Global Economic Crisis, Persistent Poverty, and Racial Discrimination
Later Thursday afternoon I attended a session entitled “The global economic crisis, persistent poverty and racial discrimination” organized by the Urban Justice Center.
Ejim Dike, Urban Justice Center moderated the panel. She began by talking about some of the racial disparities in the United States. She talked about the differential penalties for black men and others for drug crimes. She then focused on the economic situation, “Now that we are in crisis because unemployment rates have reached 8%. For black men, 8% is the lowest that the unemployment rate has been. People of color have been in crisis, but the crisis doesn’t start to be acknowledged until it affects certain people.” She then posed the question to the group, “How can we make the Durban Programme of Action address these disparities?” As the moderator, Ejim acknowledged that the panel is focused on the global crisis, but speakers are all from the US but added that the bulk of the session would be the group discussion, which will bring in the perspectives of all in attendance.
Khali Akuno, National Organizer for Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. “There is the old adage,
When the US sneezes, the world catches a cold. Well, the US has a cold and I’m assuming much of the world has pneumonia. How do we define crisis? Black communities have been in an acute state of depression and displaced from economically productive activities that been accelerating with reconsolidating in the auto production and other manufacturing industries, that have been disappearing rapidly in the past 15 years. In the past 2.5 years, almost three, we’ve been feeling it in a very acute form. Some with Hurricane Katrina have been the first and deepest to feel brunt of foreclosure. This period had been a time of the greatest dispossession of accumulated wealth in history, with the only other period coming close being in 1930s with vast dispossession of landownership in the South. The financial speculation that most of the US economy has been built on is collapsing. It’s taking place on the backs of blacks and Latinos in the US. Greater concentration of wealth taking place under the stimulus package will deepen the wealth disparities for generations, not just in the short term, but for years to come. What this situation provides for us in the US is an opportunity to introduce a human rights framework into the whole notion around how states are to regulate economies. The rights to housing, education, health care have to be guaranteed. Given how vilified, economic, social and cultural rights have been, especially with cold world rivalry, economic disparities weren’t considered real and efforts to address gaps were deemed as communist propaganda. It is time to put this back on the agenda. Compounded with ecological crisis we really have to organize to address these issues.”
Jaribu Hill, Mississippi Worker’s Center, described the roots of this crisis. “There was a time when people like me were capital, counted like furniture or cattle. Our empire was built based on this as overhead for 400 years. Imagine a corporation where I tell all my friends you can work for 5 years, I won’t pay you and I’ll build my wealth. That’s what happened for 4 centuries and it was called racism. This is the root cause for the decaying system we call capitalism. The by-product of capitalism is racism and extreme poverty. Both of which are needed to maintain capitalism.
Schools with highest dropout rates are in 10 cities that are populated by minorities and poor people. The combination of race and poverty is the order of the day in these communities. With disasters, under a capitalist system, there is no surefire way that everyone who is a victim will be taken care of. There were 60 Jamaican women who had to be brought to work every day by employer because they didn’t have a vehicle and they were forgotten during Katrina and buried alive.
For capitalism to continue there must be large sections of the population who are impoverished, illiterate, and discriminated against in one way or another. The kinds of work places that are the most hazardous, the most dangerous are dominated by people of color who then end up experiencing higher rates of work related accidents, cancers, etc. One only has to go to Mexico to see the connection, the maquilladores have massive birth defects, infant mortality rates that are sky high, and same types of injuries to children before they are even born are happening all over the world.
We are seeing the rampant strangling of Africans by banking institutions. Who gets bailed out? These are victims of remnants and vestiges of a system that is recovering from slavery because they will never have it so good where the economy is built on a system where people aren’t paid. The question of how much they are paid is another story. Wherever there is racism, poverty exists right besides it. There are always people of color/minorities that are living in poverty.”
Ramona Ortega, US Human Rights Network. “A system of labor in the US that used the labor of black and indigenous people has been substituted by a system that capitalized on the labor of immigrants. There has been a shift from slave labor to immigrant labor. They have manipulated us to be pitted against each other in terms of the myth of immigrants taking jobs from Americans. These are dangerous jobs, jobs that no one else in the US should or would take. People live in camps and produce goods that are then shipped out. Political organizations are coming together to make the alignment in terms of black and brown communities working together. This is not a new crisis for people of color. The poverty level for people of color has been double for decades.
One in four WOC in New York live in poverty and have some of the lowest human development indices in the world. There are areas in the Bronx where AA and Latinos have a lower human development index than many “underdeveloped” countries. Many women of color do domestic work that is the backbone of the country. 13% of children in the US live in poverty, many of whom are children of color. Black and immigrant labor is used to create wealth of the nation. This is one of the riches countries, but also has some of the lowest human development indices in several areas and POC are particularly affected.
Poverty is not illegal. It’s absolutely acceptable, which is why they create policies that are neutral on their face, but are detrimental to communities. Under CERD [Convention on the Elimination of Racism] there are places to raise issues of disparate impacts. This is the only place for us to go to bring this issue to the table.[ because it’s one of the few human rights treaties the US has ratified] We need to be on top of the economic stimulus packages. Obama has not focused on closing these disparate gaps. I would like to see a national action plan on racial justice. Hope that out of this conference and out of the energy folks have put into it, we can go back and ask for national plan.
In the pursuit of profit capitalist systems have had to exploit labor/workers and have done this through racism–people of African descent, migrant workers, undocumented works, people deemed to be not as deserving of fair labor standards.
Not only is poverty racialized but it is also feminized. If you further disaggregate, you see that not only POC but WOC are especially impoverished. Many women are hidden workers either through being undocumented or women working in the home. These women aren’t represented in any data and their work doesn’t go into calculating the GNP [Gross National Product]. They are a painfully absent when talking about who is bearing brunt of economic crisis. Poverty is primarily cut along lines of race and gender, and other identities, such as having a disability. We call on our governments to identify that there is a link and that it’s an institutionalized problem.”
After this session, I managed to catch a piece of the session, “People of African Descent: Assessing the Progress Made Since Durban and the Way Forward” hosted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and moderated by Joe Frans, Chairperson of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent . The presentation I heard was by Gay McDougal, Independent Expert on Minority Issues (who, incidentally, was also the person who organized the aforementioned “VOICES sessions” which occurred every day and featured testimonies by individuals impacted by racism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance) Gay McDougal’s comments were as follows:
“Afro-descendent people are at the bottom of the barrel in every situation. Yet the MDGs don’t have anything that addresses race/afro-descendent people. Once again, afro-descendent people are invisible.
There has been a resurgence of hate speech and hate crimes. Racial discrimination is embedded in all institutions that govern our lives. Discrimination serves to mask its own very existence.
Recently there was a situation where the Supreme Court was examining the firefighters’ test in New York City. It was found that all the black people fail the test. No black firefighters died on September 11th because there are no black firefighters in New York City.
Afro-descendant people are in Inferior schools and often segregated. Even when not facing hostile environments, particularly black boys who are subjected to disproportionate discipline. Minority schools have teachers who are poorly trained and poorly supported with high percentages of dropouts.”
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