by Paul Ortiz
RAINBOW COALITIONS
King’s death robbed the United States of its greatest champion in the battle against race and class oppression. Yet the Freedom Movement that had propelled King to the heights of radical leadership in 1968 endured well after his passing. African Americans and Latinx people organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Young Lords, the Chicano Moratorium, the United Construction Workers Association, and hundreds of organizations that drew from the organizing traditions of emancipatory internationalism to confront capitalism and imperialism while making common cause with struggling movements in the Global South.71 In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party created the original Rainbow Coalition, composed of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Young Patriots, a group of revolutionary white activists.72 Carlton Yearwood, a Panther organizer, explained the multiracial coalition: “We believe that racism comes out of a class struggle, it’s just part of the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Establishment and a product of capitalism. When we provide free breakfasts for poor kids, we provide them for poor whites and poor blacks.”73
Organizers consciously adopted what the historian Jakobi Williams calls a “universal identity politics.”74 The United Construction Workers in Seattle, Washington, founded by an electrician, Tyree Scott, fought to tear down “racially exclusionary hiring practices in Seattle’s construction unions in the fall of 1969.”75 Composed primarily of African Americans, the United Construction Workers adopted a politics based on “the struggles of Third World, poor, and working women and men to obtain our rights.”76 The UCWA’s newsletter, No Separate Peace, celebrated the “flowering of many communities, cultures, and movements: National groupings: Black, Chicano, Asian, Native American, Latino; Sexual groupings—women, gay people; as well as workers, young people, soldiers, prisoners, and even neighborhood groupings.” The United Construction Workers applauded the radical potential of these diverse communities, but did not expect them to organize in the same space: “Therefore, we will emphasize the art and poetry and culture of the various communities in our area, while educating people to struggle against the divisiveness of racism, sexism, and imperialism.”77 No Separate Peace honored distinctive cultures while emphasizing the importance of solidarity: “And the question of whether or not it’s the Chicanos versus the Blacks is bullshit. And the only way you’re going to get caught up in that question is not knowing who your enemy is.”
Piri Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets, first published in 1967, presented a new vision of racial identity. Coming of age in Spanish Harlem in the Great Depression as the son of Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants, Thomas was the darkest-skin member of his family.78 He wrote about feeling constantly out of place in an immigrant family that desperately wanted to hide its African roots—Thomas’s parents and siblings explained to Piri that he owed his color solely to the “Indian” in their ancestry. Thomas’s journey to find wholeness in a society that denigrated Blackness led him to establish an identity based on solidarity with the oppressed, and to declare that it was possible to be Black and Latinx. Supporting the Black freedom struggle, as well as the Nicaraguan battle against US military intervention in the 1980s, Thomas wrote, “‘Tierra Libre o Morir’ [Free Homeland or Death] is the cry of [Augusto] Sandino and the Nicaraguan patriots. ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ is the cry of Patrick Henry and the American Patriots. Tell me freedom lovers, what’s the difference?”79
The multiracial coalitions of the 1960s joined the struggle to free South Africa of apartheid. The United Construction Workers’ Tyree Scott traveled to Mozambique and South Africa in the 1970s to help build the anti-apartheid movement.80 In 1985, Howard Jordan, New York assemblyman Jose Rivera, and Congressman Roberto Garcia founded Latinos for a Free South Africa. Growing apartheid repression in South Africa “mandates a collective response by the Latino community,” Rivera was quoted as saying. “Our new organization represents the first endeavor to bring isolated initiatives together under one banner for freedom.”81 In a collective statement given to the press, the founders of Latinos for a Free South Africa stated, “Latinos who along with their African-American brothers have been the victims of discrimination and racism in this nation, are particularly repulsed by this South African system of apartheid where resources are allocated on the basis of color.” Jordan stated, “We want to foster Black-Latino unity through an understanding of the relationship between the struggle in South Africa, Central and Latin America and the domestic situation affecting Blacks and Latinos in the US.”82 The organization engaged in direct action, legislative lobbying, and international diplomacy in tandem with other anti-apartheid organizations. 83
The second Rainbow Coalition was part of a resurgence of emancipatory internationalism in the 1980s. Groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, the US/Guatemala Labor Education Project, and Veterans for Peace organized to oppose imperialism in Latin America.84 The Reverend Jesse Jackson initially formed the National Rainbow Coalition to support his 1984 presidential campaign. The coalition supported the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s (FLOC) eight-year boycott of the Campbell Soup Company, called to exert pressure for recognition of the farm labor union; Jackson used the 1984 Democratic National Convention as a platform to urge support for FLOC’s unionization struggle.85 The National Rainbow Coalition also supported the United Farm Workers of Washington State’s eight-year boycott of Chateau Ste. Michelle Wines, which ended victoriously in a union contract in 1995, a rare success story in an era of dramatic union decline.86 Ronald Walters remembers the sense of excitement during Jackson’s presidential campaigns:
No one else at that level was talking about environmental racism, “no first use” of nuclear weapons; antiapartheid (remember, the ANC was a “terrorist organization”); the Arab-Israeli situation. No other candidate had an economic policy based on major investment and cuts in the military, a program Bill Clinton would run on in 1992 (though abandon forthwith). None advocated extension of the Congressional health plan to all Americans. None regarded gay rights as inherent in a larger moral claim and not simply something to be pandered to. None twinned race and class so naturally.87
A perennial dynamic in US history is that advances made by African Americans and Latinx people always elicit counterattacks from state and private interests. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation developed the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to undermine and destroy individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. and organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. California governor Ronald Reagan, as well as other politicians, availed themselves of COINTELPRO’s resources to sabatoge antiwar activism on college campuses and consolidate their hold on power.88 Given the power and diversity of the movements for justice on all fronts in the 1960s and ’70s, it is no surprise that the following three decades would witness one of the most extensive backlashes against social progress in American history.
CHAPTER 8
EL GRAN PARO ESTADOUNIDENSE
THE REBIRTH OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS, 1970s TO THE PRESENT
On May 1, 2006, International Workers’ Day, Latinx workers initiated the largest general strike in the history of the Americas. Known as el gran paro Estadounidense, the Great American Strike, this mass action breathed new life into a labor movement that had been in disarray for decades. The general strike impacted every aspect of American life. Approximately 70 to 90 percent of students in Chicago skipped school to show the country what “a day without immigrants” looked like.1 The strike lent momentum to the immigration rights movement and helped to birth a new effort to pass national legislation for a living wage. Latinx workers and their organizations also contributed mightily to the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president. Less than a decade after the big strike, workers chanting, “Fight for fifteen [dollars] and a union!” had joined forces with a reinvigorated Black freedom movement to demand an end to labor exploitation, police vi
olence, and US imperialism.
The general strike was launched in the era of neoliberalism, a political philosophy marked by fiscal austerity, privatization, mass incarceration, and militarism. Seeking to counter the social movements and national labor strikes of the Vietnam War era, corporate-funded Republicans and so-called “New Democrats” destroyed unions, downsized social welfare, cut taxes on the rich, and unleashed the power of banks and corporations through deregulation in order to discipline an insurgent citizenry.2 After consulting with leading figures from both political parties, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, declared in 1979, “The standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don’t think you can escape that.”3 One of neoliberalism’s preeminent spokesmen, Thomas Friedman, warned in March 1999 that this experiment in social engineering would require military muscle: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”4 According to the grim tribunes of neoliberalism’s ruling class, all claims of equal justice must now be submitted to the grand jury of capitalism.5
When the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was formed in 1985 it moved the Democratic Party away from African American, Latinx, and working-class constituencies and toward big donors and military-industrial corporations. DLC members in Congress spearheaded punishing domestic and foreign policy measures, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, both in 1994, as well as the US invasions of Iraq, in 1990 and 2003.6 NAFTA increased the pace of deindustrialization in the United States, and neoliberal trade policies hit Latinx and Black workers particularly hard. Yolanda Navarra, a Watsonville, California, cannery worker, observed, “We lost our work here so that these giant companies can go and exploit those of us who remained in Mexico.”7 NAFTA also had a destructive impact on small farmers in Mexico. Texas Fair Trade Coalition organizer Bob Cash notes, “What NAFTA actually did in Mexico was throw 2 million farm families off their farms, many of them forced to come to the U.S. to find work to feed their families.”8
In the 1990s, agricultural workers on the West Coast were fighting for the rights that many thought had been earned decades earlier. In 1994, Gerard Rios, a Chateau Ste. Michelle vineyard worker, testified before the Washington State Liquor Board using words that could have been spoken generations earlier: “We [farmworkers] have made, through our sweat and sacrifice of our health, the agricultural industry the best in the world. Why don’t you come and eat in the fields where I eat and drink the contaminated water that the company gives us?”9
The 2000 presidential election, which ended with the Supreme Court choosing the president, demonstrated the linkage between neoliberalism’s contempt for democracy and racial injustice. According to the election study conducted by the US Civil Rights Commission, chaired by Mary Frances Berry,
During the three days of hearings, numerous witnesses delivered heartrending accounts of the frustrations they experienced at the polls. Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote. The Commission’s findings make one thing clear: widespread voter disenfranchisement—not the dead-heat contest—was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election.10
The report emphasized that Haitian American and Latinx voters encountered significant barriers to voting alongside African Americans. In a shocking disregard for the impact of voter suppression on the nation’s institutions, the Supreme Court and the Congress gave the election a clean bill of health and placed George W. Bush in office. Disenfranchisement and the demobilization of much of the electorate enabled policies that starved cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Flint, Michigan.11
The US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 stunned the world and served as a case study of neoliberalism in action. Federal and state authorities—not to mention the corporate media—depicted working-class people, particularly African Americans and immigrants, as alien outcasts, prone to criminality and depravity.12 During the crisis, the governor of Louisiana issued shoot-to-kill orders to National Guardsmen, even though soldiers on the ground stated that stories of civilian violence in the New Orleans Superdome and on the streets were grotesquely exaggerated by the media. Regarding the rumors of mass murder and rape in the wake of the hurricane, Sergeant First Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome, where many residents had taken shelter, said, “I think ninety-nine percent of it [media reports] is [expletive]. Don’t get me wrong—bad things happened. But I didn’t see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. . . . Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved.”13
Corporations and private investors were the big winners in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans. The state quickly replaced the city’s public school system with charter schools. Immigrant workers from Latin America and India were held in debt peonage or saw their wages stolen by employers while hotel and construction firms raked in huge profits from the disaster.14 Many workers were brought in to New Orleans after the hurricane. One Latina immigrant hotel worker in New Orleans testified, “Every one of us took out a loan to come here. We had planned to pay back our debt with our job here. They told us we would have overtime, that we could get paid for holidays, that we would have a place to live at low cost, and it was all a lie.”15 Because this worker and her Latina coworkers had signed contracts that bound her to one employer they risked forfeiting thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs. “I felt like an animal without claws—defenseless. It is the same as slavery.”
A lawyer with the New Orleans–based Loyola Law School Legal Clinic noted, “Since the hurricane we’ve really seen a meltdown of wage and hour laws, OSHA [the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration] laws, and practically every other standard that exists for work in this country.” Luz Molina, another participant in the Loyola legal advocacy program, observed, “The money is going to the big corporations and not to the workers. There is no quality control and no oversight of who they are contracting with.”16
THE CONTEXT OF HURRICANE KATRINA
“Experts” claimed that Hurricane Katrina had forced the nation’s leaders to once again pay attention to race in America; however, that’s all they had been doing the previous three decades.17 Public policies were formulated more on the basis of enhancing the race and class privileges of the few than delivering the greatest good to the many. The nation’s policy makers oversaw the resegregation of public education, the shrinking of municipal services, and the wholesale destruction of African American, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American neighborhoods from New York to Arizona in the name of “urban renewal,” “slum clearance,” and the “planned shrinkage” of minority neighborhoods.18 The destruction of these neighborhoods was part of a broader counteroffensive against Black and Brown community organizing. This included the murderous withdrawal of fire protection from the South Bronx in an effort to clear city streets for lucrative property development.19 When city officials in Arlington, Texas, wanted to move working-class Mexican Americans out of the way for a professional football stadium, they declared the neighborhood “blighted” and invoked eminent domain in order to destroy it.20 The resulting multibillion-dollar Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, subsidized with public dollars, symbolizes who contemporary municipal governments work for in the United States—and who they work against.
Simultaneously, the United States built a prison industrial complex that incarcerated more citizens than any other penal system in modern history. The prison population is disproportionately African American and Latinx people. Ostensibly in the prosecution of the War on Drugs, New York and other cities implemented policing practices that fueled the incarcerat
ion boom. The historian Carol Anderson notes, “In 1999, blacks and Hispanics, who made up 50 percent of New York City’s population, accounted for 84 percent of those stopped and frisked by the NYPD; while the majority of illegal drugs and weapons were found on the relatively small number of whites detained by the police.”21 In 1972, America’s correctional facilities held some 333,000 prisoners. By 2000, the inmate population had soared to 1,890,000. As the sociologist Jordan Camp has demonstrated, mass incarceration is in part a corporate and state response to crush insurgencies from below, as well as a mechanism to defend an economic system based on inequality, noting, “Structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have accordingly become permanent features of the political economy.”22 The United States has literally decided to “incarcerate the crisis” ushered in by neoliberalism. Writes Camp, “Increased spending on incarceration has occurred alongside the reduction of expenditures for public education, transportation, health care, and public-sector employment. Prison expansion has coincided with a shift in the racial composition of prisoners from majority white to almost 70 percent people of color.”23
The funneling of educational resources toward well-to-do school districts doomed many working-class youth to lives of poverty. In New York, state outlays to local school systems approached a 14:1 ratio in favor of wealthy, predominantly white districts. 24 In 1987, a New York Post report revealed that “money earmarked for fighting drug abuse and illiteracy in ghetto schools was funneled instead to schools in wealthy areas.”25 In Hartford, Connecticut, one study found that 93 percent of the schoolchildren in the public schools are either Latino or African American, and “more than two-thirds of the city’s students live in poverty. Six minutes away on the highway are affluent, nearly all white suburban, high-achieving school districts that seem a world away.”26 According to the business journalist Eduardo Porter, “The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students.”27