Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich

Tuesday 23 November 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Paulo Freire. (Photo: Slobodan Dimitrov)

(This is a much expanded version of "Lessons From Paulo Freire," which appeared in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

At a time when memory is being erased and the political relevance of education is dismissed in the language of measurement and quantification, it is all the more important to remember the legacy and work of Paulo Freire. Freire is one of the most important educators of the 20th century and is considered one of the most important theorists of "critical pedagogy" - the educational movement guided by both passion and principle to help students develop a consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, empower the imagination, connect knowledge and truth to power and learn to read both the word and the world as part of a broader struggle for agency, justice and democracy. His groundbreaking book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," has sold more than a million copies and is deservedly being commemorated this year - the 40th anniversary of its appearance in English translation - after having exerted its influence over generations of teachers and intellectuals in the Americas and abroad.

Since the 1980s, there have been too few intellectuals on the North American educational scene who have matched Freire's theoretical rigor, civic courage and sense of moral responsibility. And his example is more important now than ever before: with institutions of public and higher education increasingly under siege by a host of neoliberal and conservative forces, it is imperative for educators to acknowledge Freire's understanding of the empowering and democratic potential of education. Critical pedagogy currently offers the very best, perhaps the only, chance for young people to develop and assert a sense of their rights and responsibilities to participate in governing, and not simply being governed by prevailing ideological and material forces.

When we survey the current state of education in the United States, we see that most universities are now dominated by instrumentalist and conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to accountability measures and run by administrators who often lack a broader vision of education as a force for strengthening civic imagination and expanding democratic public life. One consequence is that a concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while higher education - once conceptualized as a fundamental public good - has been reduced to a private good, now available almost exclusively to those with the financial means. Universities are increasingly defined through the corporate demand to provide the skills, knowledge and credentials in building a workforce that will enable the United States to compete against blockbuster growth in China and other southeast Asian markets, while maintaining its role as the major global economic and military power. There is little interest in understanding the pedagogical foundation of higher education as a deeply civic and political project that provides the conditions for individual autonomy and takes liberation and the practice of freedom as a collective goal.

Public education fares even worse. Dominated by pedagogies that are utterly instrumental, geared toward memorization, conformity and high-stakes test taking, public schools have become intellectual dead zones and punishment centers as far removed from teaching civic values and expanding the imaginations of students as one can imagine. The profound disdain for public education is evident not only in Obama's test-driven, privatized and charter school reform movement, but also in the hostile takeover of public education now taking place among the ultra-rich and hedge fund zombies, who get massive tax breaks from gaining control of charter schools. The public in education has now become the enemy of educational reform. How else can one explain the shameful appointment by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of Cathleen Black, the president of Hearst Magazine, as the next chancellor of the New York City public school system? Not only does she not have any experience in education and is totally unqualified for the job, but her background mimics the worst of elite arrogance and unaccountable power. Surely, one has to take note of the background of someone who should be a model for young people when such a background includes, as reported in The New York Times: "riding horses at a country club where blacks and Jews were not allowed .... lending a $47,000 bracelet to a Manhattan museum ... and [refusing] interviews since her appointment."(1) With friends like Rupert Murduch, it should come as no surprise that she once worked as a chief lobbyist for the newspaper industry in the 1990s "fighting a ban on tobacco advertising,"(2) which is often targeted toward the young. It seems that, when it comes to the elite of business culture, ignorance about education now ranks as a virtue. Then, of course, there is the sticky question of whether such a candidate qualifies as a model of civic integrity and courage for the many teachers and children under her leadership. Public values and public education surely take a nose dive in this appointment, but this is also symptomatic of what is happening to public education throughout the country.

Against the regime of "banking education," stripped of all critical elements of teaching and learning, Freire believed that education, in the broadest sense, was eminently political because it offered students the conditions for self-reflection, a self-managed life and critical agency. For Freire, pedagogy was central to a formative culture that makes both critical consciousness and social action possible. Pedagogy in this sense connected learning to social change; it was a project and provocation that challenged students to critically engage with the world so they could act on it. As the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz has noted, Freire's pedagogy helped learners "become aware of the forces that have hitherto ruled their lives and especially shaped their consciousness."(3) What Freire made clear is that pedagogy at its best is not about training in techniques and methods, nor does it involve coercion or political indoctrination. Indeed, far from a mere method or an a priori technique to be imposed on all students, education is a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills and social relations that enable students to explore for themselves the possibilities of what it means to be engaged citizens, while expanding and deepening their participation in the promise of a substantive democracy. According to Freire, critical pedagogy afforded students the opportunity to read, write and learn from a position of agency - to engage in a culture of questioning that demands far more than competency in rote learning and the application of acquired skills. For Freire, pedagogy had to be meaningful in order to be critical and transformative. This meant that personal experience became a valuable resource that gave students the opportunity to relate their own narratives, social relations and histories to what was being taught. It also signified a resource to help students locate themselves in the concrete conditions of their daily lives, while furthering their understanding of the limits often imposed by such conditions. Under such circumstances, experience became a starting point, an object of inquiry that could be affirmed, critically interrogated and used as resource to engage broader modes of knowledge and understanding. Rather than taking the place of theory, experience worked in tandem with theory in order to dispel the notion that experience provided some form of unambiguous truth or political guarantee. Experience was crucial, but it had to take a detour through theory, self-reflection and critique to become a meaningful pedagogical resource.

Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world. Critical thinking was not reducible to an object lesson in test taking. It was not about the task of memorizing so-called facts, decontextualized and unrelated to present conditions. To the contrary, it was about offering a way of thinking beyond the seeming naturalness or inevitability of the current state of things, challenging assumptions validated by "common sense," soaring beyond the immediate confines of one's experiences, entering into a dialogue with history and imagining a future that would not merely reproduce the present.

By way of illustration, Freirean pedagogy might stage the dynamic interplay of audio, visual and print texts as part of a broader examination of history itself as a site of struggle, one that might offer some insights into students' own experiences and lives in the contemporary moment. For example, a history class might involve reading and watching films about school desegregation in the 1950s and '60s as part of a broader pedagogical engagement with the civil rights movement and the massive protests that developed over educational access and student rights to literacy. It would also open up opportunities to talk about why these struggles are still part of the experience of many North American youth today, particularly poor black and brown youth who are denied equality of opportunity by virtue of market-based rather than legal segregation. Students could be asked to write short papers that speculate on the meaning and the power of literacy and why it was so central to the civil rights movement. These may be read by the entire class, with each student elaborating his or her position and offering commentary as a way of entering into a critical discussion of the history of racial exclusion, reflecting on how its ideologies and formations still haunt American society in spite of the triumphal dawn of an allegedly post-racial Obama era. In this pedagogical context, students learn how to expand their own sense of agency, while recognizing that to be voiceless is to be powerless. Central to such a pedagogy is shifting the emphasis from teachers to students, and making visible the relationships among knowledge, authority and power. Giving students the opportunity to be problem posers and engage in a culture of questioning in the classroom foregrounds the crucial issue of who has control over the conditions of learning, and how specific modes of knowledge, identities and authority are constructed within particular sets of classroom relations. Under such circumstances, knowledge is not simply received by students, but actively transformed, open to be challenged and related to the self as an essential step toward agency, self-representation and learning how to govern rather than simply be governed. At the same time, students also learn how to engage others in critical dialogue and be held accountable for their views.

Thus, critical pedagogy insists that one of the fundamental tasks of educators is to make sure that the future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which critique and possibility - in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom and equality - function to alter the grounds upon which life is lived. Though it rejects a notion of literacy as the transmission of facts or skills tied to the latest market trends, critical pedagogy is hardly a prescription for political indoctrination as the advocates of standardization and testing often insist. It offers students new ways to think and act creatively and independently, while making clear that the educator's task, as Aronowitz points out, "is to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion."(4) What critical pedagogy does insist upon is that education cannot be neutral. It is always directive in its attempt to enable students to understand the larger world and their role in it. Moreover, it is inevitably a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge, values, desires and identities are produced within particular sets of class and social relations. For Freire, pedagogy always presupposes some notion of a more equal and just future; and as such, it should always function in part as a provocation that takes students beyond the world they know in order to expand the range of human possibilities and democratic values. Central to critical pedagogy is the recognition that the way we educate our youth is related to the future that we hope for and that such a future should offer students a life that leads to the deepening of freedom and social justice. Even within the privileged precincts of higher education, Freire said that educators should nourish those pedagogical practices that promote "a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished."(5) The notion of the unfinished human being resonated with Zygmunt Bauman notion that society never reached the limits of justice, thus, rejecting any notion of the end of history, ideology or how we imagine the future. This language of critique and educated hope was his legacy, one that is increasingly absent from many liberal and conservative discourses about current educational problems and appropriate avenues of reform.

When I began teaching, Freire became an essential influence in helping me to understand the broad contours of my ethical responsibilities as a teacher. Later, his work would help me come to terms with the complexities of my relationship to universities as powerful and privileged institutions that seemed far removed from the daily life of the working-class communities in which I had grown up. I first met Paulo in the early 1980s, just after my tenure as a professor at Boston University had been opposed by its President John Silber. Paulo was giving a talk at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he came to my house in Boston for dinner. Given Paulo's reputation as a powerful intellectual, I recall initially being astounded by his profound humility. I remember being greeted with such warmth and sincerity that I felt completely at ease with him. We talked for a long time that night about his exile, how I had been attacked by a right-wing university administration, what it meant to be a working-class intellectual and the risks one had to take to make a difference. I was in a very bad place after being denied tenure and had no idea what the future would hold. On that night, a friendship was forged that would last until Paulo's death. I am convinced that had it not been for Paulo and Donaldo Macedo - a linguist, translator and a friend of Paulo's and mine - I might not have stayed in the field of education. Their passion for education and their profound humanity convinced me that teaching was not a job like any other, but a crucial site of struggle, and that, ultimately, whatever risks had to be taken were well worth it.

I have encountered many intellectuals throughout my career in academe, but Paulo was exceptionally generous, eager to help younger intellectuals publish their work, willing to write letters of support and always giving as much as possible of himself in the service of others. The early 1980s were exciting years in education studies in the United States, and Paulo was really at the center of it. Paulo and I together started a Critical Education and Culture series with Bergin & Garvey Publishers, which brought out the work of more than 60 young authors, many of whom went on to have a significant influence in the university. Jim Bergin became Paulo's patron as his American publisher; Donaldo became his translator and co-author; Ira Shor also played a important role in spreading Paulo's work and wrote a number of brilliant books integrating both theory and practice as part of Paulo's notion of critical pedagogy. Together, we worked tirelessly to circulate Paulo's work, always with the hope of inviting him back to America so we could meet, talk, drink good wine and deepen a commitment to critical education that had all marked us in different ways.

Paulo, occupying the often difficult space between existing politics and the as yet possible, spent his life guided by the beliefs that the radical elements of democracy were worth struggling for, that critical education was a basic element of progressive social change and that how we think about politics was inseparable from how we come to understand the world, power and the moral life we aspire to lead. In many ways, Paulo embodied the important but often problematic relationship between the personal and the political. His own life was a testimony not only to his belief in democratic principles, but also to the notion that one's life had to come as close as possible to modeling the social relations and experiences that spoke to a more humane and democratic future. At the same time, Paulo never moralized about politics; he never evoked shame or collapsed the political into the personal when talking about social issues. Private problems were always to be understood in relation to larger public issues. For example, Paulo never reduced an understanding of homelessness, poverty and unemployment to the failing of individual character, laziness, indifference or a lack of personal responsibility, but instead viewed such issues as complex systemic problems generated by economic and political structures that produced massive amounts of inequality, suffering and despair - and social problems far beyond the reach of limited individual capacities to cause or redress. His belief in a substantive democracy, as well as his deep and abiding faith in the ability of people to resist the weight of oppressive institutions and ideologies, was forged in a spirit of struggle tempered by both the grim realities of his own imprisonment and exile and the belief that education and hope are the conditions of social action and political change. Acutely aware that many contemporary versions of hope occupied their own corner in Disneyland, Paulo was passionate about recovering and rearticulating hope through, in his words, an "understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism."(6) Hope was an act of moral imagination that enabled educators and others to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.

Paulo offered no recipes for those in need of instant theoretical and political fixes. I was often amazed at how patient he always was in dealing with people who wanted him to provide menu-like answers to the problems they raised about education, people who did not realize that their demands undermined his own insistence that critical pedagogy is defined by its context and must be approached as a project of individual and social transformation - that it could never be reduced to a mere method. Contexts indeed mattered to Paulo. He was concerned how contexts mapped in distinctive ways the relationships among knowledge, language, everyday life and the machineries of power. Any pedagogy that calls itself Freirean must acknowledge this key principle that our current knowledge is contingent on particular historical contexts and political forces. For example, each classroom will be affected by the different experiences students bring to the class, the resources made available for classroom use, the relations of governance bearing down on teacher-student relations, the authority exercised by administrations regarding the boundaries of teacher autonomy and the theoretical and political discourses used by teachers to read and frame their responses to the diverse historical, economic and cultural forces informing classroom dialogue. Any understanding of the project and practices that inform critical pedagogy has to begin with recognizing the forces at work in such contexts, and which must be confronted by educators and schools everyday. Pedagogy, in this instance, looked for answers to what it meant to connect learning to fulfilling the capacities for self and social determination not outside, but within the institutions and social relations in which desires, agency and identities were shaped and struggled over. The role that education played in connecting truth to reason, learning to social justice and knowledge to modes of self and social understanding were complex and demanded a refusal on the part of teachers, students and parents to divorce education from both politics and matters of social responsibility. Responsibility was not a retreat from politics, but a serious embrace of what it meant to both think and act politics as part of a democratic project in which pedagogy becomes a primary consideration for enabling the formative culture and agents that make democratization possible.

Paulo also acknowledged the importance of understanding these particular and local contexts in relation to larger global and transnational forces. Making the pedagogical more political meant moving beyond the celebration of tribal mentalities and developing a praxis that foregrounded "power, history, memory, relational analysis, justice (not just representation) and ethics as the issues central to transnational democratic struggles."(7) Culture and politics mutually informed each other in ways that spoke to histories, whose presences and absences had to be narrated as part of a larger struggle over democratic values, relations and modes of agency. Freire recognized that it was through the complex production of experience within multilayered registers of power and culture that people recognized, narrated and transformed their place in the world. Paulo challenged the separation of cultural experiences from politics, pedagogy and power itself, but he did not make the mistake of many of his contemporaries by conflating cultural experience with a limited notion of identity politics. While he had a profound faith in the ability of ordinary people to shape history and their own destinies, he refused to romanticize individuals and cultures that experienced oppressive social conditions. Of course, he recognized that power privileged certain forms of cultural capital - certain modes of speaking, living, being and acting in the world - but he did not believe that subordinate or oppressed cultures were free of the contaminating effects of oppressive ideological and institutional relations of power. Consequently, culture - as a crucial educational force influencing larger social structures as well as in the most intimate spheres of identity formation - could be viewed as nothing less than an ongoing site of struggle and power in contemporary society.

For critical educators, experience is a fundamental element of teaching and learning, but its distinctive configuration among different groups does not guarantee a particular notion of the truth; as I stated earlier, experience must itself become an object for analysis. How students experience the world and speak to that experience is always a function of unconscious and conscious commitments, of politics, of access to multiple languages and literacies - thus, experience always has to take a detour through theory as an object of self-reflection, critique and possibility. As a result, not only do history and experience become contested sites of struggle, but the theory and language that give daily life meaning and action a political direction must also be constantly subject to critical reflection. Paulo repeatedly challenged as false any attempt to reproduce the binary of theory versus politics. He expressed a deep respect for the work of theory and its contributions, but he never reified it. When he talked about Freud, Fromm or Marx, one could feel his intense passion for ideas. Yet, he never treated theory as an end in itself; it was always a resource whose value lay in understanding, critically engaging and transforming the world as part of a larger project of freedom and justice.

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Vigilant in bearing witness to the individual and collective suffering of others, Paulo shunned the role of the isolated intellectual as an existential hero who struggles alone. He believed that intellectuals must respond to the call for making the pedagogical more political with a continuing effort to build those coalitions, affiliations and social movements capable of mobilizing real power and promoting substantive social change. Politics was more than a gesture of translation, representation and dialogue: to be effective, it had to be about creating the conditions for people to become critical agents alive to the responsibilities of democratic public life. Paulo understood keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial complex, the rise of extremists groups and the increased power of the warfare state. He also recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond the common sense of official power and the hate mongering of a right-wing media apparatus. Paulo strongly believed that democracy could not last without the formative culture that made it possible. Educational sites both within schools and the broader culture represented some of the most important venues through which to affirm public values, support a critical citizenry and resist those who would deny the empowering functions of teaching and learning. At a time when institutions of public and higher education have become associated with market competition, conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, making known the significant contributions and legacy of Paulo work is now more important than ever before.

Footnotes:

1. David M. Halbfinger, Michael Barbaro and Fernanda Santos, "A Trailblazer with her Eye on the Bottom Line," The New York Times (November 18, 2010). P. A1.
2. Ibid.
3. Stanley Aronowitz, "Forward," "Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities," ed. Sheila L. Macrine, (New York, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) pp. ix.
4. Stanley Aronowitz, "Introduction," Paulo Freire, "Pedagogy of Freedom" (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 5.
5. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, "Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman" (Malden: Polity Press, 2001), p. 4.
6. Paulo Freire, "Pedagogy of Hope" (New York: Continuum Press, 1994), p. 91.
7. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Introduction: Genealogies, Legacies, Movements," J. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, eds. "Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures" (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. xix.

The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is Lying to You

Within hours of my op-ed being published in the New York Daily News today, the $50 million Clinton Bush Haiti Fund posted an update on its Facebook page called “Cholera Concern,” which includes this sentence: “While other organizations in Haiti are using their resources to deliver immediate humanitarian aid, we are using our resources to focus on long-term development so that these crises are prevented.”

Look at the screen shot of an Oct. 25 article about Haiti on Fox News. The advertisement for the fund is doubly deceitful: “100% of donations go directly to relief efforts,” it says. That is a lie, period. Relief is what earthquake victims desperately need right now to protect them from an oncoming hurricane. It’s what they’ve needed for the past ten months to make tent camps more livable.

Relief is not the same as long-term development, especially the fund’s chosen brand focusing on Haiti’s business class. I thought planning and executing long-term development was the Haitian government’s job. There are no Haitians on the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s board of directors.

“The best way concerned citizens can help is to donate funds…” This is BS, too. Not only because the fund in question is lying and not spending its money on relief efforts. “Concerned citizens” can be informed by serious journalism, the kind major media refuse to practice when it comes to Haiti. “Concerned citizens” can do more than toss spare change at Haiti’s morass of NGOs. “Concerned citizens” can make sure their government’s policies – from financing a dubious election, to supporting a militarized peacekeeping force, to dumping American rice – don’t reinforce poverty on a structural level.

I happen to think that’s “the best way concerned citizens can help”. It’s why I’m here doing this work.

Read the op-ed below. Thanks to the Daily News for publishing it and for historian Peter Hudson of The Public Archive for the opening quote.

Breaking: North American news outlets “excited” by Haiti cholera outbreak. They say for them, “without a crisis, Haiti doesn’t exist.”

It’s a bitterly sarcastic but, unfortunately, entirely true statement, made via Twitter this week by Vanderbilt University historian Peter James Hudson. CNN doubled its prime-time viewership in January when a 7.0 earthquake devastated much of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. With CNN lagging behind its more partisan competitors, disaster porn is now the news channel’s bread and butter.

But it has managed to entirely miss the big-picture story: The cholera outbreak itself is a symptom of failed foreign policies and organizations that have left the Haitian people as poor as ever and disconnected from the mechanisms of their own development.

Anderson Cooper pledged to stay on the story of Haiti’s reconstruction. But he’s only been seen in Haiti once since the quake, on its six-month anniversary. Cooper stopped by the collapsed National Palace to accept a medallion for his reporting from the Haitian government in a surreal ceremony celebrating the country’s progress.

At that time, more than 1.3 million people made homeless by the earthquake were living in crowded, makeshift camps. Today, they still live that way amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince, extremely vulnerable to waterborne diseases like cholera. Refugees International recently called UN-led humanitarian efforts “paralyzed” and found “appalling” conditions in the camps, despite the billions of dollars pledged for earthquake relief.

Now, CNN crews are back in Haiti, covering a deadly cholera epidemic that has killed at least 330 people and infected nearly 5,000, according to officials. The bacteria incubate in bodies before causing symptoms or passing into the environment. What most media reports ignore is that the epidemic has been years in the making.

The George W. Bush administration blocked millions of dollars in loans from the Inter-American Development Bank for public water infrastructure in Haiti’s central region. In the previous decade, President Bill Clinton pressured the Haitian government into slashing tariffs on imported American rice, devastating the rice farming economy of the area.

Families are so poor they have no choice but to drink, bathe and cook with water from the muddy Artibonite River, where the cholera outbreak began. Yet UN officials said this epidemic was unexpected, attempting to excuse their slow response and failure to quarantine the zone where cholera broke out – even as they took credit in preceding months for preventing a postearthquake outbreak of infectious disease.

“What has been the impact of what you’re doing on the ground?” At a news conference following the October meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission in Port-au-Prince, it was the second time that Haitian journalists had asked the question. But who can blame them?

There has been no meaningful recovery or reconstruction since the quake. Clinton, co-chairman of the commission, looked exasperated. “I think what they’re getting at is this: there are still 1.3 million people living in camps who -,” I offered, but Clinton stepped to the podium and cut me off. The prime minister moved aside.

Clinton said building housing is always the biggest challenge in postdisaster situations. He concluded with a plea: “It’s very difficult but we are on the move now, so just give us a little more time to show some progress.”

It’s too bad CNN’s Cooper wasn’t standing next to me, fixing his laserlike blue eyes on Clinton and lobbing righteously indignant questions. Because a little more time has passed since then; now, it’s nearly 10 months since the earthquake. Haiti has a virulent epidemic on its hands, and Hurricane Tomas is poised to lash the country this week. How many more crises must Haiti suffer through before we conclude that Clinton, the United Nations, charity groups and the current Haitian government simply cannot deliver on their promises?

For example, the Clinton-Bush Haiti fund, inaugurated by President Obama with both former Presidents at his side, is still running Web advertisements that say “100% of donations go directly to relief efforts.” That’s a cruel lie, considering the quake victims living in flood zones under withered plastic tarps. Only 8% of its $50 million had been spent by this summer, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The fund’s website now talks about supporting long-term programs to develop Haiti’s business class. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission has approved only one water project: $200 million to expand the public water supply in Port-au-Prince. But it remains only 57% funded, according to the group’s website.

Clinton’s much-lauded connections with international donors appear to have come to naught. Busy campaigning for Democrats ahead of Tuesday’s election, he has not spoken out about Haiti during the cholera outbreak.

The international community is financing Haiti’s own election on Nov. 28, but it will likely be a sham affair with little turnout. Fanmi Lavalas, widely seen as the country’s most popular party, is being officially excluded from the ballot by the ruling government as part of a continuing campaign to suppress a mass movement of Haiti’s poor majority.

Over half of American households donated their hard-earned money to Haitian earthquake victims. It’s high time we take stock of where that money went and demand some accountability, which our high-profile journalists have failed to do. Haitians must be allowed to freely choose their own leaders and chart their country’s development. CNN may bring you heartrending images of this place from time to time, but it doesn’t give the people a voice – the one we need to hear the loudest.

Poor and Rich - The Facts

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Issue 310

 

 

DEFINING POVERTY...

Absolute poverty is defined according to an absolute minimum standard, often called the ‘poverty line’. Relative poverty means that you are poor in relation to those around you. Income poverty (‘less than a dollar a day’, for example), means that you are poor if you have less money than the defined poverty line for your country. Human poverty takes into account other factors, such as life expectancy, infant malnutrition, illiteracy and lack of food or clean water. Basic needs definitions also go beyond money, to include all the things that a person needs in order to survive – including employment and participation in society.

MEASURING POVERTY...

Measuring poverty is always a problem, especially if you recognize that just using money is not enough. There are a number of new measurements emerging, like the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare.¹ This measures ‘quality’ economic activity by, for example, making a subtraction for air pollution and an addition for unpaid household labour.

Another method is the Human Poverty Index. This is ranked according to three main areas of deprivation: survival; knowledge and a decent standard of living. In the industrial world, where the Index also includes social exclusion, some 7 to 17% of the populations are classified as poor. The higher the percentage figure, the greater the poverty in that country.

AN UNEQUAL WORLD

Inequality is on the increase. In 1976 Switzerland was 52 times richer than Mozambique; in 1997, it was 508 times richer. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the richest countries were only five times richer than the poorest, and Europe only twice as rich as China or India.

The rich...

In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people who live in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20%; by 1995 it was 82 times. The world’s 225 richest people have a combined wealth of over $1million million. Only four per cent of this wealth – $40 billion – would be enough for basic education and healthcare, adequate food and safe water and sanitation for all the world’s people.

• the 15 richest have assets that exceed the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of sub-Saharan Africa.
• the assets of the 84 richest exceed the GDP of China, which has 1.2 billion inhabitants.

and poor...

More than a thousand million people still live in poverty, a tenth of them in the industrialized world.

• Of the 4,400 million people in the Majority World, nearly 60% lack basic sanitation and more than 30% have no access to clean water.
• 25% do not have adequate housing.
• 20% have no access to modern health services. Two thousand million women are anaemic (including 55 million in the industrial world).
• 20% of children in the world do not attend school to grade five.

THE GOOD NEWS:

in the past 50 years poverty has fallen more than in the previous 500. Since 1960 child-death rates have been halved and malnutrition has declined by a third. Developing countries have covered as much distance in human development during the past 30 years as the industrial world managed in over 100.

THE BAD NEWS:

one in four of the world’s people still live in severe poverty. It’s worse for women than for men; and for black people than for white. Even in the so-called ‘rich’ world increasing numbers of people do not have enough to live on.

The ‘FOOTPRINT’ of a small number of people in a rich community – or in the rich world – will take up a lot more space than that of a large number of people in a poor community – or the poor world. So the rich have bigger houses, gardens and physical space, but they also have greater access to a wider range of resources – schools, shops, banks, health services, for example. A rich community may have many doctors or schools or shops to choose from – a poor one just one of each. But the latter can increase its space by having a place to meet or by setting up its own credit union or other social group.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD LIFE?

The percentage of Americans calling themselves happy peaked in 1957 – despite the fact that consumption has doubled since. Having more does not then mean we enjoy life more – and yet consumption is increasing everywhere except in Africa, where the average household consumes 20% less than it did 25 years ago.

GHANA

‘Being poor’ in this survey meant being unemployed, unhealthy, unable to take care of your family, not being able to afford clothes or proper food, not being listened to, and being ‘lazy’.

AIDING THE POOR?^3^

The UN has set the target for overseas aid at 0.7% of a country’s GNP. Only the Netherlands and Sweden currently meet this target and the US aid budget is the lowest of all. Overall, aid is 0.22% of GNP. If it had stayed at its 1992 level of 0.33%, it would today be $24 billion more than it is.

The majority of aid is not spent on direct poverty alleviation. Some is ‘tied’ to trade deals, or debt servicing. In 1997, debt-service payments from sub-Saharan Africa amounted to 80% of aid. Only 24.3% goes to the poorest countries.

CONSUMING NEED, CONSUMING GREED

The 20% of the world’s people who live in the highest-income countries consume 86% of the world’s resources. The bottom 20% in the lowest-income countries consume less than 10%. The average protein consumption is 115 grams a day in France but only 32 grams in Mozambique. And the less money you have, the greater proportion you must spend on food rather than health or education.

Private and public health expenditure, 1990

1. See http://www.foe.co.uk/progress for more details of the ISEW.
2. Peter Ohene Kyei, ‘Field perspectives on decentralisation and rural poverty alleviation in Ghana’, presented at the 1998 Development Studies Association, Bradford, Britain.
3. The Reality of Aid 1998/99 (Earthscan).
4. All other figures are from the 1998 Human Development Report (UNDP).

 

 

 

Casting Call: Black Models with White Parts Need Only Apply

Renee Thompson puts in work. But “work” has not always reciprocated. She’s been modeling around the world for the past 10 years and is still searching for her big break. “I want to be the new girl who kills fashion week!” she chimes. Beautiful, tall, professional, and curvaceously slender: her aspirations seem tangible. However, reality is elusive: 87% of fashion week models are white, 6% are black. And although Renee is among the “fortunate” few to have “the look,” a Black girl with traditionally embraced “White features” to use as a platform, she’s found out that this platform made for a much better soapbox.

The mini- documentary, “Colour of Beauty,” (directed by Elizabeth St. Philip and The National Film Board of Canada) is Thompson’s introspective narrative into the life of a Black girl disgusted by the overt racism of the industry that she has fostered as her career. Instead of fleeing from the very same industry that has caused many Black models to give up in defeat, pouring doubt and spilt Hennessy on their dreams—Thompson is still going. And she’s going for the win.

Coco & Creme caught up with the Toronto-native between shoots to chat about the documentary, racism in the beauty industry, and the holy matrimony between Black booty and newsstands. And as you can imagine, a lot was said.

C+C: How long have u been modeling?
Renee: Surprisingly enough, I never thought about it until now, but I have been modeling for almost 11 years. Wow! Since the age of 15 in Toronto as a local model there and for 6 years after overseas.

C+C: What models initially inspired your pursuits?
Renee: I never actually was into models or the industry before getting into it. I got involved after my older cousin Mark suggested it to my mom. He took me around to see some agents and nothing initially came of it until I signed up for the Elite model look contest in Toronto in 1999. I was 14 going on 15 and won both the Colgate smile and semi finals to go to Paris. It was fun but really nothing I had ever imagined before actually winning.

C+C: As stated in your documentary the Black models who receive most work are the ones who appear to be White girls “dipped in chocolate.” You fit the mold—a thin nose and thin lips—characteristics that are universally recognized as European. How does it feel to know that your marketability is contingent upon your ability to uphold ”White features”?
Renee: I have always been subjected to criticism for being both not Black enough according to industry standards and for not being White. I am a Black girl with traditionally White features, but never has it worked to my advantage when it came to marketing preferences to clients. When they want White, they want White—period. A lot of people don’t realize the industry has changed a lot since I started back in the late 90s. Black women in the industry are not expected to have White features all the time to be considered beautiful, but yet the expectation to over compensate is there—no matter what tone of Black you are.

C+C: And by “overcompensate” you mean, having something extraordinarily unique?
Renee: Yes, being just Black and pretty is not enough for the industry.

C+C: So is there a future for just plain old pretty Black girls—the ones without the standard “Euro look” or the exaggerated “Afro-centric” look?
Renee: I believe the industry changes its mind so often that it really isn’t just one look anymore. However, I have noticed a shift in the types of Black models that are becoming most popular. Afro-centric, dark-skinned and very abstract faces are what make the runway more often than not these days. As a “classic” beauty myself—caramel skin tone, it is hard to find where to fit within a tie of great changes. But I would rather know there is change to recognize all these different types of beauty and we can all have some shine one day.

C+C: Do you know models with Black facial features that have not been as marketable? What was their story like?
Renee: As expressed in my documentary, there are lots of beautiful Black women in the business who have those historical Black features that many said weren’t marketable. Alek Wek was thought to be a huge “No-No” when she first came in to the industry, but it took the special eye of her agent and the push from her managers to make the industry understand her African beauty. This was right around the time when Tyra Banks (another Black girl with White features) was just going out of style and Alek was coming in. Ordinarily, marketability doesn’t have to do with a standard look. A lot of people say the industry wants classic understandable, commercial beauty. With Black girls, when that one girl is chosen it is her push and the one designer or photographer who makes them. Names in the industry make a Black model marketable, not a specific look. So, it’s luck and imagination of the rare few in the industry to recognize a next level of beauty that a Black model has.

C+C: It’s funny how there is a discrepancy for Black features in the beauty industry. The typical Black face is not as marketable as the Black body. If you pass by a majority of magazine stands, you will notice Black models tend to be turned around or bent over, and White models standing forward. All though not all of these mags are high fashion (Smooth, King, etc.) it is modeling nonetheless. Why do you think there is such a regard for the Black body and not facial beauty?
Renee: I personally think that when Black women are sexy it is a powerful message. Although I’m not an avid King , XXL , or Smooth reader, I think if the same passion for the body was put into W, and Vogue and when it comes to Black beauty , we would be a lot less likely to take a visually sexual position when it comes to competing for the stands. There are beautiful women with great bodies on these magazines, but there is a part of Black that is regal and facially beautiful as well. We just need the chance to be shown in the other magazines that way too.

C+C: What critiques in regards to your look do you commonly receive from agencies, etc?
Renee: A lot of agencies have asked me to lose weight in the hips, and to make my hair more kinky or afro-ish to give that “Black” look. I also have had agencies tell me I am too White looking to sell as a Black girl. I am too edgy in my style vs. what my look gives. I am often told that I need to not be so soft in my pictures. I was also told I could never be an editorial high fashion girl. I am simply beauty and commercial. There is a certain level of prestige with being a high fashion Vogue girl as opposed to a Macy’s girl. Respectively, the two are well known, but Vogue puts a model, especially a Black model, on a level that makes him or her untouchable. It’s a hard place or status for Black models to get to.

C+C: Sounds pretty defeating; how do you deal with it?
Renee: My mother forewarned me about this challenge. Criticism in life is no different than in modeling. So I take it all as advice for self improvement. It hurts, we are all human. You never like to feel like you’re inadequate but you have to be able to roll with the punches.

C+C: So I take it that you’ve taken the advice and made the modifications?
Renee: I did not have the discipline at first to make the effort to market myself and look the part of a model. The industry is incredibly competitive. If it meant shaving 2 inches off my hips or wearing a body conscious dress to compete, that was my job. My agents never encouraged unhealthy weight loss just so we are clear. However, the girls in the business are young, skinny and mostly White. It’s hard enough to compete with my skin color; I could not afford not to slack off in my measurements or my grooming. I really love my job and I want to be able to compete. I do come from a background of go-getters, and I never half step with anything I do. It’s all or nothing with me. So yes, I have taken a lot of the advice given to me about my weight and grooming—i.e. diet change, exercise and making H&M my best friend!

C+C: What transitions in the world of modeling/fashion would you like to see?
Renee: I would like to see another Vogue issue, or W issue, or Elle come out celebrating Black beauty in the U.S. edition, not just the Italian edition. In addition, I like to see use of new up and coming Black models in these layouts. They need the exposure. Using already established models, Black or White, still doesn’t make the message of this celebration clear. We want to appreciate all beauty and Black beauty comes in many forms. Black models in the industry without names never got the chance to be apart of that experience. They are limited in their opportunities as it is.

I would also like to see industry embrace the idea of having designers included in the choosing of their models for shows and shoots a like. When the designer themselves see a model and decide that he or she works or doesn’t work with his or her vision, it is a fair judgment; it corresponds with the designer’s artistic vision. Not what the backers, or production teams or casting directors’ wants. I have had most of my luck when the designer and I actually meet. It also gives the model a lot of confidence in the designer as well. Kind of like the good old days when Valentino hand picked his models and they were stars!

C+C: True, what about runway?
Renee: I would like to see more shows with Black models in them: Prada, Alberta Ferretti, Carolina Herrara. I would like to see Black models on prize brands like these. I would like to see it more than just once every 5 years or so. And not just celebrity actors or singers! I would love the industry to go back to using models for ads and campaigns.

C+C: Your opening line in this documentary is “Sometimes it’s so blatantly racist—it’s disgusting”. And you then proceed to keep it realer than most throughout. . . . Do you feel that this documentary might hurt your modeling career?
Renee: When Elizabeth, the director, approached me about doing it, she asked me the same thing. I told her, and others who have asked me the same thing, that I cannot worry about whether it will hurt my career because my career is already hurting. I am getting a rough ride and have been for almost 11 years. My friends in the business are all coming home at the days end crying or upset because they have all it takes to be stars, but the color of their skin is an everyday excuse. The need for truth at this point in my career is more important than the hurt or backlash. I know what that feels like already. Rejection for something you care about seems like a better option. Plus, a real artist and real lovers of fashion and talent will understand. I pray they do anyways.

C+C: So this documentary was made solely to articulate your personal frustration with the industry your in?
Renee: No, I think it was important to be a part of the Colour of Beauty documentary because it is a real issue in the industry; Black model are less and less apparent. Not only are Black models in need of work, but women of color in general are in need of identification. People have been suffering from this great digression, general public, consumers and that goes beyond just fashion admirers. There is a large demographic looking for answers as to why more models don’t look like them. I had the opportunity to take a stand and I wanted to. So I did.

C+C: So brown girls trying to make it as a model, what do they need to know and do?
Renee: Study the magazines, know your body and be confident. If you’re awkward, be proud you are. If you have a big beautiful lips, love them. Love yourself and then you can give what you to make things happen in your pursuits.

What’s next for you and where can we follow your updates?

Well, I am still on the hunt for a new agency in New York. I am no longer with EMPIRE and I hope to sign with a new agent with a strong vision who can push me as much as I push myself. I have a group on Facebook called The Color of Beauty and I am also working on a possible follow up project with Hill Harper and I am working on continuing to reach out to women’s groups, schools and women’s incarceration facilities doing motivational programs and self help exercises. I love people and I think in all the madness of the modeling world its necessary to get back in touch with real people and real life.

C+C: Damn straight.

CREDITS:
Photograpy: Kamaal Hall
Photography Assistant: Jermain Mageacy
Styling: Aldane Rockwood of Richborn Intern’l
Hair and Make Up: Jotashe Turnbull
Art Direction: Dwaine McLean

- Guerdley Cajus

Poetry Chapbook Contest Rules

• First prize $1,000 and publication + 5 copies
• Nonprofit mission is to publish new authors — contest only for authors without published book or chapbook
• Deadline: January 15, 2011 postmark
• Submit 20-24 pages of poetry
• Blind review: On a cover sheet submit name, address, and contact information (address, e-mail, and phone #) and the title of your chapbook. On the chapbook manuscript put only its title. Put chapbook title on every page of the manuscript. Author's name cannot appear anywhere on the chapbook manuscript.
• At least three independent readers
• Final judge: Samuel Green, inaugural poet laureate of Washington State
• Reading Fee: $25 in check or money order to Flying Trout Press
• Four finalists get a free copy
• Poems can be on any topic
• Finalists also considered for publication
• No manuscripts returned without SASE. No electronic submissions.
• Notification in April 2011

info@flyingtroutpress.org
MAILING ADDRESS
Flying Trout Press
P.O. Box 1256
Bellingham, WA 98227-1256

Welcome to Changes In Life

You are invited too submit to an Inspirational Anthology: The Woman I've Become

Seeking women of all ages who have experienced challenging, negative, toxic and/or abusive relationships in the past and have overcome these situations to become the woman she was meant to be. Were you raised in an overly restrictive, negative, disempowering or abusive family? Did you find yourself in a challenging or toxic relationship with men, friends, co-workers or your children? How did those relationships define the "earlier you"? What was the turning point? Was there some person(s) or event(s) that facilitated your beginning and/or continuing on this journey to greater self understanding and self definition? Who is the woman you've become?

• Critria for Submission

• Name, age, email address, phone number (optional), mailing address, title of your submission on and a short bio on a title page; your name on all other pages
No actual name will be used-->
• Minimum of 500 words; Maximum of 1,000 words
• Double spaced
• Submissions should be sent as an email attachment to grampat8@comcast.net
• Submission dead-line has been extended until December 15, 2010.
• If you are unable to use attachments, you can either include the submission in the body of the email or snail mail it to:
  • Changes In LIfe, Anthology
  • 305 Anne Ct
  • Prospect Heights, IL 60070
• If your submission is accepted you will receive a copy of the anthology once it is published
• * If you are interested in joining an ongoing larger community of women sharing their experiences, log on to changesinlife.wordpress.com

MUSE OR DARK ANGEL: THE WRITING LIFE

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

This is the first announcement—the first call for submissions.  BUT, BEFORE THE ANNOUNCEMENT, let me tell everyone that this year—2010—Excalibur Press is not doing a Christmas book.  We’ve had two very successful editions of the CHRISTMAS IS A SEASON series—2008 and 2009.  We’ll take a rest from our Christmas book this year and launch something new.  Excalibur Press will be doing a collection of personal essays titled MUSE OR DARK ANGEL:  THE WRITING LIFE.  The Press would like a variety of perspectives—published authors, emerging authors, beginning authors, and unpublished would-be authors.  We’d like the perspectives of older writers, mid-life writers, and younger writers.  We’d like happy, thrilled, delighted, satisfied, disillusioned, downtrodden, downhearted, or can’t-take-it-anymore essays.  Each writer should write whatever he or she is inspired to write about the writing life.  We all know that some days in the writing life are full of good cheer, hope, and joy; others are dark and dismal.  Has the sweet muse rested upon your shoulder this year?  If so, write about it.  Has the dark angel kept a thumb in the center of your back pressing you down, down, down.  Rejections, rejections, rejections!  Write about it.

We all know that the writing life is comprised of multiple components.  For each of us that includes different elements:  reading, teaching, mentoring, editing, freelancing, studying, and, of course, writing.  An essay about any one of these or a combination of these might also be of interest to readers.  A writer might experience great joy and success in one or more of these elements, but still be receiving a plethora of rejections.  A happy/sad season.  Alas!  So—WRITE ABOUT IT!

Here are the particulars:

--Essays should be no more than 6,500 words (preferably shorter). 

--The submission deadline is January 15, 2011.  (Postmarked date.)

--More than one submissions is acceptable, but not more than two submissions.  If you have multiples, select the best two.

--Mail submissions to:

  Excalibur Press

      3090 Dauphin Square Connector

  Mobile, Alabama 36607

--e-mail address:  excaliburpress@msn.com

--web:  www.excaliburpress.us  or www.thewritinglife.us      

 

Excalibur Press will run a classified ad in POETS & WRITERS in the November/December 2010 issue, so we’re expecting a good number of submissions.  Every writer has something to say about the writing life.  Start thinking.  Start writing.  Submit!!

2010 Benefit Concert

Black August Film Festival 2010

New Book: Thiefing Sugar

Duke University Press has just published Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010).

Publisher’s description: In Thiefing Sugar, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book’s title from Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley’s interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and “coming out.”

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California-Berkeley, and is presently assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

For more information, see http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=13429&viewby=title