Land of the Free

Hola mi gente,
I recently had the pleasure to work with a fellow Boricua, Jacqueline Velez -- Jackie, as we all called her. Raised in the same Brooklyn ‘hood, Bushwick, it was always a comfort for me to be able to reach out to my sister-in-the-cause in the midst of the subtle racism of the nonprofit-industrial complex, where even some people of color are removed from the lived experiences of the communities they are supposed to be “saving.” Sometimes, I had to wonder just to keep from going under. 

Much to the disdain of the culturally incompetent language police, I called her my “Boricua grrrl.” She moved on, but shortly before she did she sent the staff the following poem. I know whatever she’s doing, she’s kicking ass just as Boricua women have been doing from the get.

Land of the Free

Land of the FREE,
They make us believe,
If you can dream it, you can achieve it
If that is so, at what cost?
So much at stake, so many lives lost.

Land of the FREE,
A far cry from reality!
How could that possibly be?
Drugs pervade our streets,
An epidemic we could easily defeat,
Yet drugs make their way to our children,
courtesy of the government and the military.

Land of the FREE,
So they say,
It's beautiful in theory,
But such a long ways away.

Land of the FREE,
Many come here feeling free to dream
Yet suffer and struggle
Multiple low paying jobs to juggle

Funds appear when they find reasons for wars,
Our young get deployed,
sent straight to the frontlines and die on tour.
Can’t get out of a deficit or feed our own hungry poor.

In the wake of death mothers' cries
muffle the bugles loud sound.
Purple medals in place of loved ones,
Parents are told,
"Sorry for your loss but you should be very proud."

A race to incarcerate,
No priority to educate.
Business is business, the show must go on.
What's business to the elite, is tragedy for others.
What's a profit for some,
is slavery for our imprisoned sisters and brothers.

Land of the FREE?
To what degree?

Freedom is far from FREE
Wouldn’t you agree?

-- Jacqueline Velez

* * *

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The People's Scholar/ Activist

Hola mi gente,
I was having a discussion with a friend and former colleague the other day, and the question came up: Why don’t you start your own thing, Eddie? It is a question that she has asked before and I guess part of the answer lies in the fact that perhaps there is a part of me that is afraid. So that convo got me to thinking and I have come up with an idea… 

The People’s Scholar/ Activist

 

Thinking is an action, critical thinking is a subversive action.

At my last “official” job, part of my duties was to write reports from information we gathered from our prison visits. Whenever I am writing, whether it is for this blog or in my professional capacity, I am thinking of who I am writing for. Too often, in the interest of sounding technical or “scientific,” professional writing, as sociologist C. Wright Mills put it, is terrible. The social sciences are full of writing that depends on jargon and specialized language to express ideas and observances that should be understood by the masses. Unfortunately, that is often not the case. 

When I sat down to write these prison reports, I saw as my potential audience, not some bureaucrat from the department of corrections, or legislative aide, but the single mother of two who had a husband currently incarcerated at that prison. My thoughts were on the loved ones of the people who were incarcerated and my efforts, or at least my motivations, were to get this all-so-important information to the people who most needed to see it.

Similarly, most of the sausage-making of social policy occurs in spaces where the people who will most impacted by those compromises are not present. Yes, we are good enough when there is a press release and the nonprofit sector needs our stories, but we are actively discouraged from being part of the process of “making” policy. I even heard one long-time lawyer say that if she were able to get one hour of out-of-cell time, she could go home with a clear conscience. I was horrified. Who appointed her the arbiter of the fate of so many hundreds of people? What moral standing did she have to admit to something like that?

As anyone who has worked with me or knows me, I have never been shy of pointing out these mission-related inconsistencies in public forums. I think is at best condescending, at worst racist and elitist. I understand these kinds of behavior as having to do with securing funds and “paying the rent.” In other words, the nonprofit- industrial complex has a vested interest in keeping the status quo and, indeed, some of the larger, better known criminal justice reform organizations get upwards of 90% of their funding from the very institutions we should be tearing down. As a result, these organizations have evolved into appendages of the current monster than shackles us. And I am saying this as someone who has been quite successful in playing the nonprofit game for over 20 years.

My point is this: we need more people who are not invested in the system, people who can speak more freely and, most of all, be in touch and have a vested interest not in the systems, but in the communities that have now become open-air prisons and feeders of the prison-industrial complex.

I am developing a strategic plan identifying the problem and its solutions which I will share here shortly. Most of all, I want to do the work of the people, not the institutions that lock us up. I hope that you will help me in launching and sustaining my initiative.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…