Review: Planet of Slums

[Mike Davis. Planet of Slums. New York: Verso, 2007].

If read from a place of willingness to hear its message, Planet of Slums will inflame a fierce hatred of capitalism in your heart. It is an analysis of neoliberalism through the prism of urban space around the globe, and it is a relentless, pounding indictment of the organizing of billions of lives into poverty and suffering by capital.

Humanity is somewhere near the point of becoming more urban than rural -- maybe just past, maybe just before. The population of the planet is expected to continue to increase for at least another 30 or 40 years, and the vast majority of that increase will occur in urban areas of the global South. The next couple of decades will see several individual urban areas with greater populations than the entire urban population of the planet at the time of the French Revolution. By 2015, there will be more than 550 cities with at least a million inhabitants, and there are already 5(ish) that have more than 20 million.

A slum is "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure" [22-23]. There is not complete identity between residents of areas so labelled and the population experiencing urban poverty -- not all slum dwellers are poor and not all people in poverty live in slums -- but there is significant overlap. Fully one third of the global urban population lives in areas that could be called slums -- only 6% of the urban population in the rich countries, but almost 80% of the urban population in the very poorest.

The housing arrangements of people who live in areas that could be designated "slums" take a variety of forms. Some inhabit neighbourhoods that were once prosperous but that money and the people who controlled it have fled, and existing buildings have been taken over and used in new ways. The most talked about arrangement -- and, by some on the left, most romanticized -- are squatters, or those who have simply appropriated land or space to meet their needs, sometimes surreptitiously and individually, sometimes brazenly and collectively. Davis points out that real squatting is actually fairly rare, these days, and much more common is "pirate urbanization," or privatized squatting, in which private developers (or gangster) seize control of the land, often without formally owning it and inevitably without official permission to develop it, and make people pay for the right to stay on it. As well, many in slums actually rent their dwellings, sometimes from other deeply impoverished people who also live there. And in many cities there is a blurred peri-urban edge in which agricultural land is gradually consumed in completely chaotic and unregulated ways by informal housing of those unable to find space nearer the centre of the city.

In these processes, the classic understanding of the city is changing. Many cities no longer have a centre. It does not make sense to talk of downtown, suburbs, exurbs. Many are now chaotic, distributed networks of informal relationships and informal or nonexistent municipal services. Several do or will in the coming decades cover vast corridors of land in a single, largely unplanned, urban or semi-urban agglomeration. In some parts of the global South, urbanization has been completely disconnected from industrialization, which makes it a much different process than "classic" urbanization in 19th century Europe (which, however oppressive and exploitative it was to the newly proletarianized former peasants pushed into slums, was still able to benefit from European colonial predation on the rest of the world).

In the early 20th century, urbanization in much of Africa and Asia was very slow, in large part because European colonizers mostly kept poor rural people from migrating to the cities. In China after 1949, Maoism also severely limited urban population growth. And in Latin America the barriers were less formal but still significant. In the 1950s and 1960s (and a little later in China) the barriers to urban population growth fell away and the number of people in many cities in the global South began to skyrocket. People were pushed off the land and also drawn to cities by new policies of industrialization. In many places, new anti-colonial and nationalist regimes promised affordable urban housing as part of an overall strategy of national economic development. Few were able to deliver in any sustained, useful way. In the '70s, a combination of anarchist and neoliberal thought focused on promoting self-help as liberation within slums, but despite scattered successes this model has not made a dent in the problem as a whole either. It is becoming even less tenable, Davis argues, as classic squatting becomes less possible because of the ways in which urban space in many cities is already used.

Davis also examines various ways in which poor people living in slums get attacked in order for states and the rich to make changes to urban space for their own benefit. He looks at the environmental impact of this model of urban growth, from exhaust fumes to sanitation, and particularly their impact on human health. He examines the immense harm done to poor urban dwellers by Structural Adjustment Programs, imposed on most poor nations by the international financial institutions that serve the interests of the rich nations. He systematically demolishes the myth that informal economic activity and "micro-credit" are the magic bullets to deal with urban poverty in the global South. And he looks at the ways in which the effective abandonment of segments of the urban population in some of the great cities of the global South, and the entire city in some instances, have utterly transformed how people live, and how people can live. The book closes with a brief look at how the Pentagon is thinking about slums as the next frontier in warfare and as a space that the U.S. military must learn to dominate.

There are some interesting aspects about the ways in which Davis puts together the knowledge in this book. His sources are resolutely mainstream -- U.N. and government reports as well as academic studies that deal with everything from the physical aspects of specific slums to ethnographies of how such communities function socially. There is something powerful about condemning the system using the documents the system itself has produced, a la Chomsky, and Davis does it very well. However, given the ways in which that kind of document -- the census, the government report, the study by the outside academic -- inevitably does some violence, or at least some erasure, to the lives it examines, it makes me wonder what is missing from this book. What really goes on in the world's slums that is not reflected in this book? I have no idea, but I know there must be something.

A related question is about the ways in which he makes use of sources that examine a wide range of places. Again, in some ways his seamless combination of analyses from cities around the globe in a single paragraph or passage is very powerful and makes an important point about the homogenizing impact of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, I have to wonder what is lost in terms of specificity. I should add that Davis is as attentive to specificity as his level of analysis allows -- there are differences in the historical trajectories of the cities of Latin America and China and South Asia, for instance, and he doesn't neglect that. But I still wonder about what is lost in translating the realities of a billion people from many dozens of countries into a 210 page book.

Others have read this book as being pro-state in its orientation. I certainly have a sense that that is the direction of Davis' bias in terms of the ongoing intra-left debates about the state form, but that wasn't how I read this book. Rather than being some wistful plea for a return to the days of strong socialist states, it felt more to me like a cry of despair, a howl of grief and rage that neither state-based nor non-state approaches as they have actually been attempted have done much that was broad and lasting to mitigate the suffering into which capital forces the vast majority of the world's urban poor. And it is hard to know what to do with this pessimism. To what extent is it warranted? How would we know? He points out that he does not talk much about resistance movements among the urban poor, which will be the subject of a future book that he and a collaborator are currently working on. Perhaps that work will be more hopeful. But I also wonder the extent to which this seamless pessimism is made possible by a framework that depends on mainstream sources and that emphasizes the homogenizing impact of neoliberal capitalism at the expense of exploring the inevitable cracks and holes and seedbeds of resistance.

Despite a pessimism about whose unrelenting character I have some doubts, I think this is a valuable book for activists and lefties in North America to read. It is, for one thing, direct and accessible and politically clear. More usefully, particularly for those of us with relative privilege, it can act as an effective kick to unsettle assumptions produced by our social and geographical locations -- it isn't news to most of us that capitalism is at its most brutal with racialized women and men in the countries of the global South, but it is easy to lose focus on the enormity of what a recent event in Toronto named the "actually existing barbarism" of global capitalism. Reading Planet of Slums is a way to counteract that loss of focus in ourselves, and a way to keep alive the ongoing challenge to see how struggles in North America do and can and should relate to struggles around the world.



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Myths for Profit

A Sudbury-born filmmaker is on a cross-country tour with a new documentary exploring the myths of Canada's role in war and peace. The film will screen in Sudbury on April 1, 2009. Here is the media release:

SUDBURY-BORN FILMMAKER SCREENS NEW DOCUMENTARY ON
THE MYTHS OF CANADA'S ROLE IN WAR AND PEACE

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, March 27, 2009 - On Wednesday, April 1, 2009, Sudbury-born filmmaker Amy M. Miller will be back in town as part of a cross Canada tour with her new documentary, Myths for Profit: Canada's Role in Industries of War and Peace. The event is sponsored locally by Sudbury Against War and Occupation and will be at Fromagerie Elgin, 5 Cedar Street (across Market Square on Elgin) from 7:30 to 9:30 pm.

Myths for Profit, which Miller made in collaboration with Boban Chaldovich, tackles several enduring myths that lie at the heart of Canadian national identity. By examining Canada's prominent role in the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as well as current Canadian participation in the occupation of Afghanistan, the film debunks the notion of Canada as a peacekeeping nation. The film goes on to explore the extensive involvement of Canadian corporations, with active support from various government agencies, in producing weapons and other war-related material. It finishes with a look at the ways in which foreign aid is used by the Canadian government to push underdeveloped countries into actions and policies that do not necessarily benefit their people but do benefit Canadian corporations. Miller and Chaldovich's current tour will screen Myths for Profit in more than 40 Canadian cities.

Amy M. Miller grew up in Sudbury and currently lives in Montreal. She is a long-time activist and popular educator, and is currently involved in numerous independent media projects. Boban Chaldovich has a long history of involvement in grassroots art and political projects in
Belgrade. Both are members of Wide Open Exposure, a new Montreal-based multimedia production team with a focus on issues of social and economic justice.

Sudbury Against War and Occupation is a group of Sudbury residents concerned with all forms and consequences of war and occupation. The organization started in early 2007 to object to Canadian support for and involvement in the ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. They have also been active in supporting the struggles of indigenous peoples in North America and in opposing the occupation of Palestine.

If you are in town, please come to this event. If not, check out the tour dates to see when it will be playing in a city near you.

Review: The Threat of Race

[David Theo Goldberg. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.]

Much of the time, the ways that we talk about the world chop our experience and the social world into artificial bits. Which is not always bad -- our representations simply cannot include the full complexity of that which is being represented. But how we go about doing this chopping, and our failure to recognize that we are doing it, can still get us into trouble.

Take, for example, the notion of "neoliberalism." In most lefty talk where that's an important part of the language, it refers to various changes that have happened between the early 1970s and today. Usually the use of this vocabulary signals that the focus of attention is on trade liberalization, privatization, welfare state downsizing, a particular international trade and investment regimen, increasing capital mobility, and growing labour flexibility and precarity. It is about non-market ways of addressing human need being strangled, starved, and ended, and forced into subservience to the highly constrained and coercive set of relations that is the capitalist market. Usually, when you hear the word "neoliberalism," it is a sign that you are going to be hearing about the part of the social world that gets cut off from the rest and reified into "the economy" and the part of the social world that gets cut off from the rest and reified into "the state."

What is often missing in much left discourse on the topic is the idea that any change in social relations as pervasive as the neoliberal shift of the last few decades is not going to be isolated to just one or two realms of experience. Everything will be different. Relations of production and state relations are not somehow separate from relations of white supremacy, patriarchal relations, relations of heterosexism, and so on. In order to get beyond a partial and limited understanding of neoliberalism, you have to look beyond the narrow focus on more conventional and reified understandings of "the economy" and "the state."

That is where The Threat of Race comes in. It is a new work by a prominent critical race theorist that examines race and racism in the neoliberal era. How have relations of white supremacy (though it doesn't quite use that language) been transformed in the neoliberal shift, and how are they integral to it? It goes about examining this in a to-me novel way. It includes some introductory material on racial neoliberalism that is not particularly geographically focused, but the bulk of the book examines the topic through looking at local articulations of racism in five different regions of the world: the United States, Palestine, Latin America, Europe, and South Africa.

The general form of racial neoliberalism, to summarize Goldberg's analysis, involves privatizing the expression of racism. It involves creating situations that are no less organized in racialized ways, that are no less racist, that are no less about privileging white people and targeting non-white people, but that steal the language to name that it is happening. It creates not only racism in contexts where race is never named explicitly, racism which requires no explicit racists to function, but also, he argues, it involves "racism without racism":

This is not to say that what can be identified as traditional racisms have disappeared; quite the contrary. There is here the condition without the category and mode without the (same) meaning. The modes, forms, sociologics, even their rationales more often than not mimic classic racisms. But they lack the sharpness of their identifying account or defining contours, torn as they are from the classic conditions of their articulation. These anthraxic racisms without the ostensive reference of racism exacerbate humiliation and degradation, debilitation and desecration, desacralization and distortion. They underpin torture in denial ("We don't torture" even as "we" waterboard) and collateral damage under apology ("Sorry, we didn't mean it, they got caught in the firing zone"). So as racisms have become more difficult to track and trace, more blurred, new targets and their rationalization have appeared. [361]

In the United States, where racism was explicitly and openly organized by the state for so long, the civil rights movement partially turned the state to practices that were anti-racist in limited ways. The response to this under neoliberalism has been to privatize issues of racism, so that even if the state is no longer openly practicing slavery and segregation, neither can it be used to undo their legacies. In Palestine, the Israeli occupation is racial oppression through and through, in ways both everyday and spectacular, but one that exists in denial of its own racial basis. In Latin America, racial mixture is officially celebrated in many ways, but proclamations of no racial exclusion are used as a screen for a sort of inclusion-with-subordination to whiteness. In Europe, racism is equated almost exclusively with the Holocaust in ways that both erase Europe's history of global colonization and that make racism as a contemporary problem (such as that which targets people of colour who are migrants) almost unspeakable. In South Africa, race and racism have functioned historically almost in quasi-religious terms, and with the end of apartheid and the ANC-lead neoliberalization there is an equivalent to secularizaiton, in which the religious does not disappear as a deep organizing principle but is talked about and functions in new, less visible ways. Those poor and hasty summaries do not do his complex discussions of each region even the remotest bit of justice, though frankly his summary is kind of opaque too:

Racial americanization revealed the historical play between segregation and its privatizing born again expression at home and in its neo-imperializing reach. Racial palestinianization has concerned the forcing of occupational partition and the dialectics of terror and targeted assassinations, of suicide bombing and collateral killing in the name of securing cycles of partial population safety and frustrated revenge. Racial europeanization revealed the shift to categorical erasure and coded reference in the wake of unspeakable destructiveness, attended by the elevation of fixing boundaries cultural as much as territorial as immigration was made the dominant expression of racial threat. And racial latinamericanization has conjured the social rules for promoting and containing racial mixture. Finally, where racial southafricanization historically revealed the repressive debilitations and restrictions implicated in the convictions of a political theology of race, it has now come to exemplify the post-racial ambivalence between a commitment to nonracialism and a more robust racial irrelevance. [370-371, emphasis in original]

I learned a lot from this book. I appreciated Goldberg's critical position on the Isreali occupation of Palestine -- for an article by him written during the assault on Gaza earlier this year, click here -- though there were a handful of moments in that chapter that seemed a little peculiar compared to the rest of the book, I think because of greater attention to preempting attacks on his position. As well, I learned an immense amount from the chapter on South Africa, about whose pre-1948 history I knew little.

I'm not sure I have the knowledge to offer a constructive criticism of the argument as a whole, or of the regional pieces as whole entities either. All I can do is note a few narrower concerns.

The first is not necessarily a flaw, because it is simply pointing out one thing that this book is deliberately not: It does not talk about Canada. This is hardly remarkable for a book with global scope. While racial formation in Canada has its own specificities in comparison with the United States and elsewhere, it is not surprising that Goldberg chose the regions he did rather than this country. However, attention to the specificities of the Canadian situation might have drawn attention to areas of analysis that I think really are a bit weak in the book as a whole, or at least incomplete.

One of these was Goldberg's outline of the three global waves of anti-racist struggle that have occurred so far. In his understanding, the first wave was abolitionist struggle, including slave uprisings and anti-slavery organizing by allies in the metropoles. The second was the era of anti-colonial and civil rights struggle. And the third was global struggle focused on ending apartheid and, a bit later, achieving multiculturalism. I think this scheme is interesting and useful, but I think multiculturalism as a focus of struggle in the anti-apartheid wave deserves a more nuanced and critical evaluation than it gets. I say that because of Canada's unusual history of early adoption of official state multiculturalism, and the ways in which it has functioned not just as a terrain of struggle for racialized people in Canada but also as an important way in which white supremacy in Canada is propagated and organized, as writers like Himani Bannerji and Sunera Thobani have discussed. I don't think Goldberg's analysis precludes this sort of critical lens on multiculturalism, but it doesn't foreground it either.

The other has to do with the relationship between indigenous struggle and anti-racist struggle, and it is a more serious problem with the book, I think. Three of the regions it discusses -- the United States, Latin America, and South Africa -- have histories of settler colonialism. In the little I've managed to learn about indigenous struggle in the context of the Canadian state, it is thoroughly anti-racist in nature but has specificities connected to the indigenous relationship to and struggle for the land, and connected to (at least for some peoples, some nations) a desire to maintain (or recreate) autonomous collectives that are capable of refusing to be pushed from tradition-inspired ways of being and doing by state violence and the exigencies of the capitalist market. If these goals are seen as central to anti-racist struggle, and the refusal of them central to the social organization of racism in settler colonial societies, then you end up with a quite different picture of things than if you ignore them or put them in the background. In line with much anti-racist thought originating in the U.S., settler colonialism is not ignored but is placed in the distant past and not understood as central to current social relations when he discusses that country. I know less about Latin America and South Africa, so perhaps my understanding of the specificities of indigenous struggle is less relevant to how indigenous peoples in those regions understand their political projects. However, it seemed to me that the books discussion of these two regions was also lacking in the ways it incorporated indigeneity and indigenous struggle into anti-racism.

I have other fragmentary comments as well.

For instance, I had mixed feelings about Goldberg's writing. He is a talented writer and I appreciate it when academics make the effort to push beyond disciplined language in ways that reflect the passion warranted by the issues they discuss. Goldberg certainly does that. I also understand that a certain kind of playfulness and deliberate nonlinearity with language can be pedagogically useful and can in some situations convey meaning beyond what is possible with more plodding, linear writing. But there were places in this book where that approach to writing felt more like gratuitous smartypantsing than anything that was necessary for conveying meaning.

I am interested to know more about Goldberg's opposition to the language of "racialization." He only mentions it briefly in this book, and points towards previous work that talks about it in more detail. As far as I understand it, he has two main objections to it. One is that there is this pretense with "racialization" that the person using it is foregrounding a process of social construction of categories and of oppressions, but, as useful as that might be, most of the time the actual use of "racialization" and "racialized" is just a formulaic gesture in that direction without any deeper effort to unearth or articulate the processes involved. Which is a reasonable criticism, I think. His other point is that he sees analytic value in keeping the notions of "race" and "racism" distinct. He argues that they are deeply intertwined in essential ways, but that there is political value keeping them separate and keeping the focus on racism. In particular, he says that in all three of the global waves of anti-racist struggle, a sign that a given wave was receding was a shift in attention from racism (or racial oppression) being the basic element of the problem to "race" or racial categorization or racial language as being the bad thing to avoid, which then made it harder to name and oppose racism. I'm not sure I buy this and would like to see the longer version of the argument.

One of the chapters that was not specific to a particular region talked a lot about "civility" and its mobilization in defense of oppression. That wasn't particularly new to me, but it was a more extensive discussion of it than I've seen before. But what really interested me was that he wove that together with discussion of "civility" as understood under liberal democracy as coming about historically in a way tightly tied to the notion of "civil society." He argues that civil society, in line with a few other things I've read, is not a space that opposes the state and keeps it in check, as liberal-democratic theory would have it, but rather state relations and civil society are mutual constitutive and interdependent, and the civility that is a prerequisite of a functional civil society is an essential element in preserving the dominance of the state form. I have no writing planned at the moment that would draw on these ideas, but I'm sure I'll come back to them at some point.

I quite liked the way he talked about racism regionally. I liked the fact that the regions discussed were different kinds of entities. It lead to discussions that did not ignore the importance of the state relations within the broader context of global social relations, but neither did it necessarily restrict its analysis to the unit defined by state boundaries. The geographic scope of the regions was chosen more for reasons of what cohered naturally in terms of the history and present expression of racism. I also thought this approach was effective in conveying the idea that social relations in general can have a global character in various ways, but only take on meaning -- and in fact only come into existence -- through specific, local expressions.

And, at the risk of making the lead to my review less successful, I was actually not as impressed with this book's attention to intersection as I thought I would be -- not so much intersection with relations of production, which it talked about although perhaps not in as pointed a way as it could have, but intersection with relations of privilege and oppression beyond that. These interconnections were acknowledged in places, but rarely explored very far. For instance, I think there could have been a lot more said about gender in almost every chapter. It does raise an interesting practical question though: given what I said in the lead about the impossibility of rendering the full complexity of our social world in any representation of it, how do you write about interconnection, intersection, interlockingness that approaches the infinite, or at least feels like it does? I'm not sure any writing that I've ever done answers that question in a convincing way. Certainly there is nothing wrong with having a focus or a centre for your analysis -- with, for example, this being a book that puts racism at its centre. But I have a sense from other reading -- mainly work by radical women of colour, but others too -- that it involves not shifting the focus of a particular piece to something else, but changing how you talk about that focus and, ideally, leaving what might be called "hooks" in the writing that allow the reader to connect the ideas in one piece of writing with other ideas from other writing, other writers, or from the reader herself. Not that I'm claiming I could do better, but I'm not sure that The Threat of Race does as much of this as it could.

Anyway. This is kind of a disconnected review, but hopefully it gives a sense of the book. My choice to read it was kind of random. Most of the books I review on this site are in the service, directly or indirectly, of my current book project. I picked this one up, though, when I was down in Toronto in early December doing my usual pre-Xmas book buying trip. I like to get at least one book of political nonfiction for myself that is not about work while I'm buying stuff for other people, and this was my selection this time around. But I'm wondering, in retrospect, whether it was a good choice. I picked it because a handful of other authors that I have read in the past couple of years have referenced some of Goldberg's earlier work, so I understood him as someone worth listening to, and I was intrigued by the focus on racism under neoliberalism. And certainly I learned lots. But in retrospect, is my own personal political education really best advanced by reading a book about racism that is high theory written by a white guy? Asking that is not at all meant to disrespect the book or the author, but rather as a challenge to be critical about the ways in which the social relations of academic knowledge production shape how radicals learn about the world and who they learn about the world from. A bit of skeptical reflection on the patterns in one's reactions of "Oh! That looks interesting!" is perhaps warranted.

(For the website associated with the book, which includes supplementary materials and occasional new articles by the author, go here. To hear an interesting interview with the author, go here.)

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Support War Resisters; Video of Ex-Soldier on Why Not To Enlist

I was at an event of the War Resisters Support Campaign tonight. The two resisters who came from Toronto to speak were great speakers and very informative, and I was sorry to have to leave before the second one was quite done. I don't have much to say about it, except

• to encourage people to support the effort to prevent the deportation of G.I. resister Kimberly Rivera and her family by the canadian state, which is due to happen next week;
  
• to draw your attention to "A War Resister Speaks from Prison: Let GI Resisters Stay in Canada" by deported G.I. resister Robin Long, who is currently serving a 15 month sentence in prison for refusing to participate in war crimes;
  
• and to link to this video, which is retired Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff, who served in conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, giving a very simple, direct argument for why you shouldn't join the military...Goff also blogs here.

New Book on Mothering and Blogging

As I have happily noted on a number of past occasions, it excites me when people I know have success in publishing work of various sorts, and it gives me pleasure to draw people's attention to it. This one is particularly relevant to this space, given that it is a book about blogging.

It is a collection called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog and it is edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte. Shana, a PhD candidate and lecturer in Women's Studies, lives in Sudbury, and I've been lucky enough to get to know her, her partner, and their son a little bit. The book will be published in May by Demeter Press. You can find out more about it and order it here.

The blurb about the book says,

This important, timely collection considers how critical mothering and writing about motherhood have, in the last few years, begun to engage with a new form of communication. All over the Internet, mommy bloggers are commenting on the radical act of being mothers and women within a world hostile to both of these identities. What are some of the questions posed by this new context for motherhood? What are the implications for sites of marginalization and diversity within the blogosphere?

Place your advanced order now, or encourage your local library to do so!

Three Links

• A new radical disability site based in Toronto called If I Can't Dance Is It Still My Revolution. Check out its challenging, realistic, and ambivalent page on being an ally.
  
  
• Another Toronto-based site, this one a blog by "a social worker with an anti-oppressive research and teaching practice... As a white, middle class woman with an elitist degree, I’m always trying to be more aware of my privilege. But I’m also a queer, disabled woman who has been living in some of the poorest areas of Montreal and Toronto". Her site is A Just Society. Check out her post sketching out some basic concepts related to sexual identity, "Queer is a State of Mind".
  
  
• And here is another blog, this one by Penny Red, "a socialist, feminist, deviant, reprobate, queer, addict, literature student, journalist and sometime blogger" based in England. In her post "Identity politics and cyberculture: We're not in Kansas anymore" she reflects on the incessant attacks she experiences as a feminist blogger and on other online attacks on people who experience oppression. She began blogging, she said, when a feminist blogger she admired was chased from the internet by misogynistic abuse: "And I thought: fuck you. Fuck all of you snide little losers and rednecks and toryboys spitting bile at keyboards in your sad little bedrooms. This is my internet too. I want it back."

Local Queer Youth Speak Up About Unsafe Schools

Here is an important article from my local corporate daily about the dangers faced by queer youth in the local school system...particularly relevant given last year's national study showing how unsafe schools are for queer youth Canada-wide, and given the pitiful initial reaction by local school officials to death threats against queer people made by a federal election candidate in a school last fall.

Youths discuss terror of being gay; Study the rainbow in schools
by Harold Carmichael, The Sudbury Star, March 13, 2009.

A teenage lesbian had this advice for an audience filled with representatives of local school boards looking to help make gay, lesbian and other non-heterosexual students feel safe in school: use rainbows.

"Put a rainbow sticker up, rainbow poster up," Colleen, 19, said at The Classroom Closet: Creating a Positive Climate for Gay and Lesbian Students workshop held at the Howard Johnson Hotel in the city Thursday.

"We see the colours and we think you just gave us a whole new breath, more oxygen.

"It just opens us up. There's a safe space ... It feels like an oxygen injection in our lungs. It feels good."

The rainbow is used as a symbol to represent gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered and two-spirited people.

Colleen was one of four local teens on a Youth Voices panel that addressed more than 35 education professionals from across the northeast during the Access Aids Network-organized workshop.

The workshop was inspired by the province's Safe Schools Act and the new bill -- Shaping a Culture of Respect in Our Schools: Promoting Safe and Healthy Relationships.

Liz Sandals, an MPP and parliamentary assistant to Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, gave the workshop's opening address before returning to Toronto on a morning flight.

Colleen, who has just returned to school to complete her diploma after time away, told delegates that because she is a lesbian, she was singled out for ridicule, acts of violence and more.

"My friends were picked on and bothered because of me," she recalled. "If you are going to target me, don't target my friends. It was just blowing my mind. It made me so upset and angry. I got picked on by girls and called a dyke. 'I'd better not catch you looking at me.'

"I still see those girls today and look away. I am a target to them. It's so wrong."

Colleen said the worst thing to happen to her was in Grade 11 when the teacher in her classroom stepped out for a moment. Three boys cornered her, pushed her down and touched her all over before she was able to pull away.

"I was like some kind of animal," she recalled. "I sat in the bathroom for one hour, shaking. It was so terrifying for me to have that happen. It took me so long to trust people after that. I still have issues with people coming up and giving me a hug. I still shake."

Ashley, 14, came out as a lesbian in Grade 8.

She said that while schools are supposed to be safe places and no students should be made to feel unwanted, that's not the case.

"Some teachers who teach religion in the Catholic schools are really homophobic," she said. "It's really hard for a student to come out when they say it's wrong to be gay."

Ashley said that a gay or lesbian student is always worried about being beaten up at school.

"I remember, for the longest time, I used to have two friends come with me to the washroom," she said.

Ashley added that when she first came out as a lesbian in Grade 8, many boys thought she would be very interested in group sex.

"They think if you are gay, 'wow! A threesome!' " she recalled. "It's hot!"

Jenista, 16, came out as a bisexual in Grade 8, and then decided in Grade 10 she was a lesbian.

"It's not really just homophobia that students have to deal with, but everything," she said. "Sometimes, our parents are not there to talk to. We just want to be able to talk to people."

Vince Bolt, 19, a transgendered, bisexual male, told the delegates the emotional trauma he went through in trying to come to grips with his identity resulted in two suicide attempts and alcoholism at the age of 13. On his left arm, he said, there are 38 scars that are the result of self-inflicted cuts. On the right arm, there are 34.

"They were my coping mechanism," said Bolt. "In Grade 11, I came out as a transgendered male -- a trans-male. I didn't know how to take it (myself ). I confided in a teacher I trusted. I know I wouldn't have made it through school without her."

Bolt also had a message for the many teachers, guidance counsellors and other school officials in the audience.

"You have the power to stop the transphobia and the homophobia in the (school) hallways," he said. "It can be done."

Another speaker, Gaston Cotnoir, Access Aids Network's healthy sexuality co-ordinator, told delegates that students, especially those in high school, have a hard time coming to grips with the fact they could be or are gay or lesbian.

"When you are in the closet, you have to watch what you say," said Cotnoir, a gay male himself. "You have to hide details. If you have a crush on a guy, you don't talk about it. For the longest time in university, I had a crush on a girl -- Stephanie. His name was actually Trevor."

Cotnoir said that students who don't want their gay or lesbian identities known sometimes resort to things like being hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine to deflect attention. Some also have very low self-esteem and get involved in unprotected sex.

"It's a very hard life for them -- lots of stress, lots of pressure." he explained. "I don't want anyone to think different about me -- guess my sexual identity."

Cotnoir said that simply being a friendly adult ear at a school for a student to talk about their sexual identity issues can do a world of good as it creates a feeling of self-esteem and self-confidence in the student's life.

The original was posted here but the Star only keeps stuff online briefly. Thanks to SC for the link.

Congratulations Andrea

This is just a quick post to congratulate Andrea Horwath on winning the leadership of the Ontario New Democratic Party. I'm not a party member and I didn't follow the race, but I remember Andrea fondly from my years of covering municipal politics in the City of Hamilton for independent print and broadcast media. She was one of the small group of social democratic feminist women mostly from the agency sector whose hard work in the face of masculinist leftist posturing and sectarianism made the 100,000 strong Hamilton Days of Action a reality in the early years of protest against the Conservative provincial government of Mike Harris. She went on to become a city and regional counsellor for the downtown ward in Hamilton. It was that role that she held when I covered local politics between roughly 1998 and 2001. Her politics are pretty standard social democracy with a feminist inflection, at least as far as I recall. However, she was consistently the most progressive voice on city and regional councils in those years (with the only dependable exception being that she would usually follow along if a neighbourhood association based in her ward took a less-than-progressive stand on some ward-based happening). I think creating a society which reflects the kinds of values claimed by most social democrats can only happen through reinvigorating social movements that are not tied to any party, and that no leader or party reorganization in the absence of that is going to be able to address the crisis that neoliberalism has thurst on social democracy around the world. Nonetheless, I'm glad Andrea won, and I wish her well in her new job.

Growing Community Challenge to Industrial Pollution in Sudbury

Don't have time to insert my own commentary, but I thought it was important to circulate this article about the growing community challenge to a flawed, corporate-driven process that claims it is examining industrial pollution in Sudbury. The strong recommendation coming out of an event on the weekend, based in the experiences of other communities that have struggled against having their health sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, is that groups in the city start a process of testing for pollution both in the environment and in human beings that is community-driven and community-guided. Sounds good to me.

Here's the article:

Activists doubt soils study is valid
By Denis St. Pierre, The Sudbury Star, March 3, 2009.

Frustrated by the process and suspicious of the results of a landmark study on industrial pollution in Greater Sudbury, environmental activists say it may be time for the community to launch its own, independent research.

"It's a really good idea and we're looking into it," said Joan Kuyek, chairwoman of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. The committee was formed last year by activists and city residents concerned about the process and findings of the Sudbury Soils Study and the study's Human Health Risk Assessment.

The soils study, which has cost more than $10 million to date, is being funded by the city's two major industrial polluters, Vale Inco and Xstrata Nickel. The two companies also have had representatives directly involved in the decision-making process behind the study, prompting critics to question the project's validity and objectivity.

As a result, activists are now contemplating the merits of launching an extensive testing program that would be independent of any influence from the mining companies.

"It's a really good idea and we're looking into it," confirmed Kuyek.

"Like 64 per cent of Sudburians, we don't really trust the findings of the Human Health Risk Assessment."

She was referring to an informal public-opinion poll on the study.

"We can't rely on the Human Health Risk Assessment."

The merits of a community-based testing program were advocated last weekend at a public forum in Sudbury attended by about 50 city residents and members of the soils study community committee.

An independent testing program in Sudbury was strongly recommended by environmental activists from New Brunswick and Port Colborne, Ont., who attended the forum.

Testing of lead concentrations in the blood of Sudburians, for example, "would force the issue" and possibly compel government to order more comprehensive study of human health issues related to industrial pollution, said New Brunswick activist Inka Milewski.

"The need for doing a blood/lead level study in Sudbury is absolutely essential," said Milewski, of the Health Watch Conservation Council of New Brunswick, which is pushing for greater research into the effects of decades of lead-smelting in the community of Belledune, N. B.

"Nothing has been more powerful in Belledune than to do our own testing and sampling," Milewski said. Launching her own soil testing in New Brunswick several years ago prompted government and industry to conduct testing and studies of their own, she noted.

Independent testing in Sudbury also was advocated by activist Diana Wiggins, who has been active in risk-assessment issues related to Vale Inco operations in Port Colborne, where a $750-million class-action lawsuit has been launched against the company.

"I would highly suggest that," said Wiggins, who also offered a cautionary tale about the reliability of basic laboratory tests commissioned by mining companies.

The community group in Port Colborne investigated the reliability of test results by purchasing soil samples from an American supplier that itemizes the precise chemical content of the soil. Identical samples then were sent to three labs, including the lab that conducted testing for the environmental study funded by Vale Inco, Wiggins said.

"Two of the three tests came back accurate," she said. The third, inaccurate test came from the lab hired by Vale Inco for official testing in Port Colborne, she added.

To date, industry and public authorities have not responded to the community group's startling findings, Wiggins said.

"We attempted to have a meeting about it with the technical committee and that meeting ended with everybody walking away from the table," she said. "So nothing has happened with it, yet. The ministry hasn't acted on it, the health department hasn't acted on it, they've just kind of swept it under the carpet. But we are going to use that information and ... ultimately the province is going to have to decide what to do about it."

It will take some time for community activists in Sudbury to determine if they can finance and organize independent testing of soil or human health impacts, Kuyek said.

"There's a lot of questions around costs and other issues. If you're going to do that, you have to have it designed properly. You would need a lot of volunteers, lab fees would be expensive and you would want a respectable body to be behind it as well. So those are the things we'll have to look at. Whether we can do it or not, I don't know. But the committee thinks it's a good idea."

Talks on Technology and Autonomist Marxism in Sudbury

In two weeks, Nick Dyer-Witheford will be visitng Sudbury and doing two talks, one on the role of gaming in constituting consciousness in the context of 21st century capitalism, and the other called "Autonomist Marxism and 21st Century Communism." The event is sponsored by radical political journal Upping the Anti. Here are the details:

Two Talks by Nick Dyer-Witheford on Empire@Play and 21st Century Communism
Nick Dyer-Witheford teaches in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (1999) which provides an analysis of information-age capitalism and the movements currently dissolving it.

* Monday March 16
Empire at Play: Virtual Games & Global Capital
1:30pm, Room FA-O55 (Upper Fraser) Laurentian University.
Video and computer games are the exemplary media of today’s Empire of global capital. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual apparatus generating the bourgeois personality required by mercantile colonialism (but also capable of criticizing it), and as twentieth-century cinema and television were integral to industrial consumerism (yet screened some of its darkest depictions), so virtual games are media constitutive of twenty-first century planetary hyper-capitalism and, perhaps, also of lines of exodus from it.

* Tuesday March 17
Autonomist Marxism and 21st Century Communism
10am, Room C-207 (Classroom Building), Laurentian University.

For more information on these talks contact Gary Kinsman at 675-1151 ext. 4221. Sponsored by Upping the Anti...a journal of theory and action http://uppingtheanti.org/

Come on out if you're in town!