Sweet home, Alabama?

In my initial few days after getting to Los Angeles, I thought everything looked fantastic, like how a rich country should. 

It didn't take me much to understand that I was using the old country as a frame of reference. 

After that red-pill experience happened, I could see problems everywhere.  Like how the one grocery store in the area was always crowded and it stank.  Or how apartment buildings were secured behind electric gates and intercoms.  How the sidewalks were not all even, and how sometimes there were no sidewalks.

Halfway through graduate school, a friend told me about a room that was vacant in his apartment complex.  A single unit, with a shared laundry in the building.  The rent that he quoted was phenomenally low.  I rushed there and signed the lease.

It was inexpensive for a reason.  For plenty of reasons, actually.  The water in the faucet ran brown sometimes.  The neighborhood, it turned out, had a drug business problem.

The nearly two years there was my only ever experience to have lived in near-poverty conditions.

I was now increasingly convinced that there was something seriously wrong with the image of America as a rich country.

Close to graduation, I went to New Orleans for a conference.  I wandered through without a map and accidentally ended up in neighborhoods that looked run down and anything unlike a rich landscape.  I worried about the country that I knew would be home to me.

A decade later, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and when a good chunk of the country and the world woke up to the reality, I was relieved that finally a lot more people were seeing the city that I had walked about.

I have often told students that my travels provide me a wonderful reality check---going to economically depressed areas in the US or in the rest of the world gives me a clear idea of the luxurious life that I lead, and going to affluent neighborhoods in affluent cities reminds me that I am nowhere near the upper echelons.

Often, even without traveling, I get my lessons.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is brutal depiction of the gross economic (and racial) injustice in a rich country.  An injustice when a community lacks a sewage treatment process, and when crap literally floods people's yards.  A sewage scene that the UN rapporteur said "was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world."

This was not in New Orleans though.  It was in Alabama.  It was in "one of the poorest counties in one of America’s poorest states."

I have seen enough, read enough, and watched enough to know that it is way past time that we addressed the economic and social injustice in my adopted home.  I hope that the new administration will be laser focused on these.

The big uneasy

(I will send a final version of this to the editor)
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The annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which was held in New Orleans in early April, was an opportunity to further my understanding of slavery. Despite my intellectual explorations into understanding slavery and its continuing impacts on life in America, I, like many, have a tough time wrapping my head around the notion that human beings were bought and sold over many decades, and treated worse than animals. In this venture, The Big Easy, as New Orleans is referred to, was far from being easy.

After the United States banned transatlantic slave trading in 1808, the domestic trading and forcible relocation of human beings became even more important for the Deep South, whose cotton and sugarcane economy depended on slave labor. As in Solomon Northup's story, which was brought to life in the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave,” even free men were kidnapped from the north and brought to the plantations in the South.

Northup was one of the more than 100,000 humans who were bought and sold in New Orleans, including in the French Quarter, which is now one of the well-recognized tourist spots for food and music. While most of the city, including the French Quarter, even now lacks public memorialization of this dark past, there is at least one plaque—at the intersection of Esplanade and Chartres—that reminds us about the very spot where Northup was sold.

We as a country have never truly come to terms with the true horrors of the buying and selling of human beings and the atrocious treatment of slaves and, therefore, the racial dimensions of contemporary America. Perhaps that is also why we do not have a national museum dedicated to slavery, even though we have national museums devoted to many other aspects of American life.

Thanks to the personal commitment and financial backing from a New Orleans attorney— John Cummings—the Whitney Plantation, located about 30 miles outside New Orleans, is now a museum that is focused on slavery and the lives and deaths of slaves. The plantation was started in 1752, and later became one of the most profitable sugar manufacturers and exporters, with the slave labor working in sub-human conditions in the fields. Visiting the museum, which was opened to the public in 2015, was a painful reminder of the violence and brutality of the institution of slavery.

In this context, a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should worry us all. The report notes that our schools are not dealing with the “hard history” of slavery. In its research, the SPLC found that “high school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions.” It is always tempting, of course, to speed through the awful past and to spend more time on heroes and heroic moments. But, who we are today is not disconnected from the ugliness of the past.

Here in Eugene and in Oregon, we are no exception. Behind the reputation of Oregon as a deep-blue progressive state lies the undeniable fact that not too long ago it was a crime for blacks to be merely present here. Far removed from the Deep South, and yet Oregon along with Indiana had the highest per-capita membership of its population in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

A couple of years ago, I went to the Mims House in downtown Eugene, after reading about it in this newspaper. When CB and Annie Mims came to Eugene seventy years ago, they could not find housing within the city because black families were not allowed to live within the “whites only” city limits. Eventually, the Mims were able to buy property on the “other side” of the river.

Now a monument of historical importance, the Mims House provided safe boarding and lodging to blacks who were denied services in town. The long list of notables who stayed there includes Louis Armstrong, who was born and raised in New Orleans. The Mims House was the only place where people like Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald could stay when they came here to perform. The echoes of slavery and racism were heard loud and clear across the continent, even here in Eugene!

As the SPLC notes, teaching and learning about slavery “requires often-difficult conversations about race and a deep understanding of American history. Learning about slavery is essential if we are ever to come to grips with the racial differences that continue to divide our nation.” This is a difficult conversation that all of us ought to be engaged in, whether it is in the Big Easy or in Eugene.

Cartoon of the day

The "Chernobyl" of the oil industry

The dark shadows of the Chernobyl disaster looms in the background when we think about nuclear energy.  And, yes, the nuclear industry counters with their arguments about safety and security here in the US.

But, even a low probability for a disaster means that when that disaster happens, it is not a simple one.  The result: a great deal of opposition to building nuclear power plants.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana, is a similar story then for offshore oil drilling.  When environmentalists worried about the potential downsides, well, even President Obama minimized those concerns; he said,

today we’re announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration, but in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect America’s natural resources.  Under the leadership of Secretary Salazar, we’ll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration.  We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security.  And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.

That's why my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, while studying and protecting sensitive areas in the Arctic.  That’s why we’ll continue to support development of leased areas off the North Slope of Alaska, while protecting Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

How did the chief Republican legislator react to Obama's oil exploration proposal?  No, he did not oppose it, but chastised the president for not expanding the idea:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed the president's plan as not going far enough in opening up U.S. waters for exploration. 

Obama's decision "continues to defy the will of the American people," Boehner said in a statement, pointing to the president's decision to open Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico waters, while leaving Pacific and many Alaskan waters largely closed to exploration. 

The irony of it all: Candidate Obama made it very clear that offshore drilling would not deliver any benefit.  In the video below, Candidate Obama actually says "let me make it clear ...."

I suppose after getting elected, President Obama saw things differently, as politicians often do after winning the election!