What is Freedom ?
Guest: Brother Dr. Irami Osei-Frimpong
The Funky Academic
Saturday, July 16, 2016 <> LIVE <> 10 pm ET
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What is this elusive Freedom ? Do you know ?
Our people have been on the road, rampage and struggle for FREEDOM for over 400 years. We have rebelled, resisted, sung, marched and demanded. More Black people in prison; killed and brutalized by police; living under oppressive captialism and abandoned by corrupted politics. We watch Black men and women bodies fall in the street and in jails murdered under law. Most of us declare freedom, and some continue to fight for it. But what exactly is FREEDOM? A discussion with the Funky Academic about this convolution called FREEDOM.
We will discuss freedom in the context of police killings, mass incarceration, impotent political agency and elected officials.
Guest: Brother Dr. Irami Osei-Frimpong, Brandeis and U-Berkeley, Uof GA philosopher, The Funky Academic.
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Slick-thinking media operatives adopted this technique a few years ago. And there have always been black marionettes willing to be the mouthpiece for anti-black elements embedded within the power structure.Stacey Dash—the bronzed-skinned backwash from the conservative spit cup—resurfaced Thursday to chime in on Jesse Williams’ BET Awards speech, calling him a “Hollywood plantation slave.”Dash fits in a long line of black celebrities ever so willing to contort themselves to always fit on the good side of the anti-black, conservative argument. But she’s not the only one.I know this sounds like a conspiracist’s hypothesis, but ask yourself this: Do you think there is a single American who takes Don Lemon seriously as a journalist? Does he possess some irreplaceable charisma that people clamor for when he reads the teleprompter or delivers his inane commentary?
Twenty-five years ago, the term “gentrification” was largely unfamiliar to the average American. Today, you can’t talk about cities, race, rent or overpriced coffee without bringing it up. It’s a hard phenomenon to measure, yet most agree its harbingers include the rapid influx of young, well-to-do white people into once low-income neighborhoods, often in the inner city, usually populated by people of color.
The rest is history. Said people show up, the area is flooded with resources, property value rises and many former residents are forced to move out. We’ve seen such patterns before, where poor people are literally moved around, in and out of their homes, at the behest of the wealthy. It’s typically called “colonialism.” And that’s not an inaccurate comparison.
This dynamic came to a head last week when a group of Dropbox employees in San Francisco’s notoriously gentrifying Mission District tried to kick a group of local kids off a soccer field they had reserved:
The subtext was clear: We’re here now, we make the rules.
This outcome was uncharacteristically positive, in the short term. A petition and City Hall rally followed, after which the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department ruled that “adult permits” would no longer be issued for the Mission Playground soccer field, according to Latino Rebels.
Most gentrified neighborhoods aren’t so lucky. Change is ruthless and unapologetic. Once an area becomes unaffordable for its low-income residents, it tends to stay that way, and the “storied history,” “selective nostalgia” and “carefully sprinkled grit” that define this particular iteration of “urban life,” in the words of Al Jazeera columnist Sarah Kendzior, become the lens through which America’s cities are increasingly viewed.
Neighborhoods, then, are not just homes, but opportunities for profit and redevelopment. And the renewal fantasy that defines them hides an often racist history of deliberate and concentrated impoverishment, one that’s inevitably copied wherever poor residents are forced to move next — usually the isolated suburbs they were barred from occupying in the first place.
It’s a pattern as old as America itself — and it’s not going away any time soon. To illustrate, here are seven cities that have been radically altered by gentrification in the 21st century, as defined by the percentage of urban homes that went from the bottom half of home price distribution to the top half. Data was compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and calculates for the period between 2000 and 2007.
1. Boston: 61%
The unexpected gentrification capital of America is a city that’s more than 50% white.
As yuppies and tech professionals take over the former Irish-Catholic stronghold of South Boston, or “Southie,” the neighborhood’s once-notorious reputation as an organized crime hub has given way to a bitter nostalgia (ironically espoused by the gentrifiers themselves) for the edge and toughness personified by the Whitey Bulger era, according to the New Republic.
But make no mistake: Southie’s prototypical residents are as irritated by “SoBo” as the people who made SoBo claim to be irritated by SoBo.
“The yuppies have invaded. It’s totally overrun by yuppies,” resident William O’Brien told theHuffington Post.
Plumber Scott Clark said, simply, “It’s not my neighborhood anymore.”
2. Seattle: 55%
A small act of civic defiance occurred in Capitol Hill this February. A pair of masked individuals blocked a Microsoft employee bus on its way to the office, brandishing a sign that read “Gentrification stops here.” The move came in response to a pattern that’s defined the city for years, according to the Seattle Times: With a home price turnaround rate of 55%, the Pacific Northwestern metropolis was the second most drastically gentrified city in the U.S. between 2000 and 2007.
Neighborhoods from Ballard in the north to Delridge in the south have seen dramatic shifts of late. Law professor and longtime Seattle resident Henry W. McGee Jr. specifically articulates the fate of the Central District, once home to Seattle’s small black population, where in 2000 the number of white residents surpassed the number of black residents for the first time in 30 years.
“What is clear is that thousands of African-Americans have been displaced from the city’s oldest identifiably African-American community,” he writes.
The reasons are multipronged, but the fact that black applicants in Seattle are 2.56 times more likely to be denied a conventional mortgage loan than whites, in addition to being more likely to pay higher rates, isn’t helping.
3. New York City: 46%
Perhaps no city more thoroughly dominates modern conversations around gentrification than New York. Whether it’s Spike Lee bemoaning the sudden influx of resources into neighborhoods like Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights since white people moved in, or new Fort Greene residents complaining about homeless people being mean to their dogs in the local park, gentrification stories ranging from bad to awful abound. Today, New York City is the most expensive metropolitan area in the U.S.
4. San Francisco: 42%
Even aside from the Mission Playground incident, San Francisco consistently makes headlines for tensions fanned by gentrification.
The recent tech industry explosion has drawn unprecedented numbers of IT workers to the Bay Area, with the fallout encapsulated by stories like the recent protests designed to stop Google Buses, private vehicles used to transport Google employees, from using municipal bus stops on their daily routes.
It’s hard to quantify how drastically this transportation practice could alter the local status quo, but critics claim it pollutes the environment and makes the road more dangerous for the city’s cycling community, according to SFGate. Regardless, San Francisco’s housing economy has shifted drastically. In the seven years between 2000 and 2007, houses in the bottom half of home prices switched to the upper bracket at a staggering 42% rate.
5. Washington, D.C.: 35%
Recent conversations around gentrification in D.C. have taken a familiar turn, with some arguing that it has, in fact, been a good thing for the region’s original residents. NPR claims that gentrification not only doesn’t increase the likelihood that lower-income occupants will move out of a neighborhood, but that those who do stay reap benefits, ranging from “new parks” and “safer streets” to higher credit scores.
Of course, it stands to reason that those who can afford to stick around as an area gentrifies are richly rewarded. But even if this were the case across the board, we should be concerned that the most dependable way to ensure economic and infrastructural investment in struggling, low-income and, most importantly, black neighborhoods (such as Anacostia, Deanwood and Columbia Heights) is to have white people with money move into them.
6. Atlanta: 31%
Gentrification in Atlanta has caused the respective rise and fall of the city’s white and black populations for the first time since the 1920s, according to the New York Times. Brookings Institution demographer William Frey said, “There could be a time in the not-too-distant future when the black population is below half of the city population, if this trend continues.” (Atlanta is currently 54% black.)
The irony, according to Bloomberg, is that white conservative Georgia voters outside the city have consistently opposed measures to revitalize this now-gentrifying civic core, most notably by blocking plans to expand the city’s public transportation system. But some wonder whether projects like the Beltline, a new rail network and green space currently under construction, are themselves actually just draws for, or even byproducts of, gentrification.
7. Chicago: 28%
The racial dynamics of gentrification are perhaps no better illustrated than in Chicago. In a tellingarticle, NPR’s Gene Demby reported that the size of a Windy City neighborhood’s black population — as exemplified in areas like Englewood, Austin and Roseland, all more than 85%black — directly correlates with the speed at which it gentrifies.
His source is a study by Harvard researchers Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang. Sampson refers to this phenomenon as “‘white avoidance’ — [gentrifiers are] not moving into neighborhoods where there are lots of black people.”
“In Chicago,” he said, “the [neighborhoods] that are gentrifying are the ones where there was a white working class, or Latinos, but not many blacks.”
This is especially interesting when you look at how this pattern plays out in other cities. Williamsburg and Greenpoint, viewed as the hotspots for gentrification in Brooklyn, New York, supports Sampson’s point. Both had large Polish-American and Latino populations before the influx of gentrifiers, but very few blacks. Similar claims can be made about Boston and Seattle, the top two (and statistically whitest) cities on this list, while historically black neighborhoods like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant are “outliers,” according to the report.
Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that, due to policies like redlining and government-sanctioned housing discrimination, the people most likely to be affected by rising home prices in urban cores are black or brown. It just means that gentrifiers may tend to gravitate toward poor white neighborhoods first. It’s hard to say whether people should be happy or extremely offended by this.
The takeaway: And so it goes, the constant geographical shuffling of low-income people at the behest of those with money.
Many cities have undergone such radical shifts in recent years as to be nearly unrecognizable. There are more to come: The New York Times recently calculated gentrification rates by determining which cities have seen the biggest influx of recent college graduates between 2000 and 2012. Places like Houston (50% uptick), Nashville (48%), Denver (47%), Austin, Texas (44%), and Portland, Oregon (37%), top the list, with D.C. (36%), Buffalo, New York (34%), and Baltimore (32%) not far behind.
It’s a phenomenon that hides within it all the racial and class tensions that define American history. If only all people could share in its spoils, and do so without relying on influxes of wealth and white people.
On this Independence day it is well to remember a speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” given by the formerly enslaved and probably greatest 19th century American, Frederick Douglass, at Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, at the peak of North America slavery (indeed, about 230 years into that era).
In this era Black Americans were usually not allowed at 4th of July celebrations in the slaveholding South, apparently because many slaveholders feared that they might get an idea of freedom from such events (as if they did not already have such an idea!). Also, Black residents were often discouraged from attending such festivities in the North.
It is in this very dangerous and hostile national racial climate that the great Douglass–increasingly, a leading intellectual of his day and the first Black American to receive a roll-call vote for US President (later on, at the 1888 Republican national convention!)–was asked by leading citizens of Rochester to give an address at their Fourth of July celebrations. He gave them this stinging indictment of racial oppression:
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
But later adds:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Take the American slave-trade, which we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words from the high places of the nation as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the Jaws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish them selves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon all those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass with out condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.
Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip, and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-curdling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul The crack you heard was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.
And then concludes with this:
Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill.
The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign.
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.
Sadly, our system of racial oppression still persists, even as most white Americans are in denial about its deep and foundational reality. Yet, there remain many people like Frederick Douglass today who still fight to remove this “yoke of tyranny” from us all. May they flourish and prosper. We should remember those now and from the past who fought racism most on this day to celebrate freedom.
ADDENDUM
Some forty-two years later, in the last speech (“Lessons of the Hour”) he gave before his death—at an AME Church in DC, on January 9th, 1894—Douglass made these comments as he watched southern and border states hurtle toward bloody Jim Crow segregation, the new neo-slavery system:
We claim to be a Christian country and a highly civilized nation, yet, I fearlessly affirm that there is nothing in the history of savages to surpass the blood chilling horrors and fiendish excesses perpetrated against the colored people by the so-called enlightened and Christian people of the South. It is commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting birds and beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat over and prey dead bodies, but the Southern mob in its rage feeds its vengeance by shooting, stabbing and burning when their victims are dead. I repeat, and my contention is, that this “Negro problem” formula lays the fault at the door of the Negro, and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty, and blames the innocent. Makes the Negro responsible and not the nation….. Now the real problem is, and ought to be regarded by the American people, a great national problem. It involves the question, whether, after all, with our Declaration of Independence, with our glorious free constitution, whether with our sublime Christianity, there is enough of national virtue in this great nation to solve this problem, in accordance with wisdom and justice.
OCG 