People Before Profit blog

One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles Teenie

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 06:45:00 +0000

One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, Introduction by Stanley Crouch. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001, $35

Pittsburgh, Pa., has produced an astonishing number of Black music legends – Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstine, Eubie Blake, Earl Hines, and Errol Garner, to name just a few.

Charles “Teenie” Harris photographed them all. He also took snapshots of presidents, prizefighters and professional baseball players.

But Harris, who for 40 years chronicled the African-American neighborhood known as “The Hill,” mostly photographed Pittsburgh’s everyday heroes – its steelworkers, railroad men, mechanics and waitresses.

From the 1930s into the 1970s, Harris, whose other nickname was “One Shot,” created more than 80,000 images of daily life in The Hill.

A recent book, One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris, with an introduction by Stanley Crouch, contains 135 of these fascinating pictures. An exhibit of Harris’ work opens at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in July.

Harris gained the nickname “One Shot” because of his habit of taking only one snapshot at any event. This was simple economics. He was working freelance at the time while other photographers were on newspaper payrolls. One shot was all he could afford to produce.

The Pittsburgh Courier, for decades one of the country’s leading African-American newspapers, hired him as a freelancer in 1931.

Only later did he become its staff photographer. Even then they didn’t pay him much. Why not? a reporter once asked him. “I don’t know,” Harris said. “They were just cheap, I guess.”

Self-taught – he quit school in the eighth grade – Harris captured what Crouch calls “the enormous vitality” of his neighborhood. One Shot Harris is “not nostalgic so much as a documentation of certain kinds of human vitality,” Crouch told a New York City audience last October. It doesn’t “duck the reality” of African-American life in Pittsburgh, but provides an honest and rounded picture.

Rather than the one-dimensional images of Black people that we get from television and movies, most of Harris’ subjects are what The New York Times in a December 2001 article called “hard-working and confident.”

“Showing people in squalor didn’t contribute anything to the community,” a former city editor for the Courier, who was Harris’ boss for 10 years, told the Times. “We showed the productive side of our people.”

In 1986, Harris, who couldn’t read well, signed an agreement with a local photo dealer, giving away almost his entire archive of negatives for a mere $3,000.

Shortly before his death in 1998, Harris hired a lawyer to get his negatives back. The lawyer, who made a deathbed pledge to Harris that she would recover his life’s work, eventually succeeded and the archive was returned to Harris’ family.

His photographs are “the largest documentation of African-American urban life in existence anywhere,” according to Laurence Glasco, a professor of Black history at the University of Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing that approaches it in depth and variety of topics,” Glasco told the Times.

For Harris it was just fun. “Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All fun,” he told an interviewer.

“He thought of himself as an average guy, but he was more than that,” Harris’ son said in 2001. “He never looked for the limelight. Later in his life, after he saw that people appreciated what he was doing, he knew that what he had done was good.”

– Carolyn Rummel (crummel@pww.org)

People's Weekly World top stories, April 1, 2003

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 10:08:00 +0000

do you work.

www.pww.org

People's Weekly World top stories, April 1, 2003

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 10:07:00 +0000

do you work.

www.pww.org

I want da headlines now

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 11:24:00 +0000

Millions march against war: At home by Tim Wheeler, Feb 22, 2003 NEW YORK – Braving frigid cold, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallied near the United Nations, Feb. 15, to protest George W. Bush’s threatened war on Iraq and to support UN efforts to stop the war. The rally here was part of a coordinated one-day protest in 600 cities across the nation and around the world. Millions march against war: Around world by Marilyn Bechtel, Feb 22, 2003 An unprecedented wave of anti war demonstrations swept the globe on Feb. 15, as an estimated 11 million demonstrators poured into the streets, determined to block the Bush administration’s drive to war against Iraq. As in the U.S., initiators and participants came from a very broad array of unions, political parties, religious organizations, youth and women’s organizations, left and progressive organizations including communist and workers parties.

PWW headlines

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 11:17:00 +0000

Book review: Tinderbox

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 05:22:00 +0000

Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Common Courage Press, 2003. $18.95, paperback

Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, has written a timely and informative book. Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism has an ease of style not usually found in books dealing with complex issues like foreign policy. Written in an articulate and simple manner, Tinderbox makes clear the hidden ambitions and goals of U.S. policymakers and business interests, and shows how U.S. involvement in the Middle East, rather than challenging terrorism, supports it.

U.S. policymakers want Middle Eastern as well as American people to think of U.S. actions as benign and even-handed. This is especially true concerning the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

But, with uncritical U.S. support, the Israeli government has murdered, tortured and dislocated thousands of Palestinians. According to Zunes, “between 1972 and 2001 the United States used its veto power in the [UN] Security Council thirty-nine times to block resolutions critical of Israeli policies … more than all other countries have used their veto on all other issues during this period combined.”

More recently the Israeli government, borrowing a note from the Bush administration, used the cloak of “combatting terrorism” to further its aims. The United States supplied the hardware, Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, while Israel bombed the Jenin refugee camp for eight days, killing or wounding hundreds and displacing thousands.

According to Zunes, U.S. support for these Israeli government policies has caused tremendous anti-American sentiment worldwide, especially since most of the world supports the Palestinian people’s right to statehood and the UN resolutions calling for Israel to leave the occupied territories.

The U.S. government backing of the brutal military oppression of the Palestinian people helps terrorist organizations gain support among the disenfranchised who feel they have no other options.

U.S. arms sales to wealthy Arab monarchs have had the same effect. But while U.S. policymakers and conservative Arab states share a common cause – curbing national democratic and progressive movements and preserving the status quo – many people in the Middle East strive for democracy and change.

“For autocratic Arab leaders the perceived threat from Israeli militarism serves as a pretext for their lack of internal democracy and inability to address badly needed economic and social reforms,” says Zunes. He adds, “The resulting arms race has been a bonanza for U.S. arms manufacturers …”

Understanding the ambitions of overall U.S. Middle East policy is even more important today as the Bush administration continues its hysterical drive to war with Iraq.

According to Zunes, many in the Middle East see U.S. ambitions to overthrow Saddam Hussein as hypocritical. They see the U.S. promise to enforce human rights and international law and disarm a military “rogue state,” and its offer of the carrot of democracy, as window dressing hiding other motives.

Many ask, “Why Iraq? Why Saddam?” especially considering that support for non-democratic nations has been a longstanding cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

Addressing this question, Zunes notes that historically countries have exaggerated their own military strength, while minimizing the strength of their opponents in order to convince their enemies not to engage in aggressive action. But the U.S. government has exaggerated the military force of its opponents and downplayed the ability of the U.S. military and its allies to resist or overcome it. “From the perspective of deterrence,” says Zunes, “this would be totally foolish, since to exaggerate your enemy’s strength … would invite attack.”

“However,” he continued, “if a country’s national security is not really at stake and the primary goal of the government is to convince the public that it is worth diverting a large amount of the nation’s resources to military production and/or to engage in a war, making such claims then makes sense.”

Many factors account for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Some, like arms sales, are obvious. Other reasons are a bit more obscure. What is clear, though, is that the U.S. government has plans for the Middle East that very likely work against democracy, social and economic reform and peace.

The very real threat of terrorism has created an opportunity for many of us to learn more about the Middle East and to understand why so many people in that part of the world hate what the U.S. government is doing in our name. Zunes has provided that opportunity. Tinderbox is a much-needed critical analysis of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

– Tony Pecinovsky (tonypec@pww.org)

Maury Maverick Jr., civil rights attorney, dies

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 07:52:00 +0000

SAN ANTONIO – On January 28, Maury Maverick Jr., a veteran civil rights attorney, legislator, and progressive journalist, died Jan. 28, of kidney failure at the age of 82. During the McCarthy Era, Maverick, whose great grandfather’s free-ranging cattle made the Maverick name a metaphor and synonym for free thought, was one of few legislators fighting the intense red-baiting of that time.

In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stanford vs. Texas, Maverick successfully defended John Stanford of San Antonio, a member of the Communist Party USA, after his home was raided by police who had a warrant to confiscate materials “concerning a communist nature” in 1963. Stanford operated a popular mail-order bookstore, “All Points of View,” from his home office. The court ruled that Stanford’s fourth and fourteenth amendment rights had been violated.

During the Viet Nam war, he defended conscientious objectors in court. Other successful cases Maverick argued, included a Texas Supreme Court case in which he won worker’s compensation for an injured paperboy and one that resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a Texas statute against interracial boxing was unconstitutional.

As a young representative in the Texas House, Maverick and his fellow liberals helped kill a bill that would have imposed the death penalty on convicted Communists. In an interview in 1999, Maverick said bigots and racists in Texas used the “Red Scare” to “bust the unions, bust Blacks, bust Mexican Americans and intimidate schoolteachers and librarians.”

“It was just cruel beyond words the way they were kicking people around,” said Maverick. “I was constantly on edge for six years. To this day, I still haven’t gotten over it.”

In 1960, Maverick ran for the U.S. Senate seat that Lyndon B. Johnson gave up for the vice presidency, along with 70 other Democratic contenders. Known as the “71 in ’60” group, Maverick later said he and the late Henry B. Gonzalez – another San Antonian who later served 37 years in the U.S. House of Representatives – split the liberal vote and ultimately canceled each other out. The seat was won by Republican John Tower.

Gonzalez and Maverick didn’t speak to each other for 20 years.

“One of us should have gotten out of the race,” Maverick later recalled. “Probably me.”

Over 800 friends and relatives attended his memorial service held in the Margarite B. Parker Chapel of Trinity University here. Eulogists included the Rev. Claude Black, who had marched with Maverick during the civil rights movement, and Fr. Bill Davis who said, “All of us need a Maury in our life to know true justice.”

The nationally-known poet, Naomi Shihab Nye read from J. Frank Dobie’s poem, “The mustangs,” comparing their free spirits to Maverick’s legacy of independent thinking.

Shortly before entering the hospital Maverick wrote his final weekly column for the San Antonio Express and News. In it he praised the recent U.S. Catholic Bishops statement condemning the possibility of a U.S. war with Iraq.

We hate to see them go

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 07:49:00 +0000

I recently unearthed a copy of a folk song – from 1959 – by the very memorable Malvina Reynolds. I had lost track of it, but Pete Seeger very kindly found it and sent me a copy. It is most relevant now. Despite the technical advances in warfare that may make the reference to shovels obsolete, perhaps, the sentiment is alive and well and thriving!

– Ellen Perlo

We Hate to See Them Go By Malvina Reynolds (1959)

(intro) Last night I had a lovely dream I saw a big parade with ticker tape galore

And men were marching there the like I’d never seen before

The bankers and the diplomats are going in the army

O happy day! I’d give my pay to see them on parade

Their paunches at attention and their striped pants at ease

They’ve gotten patriotic and they’re going overseas

We’ll have to do the best we can and bravely carry on

So we’ll just keep the laddies here to manage while they’re gone

The bankers and the diplomats are going in the army

It seemed too bad to keep them from the wars they love to plan

We’re all of us contented that they’ll fight a dandy war

They don’t need propaganda, they know what they’re fighting for

They’ll march away with dignity in the best of form

And we’ll just keep the laddies here to keep the lassies warm

The bankers and the diplomats are going in the army We’re going to make things easy ‘cause it’s all so new and strange

We’ll give them silver shovels when they have to dig a hole

And they can sing in harmony when answering the roll

They’ll eat their old K-rations from a hand-embroidered box

And when they die, we’ll bring them home and bury them in Fort Knox.

Bush freezes families

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 05:44:00 +0000

CHICAGO – After more than six months, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) finally has some of the funding that freezing elderly and working-class people all across the country have been waiting for. On Jan. 24 President Bush released the $200 million of the remaining $300 million that was budgeted to the program. But for some the funding has come too late.

Jan. 27 on Chicago’s Southside 37-year-old Simone Johnson-Wilson, mother of four, died in a fire believed to have been caused by an electric space heater in her two-story greystone home. People’s Energy confirmed that gas was shut off to the residence some time before the winter season began.

Elizabeth Castro, a spokesperson for the utility, while offering her condolences for the woman’s death said “Back in November we reached out to then Gov. Ryan, Mayor Daley and federal officials in Washington. … We needed those funds released.” Instead, months went by and families continued to freeze. Activists also say that three Philadelphia seniors also froze to death just days before.

But even with the release of some of the funding, Castro still describes the heating situation in Chicago as dire and said that over 7,000 premises are currently without heat.

People’s Energy, unlike other private utilities, has voluntarily agreed not to shut off gas in the winter. It advocates for more energy assistance for people who have limited incomes, and is in daily contact with community organization like ACORN, CEDA and Operation Push to get the heat turned back on in communities, even more so since funding for LIHEAP ran out in November.

LIHEAP is a federal block grant program that gives relief to low-income families for outrageous heating and cooling energy expenses mostly due to extreme weather conditions; a residence is only eligible for LIHEAP money once per fiscal year.

Activists say Bush’s freeze of funding not only causes death, but also puts people without medical insurance, especially children and the elderly, at risk of becoming sick. For much of the country this winter’s weather has been particularly harsh and with energy prices on the rise there is little wonder why so many have protested against the president’s continued withholding of such basic assistance.

Early in January, the day before the president visited Chicago, 50 protestors entered and took over the Illinois Republican Headquarters. Three seniors were arrested. Beatrice Jackson, president of the Illinois Chapter of ACORN, said, “It’s too bad when the Republicans have to put senior citizens in jail and leave other seniors without heat.”

All across the country ACORN, the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, has been involved in the fight to turn on the heat for poor people everywhere. Other protest and takeovers were staged in 14 additional cities across the country.

Next year’s battle over heat is likely to increase for working families. Home heating oil prices are expected to increase 42 percent in the Northeast, while in the Midwest natural gas and propane are predicted to rise 20 percent.

According to Denise Dixon, executive director of Illinois ACORN, more funding may not be enough, “We need to find a solution, not just perpetuate the problem from year to year.” She continues to explain that many people end up in permanent debt to their utility companies. In Chicago the average cost of gas in the winter is over $700 a month. She also mentions that the ICC needs to ban gas and electricity shutoffs by all utilities in the winter months. One idea that is circulating and gaining momentum among grassroots groups is a percent pay cap, so that low-income people would pay according to their means.

There has been one piece of good news. Although Bush had asked congress to decrease funding by $300 million for LIHEAP in the next fiscal year, thanks to organizers around the country no decrease in LIHEAP’s funding was approved.

Additionally, there is little support for the president’s freeze on the remaining energy assistance funding. Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) met with the president personally to ask for the heat funding to be turned on, and senators from New Mexico, California and Ohio also lobbied for melting the freeze.

The author can be reached at bkishner@pww.org

Stanley Nelson: The Art of Making People Think

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 09:06:00 +0000

NEW YORK – For three decades, Stanley Nelson’s documentaries have made audiences sit up and take notice. With interviews, photographic stills, and found footage, the filmmaker’s eloquent works combine historical research and current issues to provide a uniquely intelligent perspective.

Nelson’s well-researched and balanced films are informative as well as entertaining, dealing with issues from past and present African-American history and shedding light on current events.

The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords. 1998. USA. Produced, written, and directed by Stanley Nelson.

An engaging film on the history of African-American newspapers, highlighting a largely forgotten chapter in American history. These pioneering newspapermen and women gave voice to Black America, facilitating the post–World War I migration north, and honoring such heroic figures as the Black soldiers of World War II. Narrated by Joe Morton. 90 min. Monday, Feb. 10, 6:00; Thursday, Feb. 20, 4:15

Two Dollars and a Dream: The Story of Madame C. J. Walker and A’lelia Walker. 1988. USA. Produced, written, and directed by Stanley Nelson.

A film about the cosmetics queen who was the country’s first self-made female millionaire.

The child of slaves freed by the Civil War, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter A’lelia, an important patron of the Harlem Renaissance, lived in royal style. The film ties together social, political, and economic history, offering a well-rounded view of African American life from 1867 through the 1930s. 50 min. Monday, Feb. 17, 6:00

Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind. 2001. USA. Produced, written, and directed by Stanley Nelson.

An unsparing examination of the black visionary who preceded Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using a wealth of archival film, photographs, and other documents, the story of this Jamaican immigrant who built the first black mass-movement in world history is uncovered. Nelson explores Garvey’s dramatic successes and failures before falling into obscurity – after providing a newfound sense of pride to hundreds of thousands of men and women. 90 min. Monday, Feb. 17, 7:30

The Murder of Emmett Till. 2002. USA. Produced, written, and directed by Stanley Nelson.

The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 deeply affected a broad spectrum of Americans – black and white, northern and southern – and opened a window on the vast divide in American society. With incisive and deeply moving interviews with Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, whose decision to leave the casket open to display her son’s horribly mangled body shocked America out of its complacency. The film contends that the murder was a watershed in the development of the nascent movement for civil rights. 50 min. Introduced by the filmmaker, with Q&A following the screening. Thursday, Feb. 20, 8:00

– Carolyn Rummel

Social photographer highlights working class

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:59:00 +0000

The work of social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin is unparalleled among contemporary photographers. Rogovin is considered one of the finest social documentary photographers of the twentieth century.

“Portraits in Steel” chronicles the work and home lives of steelworkers in Western New York in the 1970s. In this work Rogovin documents the working families whose jobs would later be lost when the steel mills in Buffalo, Lackawanna and Dunkirk closed down. Many thousands were left without work. Rogovin’s work stands out in an artistic field awash with images devoid of social content. His study of working-class families on Buffalo’s Lower West Side, “Tryptichs,” offers a glimpse into the lives of families as they change through time in this largely Latino neighborhood.

Throughout his career Rogovin traveled extensively in the United States, Chile, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Mexico, Scotland, Spain and Zimbabwe, documenting the lives of workers, working families, and bringing their struggles into the photographic record with a direct and compassionate eloquence seldom matched.

Selections from the wide array of Rogovin’s work are currently on display at the Burchfield-Penney Art Gallery on the Buffalo State College Campus in Buffalo, N.Y. The exhibit includes work from 1958 to the present. The National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts provided public funds for the exhibition and programs. The exhibit includes portraits of Lackawanna’s Yemeni community (1976-1977), photographs taken in Mexico in the 1950s from early in Rogovin’s career, work from the series “Storefront Churches” (1958-1961), and more contemporary work from “Children Having Children” (1993).

The exhibit will run in Buffalo through March 2 and in New York City, at the New-York Historical Society, in June. The Burchfield Penney Art Gallery is located on the 2nd floor in Rockwell Hall, Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Ave. The Gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Admission is free.

The author can be reached at smitgl40@mail.buffalostate.edu

Peoples Culture

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:56:00 +0000

The White House has cancelled a poetry reading after one of the invited guests, poet Sam Hamill, suggested attendees use the forum to read anti-war poetry. The event, which was to be held Feb. 12, was entitled “Poetry and the American Voice,” and was to feature readings and discussion of work by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman.

Two U.S. poet laureates, Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove, denounced the decision as an example of the Bush administration’s hostility to dissenting or creative voices.

“I think there was a general feeling that the current administration is not really a friend of the poetic community and that its program of attacking Iraq is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse,” Kunitz, the 2000-2001 poet laureate, said Jan. 30.

Dove, poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, said the action confirmed her suspicion that “this White House does not wish to open its doors to an American voice that does not echo the administration’s misguided policies.”

Hamill, editor of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, e-mailed friends asking for poems or statements opposing military action against Iraq.

“Make Feb. 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon,” the e-mail read.

He had expected about 50 responses; he has gotten about 2,000 thus far, including contributions from W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Hamill will post all the submissions at www.poetsagainstthewar.org/. Below is one of the poems submitted.

REFUSING

Refusing the invitation I was not given, being given instead the invitation to refuse. Which I accept. Am grateful for. The chance to be part of the poet’s chorus, the caucus of those whose politics is obvious and earnest. Whose wishes are simple: sensible diplomacy, everything to be negotiated. Tough bargaining, but easy on the violence. That’s what we poets learned from poems: it’s all on the table, but it’s stupid to break up the table with an axe, to splinter the chairs.

And it’s madness to ask poets to celebrate, when people can’t even breathe deeply for fear of war’s imminence.

– Gregory Orr

Humanity, evolution and the capacity to love

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 08:47:00 +0000

Popularizers of evolutionary theory, from Huxley on, have tended to emphasize the idea of competition between and within species, of “nature red in tooth and claw.” Often, this emphasis on conflict and competition has been the means whereby evolutionary theory is enlisted in the cause of bourgeois ideology.

Starting with the “social Darwinism” of the 19th century, commentators on evolution have used the theory to explain why human beings must compete with each other, why the weakest must always go down, why those on top of the social order belong there and must stay there.

Another dimension is often missed, though it is certainly observed by zoologists and ethologists (specialists in animal behavior in its natural environment), namely the essential role of social groups and collectives in the survival strategies of a wide variety of species. From social insects to human beings, sociality (the capacity to coordinate one’s behavior with others of one’s species) is a vital evolutionary strategy.

It is not the same in all species, of course: I used to keep salamanders and other reptiles and amphibians as pets, and can attest that these cold-blooded creatures generally are interested in others of their own kind only in the mating season or, when there is a great disparity in size between two individuals, as food. But at least among crocodilians and probably among dinosaurs, also, there was the stirring of the most basic form of sociality, namely an instinctive urge to protect newborn young.

Among birds and mammals, this social tendency develops much further. Not only do virtually all known bird species take care of their eggs and hatchlings, they often mate for life, and male and female frequently cooperate in the raising of the young.

Among mammals, those which have big brains and have few young at a time, such as whales and elephants, frequently are highly social. Studies of elephant herds show a high degree of cooperative behavior, and such things as a tendency to help fellow herd members in distress (see Cynthia Moss, Elephant Memories, Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Herd 1988, NY Fawcett Columbine – just one of many books and articles which document advance social behavior among African elephants).

And among the primates – the family of animals to which human beings belong – there is a great variety of forms of cooperative and mutually nurturing tendencies. A number of primatologists, most notably the Dutch scholar Franz de Waal, have concluded from this that the capacity for empathy is inherent and genetically transmitted in many primates, that this makes it possible for them to have cooperative social groups, and that primate survival depends on this.

In his popular book “Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong Among Humans and Animals” (1996, Harvard University Press), deWaal makes a daring, but I think justified, leap and extends this inherited nature of empathy - otherwise known as the capacity of love - to human affairs. According to deWaal, if among chimpanzees, bonobos, rhesus monkeys, stump-tailed macaques, and a score of other monkey and ape species, there is an inherited capacity to feel another’s pain and to act in a socially cooperative way, it is only logical that similar capacities among human beings should also be seen as natural, or rooted in genetics and evolution, not a “merely cultural” characteristic.

The overall tendency of human evolution can be interpreted as an intensification of this general primate characteristic. From the first appearance of the hominid (creatures in the line of evolutionary development toward Homo sapiens) line, we see increasing capacity for cooperative social behavior. Certainly the evolution of capacity for language, which entailed development of specialized structures in the left hemisphere of the brain (Wernicke’s are that chooses vocabulary and Broca’s area that forms it into comprehensible utterances) can only be interpreted as illustrating a survival need for ever more intensive communication and cooperation among our pre-human ancestors.

Can we suggest that this represents nothing less than the evolutionary development of the capacity of human beings to love each other? That, after all, is what empathy is about. Certainly, our capacity to get angry and strike out at our own and other species has not gone away from the days of the dinosaurs, but the capacity for empathy/love is what is most strikingly distinctive about our own evolution or, if you like, our “human nature.” Whether the reader is a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Marxist, there will be agreement that the capacity for love is now more than ever essential for human survival, and this little expedition into the realm of biology and evolution strongly suggests that this is an inbuilt, genetically based capacity which played an essential role in make us into human beings. So why don’t we make fullest use of it? Can we not conceive of a type of society, and a future for humankind, that is based on this capacity for love and cooperation that evolution has bequeathed us? Do we have such a society, one that makes maximum use of our capacity for love, today?

Emile Schepers has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Northwestern University. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

Harold Washington: Champion of equality

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 06:23:00 +0000

Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor, was elected in February 1983 after a bitter fight in which he challenged Chicago to embrace reform and do away with the discriminatory and anti-democratic policies of the entrenched Democratic machine.

By the time of his death in December 1987, Washington had emerged as a national leader in the campaign for peace and social justice.

At that time Ronald Reagan was president. Then, as now, the far-right had launched an attempt to roll back the clock on equality, with affirmative action programs their chief targets. Then, as now, they sought to do this by stacking the federal court system with justices opposed to affirmative action, and Reagan had nominated Robert Bork to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.

On July 7, 1987, Washington made a speech in which he made an eloquent defense of affirmative action and called for the defeat of Bork. Bork was rejected.

The nation is met with a similar challenge today as the Bush administration nominates candidates such as Charles Pickering and Pricilla Owens to the federal courts and joins opponents of affirmative action in an attempt to outlaw the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies.

We have published a condensed version of Washington’s 1987 speech below.

Make no mistake: if Judge Robert Bork is confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court, affirmative action is doomed and it may take a full generation to recover.

Despite five Supreme Court decisions in the past year endorsing affirmative action, the Justice Department is continuing its challenges – and the only thing preventing them is a thin margin on the Supreme Court. And it is that margin which has been put at risk and which compels us to press our case against the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork. At this hour of danger it’s important that we are clear with each other and with the public – that affirmative action is a critically important tool in the creation of a truly democratic society.

That clarity and emphasis is especially important in the face of the misinformation that opponents of affirmative action are putting out.

They promote three general fallacies:

The first is the idea that a social conscience is not necessary.

In the imaginary Adam Smith world of neo-conservatives, just as you should let the invisible hand rule the marketplace, you should also renounce any idea of a “social conscience,” and let creative selfishness and greed have free rein. That is if everyone acts in his or her self-interest and has an unrestricted opportunity to take care of number one, then the society as a whole will improve, a rising tide will raise all boats and economic benefits will trickle down to the bottom.

According to this theory, you don’t need a social conscience – that your own “private conscience” will suffice, so long as you are God-fearing, so long as you are a good person and so long as no one gets in your way.

That fallacy could be called the “new selfishness” except that it’s just like the old selfishness and it’s the opposite of everything America stands for.

The second fallacy is the idea that we have reached a kind of plateau, economically and socially, where there is no longer a need for affirmative action, no need for righting the balance. As one writer put it, “the white guilt trip is over” and all social decision should be reduced to issues of “merit,” rather than of fairness or equitable distribution.

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America’s minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn’t work.

Affirmative action works. Where it is vigorously and enthusiastically applied, it is transforming the way we in the public sector organize, the way we do business and the way we impact the private sector and society at large.

Chicago has been characterized as the most segregated city in the United States, a city they said could never change. And yet Chicago has indeed changed in four years and it’s continuing to change and grow in a new spirit of cooperation and partnership – largely because we had the courage to take the bull by the horns, ignore the conventional wisdom that Americans were tired of social progress and had turned to the right. Instead, we make affirmative action one of our highest priorities.

Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government. What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government. Affirmative action works but we’re going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.