Monthly Archives: September 2021

Texas GOP sees Haitian migrant border crisis as a political opportunity – Vox

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” . . . The situation in Del Rio — where more than 12,000 migrants are camping in increasingly squalid conditions without adequate access to water, food, and sanitation — is growing dire from a humanitarian perspective. Most of these migrants are from Haiti and plan to seek asylum in the US, as is their right under federal and international law. In just the last few months, Haiti has suffered from a political crisis stemming from President Jovenel Moïse’s July assassination, resultant gang violence, and the two-punch of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake and a tropical storm that left about 2,200 dead and many thousands more injured or missing. Those conditions appear to have driven more Haitians to make the treacherous journey to the US border: Federal immigration authorities have encountered more than 30,000 Haitians this fiscal year, nearly six times the number encountered over the previous fiscal year.But Abbott has sought to twist that humanitarian crisis into a security crisis designed to appeal to Republican voters in his state, who have long identified immigration and border security as top priorities in public opinion polling. He told the Texas Tribune that he was trying to “stop these [migrant] caravans from overrunning our state” and described US Customs and Border Protection agents as “overwhelmed by the chaos.” That’s in line with his recent rhetoric trying to demonize migrants arriving on the southern border as lawbreakers and carriers of disease. . . ”

Source: Texas GOP sees Haitian migrant border crisis as a political opportunity – Vox

Why does TikTok hate this affordable housing development? – Vox

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The new multifamily buildings in your neighborhood actually slow displacement.

” . . . That discussion of gentrification is instead frequently diverted to what the buildings look like is a massive coup on behalf of existing property owners. Those current owners often want to maintain aesthetic control, sometimes as a means of blocking new homes from being built (experts have found that historic preservation is often weaponized to prevent new, more affordable housing options).

It is fine to dislike the way a home looks; not all art is for everyone. But the convergence of aesthetic preferences and physical displacement under the same “gentrification” banner only serves to maintain the current system of housing development, one that has made housing prohibitively expensive for many Americans and displaced people under countless different architectural styles.

The problem with this conflation became clear when I looked into the building depicted in the aforementioned Camden TikTok video. Branch Village isn’t a “gentrification building.” It’s actually an affordable housing project funded in part by low-income housing tax credits. According to the Courier-Post, the project’s second phase included the construction of 75 townhomes, all of which “will be considered affordable, accessible to those making less than 80 percent of the area’s median income.” Per an affordable housing database, the development now has 245 units.

Despite the primary concern of gentrification usually being the displacement of low-income residents, the top two comments on the Camden video, which collectively received 76,000 “likes,” were stylistic complaints: “why is it ALWAYS h&r block green, and “they really had to pick the worst colors didn’t they?”

This is common in gentrification discourse. People want to use a word that evokes visuals of marginalized communities being displaced, either through evictions, rising prices, or even violent displacement. But, after prodding, the actual concern is artistic. The rhetorical sleight of hand is not always intentional. For many, the concepts of “new, modern buildings” and “displacement” have simply become inextricable. But the confusion around how the word gentrification is being used has real policy consequences: If people believe that new buildings work against housing affordability, they will oppose the very policies necessary to solve the nation’s housing affordability crisis . . .”

 

Source: Why does TikTok hate this affordable housing development? – Vox

 

This Week ::: OUR COMMON GROUND

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This Week ::: OUR COMMON GROUND

“The Glitch in the Matrix”

This Week on OUR COMMON GROUND

“The Glitch in the Matrix”

OPEN MIC

Saturday,September 11, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

Tune In: http://bit.ly/OCGTruthTalk

Call-In & Listen Line: (347) 838-9852

In the arc of American history, Donald Trump’s election as the president of the United States is no shock. The functional preamble remains that all white men are created superior and those who subscribe to it are periodically compelled to stick it in the face of Black folks — and now brown and Muslim folks, too — even if it comes at considerable cost to the nation and world standing.

It did not matter that under Obama the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent from the 10 percent he inherited from Bush. Under Obama’s Affordable Care Act insured millions more Americans than under Bush. It did not matter that many of Obama’s policies put money in the pockets of the working class, such as dramatically raising the federal salary threshold to collect overtime pay, or the Lilly Ledbetter Act for fair pay based on gender. Despite that he was so much like all Presidents before him. He was like them. The same kind of occupant of the WH, as Bush, Clinton, Kennedy. But, ultimately, they would elect an obnoxious, underachieving, corny, egomaniac conman to ensure that an Obama would never again usher shadows into their sacred places.

Since none of that mattered, all of Trump’s rhetoric about everything in America being a “disaster” was a smokescreen for the consolidation of crude white power. The majority of white Americans, a century and a half after the end of slavery, still spectacularly preferred economic uncertainty in exchange for returning Black people to their place and now sending brown immigrants and Muslims “back home.”

Early in the Trump candidacy an opinion columnist wrote in The Boston Globe that his “hateful nonsense, meant for white people who still think the country is theirs, is a death rattle for the most crude forms of white privilege.” I was hoping that his election would be as a death rattle for the snake, not for those whom the snake struck. Finally, and most disturbing of all, there was the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump last November, despite his record of governing incompetence – crystallized by the COVID-19 debacle – and toxic, divide-and-conquer political, to say nothing that he literally ran a global criminal enterprise out of the White House and throughout the government.

In the “The Matrix”, the film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient Machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. In Matrix parlance, red pills are those who are aware of the Matrix construct while blue pills are not. An often used admonishment to Black people to be realistic, clear about the political nuances of our citizenship.

The Matrix represents a system of control that operates completely in the mind. As a complex, machine-driven program, it appropriates any personal, political, or ideological leanings and renders them wholly false. It allows illusions but no action. The problem with the matrix that most people of control and power depend upon has a glitch. That is that Black people don’t believe in things, as Stevie Wonder reminded us in his awesome song, “Superstition, ” When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. . . “ The matrix which encapsulates America is built on the superstition of American exceptionalism- a superstition of massive import.  Black people have taught this country the potential value and power of its own rhetoric around democracy. We have also taught them the lessons of its hypocrisy and fragility. Uncovering, exposing, and revealing. Demonstrating time after time that “we” are not who “we” say that we are. So many Americans are beginning to understand more and moving beyond the energy field of the matrix. The glitch in the matrix ?  Black people. We discuss it at OUR COMMON GROUND tonight.

“I’ll Be Listening for You”
Janice