in toronto and white dealer in lets say Montreal.. In Montreal , drugs addict can virtually buy drugs anywhere including convenient stores, its such an epidemy and so wide spread, its almost a freedom. there is some paranoia but you can find bars where consuming drugs happens on the table. here in toronto, the black dealers are more paranoid, they seem to delivers around by car around and around and sometimes have change deal location a few time before a deal happen.. The reasons I know this is one of my friend has addiction problems. One day I went with him before going out. His dealer was black and I noticed the dealer being heavily followed.. you wrote: kind of like the state and county prisons and jails relying on television (fully equipped cable and big screens) to pacify inmates. This give rise to this question, can black high trafficking areas be compared to jails with the cops only intervening when matters seem to go out of hands ( like assaults) or is this influx of drugs in our cities just an aim to exert some sort of profitable control on tbalck population itself?

London's state police camera obsession may go back to fear of IRA terror bombings; my guess is that's part of it and that it was a key pretext. Chicago's many ghetto neighborhoods are dotted with flashing blue lights atop telephone poles and traffic signals. The lights signifiy the presence of rotating police cameras, usually placed in "high drug trafficking" areas. They started on the West Side but now are all over the South Side and can even be found in some parts of the North Side. Dealers move to spaces where the cameras don't reach. But apparently these are just the tip of the iceberg and they have non-marked ones in the Loop and all over the business district. They may be related to a neoliberal cost-cutting project as declining city funds leave less public money for hiring human cops...kind of like the state and county prisons and jails relying on television (fully equipped cable and big screens) to pacify inmates ..cheaper than hiring guards at 40K plus a year plus health insurance and considerable disability payments. It's a wonderful corporate neoliberal racist police state world.

Wow, I didn't know about all these surveillance cameras in England !!! and I didn't know about Chicago's cameras and abou the existence of Chicago 911 center.. I think this must be an extended paranoia..

Oh, Chicago's power "elite" is very attuned to developments in fellow global city London. My first contact with the 2005 terror attacks in London came through the mouth of Chicago's global-corporate Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley. Daley (who had recently chewed out Illinois Senator Dick Durbin for daring to notice that US military authorities were torturing permanently incarcerated terror suspects in the prisons of Guantanamo) seized the London terror moment to hold a special morning press conference at the city's ever-expanding high-tech 911 Center. The de facto Republican Daley praised his very good friend George W. Bush for (1) understanding that the permanent "war on terror" is all "about global intelligence" and (2) going to "the source" of terrorism, "whether it be in Afghanistan or Iraq." Consistent with that analysis, the Mayor had recently enlisted his son in the imperial armed forces --- an unusual action among the nation's leading public office-holders. There were much talk about the city's ongoing and apparently virtuous (as far as all the Chicago reporters and officials that gathered with Daley that morning were concerned) effort to become a world leader in Big Brother technology by linking 2,250 surveillance cameras to the 911 center. These cameras were officially meant to help city officials detect "suspicious behavior" that might lead to terror attacks. The previous fall, Daley said that "cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes...They're the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot. The city," Daley added, "owns the sidewalk. We own the street and we own the alley.” Before deciding on the new surveillance network-in-progress, Chicago officials "went to London to check out its 200,000-camera surveillance system. Great Britain," the Murdoch-owbed Chicago Sun Times noted, "has more than 4 million such cameras, one for every 14 people" (“City Plans Surveillance Camera Web,” Chicago Sun Times, 10 September, 2004, p.1). "In London," the Sun Times added, "cameras have spotted about 10,000 incidents and footage has been used in about 1,000 court cases in the last two years...About two-thirds of Britons approve of the cameras, according to a European Commission study." Getting the Olympics for 2016 will certainly permit Chicago authorities to use increased national and global security pretexts as cover for escalated racial and soioeconomic repression, cleansing and displacement. I'm sure they'll be paying close attention to the British experience in 2012.

Well, I know what you mean but here's an interesting bit of writing and information from the brilliant writer Elaine Brown (onetime head of the Black Panther Party)  on pp. 78-79 of her remarkable book The Condemnation of Little B:

"In 1993, the United Nations issued a report on the quality of life in the world based on its study of the health, education, and purchasing power of the populations of 173 countries in the world.  As a result of this study, the U.S. ranked countries in terms of 'quality of life.' The citzens of the United States ranked at the top - as might have been expected.  Whites in the United States, considered separately, however, ranked number one in the entire world.  Blacks in America, when viewed separately, ranked number thirty-one, along with Uruguay."

I suspect the same reality holds in this millennium. 

We have something of a "third world" inside the "first."

After having to prove its existence you then get mired in the tougher question of why it exists, with the regining and bipartisan answer being that "it's their own fault" --- a sentiment expressed above by "Anonymous"

At least, the segregation isn't as bad (yet) in south side of Chicago as it is in this global metropolis under US control. Maybe they'll do an enquiry about Chicago too when liberal Congressmen start worrying that the situation is sending "exactly the wrong message...about US respect for human rights.”

 

 

Anthony: One of the things I do in the book is present data and talk at some length about the segregation of concentrated black poverty that is taking place in the suburbs.

The evidence indicates that there is little to celebrate from an integrationist standpoint about the rising presence of African Americans in the region's suburbs.... Lower black isolation and higher black exposure numbers in the suburbs (as compared with the city) reflect blacks' considerably smaller total numbers in predominantly Euro-American (72 percent) suburbs, not any suburban preference for interracial living. The suburban Chicago area remains very much a predominantly white preserve, exhibiting exceedingly high white isolation: the average suburban Chicago-area white lives in a census tract that is 82 percent white. Suburban whites experience remarkably low exposure to blacks—the average suburban Chicago-area white lives in a census tract that is 4.2 percent black—and the suburban black-white (dissimilarity index = 73), black-Hispanic (68), and black-Asian (75) dissimilarity scores remain quite high in the suburbs

Moreover, 50 percent of African Americans living in Chicago-area suburbs reside in just 18 of the six-county Chicago area's 264 suburban jurisdictions..."A comparison of the top 20 suburbs by population for each racial group,” notes Guy Stuart of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, “shows that African-Americans and whites only share one suburb”—Oak Park.  By contrast, whites and Latinos share 3 suburbs and whites and Asians share 10 suburbs.

I'm quoting the anonymous reply:

"I'm not from Chicago but I understand it's a very successful city, creating plenty of chances for people who care enough to advance to move up like Barack Obama. You've a got a whole bunch of black city council folks and rich black business people too I'm pretty sure...people your nemesis Obama says helped pay for his Senate run."

This person clearly has no idea what they're talking about. The admission that they're not "from" the area simply doesn't justify their ignorance and racism. Chicago has been well known throughout history to be one of the most segregated U.S. cities, and the CHA has been referred to by such "radical" sources as The Economist as the worst housing authority in the country. It's hard to disagree with that assessment when you look at the most recent form of blatant gentrification that has been going on in recent years. When I lived in Logan Square I drove by what's left of Cabrini everyday, and what happened to that area is as blatant an example of exporting poverty as one can find. While I don't know anyone who will defend locking away the poor in slums, simply getting the poor out of sight, out of mind is no solution for any self-respecting person with even a speck of compassion.

The Daley-CHA gentrification plan is shrewd and cynical: let someone else deal with the poverty problem a racist system in Chicago created. Send them to Peoria, Bloomington Normal, Rockford, or South Side suburbs, or wherever. But just get rid of this eyesore as soon as possible. That's a pretty appalling "solution" to urban ghettos and slums if I've ever seen one.

Anthony DiMaggio

University of Illinois, Chicago

cyrano wrote: "re : Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis damn it david, where did Paul find the time to write a book? Funny that I got 2 book covers on my table, its using the same blue and tones as Paul's book, it must be a trend :)" To cyrano: I stole the time. I like the colors too. "Anonymous" is the worst kind of racist - give me an old-fashioned Klansman any day over these types. All of this commenter's "concerns" and arguments are addressed and countered in a very direct and empirical way in the book.

Thanks David. We have a good Chicago-based cadre on ZNet. It makes sense. Chicago is very good at demonstrating the cringing business captivity and corporate authoritarianism of the Democratic Party. It's a one-party Democratic city-state and of course global business and related commercial and real estate interests couldn't have better friends in Chicago's City Hall if actual Republicans were in charge.

Chicago's very good also in educating on the false dichotomy of either class or race (I sometimes have people like the laughable "cryofan" write to say that "race" is an elite liberal issue and that I should only focus on class).  The metropolitan "elite's" classist-neoliberal "global city" agenda is also very much a hidden and covert (and perhaps therefore all the more powerful) racist agenda and of course it involves the steady displacement of impoverished African Americans, who are being pushed further from the glittering (and "green") downtown to the metropolitan periphery - something an Olympic extravaganza could be expected to  escalate.  

The second chapter of the Racial Oppression book, titled "Whitewashing Global Chicago,"  treats Boeing a bit; it also contains some related treatment of local dominant media, the MacArthur Foundation and a host of other strategically placed agents and enablers of modern neoliberal urban racism, including people and institutions within the black community. Obama makes a few small appearances.

 

damn it david, where did Paul find the time to write a book? Funny that I got 2 book covers on my table, its using the same blue and tones as Paul's book, it must be a trend :)

Paul:

Great looking new book by you:

Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)

Very impressed by what I've seen.  But even moreso about the fact that your eyes are focused on Chicago. 

Clearly, what the neighborhoods need are more relocations to the city's Central Area of Fortune 500 giants -- and military-industrial leaders -- such as Boeing's corporate HQ.  And if Lockheed - Martin won't follow Boeing and relocate its corporate HQ?  Then surely the Illinois Medical District can nurture more firms like that new bioech facility scheduled for the city's West Side at Polk and Leavitt.  Or the Mayor's pièce de résistance: The 2016 Summer Olympics.

I still recall a line some years ago from Adolph Reed.  Unfortunately, I'll have to paraphrase: Richie Daley's long-term plan for Chicago is all-white from the lakefront west to Interstate 90/94.    

Evidently, if you are black and you are poor, you're supposed to have the decency to retrace your roots to your great or great-great-grandparents, and relocate to whichever Confederate state they came from. 

(Though I hasten to add: Boeing and the biotech firms still need janitors to keep the places clean.)

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

Maybe you should start calling yourself the Great Exonerator. A commenter recently accused you of exonerating U.S. soldiers for invading Iraq. I didn't really agree with that but now you appear to have written an entire book exonerating poor poor blacks from their responsbility to follow other ethnic groups in getting out of jail through hard work and moving up the ladder of opportunity in the world's greatest country. "Racial oppression" is so over, dude - get over it. I'm not from Chicago but I understand it's a very successful city, creating plenty of chances for people who care enough to advance to move up like Barack Obama. You've a got a whole bunch of black city council folks and rich black business people too I'm pretty sure...people your nemesis Obama says helped pay for his Senate run. I'm sure having the Olympics would create a lot of jobs and would also give Chicago a chance to advertise itself to the world. I bet you've got a lot of Hispanics coming in who are happy as they can be to work low level jobs there and to move up. Buddy of mine hires Mexican guys all the time because they don't complain about shit all the time like you and your soul brothers/sisters. Also - they don't have criminal records.