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Reviews

When the foxes guard the henhouse

The unusual relationship between John McCain and the media.


A review of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by David Brock and Paul Waldman.

In this informative and thought-provoking critique of the media and its relationship with Senator John McCain, David Brock and Paul Waldman argue that McCain, the Republican candidate for the 2008 presidential election, has "cracked the code" of dealing with journalists and that’s why he’s received such favorable press coverage in the past.

The authors propose that John McCain has been well received by the media in the past because of his excellent rapport with journalists — he gave it regular access, he was willing to talk on the record, and he was never afraid to be the “guy next door” who shoots the breeze and sometimes says things he later regrets. The authors also demonstrate how McCain has cultivated his "maverick" image, encouraging reporters to think of him as a trailblazer who breaks with his own party, when his voting record shows a mainstream Republican with a few pet issues.

Another factor the authors address is the nature of the media itself. Smaller media outlets frequently use wire stories from the bigger news outlets, which tends to create a more homogeneous view of a candidate than a news consumer might otherwise get. They also compare the type of coverage he gets from his home state media, which tends to be less flattering  than the national media. The dustups between McCain and local journalists are legendary in Arizona. Brock and Waldman stick to the facts in exploring McCain’s long history with the press, neither fawning over the man nor suggesting that the national media has allowed itself to be manipulated by a cunning media strategy.

It’s a quote-heavy book that draws on numerous sources to illustrate the arguments presented on John McCain’s treatment of and by the media, from print and cable television news reporting as well as the senator’s own record, interviews, etc. The book paints the picture of a master at work, using the media carefully and deliberately in his political career.

What the book doesn’t answer, however, is why McCain abandoned this strategy when he became the Republican nominee for president. Instead of the open, collegial relationship the press had come to expect from McCain, it was instead kept at arms length. He treated it as a traditional Republican candidate would treat the press: as an enemy. Predictably, with their access taken away, the press turned on McCain. The majority of his coverage since mid-September has been negative, and the standard protestations of liberal media bias emanated from the campaign.

It is unclear why the McCain campaign would throw away one of its candidate’s greatest assets in pursuit of the presidency. This book details what a powerful weapon it was, and how skillfully McCain has wielded it in the past. In exploring McCain’s previous relationship with the press, one comes away with a new view of McCain and who he really is as a person and as a politician, rather than a nuanced view of how and why the media behaves the way it does toward the candidate. One almost feels that it is the media that is getting the free ride.
 

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Reviews

God and the “chosen one”

An evangelical Christian looks at what religion means to Obama.


 

The religion of Barack Obama has become a matter at the forefront of the 2008 American presidential race, from the media storm surrounding his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to assertions that the democratic nominee harbors a closeted Islamic faith. In his latest volume, The Faith of Barack Obama, Stephen Mansfield attempts to trace the arc of the Illinois senator’s spiritual development, casting it as a paradigm of contemporary faith with potentially profound political resonance.

Beginning with the admission that the book is "written in the belief that if a man’s faith is sincere, it is the most important thing about him, and that it is impossible to understand who he is and how he will lead without first understanding the religious vision that informs his life," Mansfield frames his work with an exceptionally honest recognition of the writer’s worldview. He regards spirituality as the imminent force of one’s life, identity, and behavior.

With an atheist mother, a stepfather practicing folk Islam, and educations at Catholic and Congregational schools, Barack Obama was not raised with unified religious influence. His faith today is one that he selected as an adult, not one that he received osmotically through his rearing. Mansfield implies Obama to be a man fortunate to have risen from the spiritual mishmash which his mother, Anne Soetoro, allowed. Mansfield somewhat disparages her as he writes, "She paid the price for her [religious] detachment by ultimately having no belonging, no tribe, no people to claim for her own," and, "Only through a steely shielding of the heart, only through a determined detachment, could a child of Barack’s age be exposed to so much incongruous religious influence and emerge undamaged."

Yet Obama’s early introduction to diverse forms of spirituality informs his belief that various religions may act as vehicles to the same objective Faith. Though later he chose to worship via the United Church of Christ, he refuses to view it as a denomination holding a monopoly over religious truth. He can appreciate pluralism despite his particular affiliation with the sect, saying in 2006, "Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

Obama did not commit to a particular church until adulthood, when he began attending the Trinity United Church headed by Reverend Jeremiah Wright in Chicago’s South Side. Seeking what he called a "vessel" for his beliefs, Obama chose it as his own. It was a church that permitted close intellectual examination of the spiritual, a method not unlike the textual deconstruction he practiced as a student of political science as an undergraduate at Harvard. It was a church in which sermons often conflated religious life with fighting oppression, much as Obama did in his job as a community organizer. It was indeed a vessel for him to enter as himself without needing to excessively remold himself. Mansfield infers that Obama did not immediately abandon the Trinity United Church after incendiary remarks, such as "God damns America," were made by Wright because of this newfound sense of belonging.

Still, Obama did not leave everything of the Trinity United Church behind, retaining a conviction in that religion and civic life need not be always divorced. In 2006 in a speech at a conference called "From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America," he deviated from the norm of secular liberalism by saying, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square…to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality."

Mansfield depicts Obama as the ultimate example of this generation’s spirituality, one not of rigid dogma but one of plasticity permitting interfaith fluidity, integration with civil life, and most of all, doubt. Though the senator has expressed belief that faith will lead him to eternal life, he has also confessed that when asked by his daughter what happens upon death, he vacillated between telling her he was uncertain or simply providing a comforting answer. Obama has professed his belief that Christ is the Lord’s son but does not believe Christianity is the sole path to God. He has attended church regularly for twenty years and staunchly supports women’s rights in Congress, yet has admitted that someday he may realize error in his pro-choice sentiments. To Mansfield, Obama is a model of this generation’s believer, that is, a believer who does not always adhere to dogma, does not always sever church and state, does not always insist that he knows but permits doubt into his faith.

This new religion is one that Mansfield compares to three other kinds of faith typified by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and George W. Bush. The difference to Mansfield is not so much the doctrinal as narrative. While Clinton has experienced faith as the exercise of social decency, McCain has kept a quietly personal religiosity separate from his position as a senator, and Bush has felt an evangelical call which provided a sense of destiny to his foray into politics. Mansfield asserts that Obama, by choosing his religion yet tolerating the religion of others, by refusing to allow faith become the sole possession of Republicans, and by allowing morality a place in public life, may heal recent wounds of partisanship, class stratification, and racial or religious rivalry to move towards an improved nation. His is a faith that today could change America.

Though certainly Mansfield often makes overly broad statements without providing evidence of their veracity, proclaiming that we live in a "faith-fixated age" and that "brilliant dresses, hats, and fashionable suits [are what] one expects of a black church in America," he offers a detailed study of Barack Obama’s spiritual development. At times it is evident that he must fight his own prejudices of what religion is, such as when he rather dismissively writes that Obama epitomizes "a new, postmodern generation that picks and chooses its own truth from traditional faith, much as a man customizes his meal at a buffet." Yet Mansfield is not so myopic as to miss that a man such as Barack Obama, who has defied so many preconceptions of what it means to have belief, may indeed help Americans have the faith to change.

Next month: A review of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by
David Brock and Paul Waldman

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Photo Essays

Scenes from Antarctica

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]


[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

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Commentary

Loss through change

Another perspective of urban renewal.


Most people hear about urban renewal and consider it a good thing. They think about slums and ghettos being turned around into safe, clean, and prosperous neighborhoods that in turn become close-knit communities. They have images of children playing baseball in the street and neighbors getting together to talk and plan festivals. It’s a popular image that accompanies a popular catch phrase. It’s also wrong. What people don’t think about is the loss of community and the locals who are forced out due to the increasing property taxes that stem from “renewal.”

Most metropolitan areas have neighborhoods that are considered “unsavory” and present an image that the city would not like to portray. Cities respond by beginning the urban renewal process. First they’ll install a park or two and a community center. Then they’ll give tax breaks to certain businesses and homebuilders in an attempt to lure them in. Then they’ll advertise about how this area that “decent” people used to avoid is now the place where they need to be. The area then takes on a tourist feel, as people begin to flood the area hoping to become part of the new “hip” place to live. Overpriced boutiques sprout up, while old food markets get torn down to make way for the large organic grocery store chain. Playgrounds and empty lots get replaced by Starbucks and tapas restaurants. Ordinances get passed to get rid of street performers in favor of kiosks that give directions. Streets get completely renovated until the area no longer resembles the community that used to thrive there.

These changes cause problems for the people who have lived in the area. Their rents go up, while their old gathering places come down. Many of them can’t afford the groceries in the new trendy organic market, and they could never dream of affording the clothes in the boutique that replaced the old vintage shop. Their bars and restaurants are no longer places to meet their friends but are filled to capacity with the new crowd. The city has taken over their community festivals, which now feature large corporate sponsorships and are so crowded that the locals can’t even park at their own homes. New neighborhood associations mandate restorations on the old houses they live in. The Joneses move in, outspending neighbors in vain attempts to best them. Gone is the concern or respect for the people who were there before them. Alienation settles in, as old neighbors and friends move out.

In a decade’s time, I’ve watched firsthand the life of an entire neighborhood from ghetto, to renewal, to trendy, to cliché, to decline, and back into ghetto. Once the locals move out and the neighborhood loses its character, many of the newcomers no longer find it desirable. The once-hip place gets left behind, as its residents look to the next happening place to call home — typically another community undergoing renewal. So as the old neighborhood becomes totally vacated, taxes and rents get lowered until the only people moving in are those who can’t afford anything else. Of course after some time, these new residents will have set up their own community and brought some sense of character, and the city will take notice and begin the entire process again.

I think it’s important for communities to exist in a large city. A city is not defined by buildings and attractions but by the people who call it home.
It is they who preach the loudest when their parks and roads are not being properly maintained. It is they who protest when a new parking deck is being planned for an empty lot where their children play. They are the ones who gather in droves when neighborhood crime rates spike.

If urban renewal is to spread, perhaps cities should consider putting it into the hands of the locals. Instead of businesses and politicians deciding which businesses would improve an area, residents should have the say as to what they might enjoy. They might choose a dive bar over that expensive wine bar.    

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Commentary

Autumn visitors

Shaking up the campus.


Autumn – the season of change, of turning inwards for warmth as the summer sun fades -– is always a time for excitement at universities. Classes begin, friendships are rekindled, and roommates meet for the first time. Students are reminded once again of the unique pleasures and challenges of school living, of the joys of this liminal space brimming with knowledge for those between youth and the “real life.”

At Columbia University, where I am an undergraduate senior, autumn is also high-profile visitor season. At least once a semester, an infamous guest appears on campus, addresses over-excited students, and then exits. Often, the Daily News or the New York Post weigh in on the event:  “Columbia Hosts a Thug” opined the Post when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared on the scene last September.

This year’s visitors came on the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Students were ecstatic when they found out that Columbia was hosting a forum for presidential candidates Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain  as part of the ServiceNation Summit, a two-day gathering of leaders highlighting volunteer and national service. The candidates’ presence, especially that of campus favorite Obama, a 1983 grad, was expected to exorcise the ghosts of fall speeches past.

In late 2005, I was a freshman when I saw John Ashcroft, who’d stepped down as Attorney General earlier in the year, speak to a hot undergraduate-filled auditorium. Some students brought banners decrying torture; others presented rational arguments during the question-and-answer portion of the event. I stayed up the rest of the night, buoyed by adrenaline, to write a paper due the next day at 9 a.m. At the fourth or fifth hour of my vigil, I realized that the political themes of the Ashcroft spectacle – the debate over security, national identity, civil liberties – had informed my understanding of Thucydides’ reading of the Peloponnesian Wars.

This is what they meant by extracurricular education, I thought. I was pleased.

The next fall, when I was a sophomore, the College Republicans invited the Minuteman vigilante group’s leader Jim Gilchrist to discuss the perils of letting immigrants over the Mexican border. Many student groups, led by the Chicano Caucus, viewed the event as deeply offensive, even threatening. I was covering the swelling protests on campus for a student magazine when a cluster of friend reporters cried out that chaos had broken out. After an introduction by an African American preacher, Gilchrist began spewing invective against the heckling students in attendance. A Chicano Caucus-led contingent then burst onto his platform to unveil a banner that read “No Human is Illegal” in English, Spanish, and Arabic. Minutemen supporting Gilchrist responded by trying to rip down the banner. College Republicans jumped into the fray, and a Latino student was kicked in the head by a middle-aged, burly, booted vigilante.

In the weeks that followed, “The O’Reilly Factor” had a heyday with the debacle, University President Lee Bollinger – a free speech lawyer – denounced the student protesters, and the Columbia blog at which I was an editor received dozens of threats and vile messages. One read simply: “your worse then the mooselums [sic] who flew the planes into the buildings.”

My bright-eyed freshman enthusiasm for Thucydides on the wane, I stared head-on at the ugly side of racism, media bias, and violence underpinning various aspects of American society. 

Within weeks of returning to campus, this time for my junior year,  we received a jolt of news: Iran’s Ahmadinejad, who’d reportedly called for a “world without the United States and Zionism,” had been invited to speak at the university’s World Leaders Forum. The press exploded. On the day of the speech, nearly sick with excitement, I entered an auditorium buzzing with reporters, students both angry and curious, and sedate professors, while outside, thousands of students watched on massive screens. It was here that Ahmadinejad said, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country” and called Iran “friends with the Jewish people.” 

My friends’ reactions ended up on USA Today, The New York Times, international wires as well as Fox and CNN. I soon learned that Richard Bulliet, a history professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, was behind Ahmadinejad’s invitation. In an interview with me for The Bwog, he explained, “My feeling, what I wanted, was to see to what degree this event can serve as a brake on the push towards war.…What kind of a triumph would it be to bring down Ahmadinejad?”

So with these memories of speeches past, I geared up this September for what I thought would be the most exciting autumn addresses yet: Obama and McCain, either of whom could become the next president of the United States. The excitement was all the more palpable because of their Columbia connections: Obama as an alum and McCain as the father of a 2007 grad.

“You realize that he’s had the exact same education as us,” a female student said of Obama. Her eyes brightened. “He’s read The Wretched of the Earth too.” For McCain’s part, he wasn’t just a Columbia parent; he also delivered the keynote address to graduates in 2006. We felt these things were significant.

By 8 p.m. on the big night, thousands of students had swarmed over the steps of Low Library, Columbia’s popular  hangout, to watch the event on a large screen. The expanse of stone and brick was covered with picnics, games, books, blankets, beer bottles, water jugs, cigarettes, and cameras. Clusters of students became territorial about their 2-by-4-foot plots of brick ground, and bathroom runs were out of the question. There was something epic about our rock concert stance, as if we expected to wave lighters or break out in mass dancing.

McCain, we were told, had won a coin toss to be the first interviewed by PBS correspondent Judy Woodruff and Time editor Richard Stengel. McCain said America should expand its military without a draft. He also criticized Columbia for not allowing Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) recruitment on campus, a measure first taken to protest the Vietnam War and later reaffirmed because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay personnel. After a commercial break, Obama took the stage. He too called for the expansion of the military, and he also criticized Columbia’s stance on ROTC.

Suddenly, things were not as they had seemed. We had assumed Obama read Fanon, that he understood us and represented our intellectual desires. But on the ServiceNation stage, under the scrutiny of television viewers, he joined McCain in criticizing our school for its hard-line stance for gay rights. We were at a loss.

In my first three autumns of college, I came to understand that the truths we held self-evident were really strands of many truths tied together with frayed edges. Politics was messier than I ever imagined. And big issues – about civil liberties, racism, and foreign policy, to name a few – were so complex it was a wonder anyone made any progress. Watching McCain and Obama laud service, I hoped desperately for a deep, real change.

Additional Reading:

The rationale of Richard Bulliet

President Ahmadinejad delivers remarks at Columbia University

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Commentary

Amalgamation

A collective identity.


 

     As I step uncertainly through the doors beyond the Nothing to Declare lane, a catholicity of stimuli greets my senses. A sea of earth-toned faces of various gradations waits eagerly. Arab North Africans, dark-haired Andalucianos, and fair-skinned Vascos mix with expectant German and American tourists, completing a cultural mosaic. The dry, crisp smell of winter hits my nose, making it tingle slightly. I think I am already engulfed, when suddenly I hear it: the deep, sonorous music of words. 

    It slides off tongues quickly, but consciously, pointedly. It lacks the song-like sprightliness of Swiss-French and the sharp, long tones of Swiss-German. Dialogue now has a smooth, rich molasses quality; it clings to the ears like the lingering aftertaste of a robust red wine on an attune palate.

   “Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.”
   “Hola guapa, que tal?”
   “Como fue tu viaje cariño?” 
   I am inundated, overwhelmed, enraptured.

    In Salamanca, Spain, I was una americana to the Spaniards, “so Euro” to the Americans, and to the three Gabonese in the entire city, I was une Camerounaise—une belle café au lait, that they would gladly bring home to Mom and Dad. My identity shifted constantly, based on the story I told people. When I felt like being adventurous, I laid it all out—a ten-minute saga describing my Cameroonian origins and upbringing, my current dual residency in Geneva and Providence, and the fact that I now simultaneously call three continents home.

    Other times, surrounded by scrutinizing Spaniards who claimed “hablas muy bien para una americana,” I claimed Boston as my home turf, although I have never lived there, and neither of my parents are from there. Given my time at Brown University, only fifty short minutes from the city, and the many summers I escaped Cameroon to find solace in Boston’s commercialized downtown districts, I figured I could make this slight breach of the truth. Mom often attested that she was from Boston when questioned. Although she was born in Georgia and lived most of her life outside North America, “Boston is the place where I spent the most time within the U.S.” she would justify. Calling it my own didn’t seem too far-fetched, I decided. —

    When I felt like being exotic, I snobbily expounded on my life in Geneva with tales of Gruyère and Vacherin fondue savored with Chasselas wine, indulgent soirees at expensive Swiss night clubs, and daytrips through the Alps. With these slightly fictionalized accounts, I dazzled the Americans, coloring their pre-existing fantasies of Europe as a bastion for cultural and gastronomic excellence.

    But encountering sub-Saharan Africans in Salamanca made me squirm.

    “Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?“ they would ask, as if my seventeen years in Cameroon and native Cameroonian father guaranteed that I would speak French and the language of my father’s ethnic group perfectly. The backlog of memories from my upbringing in an isolated international, largely American, community in the heart of Yaoundé would stream before me, strangling my tongue. I didn’t speak perfect French, or my father’s Bamileke language, because  we spoke English at home. And so that was my final answer.

    Whenever I came into contact with Cameroonians the realization that I was half-white often emerged amid these heated cultural discussions, often followed by a barrage of professions of love and marriage proposals.  To these I simply answered no, in Spanish, the language that helped erase some of the societal barriers that threatened to separate us extranjeros. Most often it served to unite us across cultures, creeds and colors in our new country.

    As I grappled with my identity, for perhaps the first time since freshman year—when I was encouraged to associate and self-identify based on my race—I  had to recall my personal mission for my study abroad. My desire to experience Spain was the primary objective, and although this understanding would be colored by culture and identity, I would not allow these issues to obfuscate that goal.

    The truth is that I am an amalgamation of all these cultures, each subsequent experience in my life shedding a little piece of itself into my collective identity. Pooled together, these seemingly disparate parts have become the all-encompassing me.

  ***

    It has been three months since my American comrades and I have hit Iberian soil, and tonight we have begun yet another noche de fiesta.

   We sashay along, Marlboro Lights in hand, teeth tinged blue by cheap Ribero wine, swaying to the music in our heads. Passing by O’Hares we laugh at the American mini-circles of exclusion, holding the walls for balance against the turbulent forces of legal drinking. We smirk at the Spaniards calling out their piropos to us with that sensually slurred manner, undoubtedly attributable to the calimocho we have all been drinking for hours. I am sloppily reflecting on the lewd, wine-savoring stereotypical Castellanos before us, the kind we hear about from politically correct northeastern American tourists returning from their first European vacations, utterly scandalized. And then, puzzlingly, I am gripped by something.   

    There is something all too familiar about los Castellanos, both men and women. It is an indescribable, amorphous passion for life that one cannot fully describe and must simply be experienced. It is something that many Americans are removed from in their commercialized, commoditized lives-on-the-go and something many Europeans tend to regard as inappropriately effusive in societies where emotions are expressed through a veil of reservation.

    It is a fervor that reminds me of the countless celebratory, makossa music-infused Cameroonian nights, garnished with bitter plums, ndolé greens and rice, topped off with palm wine. I remember the numerous troops of joggers who would trot by our school in Yaoundé singing in harmonious tones almost unaware of their beautiful sound; the creativity of the little boys in my quartier, who would use metal and rubber from old flip-flops to create trucks and cars to play with. I am taken back to the cries that would shake the valley when a goal was made or missed during a Cameroonian football game and the pride with which Cameroonians embrace their culture—seeking out occasions to speak their native tongues, wearing their traditional clothes in cultures of suffocating uniformity and commercialism, gaining simple happiness by meeting other Africans in foreign lands, and artfully recreating customs and traditions through music, food, and art. The Cameroonian and African zest for life is something that I had never seen reproduced so powerfully in any other country.

    But Spain embraces its own customs as fervently and passionately as Cameroonians. I was taken aback each time I observed the multitude of older men sitting in plazas sipping on cafes con leche and tortilla espanola while reading El País; the way the city shuts down at two p.m. and everyone goes home for the sacred family lunch, followed by the religiously-observed cena six hours later; the constant responses of no pasa nada and tranquila which categorize the Spanish mentality; the tapas bars and vinotecas bursting with people eating, conversing, watching their favorite teams battle it out in La Liga, and of course the passionate, drunken uprisings upon each potentially goal-resulting flick of the foot. This lifestyle, and the way los Castellanos embrace it, strikes a deep chord in me; it resonates and harmonizes with the other facets of my identity. It is as if somehow a piece of Cameroon has nuzzled its way into mi Salamanca, this tiny diverse town.
   

     Mom always remarked on the dancing at parties thrown by her African friends. People were never shy; everyone was extremely outgoing and eager to move. Whereas at parties sponsored by her white American friends, people had to be pried off their chairs and lured to the dance floor, or jostled out of their comfortable chatting circles after one too many beers. This memory comes to me as I sit at the bar at Capitoleum, surrounded by eager Castellanos trying to chat up my friends and me. I am amused. As a short, dark-haired Andaluciano approaches me, I smile. He thinks I’m flirting with him, but I’m really smiling at the memory, lifted from the rest,  rising to the forefront of my mind. “Anímate, be alive,” he encourages. He is aggressive, nearly knocking me off my chair with his forceful, tugging hands. As we rise and join the stream of dancers, I lose myself in exuberance.

Glossary

Spanish terms:

“Querida mía, hace mucho tiempo.” – Darling, it has been awhile.
“Hola guapa, que tal?” – Hello gorgeous, how are you?
“Como fue tu viaje cariño?”  – How was your trip, sweetie?
Una Americana – an American woman
“Hablas muy bien para una Americana” – You speak Spanish well for an American woman
Extranjeros – foreigners
Piropos – cat calls and flirtatious comments
Calimocho – typical Spanish drink made of beer and red wine
Los Castellanos – Spanish people
Cafes con leche – coffee with milk
Tortilla Espanola – Spanish dish made of eggs, onions and potatoes
El País – Spanish periodical
Cena – dinner
No pasa nada/tranquila – don’t worry about it
Vinotecas – wine bars
Salamanca – small town in Central-West part of Spain

French terms:

Une Camerounaise – a Cameroonian woman
Une belle café au lait – a beautiful coffee with milk
Gruyère and Vacherin – two types of cheeses native to Switzerland
Chasselas wine – typical Swiss wine often eaten with fondue
“Mais, tu parles français avec un accent américain? Et la langue de ton pere?” – But you speak French with an American accent. And what about your father’s language?
Bamileke – Language spoken by the Bamileke people of Western Cameroon
Makossa – type of music popular in Cameroon
Ndolé – Cameroonian dish made of greens and bits of beef
Quartier – neighborhood

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News

A bridge too far

Protests at the RNC in St. Paul.


 

 

My wife and I were driving home from a long Labor Day weekend spent in northern Minnesota. Traffic was light, considering there were more than 50,000 visitors in the Twin Cities for the Republican National Convention (RNC). At the other end of the Mississippi River, 1,200 miles to the south, Hurricane Gustav was slamming into New Orleans, the first hurricane to do so since Katrina in 2005. The country held its collective breath, waiting to see what damage the storm would bring, but in the streets of St. Paul, pepper spray hung in the air, riot police crushed protesters into the asphalt, and the National Guard stood watch.

We listened to reports of the chaos on the radio, hunched forward in our seats as our car zipped toward our apartment in St. Paul. By the time we collapsed into our beds that evening, exhausted from the long weekend, nearly 300 protesters were in jail. What began as a call for peace and a demonstration against the Republican Party ended in smashed windows, tear gas, and mass arrests. And this was only the first day.

Between Monday, Sept. 1 and Thursday, Sept. 4, the St. Paul Police Department and other cooperating agencies arrested 818 protesters. The vast majority of the protesters were nonviolent, but the police used pepper spray, tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, and other “less lethal” crowd control measures. They conducted mass arrests, cordoning off streets and arresting everyone, including street medics, innocent bystanders, and journalists. Downtown St. Paul looked like a police state, filled with police officers in riot gear, an alphabet soup jumble of federal agents with three-letter acronyms, and National Guard soldiers.

Rick Kelley, of Coldsnap Legal Collective, a group of concerned citizens dedicated to providing support to activists involved in the legal system, was taken aback at the intensity of the police response. "I didn’t expect the preemptive raids, I didn’t expect the felonies, I didn’t expect the invocation of terrorism charges against people who are as far from terrorists as anyone I’ve ever met," Kelley said. "The kind of police response that we experienced was, I think, unprecedented in a lot of ways, and it shocked me."

Irene Greene, a practicing therapist and a coordinator with North Star Health Collective, felt the same way.

"It was a much wilder scene than any of us anticipated, but we were prepared for the worst, so folks were prepared for what they had to deal with: people getting beat by batons and beat up in jail, and tasers,” said Greene.

North Star Health Collective (NSHC) is a group of health care workers, students and community activists who are dedicated to access to health care for all, regardless of ability to pay. During the RNC, volunteers associated with NSHC organized, manned, and operated a first aid and wellness center in downtown St. Paul. The center housed a first aid station, a base of operations for the street medics who tended to injuries of both protesters and police, an outdoor decontamination center for people who’d been sprayed with chemical irritants, and a wellness center to help people cope with the mental trauma of protest-related violence.

First aid centers are common at large-scale protest events like the RNC, but the attention to the mental health needs of protesters was something new.

 

 

 

"One of the things that was especially unique about our center was that there hasn’t, to our knowledge, been a wellness and first aid center that has combined crisis counseling with the first aid/medic component," said Greene.

During the events surrounding the RNC, 58 street medics came from around the country and assisted more than 1,100 individuals with injuries as minor as blisters and sunburn and as severe as taser wounds and projectile injuries. There were 375 people decontaminated at the washing station outside the first aid and wellness center, 65 people treated at the first aid center, and another 85 counseled at the wellness center. There were 21 street medics who were arrested once, and four who were arrested twice, despite clear markings.

The volunteers and activists of Coldsnap Legal Collective (CLC) were also standing by to provide assistance to the protest groups. "Long days, little sleep, and a barrage of phone calls from people out on the street," said Becky, who asked that her last name be withheld, from CLC.  Coldsnap encouraged protesters to write their legal hotline number on their arms or legs, so if they were arrested, the police couldn’t take it away. They fielded calls from protesters in the thick of the action, people who’d been arrested and were making their one phone call, and people who’d been released from jail. CLC served as a liaison between those in jail and their friends and family. They also maintained a vigil outside the Ramsey County Jail, so that arrestees would have warm food, clean clothes, and a hug when they were released.

The police were as prepared for the protests as the activists were. Infiltrators placed inside the protest groups kept the police informed on the protest actions planned during the week. On Friday, Aug. 29, the police launched a series of preemptory raids targeting activist groups and independent journalists when they entered the Convergence Space, a gathering place for anti-RNC activists. The next morning, there were three more raids in Minneapolis and another in St. Paul. The St. Paul raid targeted the base of operations of I-Witness Video, a NY-based group of photojournalists whose mission is to film and document police abuse. Video taken by I-Witness helped invalidate many of the charges filed in arrests surrounding the 2004 RNC in New York. Also targeted in the raids were the "RNC 8," prominent members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an ironically named activist group. These eight people have been charged under the Patriot Act, and they face terrorism riot charges.

"Monday and Thursday were really big decontamination days," said Greene.  On Monday, about 10,000 marchers from several different groups came to protest the war. The majority of protesters walked, chanted, and waved signs, but a few broke windows and blocked traffic. The police clamped down hard on the violence, arresting nearly 300, including journalists and street medics. They used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other "less than lethal" crowd-control measures, and eventually arrested almost 300 people, including passers-by caught up in the violence, and Amy Goodman, Nicole Salazar, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous from Democracy Now!

The protests and police violence culminated on Thursday in a drama played out over several hours on several highway overpasses near the state capital. A rally held at 4 p.m. fired up a crowd of about 2,000 for a march at 5 p.m., when the group’s legal permit to assemble expired. When the protesters headed for the Xcel Energy Center and the Republican delegates who were beginning to arrive, mounted police cut them off, blocking their path on the John Ireland bridge. As protesters moved east, to the Marion and Cedar Street bridges, the police moved as well, closing all downtown overpasses over the interstate and blocking the protesters’ path with snowplows, mounted police, and cops in riot gear, brandishing batons.

The standoff ended in the inevitable way. As the sun set and darkness settled in, the police issued the final order to disperse. Shortly thereafter, they moved in with tear gas, pepper spray, concussion grenades, and full riot gear.  The police drove the group onto the Marion Street bridge and arrested everyone, including journalists and street medics.

"When I was out there on Thursday night, one of the first instances that happened is basically that this line of mounted police formed in front of some of my friends and I, and I stood there for several minutes, my friend and I stood there with our arms around each other and stood in front of them and just stood there,” said Becky. “All I wanted to do was have them look me in the eyes. And they wouldn’t do it. I actually said at one point, ‘Look me in the eyes, please look me in the eyes right now, and the woman looked down and gave this uncomfortable laugh […and said], ‘I can’t, I’m watching the crowd,’ and I thought, no, it’s because in the next minute if you’re ordered to beat the crap out of me, looking me in the eyes and recognizing me as a human being might prevent you from doing that. Making that human connection with me right now might prevent you from doing your job."

Becky, Greene and Kelley all agree that the purpose of the police actions seemed to be to demoralize protesters, to isolate them from their fellow activists and to discourage further protests, Instead of tearing activists apart, the harsh actions of the police had the opposite effect.

"I truly do not believe that anyone involved in the protester side of the convention is going to come out of that and say, ‘Well, clearly they’re right. Clearly I should no longer be anti-authoritarian,” said Becky. “Clearly, the government and the state and the police . . . know what’s up and I should probably listen to them from now on. You guys win.’ That’s not what we’re going to see, that’s not what we’re seeing. If nothing else, people are more politicized."

The response a lot of people have, in the example of Amy Goodman’s arrest, is, "She should have stopped when the cops told her to." When asked about Thursday’s events, many people respond, "Oh, well, their permit expired at 5 p.m. They shouldn’t have been there." Both of these arguments boil down to "You should do what you’re told." And that’s true, at least if you want to stay out of jail. I knew at 5:30, when the standoff on the bridges over I-94 was just beginning, that there were going to be arrests and tear gas and everything else. Every person on that bridge, be they protester, police, journalist or observer, must have known it too. After the events earlier in the week, how could they not?

The problem comes in when what you’re being told to do is unjust. Then you have two choices: go home and allow the injustice to continue or refuse to do what you’re told, make your voice heard, and suffer the consequences. When the state is unjust, you can’t wait for the state to give you permission to object to their actions. During the civil rights movement, marchers were refused permits and faced fire hoses and police dogs. They marched anyway, because they knew what they stood for was honorable and just. This is why people stayed in the streets of St. Paul, knowing what was about to happen to them and standing defiant. They had something to say and were determined to be heard.

In situations like these, I try to think about things from the opposing view. What was going through the minds of the police involved? I assume, from the cops I’ve met and known, that most of the police involved were good people doing the best they could in a tough but necessary job.

“I don’t think you can police always for the best in the crowd. You have to police for the worst in the crowd,” said Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher in an interview with Amy Goodman. It wasn’t an easy situation, either. Downtown St. Paul was filled with celebrities from around the country. The national spotlight was fixed on our city. We wanted to make a good impression.

Also assumed: the police are a tool of the state. They are the monopoly on violence that any government must maintain, without which it cannot exist. I buy into government’s basic assumption: violence is inevitable. We are all humans. We are violent creatures. Someone will always be in charge. But I also buy into the basic assumption of anarchy: I am my own best boss. If we all treat each other like adults, we don’t need the enormous infrastructure of government and we can all get along. It’s an optimistic viewpoint, and I buy it. At least until someone gets shot.

So what happened? Why did the police turn on the citizens of the Twin Cities and our guests with such brutal force? Why did they spend so much time infiltrating activist groups? Why did they use pepper spray, tear gas, and concussion grenades against nonviolent protesters? Did it have anything to do with the $10 million lawsuit insurance policy the city of St. Paul negotiated with the Republican National Convention?

"If you’re going into something knowing that you’re not going to be held accountable in your community… and you’re not going to have to deal with that public pressure, I think it lifts a little bit of that weight off your shoulders and gives you a little be more free reign,” said Becky.

The agreement, made between the RNC and the city of St. Paul, is unprecedented, and covered "up to $10 million in damages and unlimited legal costs for law enforcement officials accused of brutality, violating civil rights and other misconduct," according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in an article published Sept. 3, 2008. An agreement like this creates a situation where the police don’t have to worry about the legality of their actions, because they know there won’t be any heat from taxpayers. Instead, maintaining "order" becomes the prime directive, and constitutional rights are violated in the interest of temporary security.

It’s easy, though, to get bogged down in the negativity that surrounded the RNC. Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin may have mocked community organizers in their speeches to the Republican delegates, but on the streets of St. Paul, friendships were being forged in the crucible of a shared crisis. Communities were organized. "I feel like I met people that I will be friends with for life," said Greene. "To go through something like that, it’s definitely a uniting experience."

Giuliani, Palin and others may sneer at people who care enough to go out into their community, reach out and try to make their community a better place, but it hasn’t stopped those who were brought together by events surrounding the RNC. One of the shared goals of the many activist groups that protested at the RNC in 2008 was to build solidarity and bring together like-minded people. In that sense, the protests were a success.

 

 

 

Epilogue
Becky, Coldsnap Legal Collective:
"One of the most beautiful things I saw out of this week was how close we became as a community. The number of hugs that I got, the length of time of those hugs. We held each other longer, we cried together. People that I didn’t know that well before the event, I could meet them on the street and be like, ‘I remember talking to you when you were in jail, I’m really glad you’re out. Can I give you a hug? How are you doing? Thank you for being out on the street,’ and they would respond with ‘Thank you for being in the office.’ That kind of mutual support and mutual aid and caring was really great.

"The state uses this divide and conquer technique. We saw that on a smaller scale in the convention, even in just little things, like isolating individuals, putting them in solitary, or dropping them off in the middle of nowhere after they got out of jail,  It’s trying to isolate people, trying to make people feel like they’re alone, feel like they don’t have any people to support them. Those isolation tactics can be very useful if we don’t recognize that together, we’re really strong and we have each other’s backs. If we allow members of our community, whether radical or not, to be isolated and to be picked off, it makes the larger group smaller. They just keep picking us off one by one.

"We have amazing community resources in our city right now. We have a legal collective where none existed before. We have a radical healthcare collective. We have a community bike space. We have a group that formed around confronting and dealing with sexual assault in society… there are things to be optimistic about."

 

I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

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Dissent and repression at the DNC

The untold story.


 

Lots of people were yelling. Black helicopters circled over our heads. I ran between groups of black-clad protesters huddled together and fending off the police…or were the police fending off the protesters? Two thick lines of riot police had us surrounded. By us I mean about 300 anti-capitalist protesters, the journalists crazy enough to follow them, and some unfortunately curious passers-by. The cop lines were closing in, pepper spray was going off and protesters were disappearing under piles of cops before being arrested and dragged away.

Some of the protesters were yelling about the “police state,” others were chanting “no violence, no violence,” and some were just screaming for medics.

It was Aug. 25, and we were in Denver, Colorado. The Democratic Party was celebrating the opening night of its 2008 convention just miles away, but in the streets protesters were trying to throw a different type of party. The cops were just not having it.

One of the protesters was Mac Tuttle, a young anarchist most recently from Washington. Tuttle was 13 years old when his friend’s mother Celia taught him about the police state by simply telling him the story of her own past. Celia was a political exile from Argentina, where her father worked as a journalist before his criticisms of the government angered the wrong officials. Celia’s family was forced to flee the country in fear of imprisonment, or worse. Since her youth Celia has called herself an anarchist and maintained the position that government does more harm to democracy than good.

Inspired by Celia and the romance of the underground, Tuttle ran away from home to live in a communal “punk house” in Greenville, NC. He has always had his qualms with the state, but now, at age 20, his anger at the system, and its police, has deepened further. That’s because Tuttle was one of 106 “anti-capitalist” radicals rounded up, physically intimidated, and arrested during the single “nonviolent” protest-turned police riot on the opening night of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

In a scene that conjured up the violent images of the 1968 DNC in Chicago 40 years earlier, armed police surrounded a group of several hundred protesters during a non-permitted march that took the streets around Denver’s Civic Park. Police were generous with their pepper spray, which was dispensed from canisters, pellet-ball guns, and large cannon blasts. Several protesters reported that the police also used tear gas and rubber bullets to subdue the crowd. Even civilians, including journalists and curious passers-by, were pepper sprayed or struck by police, and then held on the street for more than two hours before being arrested.

“[The police] didn’t care about anybody,” Tuttle said later. He said that he saw riot police order a young woman who didn’t look like she belonged in the protest to back up, but when she tried to obey their orders she found herself trapped beside an immobile group of protesters. “This cop kicks her in the stomach, whips out his (pepper spray ball) rifle, and shoots three people. This chick was trying to back up, and he just shot her.”

This particular police riot did not receive the same attention from the national media as the larger demonstrations that lead to violence at the Republican National Convention, so many of those who were arrested and allegedly abused by police fear that their story may never be heard, and that authorities in Denver will never be held accountable for the way they handled, and stifled, dissent.

On that Monday evening, it became obvious to journalists and demonstrators alike that the hundreds of police who blockaded the march knew exactly who they were after, so understanding the roots of the riot starts with understanding the anarchists and radicals who converged on Denver and inspired a police state in the first place.

The calm before the storm

On the morning of Sunday, Aug. 24, I woke up on some unknown patio wrapped in a tarp and a light sleeping bag. With me was William Aanstoos, a 19-year-old college dropout who traveled to Denver from Asheville, NC to protest the DNC. I had met and befriended Aanstoos when I backpacked to Asheville in July. There we made plans to stick together in Denver because neither of us had ever been to the city, knew anyone who lived there or had any place to stay, which is how we ended up crowd surfing at a punk show and sleeping in some activist’s back yard together.

On the surface, Aanstoos typifies the young anarchist radicals who show up to represent the anti-capitalist left at large protests: white, middle class, independent, and radicalized by punk rock and the romantic allure of  the underground anarchist communities that can be found anywhere in the country yet remain virtually invisible to the uninitiated. I knew, however, that Aanstoos is also a well-educated, shy kid who had left his home in Texas for college only a year before. I also knew that the DNC would be the first time Aanstoos would find himself on the front lines of a confrontational protest, so I felt obliged to look after him as he looked after me.

That Sunday morning the radical rapping duo Dead Prez kicked off a series of anti-war demonstrations with a performance on the steps of Colorado’s state legislature. I filtered through the hipster socialists, the super-paranoid 9/11 Truthers, and assorted hippie types and found the grungy looking, black-clad twenty-somethings I was looking for. One of them handed me the memo: a small, glossy flier detailing information on the upcoming “direct actions” as planned by the anarchist group Unconventional Denver and its allies.

Aanstoos told me his reasons for protesting were about the same as those posed by Unconventional Denver; the Democrats, although liberal, were simply the not-so-bad-guys whose existence only upholds a system of government that has failed to meet the needs of its people and wages perpetual war against foreign countries and the millions immigrants, workers, minorities, and impoverished peoples that fill its prisons and ghettos.

“We just want to show that there’s other options out there,” he said.
 
The actions and protests planned by Unconventional Denver, the local wing of Unconventional Action, were part of the broader DNC Disruption, a coalition of radical activist groups seeking to disrupt delegate activities and bring “the DNC to a halt” according to their website, www.dncdisruption08.org. It was an attempt to simultaneously crash the Democrats’ party and bring the public’s attention away from mainstream politics and to the spectacles created by protest groups offering the anarchist alternative to the system of global capital ultimately supported by Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Unconventional Denver and their more moderate allies in the Recreate ’68 coalition spent well over a year planning the protests at the DNC. They distributed stylish propaganda newspapers and flashy wall posters across the country. They organized workshops and legal information for activists interested in confrontational demonstrations that could disrupt DNC activities. They held meetings across the country and networked with activists ranging from the Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war feminists of Code Pink to the hard-line anarchists associated with Unconventional Action and the RNC Welcoming Committee, whose “leadership” was arrested and charged with “conspiracy to riot” and “furtherance of terrorism” under Minnesota’s version of the Patriot Act in early in September.

Denver officials were not in the dark about the planned protests. In May an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit revealed that Congress allocated $50 million to reimburse Denver for security-related expenses, and city budgeted $18 million for crowd deterrent equipment, which manifested on the streets as body armor, tear gas guns, pepper spray canons, guns that shoot paint ball-like pepper spray capsules, black armored vans, gas masks, and riot helmets for the thousands of cops that showed up from counties across Colorado.

After Dead Prez played on Sunday morning, I took an hour or two to walk around downtown Denver and observe the police presence. They were everywhere; riding in motorcycle brigade, in unmarked vans and cars, hanging around in every public park, standing on street corners, and even patrolling the streets on dozens of bicycles. As soon as anti-war marchers took the streets, police seemed to just appear out of the walls to observe and contain a series of peaceful protests.

Despite the hundreds of protesters and police that gathered in central Denver on Sunday, the demonstrations were mostly peaceful and few arrests were made. Even Unconventional Denver’s “street reclamation party,” an non-permitted parade that featured boom boxes blaring music from shopping carts and around two hundred masked radicals blocking intersections, ended peacefully. The police did finally face off with the radicals outside of the capital building, but when the protesters ignored the order to disperse the police simply walked into their front lines and guided them back onto the sidewalk. It was clear the neither side was interested in escalation. It was as if the police knew nothing violent was planned during that parade, so they simply cleared the streets after the kids had their fun. But this was all about to change.

The convergence center

Aanstoos and I spent our Sunday evening at Unconventional Denver’s ad hoc “convergence center,” a rented hall in Denver’s industrial district. The center had a small kitchen, tables covered in anarchist ‘zines and publications, an area designated to street medics, and a large area to hold meetings. A volunteer security force watched the front door night and day. A sign on the door announced that booze, drugs, recording devices, and cops were prohibited, but there was a giant bowl of condoms in the unisex bathroom.

That night Unconventional Denver held a meeting to discuss the next day’s set of actions, which would include an “anti-capitalist bloc,” which basically translates to “Black Bloc.”

Black Bloc is a style of protesting that became infamous during the anti-globalization movement almost a decade ago. During massive protests, international swarms of black-clad anarchists provoked (or were provoked, depending on who you talk to) to riot at the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle and outside of G8 meetings in European cities like Prague in 2000 and Genoa in 2001.

There was no talk of rioting or violence at Unconventional Action’s meeting, but it was clear from their discussion that this Black Bloc would not be an average street protest.

Police intimidation began almost immediately after the meeting ended, as if they had been listening into the meeting the entire time. A car full of anarchists was pulled over in the parking lot as soon as they left. Around 10 anarchists gathered outside the convergence center to observe the police, and within minutes there were eight police vehicles and over a dozen cops sitting in the parking lot. After about fifteen very tense minutes, the cops pulled away without issuing the driver a ticket.

Things heat up

The Black Bloc protest was planned for 7 p.m. on Monday, so Aanstoos and I spent our afternoon locating “The Freedom Cage,” as Denver activists had nicknamed it. The Freedom Cage is a parking lot just outside of shouting distance from DNC headquarters at Denver’s Pepsi Center. The lot is surrounding by metal fences and outfitted with a microphone and speakers. It was created to be a “free speech zone” for protesters, but for whatever reason the protesters refused to use it, with the exception of some college-age leftists who set up an overnight shantytown for camping there.

When I arrived at The Freedom Cage it was empty except for a few curious reporters. There wasn’t much to look at except for a large piece of poster board with a sign-up sheet for speakers.

Here are some of the speeches that were planned for The Freedom Cage:

“I Agree Completely” by A. Hitler
“This Is Awesome” by Joseph Stalin
“I Could Wear My Dress Here” by J. Hoover
“I honor and accept this nomination…and promise more cages” by Sen. Joe Biden

Aanstoos and I planned to meet back up at the Civic Park for the Black Bloc and split up for a while. I grabbed some dinner and set out for the park at around 6:45 p.m. As I neared the park I saw van after van of riot police covering themselves with body armor and strapping different kinds of weapons to their legs and sides. The cops were obviously preparing to respond to a different kind of protest. It was an ominous scene.

The protesters, mainly black-clad anarchists and their anti-capitalist supporters, were milling around in Civic Park and sharing plates hot food, compliments of an anti-war group called Food Not Bombs. Cops were everywhere. Suddenly, as if a signal was given, a group of about a hundred masked protesters gathered close together and began chanting anti-capitalist slogans as they marched into the street. Mac Tuttle, wearing a mask and swimming goggles, was on the front line.
 
This was Tuttle’s third time in a Black Bloc. He expected trouble, but he put on his mask and marched in the front lines anyway. He said that his role was to act as a buffer between the police and less confrontational protesters who simply wanted to speak their minds in the streets.

“The police are fucking terrifying, hands down,” Tuttle said later. “They’re scary as shit.”

Riot cops were in formation as soon as the protesters hit the concrete. The protesters were immediately surrounded by riot police on both sides and decided to march directly toward one of the lines. As soon as the front line of protesters came within ten yards of the police line, the riot cops raised their batons and shot a cannon burst of liquid pepper spray. Several protesters went down and were either arrested or lead away by volunteer street medics.

A Salt Lake City man who identified himself as Fred Javalpra told me later that he saw two or three protesters get shot with rubber bullets during this time. Several protesters would later tell me that police used tear gas at another point during the protest, and I saw several police wearing respiratory gas masks during the confrontation and eventual mass arrest. A statement that the Denver Police Department released shortly after the protest, however, claimed that police made “limited use” of pepper spray. According to the Denver Police, during the initial confrontation only two police officers used pepper spray and one policemen shot paintball-like balls of pepper spray from a gun. This does not explain a reporter I saw suffering from pepper spray later in the protest.

“I was fucking scared shitless,” Tuttle told me. He had been hit by pepper spray during this initial confrontation, but didn’t consider himself injured, so he pressed on, even though the police “had a lot of new (non-lethal weaponry) that I didn’t want to see what it did.”

The statement from the Denver police said that protesters were observed possessing rocks and “other items that could be used to threaten public safety.” I did not see anyone carrying rocks, but there were several groups of protesters carrying cloth banners and one protester carrying a skateboard.

After the initial confrontation the Black Bloc retreated back onto park property, and then their supporters filled the streets. The police momentarily retreated. It was immediately clear that the police would preemptively confront the Black Bloc, but not other protesters. This trend continued for the rest of the night. They knew who they were after.

The police re-grouped and charged those who were still in the street. I was on the sidewalk taking pictures, and before I knew it there was a riot cop shoving me in the back and laying his baton in the back of my neck. “Move!” he yelled. “Press!” I said, and then I ran backward into… the Black Bloc’s front line. “Oh, great,” I thought.
 
I made it through the Bloc and climbed up unto the base of a light pole to watch what happened next. The police stopped and held their position just before the sidewalk. The Black Bloc and their supporters approached them, began chanting as if they were going to stage another offensive, and then they all began laughing and running in the opposite direction across the park to flank the cops’ position.

The protest made it through the other end of the Civic Center Park, but they didn’t get far after that. They marched in the street for about two blocks before being surrounded by two lines of riot police in a short length of street between two intersections. The police spread out across the street and prevented anyone from leaving. The Black Bloc, their left-wing supporters, and the journalists who were following them were now all trapped between two very angry looking lines of riot cops.

And the cops multiplied. They amassed in vans, buses, cars, and horses. Helicopters with searchlights began circling overhead. Soon there were two hundred, then three hundred cops piled up on both sides of the protesters, who were now screaming “peace” and “we’re nonviolent.” The police seemed to outnumber protesters by nearly two to one.

“Tell what a police state looks like!” someone shouted. “This is what a police state looks like!” the protesters screamed in reply. Despite their chants, many of the young protesters, some of whom had removed their masks, were as frantic as rats in a cage.

The front lines of police slowly closed in on the people between them. Anyone with a press badge was grabbed and sequestered outside of the police line. I stayed as long as I could before a riot cop wearing a gas mask grabbed my hand. I told him I was staying, but this was apparently not an option because he began dragging me toward him. I decided to comply and the cops pulled me through the police line and onto a long set of stairs outside of an office building. The stairs were filled with civilians and reporters trying desperately to document the fate of the protesters on the other side of the police. One reporter, who was fully credentialed for the DNC, was one the ground trying to recover from a pepper spray blast to the face. I gave him my water bottle and a medic soon arrived.

After most of the press was removed from the street, the police began chanting “move,” and charging toward us while thrusting their batons forward in unison. We reporters ran like hell. It seemed as if we had been specifically picked out of the crowd so that we could not document the escalating violence and mass arrest.

I ran around the outside of the building to see if I could get a better view from behind the opposite police line, but I soon discovered that the police had boxed-out supporters and the press there as well. These supporters continued to shout insults and slogans at the riot police in front of them, but the voices inside the police blockade were not as brave and had gone silent.

I climbed on a concrete statue, and from that vantage point I could see that the riot police had separated the protesters into two groups: The Black Bloc and the others. Each group was backed up against a building and trapped there. Then I felt someone tapping on my shoe. I looked down. It was Aanstoos. I jumped down from the statue and hugged him. He was white as a ghost and obviously shook up.

“William, are you OK? What happened to you?” I asked.

“I got pepper sprayed,” he said quietly. It was at this moment that I finally felt overwhelmed by whole situation, and I thought I might cry. Instead I just hugged him again.

Aanstoos explained that he was one of the protesters hit by pepper spray cannon blast when the Black Bloc first approached the police line outside of the Civic Center. He said he went blind until a street medic treated him. His clothing was still covered in pepper spray and it pained him to touch most parts of his body. 

The aftermath

Over the next two hours police searched a majority of the protesters and picked out dozens and arrested them for possession of objects that could be used as weapons. Resisters were pepper sprayed. One demonstrator told me she saw someone arrested for having nail clippers in their backpack.

Supporters outside of the blockade chanted and harassed the police, but nothing else could be done for those inside. At 8:22 p.m. most of the non-Black Bloc protesters were let free. The rest of the block was either still inside, being processed for arrest, or arrested. Mac Tuttle was one of them.

Tuttle and 105 other protesters were bused to a warehouse at 3833 Steele St. that, with the addition of some metal chairs and a series of metal cages, had been converted into a temporary jail. Tuttle said that defendants had their mug shots taken next to “mass arrest boards” listing charges against them, which included everything from resisting arrest and failure to disperse to begging, loitering, and throwing missiles/rocks. This lead many protesters, including Tuttle, to believe that they were being charged with multiple offenses, when in reality most of them were only charged with resisting arrest or failure to disperse.
 
Tuttle and his comrades were held in the jail overnight. There were no blankets, and “white PVC pipes” constantly blasted cold air into the facility. Tuttle said he was allowed to see a doctor, but the doctor only asked if he was suicidal. Tuttle said that he wasn’t, but that he was suffering from bronchitis. The doctor promised him pills in the morning, but they never came. Tuttle’s bronchitis developed in pneumonia by the time he returned to his home in Washington a week later.

On Aug. 27, Mark Pendergrass of the Colorado ACLU sent a letter to Denver officials detailing concerns about the detention of protesters like Tuttle, who, like many protesters, was arraigned in the early morning hours after a sleepless night in the horrid conditions of the warehouse. “[It] was evident that the arrestees were laboring under a myriad of misunderstandings and misinformation that was predictably highly coercive in convincing an arrestees to plead guilty, which have been remedied if they had received legal council,” Pendergrass wrote. He also claimed that the ACLU lawyers and other legal supporters were repeatedly denied access to confidential meetings with arrestees, which Denver legal officials had previously promised. Both the Denver sheriff and city attorney have not responded to my requests for an interview on the subject. The legal defense of the arrestees is ongoing.
   
Despite their experience at the anti-DNC Black Bloc, Aanstoos and Tuttle remain close their political convictions, and they both vowed to protest again. In fact, Aanstoos and I parted ways after the DNC, and he went to the Twin Cities to protest the Republican National Convention. I have not heard from him since.

Tuttle ended up pleading guilty to “blocking a roadway” and was fined $140. He’s said it was worth it, and he has no regrets. He believes that the Black Bloc did succeed in changing people’s minds about the system, even if it did end ugly.

“A lot of people who didn’t want to be in the protest got blocked in by the police,” Tuttle said. “Now they understand that the police don’t give a shit about them… and I will be at the next DNC in four years. This just made me more upset and more angry.”

As Tuttle points out, protesting may not be about whether anarchists and radicals can disrupt or shut down events like the DNC. Perhaps it’s just enough to step out into the streets for a miniature revolution, even if it only lasts a couple of hours.

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An end to the long dark

Spring at the South Pole.


Only the man who was in charge of the single lamp at the North Pole, and his colleague who was responsible for the single lamp at the South Pole, only these two would live free from toil and care: they would be busy only twice a year. —Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

 

The stars have been our companions for the past few months. Dancing in between them, the ribbons of the southern aurora offer light when the moon is gone. Watch them fade and the black grows so deep as to lose hands in front of faces, to discover wind drifts in the snow or a wall by blunt impact. The last remnants of the sun set in March, and the long dark has carried the sixty of us through the bitter winter of the South Pole.

All of Antarctica offers uniqueness in character of the land, the sky, and the sea. It’s a world as yet untamed, where it is still risky to do something as simple as stepping outside, or understand something so patterned as the rise and fall of the sun. Men of written history have found God and lost sanity here, have faced frostbite and harsh wind, fierce loneliness, silence and death. But in confronting this world, many of them also found tremendous beauty and great humility.

The last hundred years have tamed this continent somewhat, to a level that finds its safety concerns part of corporate databases, the warmer seasons attract thousands of visitors, and human impact grows every year. Yet in the midst of the growing hustle, a set of people gather, intent on experiencing that which only Antarctica can offer — the long night of winter.

From mid to late February through to mid October, Antarctica grows weary of visitors. Winds driving in from the polar plateau bring storms, gales, and extreme temperature drops. Travel not only within the continent but to and from it brings great risks. Temperatures descend into territory that render vehicles unusable, ice locks in summer harbors for tens if not hundreds of miles, planes cannot land in the cold and dark Antarctic winter, and survival without protection is measured in minutes. In response, the various stations close down, become isolated, and build upon an internal community to make it through the winter. When the last flight leaves, very few will see a new face for eight months. An entire existence becomes dependent on the equipment and people immediately around. In the event of any disaster, rescue, if possible at all, will be severely delayed.

Just over 900 people from a multitude of countries find this appealing each year. We’re split between 36 different stations, spread out over 4.5 million square miles. To some extent, every station experiences the Antarctic night. It is only at the very bottom of the Earth, eight hundred miles from our closest neighbor, that the South Pole bears witness to a single day spread out over an entire year. One sunrise and one long day; one sunset and one long, dark night.

 

The pursuit of science and the International Antarctic Treaty (one of the premier examples of international cooperation, preservation, and exploration) drive this continent’s development. Everything that is done here can relate back to furthering the knowledge of humankind.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is an international hub, hosted by the United States Antarctic program. From a peak population of 300 in the summer months, who fly in and out from the coast, the isolated winter reduces that population to 60 or fewer.

We form a modern tribal community with the necessary skills between us to keep the station warm, powered, and gathering data until the return of the sun and the summer.

 

Scientists and technicians (known as “beakers”) manage an array of scientific acronyms designed to peel back the fog of the unknown. There are massive telescopes that look into the darkest sky on Earth, detector arrays that are buried kilometers deep in the ice below, gathering evidence of subatomic particles; digital eyes that seek out the streaming auroras; weather stations; atmospheric ozone devices; and sampling systems that gather the some of purest air on earth. The data pooled helps us to see and understand the very beginnings of the universe, to explore the relationship between the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field, and to provide a baseline for atmospheric comparison the world around.

To ensure the integrity of the data, a slew of men and women are responsible for maintaining everything from something as mundane as a clogged drain to the severity of a generator failure. Their skills keep us powered, warm, and alive. Chefs work miracles with frozen food (much of it years old) and supplement meals from the harvest in our greenhouse. A small IT department maintains the computer and server systems on station and keeps the limited, but vital, satellite and radio links to outside world, live. Carpenters, electricians, welders, and plumbers continue needed construction through the winter months and aid the maintenance crew when needed. The power plant technicians guarantee lights, heat, and water. A materials department tracks inventory long since buried in drifts, much a mile or more distant from the warmth of station. Engineers and planners communicate the changes made and needed with management who are off-continent. Our heavy equipment operator strives to support construction, material movement, and fueling the distant buildings.  As the cold damages the vehicles, the shop endeavors to keep them running. Our two-person medical department is prepared to tackle any contingency and all of us are involved in emergency response teams (fire, trauma, and logistics) in some form.

We do this all in the cold, in the dark, with a necessary willingness to step outside our basic responsibilities and aid the friend next to us. Often, we do this at temperatures that we can stand but that our equipment cannot. Working outside at -95 ºF with a windchill thirty or forty degrees colder is not uncommon. Doing it with clothing that freezes, goggles that fog over in minutes, numb fingers and numbing minds, dying batteries for limited light (to protect the light-sensitive science experiments), and exhausted lungs from the ten-thousand foot altitude? This is our normal.

Your breath at these temperatures crackles when it moves past your lips, a brief respite from the searing cold of the winter air diving deep into your lungs. Though only your eyes may be visible to the cold, the lightest touch of the wind bites hard, freezing eyelids to low hanging hats and mingling with the quick forming ice on your hood and facemask. Fire comes to mind, a white-mix of intensity, when skin has been exposed to cold for too long — a sign that you have seconds to cover it or frostbite will set in.

Ostensibly, we tackle these challenges and risks to keep hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and data in good order for the U.S. Antarctic Program — for individuals in offices ten thousand miles distant and an ideal based around scientific exploration. Realistically, we do this for each other.

 

In the dark, isolated and distant from any neighbors, the sixty of us have a jumpstart on familiarity. We immediately share a context and a challenging environment that few other places can offer. We depend on each other in the most literal sense for eight straight months. Friendships and disagreements, loves and arguments abound — the panoply of human emotion and action is all here, often magnified, often gossiped about. Our situation, however, also has an obvious undercurrent of dependency. All of us are necessary for the survival of the other. Anyone short-shifting their work forces others to carry their burden and then has to eat meals with them at the end of the day. “Family” may be too strong a word but say “community” and that notion becomes far more tangible. 

In his book Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut talks of a sadness of the modern connected world. He speaks to how a talent is suddenly compared to the whole of humankind. How an ability to sing, which may have once entertained a small village must now compete with the talent that can move an entire planet. Though we are children of the first world and modern globalization, here we can explore what Vonnegut laments.

We make our own entertainment, our own plans and pursuits. We compare ourselves and compete with each other, come to know our abilities in a group where “better than” has less weight than “different than.” Over the season the last delivery of magazines grows old, movies are watched one too many times, and the ever-present voice of consumer culture fades. Somewhere in the setting of the sun even those not previously exposed to the value of individual talent find their eyes opening toward it.

How entertaining others manifests itself differs — it could simply be consistent human conversation and company in the bar every night. It could be stepping up to sing in a band having never before performed or learning to play an instrument and sharing those painful first steps. At this point, over half the station is involved in music in some fashion.

The escapes that society uses to avoid the awkwardness of human contact are still here but the press of people (sixty may be few but our space is limited) makes real and true interaction hard to avoid. By virtue of our shared context and isolation we can quickly move past being new and strange to each other and reap the rewards of a relationship. We can institutionalize ourselves, grow used to constant company and eating nearly every meal with friends and familiar faces. There’s a saying that the first time you come to Antarctica you do so for the adventure. The second trip is for the money. Every time after that you return because you can’t seem to fit in anywhere else any more.

What they say, though, is just that. All of us come here for our own reasons, all of us with our own goals and aspirations, with our own hopes. How those measure up to the people we meet and the effects of the cold, the dark, the altitude, and the night sky vary.

 

 

“Polies” (as we’re known in the Antarctic communities) often set up for a winter with specific ideas of changing their life, be it through exercise, education, self-reflection, or something else entirely. An individual might come down hoping to write a book, read a great many more, learn a language (or three), to leave problems stateside, learn an instrument, find a lover, cook, build something, make art, get into better shape — the combinations and specifics are multitudinous, including the many not spoken out loud.

We come expecting to be able to complete these goals in full, picturing months of time set aside from the distractions of the real world back home, easily saying that we can put something off one more day — we’ve plenty left. We don’t realize, unfortunately, that distractions are common to society regardless of size or place. We don’t see or understand always that change occurs over time — that if one lacked the discipline to write a book in his or her life before, he or she will likely not gain it here. We don’t expect or count on the environment to the degree that it affects us.

Buried under 9,000 feet of ice sits the land at the center of the Antarctic continent — we rest on top of it. In combination with our physical altitude, variations in barometric pressure and weather patterns cause the physiological altitude to rise to 11,500 feet in the winter. When that hits, no one on station sleeps well, if at all. Walking the halls the next morning, you can easily believe you have awoken to zombies taking over the station. The cold, of course, does its own number on our metabolism. For those working outside daily, the exhaustion may be welcome, but it can and will drive ambition into the ground. Inspiration can be difficult to find when the environment doesn’t change and when one cannot seek out new things or leave. However, the altitude, the cold, the static nature of this place — none compare to the dark.

There is great excitement when the sun first sets in March — the winter is still new, nothing is yet too worn or staid. Your fellow winter-overs are still mysterious, your friendships still new. The setting sun, though below the horizon, takes weeks of horizontal circling to fade. As a group we wait for signs of the coming dark — of the steps between nautical twilight and astronomical twilight, of the first stars, of the first of the southern auroras. The magic is still easy to see and find — the horizon, stretched and perfect, humbles with its stark beauty. The first shadows from the moon bring smiles (soon frozen). The aurora dance with an intensity and frequency that is to become familiar — they are present so long as the sky is clear and moon is set. 

As the dark grows we cover the station windows and shut off exterior lights to shield sensitive science projects. Though we can’t see the horizon, there is cocoon-like comfort in the sheltered station, in the settling night sky. For the majority of us from the northern hemisphere, the constellations are new and unfamiliar. We learn to navigate in the black by watching the direction of the Southern Cross and we watch for the first of the iridium flares — reflections from the satellites that keep us in touch with the outside world.

Two or three months in and the night still feels positive and powerful. Two or three months in, however, and the reality of a vacant sun and isolation begin to take their toll, rendering personal feelings irrelevant. According to research compiled by Lawrence Palinkas, “Among the physiological responses to these environmental conditions are a complete absence of Stage IV sleep as well as sizable reductions in the amount of Stage III and REM sleep, a disruption of circadian rhythms, dyspnea, arterial hypoxia, headaches, hypocapnia, erythrocytosis, mild alkalosis, suppression of the immune system, and disruption of thyroid function.” The effects of the dark on your mind and on your physiology grow more apparent daily. Manifestations of memory-loss, sleeplessness, and mood swings all creep into normal interactions. Palinkas offers the scientific terminology to use. For us, we simply say that you are getting “toasty.”

We are all affected in some degree or another and all of us move down the slope together. Isolated as we are, we don’t have an easy comparison to see how we have been affected. Veterans tend to laugh it off as the names of our friends begin to slip from easy recall. Attempting to come up with simple words becomes a chore — referring to something as common as a boat becomes, “that thing that, you know, floats on water and hauls stuff.” We stare off into the distance, often in the middle of a conversation and count how many times we’ve tried to tell the same stories to the same friend. Small disagreements balloon into massive arguments beyond any logical perspective and basic troubleshooting of problems requires extreme concentration. None of us have an accurate understanding of how much or how severely we’ve been affected — we won’t, until the sun has crawled back above the horizon and the station opens again.

For six months now, we’ve been on pause. Our cares and concerns from the outside world have been muted, rendered distant, physically and emotionally. Our day-to-day routine consists of simple plans, of familiar people and few responsibilities that exceed what has become habit. Expectation followed us here in the form of our plans, our hopes, and our goals. The expectations built up over the beginning of the season, and played out calmly or not at all. The future happened to other people, was worried over by those long away from here. We’ve been able to simply exist, continuing along at a pace unaccustomed to change. Though we have our challenges — to us our world is simple and comfortable. It is simply here.

And then the sun started to rise.

 

 

We first noticed it in early August. Clouded horizons had masked the beginning few days of twilight that we were supposed to be able to see. There were rumored whispers that someone had seen something — an edge of color on the horizon from the corner of their eye — but nothing solid. Then, in the middle of a weekend concert, excited yells led to ill-clothed runs to the observation deck. Cheering, smiling, laughing, joyous piles of people ran out at seventy below, hopping barefoot for moments, breath clouding faces and wide, thrilled eyes. In the distance stood the barest glow of orange.

Suddenly we find ourselves thrust into the undetermined future. The sun cracked the horizon on September 22 and the evidence of its rising grows daily. Even in an overcast sky we can now see drifts, other people, and all of the station at once.

No longer able to avoid it, we are pushed into planning vacations and the next job, into finances and the pragmatic aspects of the future. We are pushed into wondering about friends and family soon to be seen again, into wondering how we will react to them, to the outside world. We are forced to wonder how they will react to us.

Our expectations for the season are now measured in progress versus the time left. Our goals, our projects, and our ambitions are laid bare to the truth of what we have accomplished. We have no choice but to weigh our own minds toward failed pursuits. Do we struggle with self-doubt or do we treat them as casualties of the dark and move on? We begin to count our victories and contrast our memories against the grip of nostalgia. The great unknown has moved from a vague fog of dream and wonder to storm clouds brewing on the horizon.

The last couple of months of the winter season are described as among the most difficult and trying, because the drama and conflict are knocked up a few notches. The rising sun drives a fierce desire to move on and experience the next step of life. It is easy to assume that this is due to the effects of the long dark. The suspicion is growing that it is instead to do with our rebirth into the world at large.

To waver too long on self-reflection and the unknown of the future is to become lost. Now is to relearn decision-making, to plan again after a year-long break and to face our actions from the past year. The waves are rising, the wind is building, and the time to pick a direction and run strong is nigh.

The other night, when the sun first cracked the horizon, the storms that had been obscuring its rise cleared for several hours. A group of us gathered around the galley windows to watch. Not yet fully crossing the cover of land to sky, atmospheric refraction left the top of the sun rippling. Pieces of it seemed to break off and hover above it, shimmering into blue, then green, and disappearing. In all the rest of the world one might be lucky, on the clearest of days with the flattest of horizons, to see the flash of green for only a second. Here, we watched it dance for hours.

This is our sunrise — our one sunrise that brings with it more than any other before. This is our demarcation point, a decided moment that cannot fade like an ordinary dawn back home. It is our marker for the change that we find has already happened and the untold affects that this experience will bring for years to come.

 

 

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Photo Essays

Semana Santa

Holy Week in Guatemala.


 

 

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Interviews

A “little death penalty” case

One refugee’s story of seeking protection in the United States.


 

David Ngaruri Kenney, a farmer in Kenya, was imprisoned in a water-filled cell for organizing a protest. He applied for asylum in the United States and Philip Schrag, director of the Georgetown Center for Applied Legal Studies, worked on his case. They jointly wrote the recently published Asylum Denied: A Refugee’s Struggle for Safety in America, which recounts Kenney’s improbable trajectory from Kenyan farmer to U.S. college basketball player, and now, American lawyer.

Interviewer: Scott Kuhagen

Interviewee: Philip Schrag

What is the objective of the book and how did you get involved in Mr. Kenney’s case?

David Kenney was a political activist in his native Kenya in the early 1990s. He didn’t choose to become a political activist; he was a peasant farmer trying to grow tea and making a living. By doing so he discovered he couldn’t make a living growing tea because the price the government was paying was so low that it was causing him to lose money to grow tea. And yet the contract he had signed with the government monopoly prevented him from growing any other crops on his land.

So he organized a farmers’ boycott and protest to try to get the government to justify its policy or change it. And as a result, he was put in jail [and] nearly executed at gunpoint in a forest. He was saved at the last minute because the security forces of Kenya thought he could be more useful to the regime alive than dead. So they tortured him for a week, putting him in a water-filled cell in which he was in constant threat of being killed by drowning, and eventually put in solitary confinement for eight months.

When he was released from solitary confinement, his bank account was frozen and he was prohibited from meeting with more than three other Kenyans at the same time, so his life was effectively over. He had no commercial or social life, and could not even continue his education. He had an incredible piece of luck in that he met some American Peace Corps volunteers who had been assigned to his region, and they had the idea — since he was 7 feet tall — of getting him a basketball scholarship to the United States. This was pretty amazing because he had never seen a basketball! So this was a pretty far-out idea.

Nevertheless, they pursued it. They persuaded an American basketball coach to come from Colorado to Kenya to see him play basketball, and meanwhile frantically taught him how to play basketball.

He ended up coming to the United States on a basketball scholarship. He got a U.S. college degree, and when his education was over, Daniel arap Moi, who was in charge of Kenya when he was jailed and tortured, was still in power. So he applied for asylum. The book tells the story of his four-year struggle with our immigration services, in which he was constantly denied asylum by one bureaucracy after another, and eventually forced to go back to Africa, where he was nearly killed once again.

For those who might be unfamiliar with asylum, can you talk very generally about what an applicant would have to show [to win asylum]?

A person can apply for asylum if he has come to the United States either legally or without permission, and says that he is afraid to go back to his home country because of a fear of persecution on account of his race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Kenney of course was afraid to go back on account of persecution as a result of his political opinion.

If you apply for asylum, you get fingerprinted and photographed. Your identity is checked to make sure you’re not a terrorist. But more important than that, you are required to file hundreds of pages of corroborating evidence if you want to have a good chance of winning your case. It’s very difficult to obtain this corroborating evidence if you don’t have a lawyer working for you and if your friends and relatives back home are afraid that if they cooperate with you they themselves would get in trouble with the regime. This is a very challenging process for any asylum applicant, and most people who apply for it do not win asylum.

Is his experience with the system typical of the challenges that asylum seekers face?

Well, every case is different, of course.

Mr. Kenney, for example, was denied [asylum] by an immigration judge even though she believed that everything he said was true and he had a lot of documentation.

When he was halfway through his college education in 1997, he got a letter saying that his younger brother, a boy he had brought up as his own son after his father died, had been arrested and was being tortured in a Kenyan prison. And he knew very well what that meant.

So Mr. Kenney dropped everything, flew to Kenya, hired a lawyer, got his brother out of jail, and immediately returned to California to resume his studies. But because of this trip to rescue his brother, the immigration judge ruled that he had forfeited his status as refugee — that he was a legitimate refugee but he had returned home, proving that he was not eligible to be a refugee anymore.

His case went even further than that, correct?

Yes. He was represented at the initial stages of the case at the immigration court by students of mine at the clinic I run here at Georgetown Law School. It’s called the Center for Applied Legal Studies. The Center and clinics like it throughout the country have students who do all the work that lawyers would do, for academic credit, under the supervision of professors who are experienced lawyers.

And these students did a fabulous job of representing Mr. Kenney. One of them even made an impassioned closing statement at the trial, comparing his [Mr. Kenney’s] tea boycott with the Boston Tea Party of 1775, which did impress the judge despite the fact that she denied asylum. So they did a great job, but he lost there, he lost at the Board, and I took his case to the United States Court of Appeals.

Recently there have been some press reports, especially an article in the Washington Post that quotes the dean of Georgetown Law School, saying that interest in immigration law and immigration law clinics in general has really increased. As a clinical instructor yourself, what really excites you about this increasing interest in immigration law, and what are the hopes that you have for this new group of students moving into the field?

This field has just burgeoned in the last 20 years. In the early 1980s, there were virtually no courses in immigration law at most American law schools. It was a real backwater of legal education. Thanks to a small group of people who started popularizing this field long before I got into it, it is expanded, and now there are immigration law courses at most American law schools, and there are clinics in which students represent immigrants in real cases, as my students did in Kenney’s case.

Students find this area of law extremely exciting and interesting for several reasons. One is that they are little death penalty cases: there is a lot at stake! If a person wins asylum, they can apply for a green card after a year, and then start on the road to American citizenship. If they lose, they are ordered deported. If they are deported to their own country, which is the usual case, they may face imprisonment, torture, or death.

I was curious if you had any surprising or noteworthy examples where you’ve learned of how one of your clients who has received word that they can stay indefinitely in the United States has embraced their new country of the United States?

I think that the most dramatic instance of that occurred today! We recently won asylum for a young woman who had escaped from Zimbabwe — a political activist who had escaped from Zimbabwe — where you know that the human rights record, especially during the last election, has been very bad. She not only won asylum, but because she won asylum, she is able to bring her husband and children over to the United States, and everybody will be safe from retaliation and persecution. Well, she called our offices today and offered her services to volunteer to help other people in the clinic because she was so impressed with what the students had done to help her win her case.

Do you think that we are a generous and welcoming country, or do you have concerns in that area?

Our refugee law isn’t perfect. There are many blemishes and problems with it. But we’ve really come a long way since the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the most terrible incidence in American immigration history was when Hitler allowed 939 Jews to leave Germany in 1939. They thought that they could go to Cuba, but the Cuban president refused to let them in. The Christian captain of the ship then sailed the ship toward the United States, and off the coast of Florida radioed President Roosevelt and asked for permission to land his passengers in safety in the United States. And Roosevelt refused to let them land.

The ship went back to Europe, where nearly half the passengers, a little over half the passengers, were killed in the Holocaust.

We’ve come a very long way since then. In 1980, we passed a Refugee Act, and now we’re one of the most welcoming countries in the world at a time when other countries are again turning away refugees. We resettle a lot of people who are in need. Refugees are about 10 percent, maybe 15 percent if you include asylum winners, of all U.S. immigration. In 2006, we resettled about 40,000 refugees from United Nations camps around the world, and granted asylum to another 30,000 or so additional refugees. So that’s a pretty large number.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things we could do to make our system more fair. Perhaps the principal one, one of the first things that we should do is that we should enable people to get fair representation in asylum proceedings when they are indigent. The chance of winning asylum without a lawyer or a representative is 16 percent in immigration court.

With a lawyer — all lawyers combined — it’s about 41 percent. With a lawyer from a law school clinic or a nongovernmental organization [NGO] such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, or a pro bono lawyer from one of the large law firms, the chance of winning asylum in immigration court is about 90 percent. Not because these organizations select the cases more carefully than others, and not because they’re more brilliant than the other lawyers who represent asylum seekers, but because lawyers from big law firms and NGOs limit their caseloads and devote enormous amounts of resources to investigating the facts of each case, getting all that documentation to prove the case so that the judge doesn’t just have to accept the asylum applicant’s word for it.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough such lawyers to go around, so providing free legal representation to indigent asylum seekers is essential for fairness in our system.

[Without giving away the ending] what is the outcome of the case and your relationship with Mr. Kenney?

Mr. Kenney, despite being nearly killed three times in his life, is currently back in the United States. He is a lawful permanent resident and has applied for American citizenship. He has graduated from an American law school, Catholic University Law School, and is working in the district attorney’s office of Montgomery County, Maryland. So it’s been an extraordinary odyssey for him from being a peasant farmer, to being a political prisoner, to being a student at an American college, to being ordered deported and leaving the United States and being nearly killed in Africa again, to coming back to the United States and graduating from law school here. During that period, I have been fortunate enough to become his friend and his co-author.

 

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Commentary

Notes from a “white immigrant”

I’m a minority too.


 

I’m a white American, so I suppose that immediately means I have this great white privilege, like I got a VIP card in the mail or something. Let me say, to start, that I absolutely believe that racism is still around. Institutionalized racism and white privilege are both very real in modern American society. I’m not denying that at all.

I’m uncomfortable being associated with white privilege, because I wasn’t born here. In fact, I’m a refugee.

I came from Poland to America as a baby. In my early days, we lived in Section 8 housing and my mother worked at a Kmart in the ghetto. It was I who taught my mother how to drive: Along with English, driving really stumped her. I had to learn the fundamentals from our teacher in English and then drive around yelling “CLUTCH!” in Polish. I also translated for my grandma when she lived with us. We went to refugee groups with the Vietnamese, and attended “poor” family activities at the YMCA.

At about seven years old, I remember riding the bus with my mother with an incredible tension inside me. My mother had taken the civil service exam and aced it. Having studied half a dozen languages growing up, she found written English far easier than spoken. Now she was going to find out if she had landed a job at the post office. In our home country she had a job as a newspaper editor, and now our only salvation was the post office.

She got it and has worked there for over 20 years now. The reliable pay and good benefits of that government job slowly pulled us out of our lives as poor immigrants. I went to Catholic school, where I was ostracized for my Nutella “chocolate sandwiches” and thrift store clothes. She eventually pushed me to go to a “fancy” private university, where I felt very out-of-place among the 98 percent very rich, very white population. I hung out with the poor kids on scholarship like me. My best friends were a black woman from Atlanta and a redneck from Mississippi.

I was hurt when my black friend started hanging out with the girls in the black sorority. They and the other minority students in my junior high and high schools got to bond in their ethnic clubs once a month.

From kindergarten through 12th grade, we spent half a year reading black history books and researching the Holocaust. To this day, I’ve only met two other Eastern European refugees. I’ve never learned in school about what happened to me and my family.

I’m white, right? I get a passing grade if not privilege.

As an adult, my skin color has allowed me to drop almost all issues of being an immigrant and of being poor, within a matter of years. I do get it: Fat people get hassled in grocery stores and restaurants because they can’t hide their weight. Black people get turned down for loans and jobs because they can’t hide their skin color. Fourth-generation Americans get pulled over by airport security for “looking like” terrorists. My Asian friends, despite saying they are from America or Canada, get asked, “But where are you from originally?”

By contrast, I tell people I wasn’t born here and “that’s right, I’m a stealth foreigner, here to take your jobs.” Sure, there’s no big “FOREIGNER” stamp on my forehead, but sometimes I want to share in that struggle with my fellow “underclass.” That’s why I live in Harlem and eat in Greenpoint.

I feel as if I spent my childhood with all the poor immigrants and at some point in my teens someone ran in and said, “Wait! Dear God, what’s a trustworthy, white American girl doing mixed in with these people?”

There are snobby, rich people in every country, but I always found it somewhat sweet that so many wealthy people in the United States are completely egalitarian. Even as they earn six figures, most “middle-class” friends of my mother and me are quick to defend the fact that they work, have only part-time cleaning services, and that their kids’ cars are used.

My fiancé’s family is fairly well-off, though I suppose they’re still middle-class by American standards. They’ve only had positive things to say about my family’s early struggles, and openly embrace the color I bring to their lives. I imagine it is taboo in their culture to consider themselves above people like me.

Still, the other day we were driving through Connecticut, and I mentioned that my cousin lived and worked there.

“Illegally?” my fiancé asked, and I murmured an affirmative. There was no judgment, just surprise. Just a bit of weight in the air between us, as my other life — the life of a poor refugee — drifted into the car and sat between us. It left quickly though.

We were a nice white couple driving through Connecticut, after all.

 

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