Against the Current, No. 84, January/February 2000

TWO MONSTROUS EVENTS have opened a window on a daily reality: In the name of safe streets and schools, an undeclared war has been opened on a generation of African-American children.  In affluent suburban Oakland County, Michigan, a nearly all-white jury convicteda 13-year-old youth of second-degree murder, tried as an adult in a shooting that occurred when he was 11 years of age. In Decatur, Illinois, seven Black students were expelled from high school by a nearly all-white school board, against the opposition of the only Black member, for a brawl in the stands at a football game.

THE EXPLOSIVE SIGNIFICANCE of the mobilization against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle has altered the terms of the "free trade" debate.  We present here brief edited excerpts from a discussion broadcast on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, on the program "Beneath the Surface" hosted by Suzi Weissman, December 13, 1999.

Dana Frank teaches American Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and is the author of Buy American, The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, just published by Beacon Press, a critical analysis of protectionist movements.  Leone Hankey is coordinator of the Southern California Fair Trade Network.  Lisa Fithian, a veteran of civil disobedience and a Direct Action trainer for the Seattle protests, was arrested there and jailed for five days. She has also worked for Justice for Janitors in LA.

WHAT'S FEMINISM GOT to do with it?

The well-organized and publicized political protests at the WTO meetings in November have inspired activists from a wide array of movements hungry for precisely the kind of multi-issue organizing and solidarity that blossomed in Seattle.

While much has been made of the labor and environmental bridging, little has been reported of any feminist presence at the protests. But if any issue is a feminist issue, it's free trade.

THE NEAR-GENOCIDAL WAR that Russia's Putin-Yeltsin government is waging in Chechnya is cynical on many counts. Some might compare it to U.S. efforts to end the “Vietnam syndrome” by engaging in small wars certain of victory without U.S. casualties.

THE RECENT BARBARIC explosions [at apartment buildings in major Russian cities], which caused hundreds of deaths amongst Russian citizens, were used by the authorities to resume a campaign of searching for "entire enemies" and, exploiting our grief, to hide the real perpetrators....

ON JUNE 4, 1300 Teamster meatpackers shut down the Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) plant in Wallula, Washington in the largest wildcat strike in the United States in decades. Fed up with low wages and unsafe working conditions, immigrant workers from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos and Bosnia united against the world's largest processor of meat and pork products.

As strike leader Maria Martinez told the New York Times, “Enough is enough is something that you can understand in any language.”

Here we speak with Dr. Claire Cohen, a veteran of African-American community organizing in Pittsburgh, PA and an activist in Citizens for Police Accountability. ATC has spoken with her on previous occasions, most recently in our January-February 1997 issue, where she discussed the origins of CPA in the light of the police murders of Johnny Gammage (October 1995) and Maneia Bey (Thanksgiving 1994).

THE DIALOGUE ON race and nationality in the United States has always been conducted from the standpoint of the dominant racial group—whites.  Not surprisingly, President Clinton's commission on race produced very little to overcome racism, something that would require facing up to the reality of centuries of white supremacy.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988) 1062 pages, $16 paperback. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 by Taylor Branch (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998) 746 pages, $17 paperback.

Kim Hunter is a Detroit-based poet.