Urban Issues and Actions

With a newly elected president who promised that change will come, it is important that AIDS activists (such as myself) and others remind Barack Obama of his promises regarding the domestic and international fight against HIV/AIDS. It is true that the economy is in poor shape, people are losing their jobs and homes and a controversial war continues; however, 40,000 people a year being infected with HIV in the United States with 25% of the HIV infected persons unaware of their status. HIV/AIDS is not a separate issue, but an issue that intersects many boundaries: health care, the economy, and the welfare state. Thus, the issue can be address in conjunction with the other issues that haunt our country. We are in a state of emergency with the HIV/AIDS crisis, because for a preventable disease, many people are infected and dying. Therefore, there must be a correlation between one’s health and the state of the nation as a whole.

On November 21, 2008, roughly 1,000 AIDS activists from all over the East Coast attended a mock “inauguration” of President-elect Barack Obama in which four activists posing as Obama was inaugurated by placing their hands not on the Bible, but on a National AIDS Strategy. The crowd screamed, “Yes, we can!” and “Yes, we will!” in which the activist called on Obama to begin to implement real changes to AIDS policy in the first 100 days of his administration. So, one may ask, “Why are AIDS activist excited about Obama’s plan for the domestic and international AIDS fight?”

According to Barack Obama’s commitment to the AIDS fight, he has developed a National AIDS Strategy and a Global AIDS Strategy. In addition, he supported legislation such as the Early Treatment for HIV Act (ETHA), Microbicide Development Act (one of the primary sponsors), Syringe exchange, Ryan White CARE Act, Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA) and the repel of the HIV travel and immigration ban. He promotes and supports comprehensive sex education (co-sponsored the Prevention First Act), ending funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage prevention methods and for prison HIV prevention (expressed support for the Unprotected against Sexually Transmitted Infections among Confined and Expose (JUSTICE) Act currently in the House of Representatives). All of this support and action taken by Obama, along with his strategic plans, has many AIDS activists excited and hopeful regarding the future.

As an individual passionate about the HIV/AIDS epidemic nationally and worldwide, I am excited about Obama’s commitments to the ongoing fight. However, I question how much will be able to do regarding not only AIDS, but other critical issues in general. The reality is that as a country and under the Bush Administration, we are intertwined in several complex situations that must be addressed. Our creditability and reputation worldwide is poor, our economy affects that of the world, we are involved in two wars, etc. However, I will just have to see what Obama will and can do once he is officially inaugurated.

This week for Bonner Scholar I volunteered with Immigration and Refugee services. This Richmond non-profit, provides various services for new immigrants, refugees and their children to help them assimilate more smoothly in the United States. My role in this nonprofit is to teach English–something that I have absolutely no experience with.The first day there was a group of about twenty immigrants mostly Hispanic. We divided up the group into small groups and started going over the alphabet and the verb “to be.”  Apart from several small mistakes, each student was incredibly diligent and eager to learn. In fact, I was incredibly impressed. They were able to pick up sentences and phrases very fast (Much faster than when I was learning Spanish).  I think that my experience at teaching English tells a story about Richmond that not many people hear about.
            The reason that I am writing this blog is not to discuss the pedagogy behind this nonprofit or to elaborate on the effects that this nonprofit has on people, but it is to tell the stories of the people who go to classes. To show how strong, proud, but yet vulnerable certain people in Richmond are.Last Thursday I taught a woman who was the most delightful person you could possible run into. She had this huge smile and every time she made a mistake she would throw her hands in the air and laugh. I found out during that class that she has seven daughters and sons and has to work two full time jobs. On top of that, she knows little to no English and has to come to English lessons from six to nine every Tuesday and Thursday night. She was an incredible woman.  Not in my best years do I think that I would have the strength to do what she does and still beam the beautiful and contagious smile that she has.Another woman who was also from Mexico had a cute shyness to her. She became very bashful whenever she made a mistake. I didn’t have to do much to encourage her, because my poor Spanish skills made us both realize how equally bad we were in each other’s languages. I like to believe this made her a lot more comfortable. At one point I made her laugh trying to find the word for “drawer.” Instead of saying the right word, which is cajon, I accidently said the word cabron–which loosely translated into English means “asshole.” This woman also worked incredibly hard day in and day out. At only 27 years old, this woman had to work two jobs and find whatever oddjobs she could find in order to make ends meet.At the end of class I met two boys from Venezuela. We first started chit chatting, talking about girls and sports, through our discourse I could draw a line of difference between me and them. Although the three of us were all about the same age, the two Venezuelans were men not boys. The two of them started a construction and painting business here in Richmond in order to support his family and friends back home. The younger one had only been in the United States for five months and was already speaking broken English. I remember them telling me how hard it is to run a construction business. The younger one told me that life in the United States is harder and more serious. But he has to be here in order to make money.

These are only a handful of stories from the hundreds of immigrants in the city of Richmond. On the drive home, I wondered how do people like these affect America? How do they affect the Richmond area? On a personal level, I know that they bring large capital and ability to the Richmond area. Just by looking in their eyes and seeing strength and determination in them, I can see their value. Another question to ask is, is the Richmond community assimilating and investing in these people as best we can? Even though immigration and refugee services provide a lot of wonder services for the immigrant community, in the end, it is people like me that are teaching English. I believe that there should be more done to include people like these in Richmond life. That we can better their lives if we help them and certainly they can better ours as well.  

I am sick of hearing about this stock market crash. The Dow is going down again, and so is everything else. I am sick of reading the Wall Street Journal, so I decided to read the Richmond Times Dispatch. But guess what? Even the Richmond Times Dispatch has the same news about how the financial market is affecting everything. I thought I could never get rid of it. As I kept looking I saw an article about the school district of Richmond and how the market crash is affecting it. The article mainly focused on how schools all around the Richmond area are making adjustments by cutting down their budgets. “Yet another victim of the slowing down of the economy”, I thought. This article made me think about the issue that we were discussing in class. I think many of us agreed that improving the education system is one of the top priorities to help develop the city, and the first and foremost way of doing it is by providing better funding to schools. With the increase in funding, the quality of teacher increases, as school districts are able to pay teachers a larger sum of money. As a result, the quality of education increases as teachers are motivated to work harder.   So, funding is directly proportional to the quality of education. I think it is important that education be one of the main priorities, because if we have a strong education system we will have a good future considering the fact that the children of today are the future of tomorrow. Thus, does the cut in school budget hamper the development of Richmond? I guess we will find out in a couple of years.

Ok, so there is a lot of literature out there about subconscious racism and racism built into our thought processes, i.e. “white lies” and “the black market”- most recently this was argued by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in “Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States.” I’m not normally a fan of these arguments, as I see it as reducing the racial problems in the United States to pro-noun’s in common figures of speech. However, while filming our documentary on gangs, I came across a double standard that I could not ignore. Time and time again both hollywood movies and popular literature talk about the horrors of gang initiation; this including ‘beat-ins,’ ’sex-ins,’ and ‘crime-ins.’ You will watch a movie about how kids are almost killed, or kill someone else in attempt to obtain a sense of belonging or family. Of course, this behavior should be demonized and rejected by society as a manifestation of male-driven testosterone and false comradeship.  However, the “white” counterpart to this is fraternal hazing. Not only is it not looked down upon by mainstream society, but it is glorified as a passage to manhood by movies like “Animal House” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” Why is it that foolish, reckless, and pointless behavior performed by a predominantly white youth population accepted by people, colleges, and law enforcement while the other is not. Obviously, gang violence should not be tolerated, but neither should fraternal violence. Since when did forming bonds with peers involve deception, sleep deprivation, forced drinking, and ultimately violence. Don’t get me wrong, I played sports in high school, and I know what it’s like to be at the bottom of the totem-pole, but this is not ancient Spartan society here, this is the United States of America. The obvious conclusion here is that both forms of violence and shenanigans should be viewed as non-sense, but unfortunately, the reality is that one is glorified and the other isn’t. The only conclusion I can come to about this is: racism.I am interested to hear thoughts from others, possible people who have experienced either of these forms of group initiation. I am by no means attempting to belittle those who have experienced this, but I am critiquing  the acceptance of one as legitimate and the other as criminal.

Although our group documentary will hopefully discuss this in detail, I wanted to bring this recent development in the Richmond Public School System to the attention of my classmates and the blogging community: by an 8-1 vote the Richmond School Board just recently approved an open enrollment policy, which allows “city parents to send their children to any school they choose, beginning next year.”  Sounds great, right?  The ability to go to any school—that’s good.  There are limitations, however, and very large ones at that. 

As the Times-Dispatch article states, “The only limitations are space and transportation.”  The only limitations?  Those are huge!  The policy is well-intentioned in theory, but the problem is that students must provide their own transportation to school, so a poor student living in the city might not have the necessary resources (like a parent able to play taxi driver, for example) to go anywhere else but the poor neighborhood school.  The result is a school system that has an even higher concentration of poverty in the city center. 

Space is the other limitation, and this one in my opinion is just as scary for our school system. “In-zone students will continue to get preference for seats,” so the available spaces will be filled by application.  “If more students apply than there are spaces open, they will be chosen in a lottery.”  This will open the door, yet again, for discrimination based on race and economic class.  A very similar policy was used (in Richmond!) back in the 1960s called “freedom of choice,” which allowed students to apply to attend any school.  The Pupil Placement Board was in charge of accepting or turning down the applications, and the result was very little change in the demographics of the schools because of their discrimination.  History repeats itself. 

This semester has been very frustrating for me, learning about the many problems of the cities across the country and in Richmond.  It is incredible to see the ways in which everything connects.  The housing market: African Americans denied loans and poor black neighborhoods redlined.  The road systems: construction of major highways ripped through poor black neighborhoods, dividing the cities even more by race and class, and left people without homes.  The school system: desegregation came very slowly and with a lot of feet dragging, black schools were underfunded, and many whites resisted integration, fleeing to the suburbs.  It is so difficult to separate these very complex issues and focus on only one because they all influence each other.  I am really looking forward to sharing my group’s documentary with the class and to see the other ones as well.  Shedding light on these modern issues, with the very important component of a historical context, is absolutely necessary in order to understand how our cities will fight against its sometimes dark past.  Had all 9 school board members known of Richmond’s past discrimination in the schools, would open enrollment still have been passed?

Yesterday, Russ and I drove for at least two and a half hours through Jackson Ward and around the city of Richmond using both small neighborhood roads and big highways. In the process of getting some much needed filming done I was amazed with Jackson Ward and the surrounding area of the city. There are two specific points of interest that I have learned during the filming of this documentary: 

1. When driving through Gilpin Court it is not wise to stop in a parking lot and walk around with a video camera. This point is pretty loaded with implications. It’s not that Gilpin Court is an extremely dangerous, but I was really uncomfortable with what DuBois calls the “car window sociology” of driving through an area. I was legitimately scared a few times when there was a dead end or when we were driving in between groups of people. I’m not sure if it’s some abstract racism or just a legitimate concern for the lives of two well-meaning guys driving around in an Accord with a video camera, but I cannot deny my unease as we entered what Mufasa called the “shadowland.” To make matters worse, while Russ was walking around getting footage of the area, a police officer drove up to my car and started talking to me. When I told him we were doing a documentary on Jackson Ward he said something to the extent of “Be careful, this is a very dangerous area.” I said he was thinking,” Stupid white boy” but Russ just thought he was being over cautious. Russ got into the car and we proceeded to finish our drive through the area and left with no bullet wounds or any other stereotypical dangers some people attribute to public housing such as Gilpin Court.
2. At one point, while Russ was filming the Highway that displaced ten percent of the black population and ruined what was once a thriving community, I was driving on the more “posh’ side of historic Jackson Ward. While there, I drove in between two rows of newly renovated row houses and saw a BMW parked out front. A few seconds later, I saw a trendy, young couple parking their SUV and walking towards the row houses. Then I thought to myself, “How weird is it that only 100 yards separate these new residents from the public housing nearby. Do they realize they are so close to the people their parents may have run away from just a few decades earlier? At any rate, I’m sure they were confident in the Highway as an effective form of segregation. Jim Crow is no longer a system of laws and violent crimes of hate. Now, Jim Crow is the legacy we can see in the highway system that separates the societal outcasts with the affluent

 There is no easy way to talk about Jackson Ward, Gilpin Court or the Highway that divides the two. There is no easy way to place a value on the benefit of the highway versus the value of the houses destroyed. Because of this difficulty, our group cannot deny the history of the place or the current state of the area. Either way, the history should be told and hopefully a documentary will prove to be the best way to do so.

Detroit was once known as a thriving metropolis, however nowadays it is referred to as a ghost town.  The Big 3in Detroit (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) are automobile manufacturing companies that have had a tough time economically in the city of Detroit with the mid-century layoffs that sent the city of Detroit basically back into the Stone Age and are now seeking $25 billion in low-cost direct loans from Congress.  The CEO’s of each company met last week in Washington with congress and Congress grilled them hard about each company’s financial plan to get back on track and begin to bring profits in again.  Before they were seeking $50 billion but automakers have postponed looking for the other $25 billion until next year.  The Big 3 claims that the money is to be used to modernize factories, speed development of fuel-efficient vehicles, etc.  My question to all of you, is should Congress grant these automobile companies $25 billion of our hard earned tax dollars?  And take note that most of these companies, the income salaries of the CEO’s and CFO’s, etc have increased while their so-called “troubled companies” have been going down the drain.

Today, I came across a New York Times article called Home Prices Plunge in October, and I felt obliged to read it and see how the economic and housing crisis was progressing, based on the title, not well. Living here at the University of Richmond, we are in a bubble. Even if it is not the ‘Richmond bubble’ that people talk about, we are definitely in a college bubble. The biggest concern college students have, including me, is getting through their classes, finishing their work that is due tomorrow, and then trying to get as much sleep as they can with the little amount of time available. Once you add working out, research, extracurricular activities, and socializing there is very little time for worrying about the real world beyond this college campus.

So, I took time from all that to read this article about the housing crisis, which is unfortunately linked in a cycle with the economic crisis. As the housing crisis worsens, it hurts the economy, and as the economy fails, the housing crisis worsens. The article believes that the housing crisis will improve when housing prices hit bottom and then the buyers will start buying again, which will benefit the economy and pick everything back up. However, until then we have to wait for everything to get worse. This just seems wrong.

Why do we have to let the economy do as it pleases? Is it wrong to want regulation of the economy? To have financial and local stability? We discussed some similar questions in sociology recently, and the conclusions my fellow classmates and I came to involved increased government regulation of businesses. If the government played a larger role in the economy and businesses, then it could regulate the economy and hopefully prevent these recessions and depressions from occurring. Recessions and depressions are always going to happen for as long as we have a free economy. However, I am not saying that we should allow the government to have complete control because that would potentially lead to conflict of interest. If elite government officials owned all businesses then they would enact laws and regulations for their benefits. Although, if the government owned a small portion of every business, like one-fourth, then they would be capable of keeping businesses alive and regulating the economy, but they would not have a large enough conflict of interest to be corrupted (hopefully).

As I continue reading articles about the housing crisis, I cannot help but wonder how many more homeless people there will be over the next year. With the majority of houses that are being sold on the housing market due to foreclosures, one must wonder where the people that were foreclosed upon go. Fortunately, there are a lot of great programs and shelters in Richmond that can help the homeless, but hopefully they have enough resources for the amount of people that will need help over the coming months, especially through the holiday season.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving and remembers how lucky we are to go to a great school like the University of Richmond. Don’t ever take good health and happiness for granted

As Circuit City declares bankruptcy, our Big Three Auto manufactures self-destruct and our economy is in a state of peril unrivaled in our history, I wonder how effective our current economic system is? Throughout the 2008 presidential election the dangerous “S word” was constantly hurled at Barack Obama in an attempt to discredit him, but clearly the “C word” is crippling our society, so how bad can the “S word” actually be? In case you did not get the reference, the “S word” stands for socialism, which no red-blooded American would ever want to be. We would never want a system of equality where everyone has a roof over their head, food in their stomach, clothes on their back and a decent shot at success. Equal education, a stronger welfare system and a redistribution of wealth such that it’s not concentrated within 1% of our population is an outrageous suggestion- Thus; we remain ever faithful to our good old American system of capitalism. However, since capitalism clearly is struggling at the moment, and we would never want to be a socialist society, maybe we can find a happy medium in compassionate capitalism. We can still have our system of stratification, where one can claim the elusive title of the upper-class and others can revel in the normalcy of the middle-class, but also have a system where everyone can make a living wage and get a decent education. We constantly complain about illegal immigrants taking “our jobs” and “our jobs” being shipped overseas, but if it wasn’t for our system of capitalism those jobs never would have been taken away from “us” in the first place. So maybe we need to move away from this unchecked system of capitalism which we have come so heavily to rely on. Substitute cheap megastore prices for the ability of everyone being able to clothe and feed their families. Not tying the idea of middle-class to the fact that some people can’t pay rent. Because, at the end of the day, our current situation is hurting us all. The sad part is that it took us this long to realize that our system wasn’t working. It took gas prices rising, and homes’ foreclosing for people to begin to realize that a change needs to be effected, even though for some people these new found hard-times have been a life long reality. But on a positive note, let’s take the struggle of the times, and try and help everyone struggle less, not just the middle-class, not just Joe the Plummer, not the movers and shakers on wall-street, but EVERYBODY.